It’s Not Just a Job, It’s an Adventure: My Low-Budget Film Gig

Back in late 1988, about six months before Vinnie and I got married, I got the chance to do more than just watch movies; I got to help make them, too! It all began after Vinnie and I returned from our first trip overseas, the “Conspiracy” Worldcon in Great Britain. I was all set to take NYU’s Intensive Filmmaking Workshop for eleven weeks. Then Fate stepped in, thanks to a phone call from Bob Zimmerman (not to be confused with the singing Bob Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan). This Bob Zimmerman was a friend and fellow member of CAPrA,short for Cinematic Amateur Press Association. For any young’uns reading this, an APA is a homemade newsletter in which each member of the APA contributes their own fanzines (‘zine for short) and collates them all together while enjoying food and fun. This all happened before the Internet came along and begat blogs!

At the time, our Bob Zimmerman had been hired by producer Steve Mackler for Sony Pictures to be the line producer (click here for more info on what the job entails) for three theatrical films they were financing. Since movies were a new area for Sony at the time, they played it safe by starting out with low-budget genre films which would be sure to make a profit one way or another, whether in theatrical release or on home video. Bob needed a Production Office Coordinator on these films, starting with Rejuvenatrix (not to be confused with The Re-Animator), and he offered me the job. How could I pass up a chance like that? The pay wouldn’t render me fabulously wealthy, but I was more interested in getting hands-on movie set experience, and even my dear mom finally agreed it was worth going for, despite her worries about the crazy hours required. Besides, movie job opportunities with someone I could trust, like Bob, are harder to come by than film school classes!

When I reported to work on Rejuvenatrix, my job was pretty much to be Bob’s second-in-command, running the production office. I was in charge of keeping track of the budget (on the computer, of course), and during the early days of pre-production, I was running errands and scouting around for the props and locations, getting prices and directions and the like. For example, my first two weeks on the job had me calling all over New York and New Jersey for white rats, rabbits, and a Mercedes-Benz. (No, smarty, the Mercedes wasn’t for me, fun though I’m sure that would have been!) I also helped draw up the contracts and the crew/cast lists for everyone involved. My duties included hiring Production Assistants for the set. Many of them came from film schools, while others were filmmakers who Bob had worked with before. I even had my own assistant, Caroline Sinclair. We wound up helping each other because Caroline had done more movie work than I had. I was really grateful to her for filling in the cracks of my film production knowledge, and in return, I taught her how to use the computer; not that I was ever a computer genius by any means (that’s Vinnie’s bailiwick), but as my dear old dad used to say, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

Finding good P.A.s wasn’t hard; even the ones with little experience were fine as long as they were enthusiastic and willing to learn, though I won’t deny that the $150/week salary put off some candidates. Granted, back in the late 1980s, $150 went farther than it does today, plus at the time, I was only 22 and still lived in NYC with Mom. But hey, from what my co-workers told me, many Production Assistants on low-budget movies don’t get paid at all, except in experience. More often than not, the camaraderie and the filmmaking experience convinced most newcomers to stay (sometimes even when we hoped they wouldn’t!).

 Synthesizing sinister serum with scientists Stella Stone (Katell Pleven) and Gregory Ashton (John MacKay)

Frankly, being part of it all was pretty exciting, and it was much more responsibility (and more intriguing) than I’d been used to. I’ll admit it was a little intimidating at first, but I quickly got used to my authority, made contacts, and enjoyed the experience while still being kind and having a good rapport with everyone. It helped that many of the folks working on these films weren’t much older than I was at the time. The oldest person on the film was the producer, and he was a mere lad of 40! I even sat in on production meetings; it’s fun to listen to people talking about creating mutant rats as if they were exchanging cookie recipes. I enjoyed listening to the terrific cast reading the entire script out loud, too, with humor and gravitas in all the right places. I particularly enjoyed John MacKay’s performance as Dr. Ashton, the young scientist who gets into an unholy, lust-laced alliance with aging movie queen Elizabeth Warren (Vivian Lanko); his voice has always reminded me of Martin Sheen. He was a nice guy with a great dry wit, too. Since then, our man MacKay has been on such TV series as Third Watch and Law and Order, and his films include Regarding Henry and Niagara, Niagara, as well as a hilarious recent Sprint commercial about “sticking it to the man.” (Click here for the commercial!)

