Hollywood Monster Page 7

  KENNETH JOHNSON HAD BEEN working on TV dramas since the late 1960s, and was best known for producing and writing many episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, and creating its spin-off, The Bionic Woman. At that moment, his main task was executive-producing the show he’d created in 1978, The Incredible Hulk. He clearly had an affinity for one-hour science-fiction-oriented dramas, and he graduated to the long-form miniseries with a script about a bunch of aliens who come to Earth looking and acting like the nicest human beings you’d ever want to meet. Unfortunately for the population of our fine planet, these aliens are actually evil lizards that want to pillage Earth for its natural resources (humans!) to help resuscitate their dying home planet. In the midst of this mayhem, we meet a kind, lovable alien named Willie, the show’s comic relief, who becomes a hero of sorts—the perfect part for a kind, lovable guy such as me. The miniseries was called V.

  Thanks to my casting friends at Warner Bros., I was asked to read for the role, and going in, I found that my recent exposure to improv comedy, combined with six months of stage work in Journey’s End, helped loosen me up for my audition. The reading was held on the Warner’s backlot, and by that time I’d done so much work at Warner Bros. that I didn’t even have to show my ID to the studio security guard. After I parked, I went up to Ken Johnson’s office. After a few minutes of small talk, I asked if he had any specific notes as to how I should play Willie. He thought for a moment, then looked up, scratched his beard, and said, “Okay. Two words. Gene Wilder.”

  I consider Gene Wilder one of the great comic actors of his generation. I’d idolized him since 1967, when I saw him steal a scene from Warren Beatty from the backseat of Clyde Barrow’s getaway car in Bonnie and Clyde, and of course he was brilliant in The Producers, not to mention that Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies. So when Ken suggested that I play this shy, sweet, confused alien-cum-lizard-cum-human with a dash of Wilder thrown in, not only was I thrilled that Ken and I shared a comic hero, but I knew exactly what he was looking for. He wanted awkward pauses, a sense of surprise, and offbeat comedy timing. I channeled Gene. And it worked.

  A property of NBC, V was a big-budget project, the kind of budget that would make Roger Corman weep with envy. (Actually, if Roger ever got V money, he’d have used it to make twenty-eight films and build a new studio, and he’d still have enough money left over to spend a month at a château in the south of France.) Thus plenty of money was around to afford me state-of-the-art Hollywood-studio makeup special effects, circa 1983. But that art was not very advanced.

  For example, in one scene Willie’s face had to look as if it were burned by ice, so the makeup crew got a bunch of green grapes, cut them in half, laid me on my back, affixed the fruit to my cheeks, nose, and forehead, then dripped melted paraffin all over my face. Now the only thing I knew about paraffin was that back in my younger days I would grab a handful of it, toss it into a pot, heat it over the stove, then drip the hot liquid wax on the deck of my surfboard so I’d have better traction in the surf; I had no idea the stuff could serve any cinematic purpose. But the makeup crew knew what they were doing. My face looked blistered and frozen. Their low-tech recipe worked. For the first time—but certainly not the last—I felt like a modern-day Lon Chaney.

  However, that wasn’t the toughest makeup application I had to endure as Willie. In a later chapter of V, Willie had to undergo what could only be described as an alien allergy test, and to display his lizard scales in their full glory, I had to be fitted with a big, bulky back piece. One weekend, on a day off from shooting, I went to the makeup lab on the Warner Bros. lot—which wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as it would become a few years later, when artists such as Rick Baker of Men in Black and The Nutty Professor fame would rule the makeup special effects world.

  The old-school makeup technicians, who were all dressed in white lab coats and resembled the researchers from those old Volkswagen commercials, ordered me to lie facedown on a cold stainless-steel table. All these guys were older and jaded, except for one of the apprentices, a young man with long hair, headphones, and a positive, eager attitude. If not for his joking with me through the process, I might’ve jumped off that coroner’s slab, grabbed Jan and my surfboard, and gone to the beach.

  KEN JOHNSON HAD CONCEIVED V as an allegory for the occupation of Europe and the survival of the Jews in the ghettos during World War II. The alien’s logo had a Nazi-like vibe, and the uniforms and sunglasses had a storm-trooper ethos about them, plus many of the actors who were cast as the aliens had a Germanic, Teutonic look, so the message wasn’t exactly subtle, but it gave the whole project some gravitas.

  The actress who played our Anne Frank was Dominique Dunne, the daughter of journalist and author Dominick Dunne, and sister of actor Griffin Dunne. Dominique had played the teenage daughter in Poltergeist, a superb horror thriller directed by my old pal Tobe Hooper. Soon after Poltergeist, she met an up-and-coming chef named John Thomas Sweeney. She and Sweeney fell in love and moved in together, and almost immediately John regularly abused the hell out of her. Dominique dumped Sweeney, and after she refused to reconcile, he strangled her in her own driveway. She went into a coma and died five days later. Sweeney served a grand total of two and a half years. (Nice penal system, right?) Dominique’s senseless death saddened all who knew and worked with her on V, and the tragedy brought the entire production team closer together. You’ve probably heard actors say time and again that “everybody on this movie became just like a family,” and most of the time that’s just lip service. In our case, we did support one another both professionally and personally, just as a real family would. We all believed in the project and wanted it to be the best it could be, so we soldiered on through our grief and produced what everybody felt was some pretty good work.

  The ad campaign for V was the most imaginative and subversive since Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, fifteen years earlier. For that campaign, the studio had hired an army of people to stencil baby carriages on the sidewalks of busy city intersections, and in front of movie theaters. They also put up billboards that said PRAY FOR ROSEMARY’S BABY, without explaining who Rosemary was, and why we should talk to God about her brat. Rosemary’s Baby is a certified classic now and would probably have made its mark strictly on its merits, but that alternative campaign pushed it over the edge.