Rejuvenatrix (whose working title was Brains for Beauty, by the way) was a wonderfully nutty, campy, stylish script. It was B-movie-ish in a good way, a nifty hybrid of Sunset Boulevard, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Altered States, with pretty darn good horror F/X, considering our tight budget. It’s about an aging movie star, Elizabeth Warren, initially played by Jessica Dublin. She and John MacKay as Dr. Gregory Ashton join forces, with Elizabeth using her big bucks to finance experiments to create a youth serum. It works, with Elizabeth’s renewed gorgeous self now played by the lovely and talented Vivian Lanko. Of course, this being a horror film, the serum turns out to have some wild side effects: now and then she turns into a bloodthirsty mutant! Don’t you hate when that happens? Dig the cool monster transformation scene!

Like Hitchcock with Psycho, we worked wonders on a low budget! :-)

There are some great lines, like when Elizabeth starts mutating in a nightclub rest room in front of two trendy types, one of whom sniffs, “You know, as soon as a club gets hot, they let in the bridge-and-tunnel crowd.”  Then there’s the scene with hungry mutant Elizabeth killing Dr. Ashton’s sweet young assistant, Stella (Katell Pleven). The doc kneels at her side, moaning, “Stella! Stella!” Mutant Elizabeth, now turning back into Gorgeous Elizabeth, says, “Your Marlon Brando needs a little work, darling.” And then there was Team Bartilucci’s favorite: MacKay’s intense delivery of this sibilant line: “I’ve got to synthesize the serum!” Personally, I enjoyed working on Rejuvenatrix the most. Sure, the hours were long; at first, I got in the office by 9 a.m. and rarely left before 8:30 p.m. But once filming began, most of the action was on the set, so my hours and duties lightened up a bit.

Much as I enjoyed working in the production office, I also wanted an opportunity to work on the set, just for the experience. I got my chance with our second film, Bloodscape, a.k.a. Escape from Safehaven (EfS).  (Check out DVD Update's review on YouTube.) This was a more grim-and-gritty thriller, set in a post-nuclear holocaust world about a family desperate to live in Safehaven to avoid the horrors of the ravaged outside world. Need I say things turn out to be a whole lot worse on the inside? Hero Rick Gierasi went on to Troma's Sgt. Kabukiman, TV's Caroline in the City, and Star Trek: Voyager.

This time, I was a Production Assistant — specifically, I was the P.A. in charge of Craft Services, a professional-sounding way of saying I got food for our cast and crew. It was like feeding an army every day. Imagine grocery-shopping every day for forty to fifty ravenous people. Now imagine having to keep two large Craft Service tables—one on the first floor of the school where we were filming, and the other located anywhere from the fifth floor (did I mention the school had no elevator?) to two or three blocks away (for outdoor scenes). I did most of the shopping, though Vinnie helped me out with the shopping on weekends. That’s a lot of heavy lifting, lugging, and schlepping! I soon began to appreciate the soothing powers of a nice warm bath before bed, especially since I usually came home dusty and/or grimy from head to toe, to my dear mom’s dismay. My mission was to provide breakfast, usually bagels, muffins, and the occasional order of hot egg sandwiches, cold cereal, fruit, yogurt. The afternoon brought our stalwart cast and crew cold cuts and veggies—or as our otherwise tolerant sound man Pavel Wdowczak would snort in his thick Polish accent, “Weggies!” Anything edible was washed down by gallons of coffee, coffee, COFFEE — hold the decaf! Oh, and don’t forget the wrap beer! An hour before our projected wrap time each night, I had to place three cases of beer (Budweiser was the favorite) and a bag of ice into the beverage cooler, all the better for the crew to unwind after a tough day. Ironically, I’ve never enjoyed alcoholic beverages or coffee myself; I just never developed a taste for them. As a result, I had no idea whether or not the stuff was any good, taste-wise. “You ought to try them and see what all the excitement’s about,” our Unit Manager Phil Dolin wryly suggested. But I daresay our tired, thirsty crew wasn’t all the choosy about their beer by the time we wrapped things up in the middle of the night!

Would Louise Brooks think our films were lulus? :

And of course, what would a Craft Services table be without snacks? Even with EfS’s tight budget, variety was the by-word; every so often I’d come up with something special, like strawberries and cream, kiwi fruit, or my mostly-homemade spinach dip (I seasoned it with Knorr’s leek soup mix). Although most of the cast and crew were appreciative, there was always some self-styled epicure who wasn’t quite satisfied. I could have five varieties of bagels (since we were in New York City, they were truly awesome bagels), and three types of rolls on the table, with all kinds of different spreads, and there would still be some wise guy who’d say, “Ya got any Wonder Bread for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” (To be fair, the p.b. & j. fan was thrilled and thankful when I brought him the necessary ingredients the next day, and so were several other members of the cast and crew.) I took great pains to include fresh in-season produce along with the munchies, but of course, the sweets were always the first food items to be snapped up. “We’ve gotta eat more healthy food,” people would wail as they stuffed their rosy little cheeks with M&Ms (the favorite snack of our director, Brian Thomas Jones), Double-Stuf Oreos (everybody’s favorite), or Entenmann’s cakes, the only cake with frosting guaranteed to survive a nuclear attack. All kidding aside, I can’t deny that I loved them all, too! Lucky for me this job required lots of walking and stair-climbing; believe me, I burned off an awful lot of those calories, empty and otherwise. (If Entenmann’s ever makes gluten-free goodies as melt-in-your-mouth delicious as their traditional goodies, I for one will be a very happy girl! But I digress….)

Lunch break! Come and get it!

Fortunately for my sanity and the filmmakers’ petty cash supply, a caterer brought a hot lunch for us every day. For late shoots, we’d order out for pizza or Chinese food. Heck, thanks to Pavel, we even splurged for Polish food—one of the advantages of filming in the East Village was the variety of exotic yet affordable take-out cuisine. Still, Craft Services is a pretty relentless job. In addition to all the running around between tables and supermarkets, you’ve got to make absolutely sure you’re not running out of anything — especially coffee, soda, and utensils — so you quickly learn to anticipate your future food needs.

On a movie set, it’s not just hunger that makes people place such importance on Craft Services. People don’t just eat because they’re hungry, they eat because:

• It gives them something to do during the long set-ups and such between takes.
• Like Mount Everest, the food is there.
• Eating is fun, especially in New York City!

The folks most often guilty of recreational eating are the actors and extras. They often have no choice but to sit around in “The Green Room” or in the location’s production office for hours on end while waiting to do their scenes. I provided recent magazines from home to occupy the gang, but the siren call of the Craft Services table inevitably lured them. There was plenty of hard work involved, but there were many bright spots, too. If you do Craft Services well (and I think I did, if I do say so myself), you’ve got a certain amount of power. Faces lit up when I entered the room with beverages and comestibles; the reactions are almost Pavlovian! People courted my favors in hopes that I’d save them the last bottle of Orangina (and I did just that whenever I could; I’m not heartless, you know!). You get to schmooze with the actors and, if it’s an action flick like EfS, the special effects folks. More than once, someone would leave a bottle of fake blood on the Craft Services table. Good thing the main ingredient in the fake blood was corn syrup and red food coloring!

I even got a chance to be an extra one day! Lauri, the makeup artist, grimed me up good. I had to laugh; I’d spent about ten minutes artfully dabbing concealer on the circles I already had from long days on the set, and Lauri undid it all within seconds with some brown goop, bless her. I wore some dystopian-style clothing, and voila! I, a sworn teetotaler, had been transformed by movie magic into a seedy patron at a sleazy dive bar.  As Pierce, a young Clint Eastwood type, Gierasi passes right by my table when he enters the bar. If you happen to come across EfS sometime, you just might spot me in the scene for a nanosecond near the top of the screen. I even got my sister Cara into the act, however briefly. She came to help out one day when we had fifty more extras (extra extras!), and Cara became the 51st; she’s one of the shocked Safehaven citizens witnessing a public execution in the Arena. Barrymores, Carradines, Baldwins, eat your hearts out!

I wasn’t in on the third Sony film because by then, I really needed a steady paycheck, especially since Vinnie and I eventually wanted to get married and start a family. Still, I have fond memories, and I’ll always be glad I got to be in pictures! (Speaking of pictures, the movie illustrations sprinkled throughout this post came from Ready-Made Rubber's line of movie stamps by Rick Geary.)

Lord, won't you rent me a Mercedes-Benz?

X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES: I’m Looking Through You

In honor of the Roger Corman Blogathon, created by fellow blogger Nathanael Hood of Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear, Team Bartilucci is blogging about X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

Dorian's View:
The X... DVD includes a great commentary track by the sepulchral-voiced Corman himself, as well as the movie’s trailer and its original prologue, which comes across like a well-done documentary about people and their senses. Vinnie quipped, “This could turn into a nudist flick any minute!” In voice-over, we learn how people compensate when any of their senses no longer function (we see a deaf man using sign language and a blind man with his Braille Reader). Suddenly Ray Milland stumbles onto the screen, and we’re startled to see that his eyeballs are pitch-black—not as freaky as the opening Corman eventually opted for in the theatrical release, a long tight shot on a bloody eyeball, but either way, X… grabs your attention and doesn’t let go!

 

I can see for miles and miles: Ray Milland

Ray Milland had always said that The Lost Weekend and X… were the films that he’d been the most proud of during his long acting career. I can understand why; both movies hit you in the gut, the heart, and the mind. Milland plays Dr. James Xavier, a dedicated doctor and medical researcher. As is often the case in Corman’s movies, Jim’s an outsider, a maverick. His unorthodox but brilliant experiments in ophthalmology attract wary looks and accolades in equal measure. He’s developing an eye-drop formula that could bring human eyesight to another level, one that would enable physicians to help their hospital patients by literally “seeing inside them, as if they were windows…seeing their sicknesses with a clarity that would make X-rays a tool fit only for witch doctors.” Jim and his supportive, attractive colleague Dr. Diane Fairfax (stage actress Diana Van der Vlis) test Jim’s eye-drop formula on a cute little monkey in their lab—but the poor critter dies after getting, um, super-vision. “What did he see? What did he see?” the worried Diane wonders. She and their friend and colleague Dr. Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone) are supportive, but the skittish higher-ups who run their hospital cut off Jim’s funding. Jim decides to eliminate the middleman by experimenting on himself. Didn’t he learn anything from The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, Andre Delambre, and so many other well-meaning but ill-fated scientists who came before him?

It’s all fun and games when Jim is able to see through party guests’ clothing thanks to the magic of Spectarama, a photographic gimmick that makes Jim’s X-ray viewpoint look kinda like those colorful crystal prism suncatchers you find in New Age novelty shops. Kudos to Diane for having a sense of humor about this wacky episode! (I got a kick out of the doctor guests using syringes to mix their cocktails.) Milland and Van Der Vlis have a charming, sophisticated chemistry together, making them a delightfully urbane couple. But when a fatal accident propels Jim into the life of a fugitive (director of photography Floyd Crosby does a great job here, especially with the suspenseful, claustrophobic scene where Jim flees down flights of stairs), X… becomes increasingly tense and thought-provoking. Jim doesn’t have a moment’s peace one way or another; he can’t even close his eyes to sleep because of his X-ray vision (note the progressively larger, darker, clunkier sunglasses he wears over the course of the film). When Jim snaps, “Get out of my sight,” you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, because that’s literally impossible for him now! The peril of playing God is a time-honored trope, but Corman and screenwriters Robert Dillon and Ray Russell do a great job of blending parables, suspense, and science fiction. Les Baxter’s quicksilver musical score ably covers the many moods of X… In addition to being a box-office hit, X… won the 1963 Best Film Award, The Silver Spaceship, at the First International Festival of Science Fiction Films.

This tight, tense, thought-provoking science fiction thriller packs a wallop, with excellent performances all around. Don Rickles was a revelation in a rare dramatic role as Crane, a sleazy carnival barker who makes the most of our beleaguered hero’s X-ray vision by casting him as “Mentallo” in a mind-reading act. Keep an eye out for Corman regulars Dick Miller and Jonathan Haze in the Mentallo scene, as well as an earlier scene with uncredited bits by character actors Morris Ankrum (I Wake up Screaming, Lady in the Lake) and John Hoyt, the most angular man in show business (My Favorite Brunette, When Worlds Collide, The Bribe, TV’s Gimme a Break).

How Dr. X. sees the world: This is Spectarama!

Vinnie's View:
This is rather an interesting change for us, 'cause it's the first time The Wife and I are writing about the same film. While her milieu is more the noir films, tongue-in-cheek thrillers, and other more respectable genres of film, I lean more towards the science fiction and fantasy areas, with a sub-major in comedy. So upon hearing about the Corman-a-thon, I took the initiative and suggested this film. I knew there'd be a dogfight for Little Shop, but X had always held a place in my heart for being a great example of what can be done under the guise of a simple B-picture.

After quite a bit of television work, Ray Milland made three films in rapid succession over two years for American International: The Premature Burial, one of Corman's Poe adaptations; Panic in the Year Zero, a classic Cold War thriller in which the bomb drops on L.A. and the people must do the best they can afterwards (which Milland also directed, and another film which I could go on about for quite a while) and the film we're discussing today, X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Milland took to the fast-paced world of independent film-making easily; Corman describes him as a good man to work with, and utterly professional.

Co-writer Ray Russell came out of the gate with a first script that was also a far better film than it's remembered being, William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus, based on Russell's own novella. He followed this up with The Premature Burial, and another all-but-forgotten madcap classic for Castle, Zotz! So he came onto X with a short but solid resume. Corman's initial concept was for a jazz musician to gain the titular powers after excessive illegal drug use; the final idea of a research scientist experimenting on himself gave them the ability to examine the question without being forced to portray the drug as "evil".

Milland does not play Dr. Xavier as a "mad scientist." His experiments are solely for the benefit of mankind, as he displays early in the film, where he corrects John Hoyt's diagnosis of a young girl's heart ailment by looking into her and finding a tumor that escaped being caught on x-rays. The implication is that continued use of the drops may cause mental instability, which seems the case when in a fit of anger he knocks his friend and fellow Doctor Sam Brant (played by character actor Harold J. Stone) out a window.

A theme throughout the film are the ways that people would use the ability to see beyond the visible spectrum. Diane has to ask what the practical uses would be; Xavier uses them to save the young girl's life. It's only after he's forced to play the fugitive that he explores the more mercenary advantages of the power. He hides out in a carnival, hiding in plain sight as a mentalist; people naturally assume his ability to see people's secrets is a simple sideshow con. One carny presumes that the power couldn't be real; if it were, such a person could rule the world with it. But Don Rickles (who damn near steals the film as the carnival barker Crane) realizes that the trick is no trick at all, and has an idea on how to exploit it. He opens up an office in the Skid Row area and lets the word spread that Xavier is a "healer", and doesn't charge for a consultation, but will happily take "Donations." It's an interesting scenario; he's taking advantage of the poor people's simplicity and fear of hospitals, but Xavier is giving them solid medical info. Dr. Fairfax tracks him down after a number of people come to her practice with exactingly correct diagnoses for their ailments. As he grows more desperate, only then does he use his abilities where everyone else would have gone first: Las Vegas. By this point the pressure is getting to him, and he grows swaggering and arrogant as he wins hand after hand. Bad move, as when they challenge him on his skills, he loses his protective goggles and reveals his transformation, shown through a pair of Sclera lenses that must have hurt like hell.

This film was shot in a mere 15 days of principal photography, a schedule Corman describes as luxurious for him, as most of the time he would shoot in 10. But even there, he had the time to make the film look bigger than it had a right to be. He drove to Vegas and the Long Beach carnival pier with his cameraman to get enough B-roll footage to make the end of the film look like the cast were there as well. To show the way Xavier saw the city, Corman got second-unit footage of buildings still under construction, cutting them together to make it look like the doctor was seeing the facades vanish, revealing the girders beneath.

Corman is legendary for his work, and for the people he's mentored into Hollywood's upper echelon. Ron Howard got to talk about him when he got his honorary Oscar in 2009. I include the speech here as a testament to a man who can squeeze a nickel and get two dimes, and take an idea about a guy that can see naked people and get a classic.


2009 Governors Awards - Ron Howard toasts Roger... by dreadcentral