  Somebody in the NBC advertising department must’ve paid attention. They blanketed the country with billboards that looked as if graffiti artists had defaced them; all you saw was a giant, spray-painted red V. The general reaction to the billboards was “What the fuck is that?” which is just about the best publicity one could hope for. NBC also came up with a terrific batch of commercials that made your television screen get all fuzzy and staticky, as if the station had gone off the air. Then, as if it suddenly had a mind of its own, the picture would click back on and the screen filled with the warning THE VISITORS ARE COMING. (V, as people were starting to realize, was an abbreviation for “Visitors.”) The hype was imaginative and pervasive, and with only three major networks back then, it entered the collective consciousness of the nation’s TV viewers—especially sci-fi-starved fans—which boded well for heavy media coverage and big ratings.

  It worked. V became a cultural phenomenon, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. It was one of the highest rated miniseries in television history, so almost overnight I started getting recognized on the street. None of the films or TV movies I’d appeared in before had had anywhere near the visibility that V did, and suddenly I was on the pop-culture radar. I immediately learned that in terms of recognition, television makes far more of an impact than film. TV fans don’t have to pay to see you, plus you’re right there in their living rooms night after night, week after week, which means that it’s all but guaranteed that at some point during the run of your series, somebody will ask you for an autograph while you’re shaking off at a urinal.

  MY LIFE AS A semi-anonymous character actor ceased to exist. It was
my first bout with national celebrity, and it made those fallen nuns back in Cleveland who tracked me down backstage at Godspell, or the little kids who wanted Pinocchio’s autograph at the Teenage Drama Workshop, seem like another lifetime. People bought me drinks at bars, and meals at restaurants, and I was constantly signing pictures of America’s new favorite alien. Science fiction and horror fans are an intense, knowledgeable, loyal crowd, so I was besieged by fans with arcane questions about Willie, and his ability to straddle two worlds. My feeble answer was along the lines of “Uh … you should probably write to Ken Johnson. He’ll know.”

  For the first time, I was getting fan mail … and lots of it, more than I could handle. As I discovered, it was more than Warner Bros./NBC TV could handle too. One afternoon during a break from shooting V, I went across the lot to visit a friend of mine who was guest-starring on the prime-time soap Hotel. The main set was the lobby of a grand hotel, complete with cubbyholes behind the reception desk, where the concierge could leave mail or messages for the guests. My friend pointed to the cubbies, which were filled with assorted envelopes, and said, “See that? They have to put prop letters in there, and the prop guys are using studio fan mail they found in the trash. A lot of it was addressed to Willie.” (So if you wrote me a letter during my V years and I didn’t answer it, you can blame the Warner Bros./NBC publicity department.)

  For me, the timing of this show couldn’t have been better. In the early eighties, few science fiction shows were on American network television; hard-core sci-finuts were watching either syndicated reruns of Star Trek on their local stations, or flipping over to PBS for Doctor Who marathons. This was a neglected demographic that we happily catered to. Sure, V was a fine show, and I’m still proud of it, but the mammoth size of our audience wasn’t only about quality; it was also a happy synergy of timing and marketing. V filled a void, and luckily for me, Willie—a malaprop-spewing alien who is all about peace, love, and understanding—became one of the viewers’ favorites. I too filled a void and became a sort of de facto Dr. Spock for the post–boomer generation.

  I was invited to a number of science fiction festivals, and I had no idea what the hell they were about, although I suspected it was going to be a bunch of nerdy Trekkies. Would it involve simply signing autographs, or Q&A sessions, or would I have to do a few Willie impersonations? I quickly learned that the sci-fisubculture was evolving from isolated underground fanboys to hundreds of thousands of hard-core followers valued by the industry, and attention must be paid. The crossover popularity of Comic-Con was still several years away, but I had a front-row seat for the genesis. (Many of those aforementioned nerdy Trekkies now rule the world. They’re game programmers and softwear designers and comic- book artists, and, of course, film and television executives. They embraced their Trekkie origins and unashamedly let their geek flag fly, and look where it got them.)

  The miniseries was such a phenomenon, it was only logical that V became a full-blown weekly series. In the fine print of my contract, it read that V could be construed as either a mini-series or a TV movie, and if it was deemed to be a TV movie, it could also be construed as a pilot for a weekly series. Rather than dive into a weekly show, the network opted to do a longer miniseries—it would run ten hours rather than four—which sounded fine to me. My agent negotiated a deal that everybody was happy with, so when V: The Final Battle went into production in 1984, I’d be there.

  But first came a hiatus, during which plenty of casting people contacted me. In one instance, I was up for literally every male role in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, probably the first serial-killer spoof in film history. National Lampoon had proved they could make a classic comedy with Animal House, so I wanted in. I was up for the killer, the hero, the jock, the nerd, every-fucking-body, and after half a dozen callbacks, I was certain I was going to attend that Class Reunion. Well, I was wrong. I got nothing. Nada. Zero. Bubkes. All those callbacks must have canceled each other out and done more harm than good, and after that I decided that it would take a hell of a lot to get me to ever go on a callback again.

  I think the Class Reunion casting director, Annette Benson, might have felt funny about having me come back so many times to audition for so many parts and then end up empty-handed, so she called my agent, Joe Rice, and asked him if I’d consider a horror movie.

  I had fond memories from Eaten Alive with Tobe Hooper, and Galaxy of Terror with Roger Corman, so I told Joe, “I had fun working on them in the past. I’d definitely consider it.” Plus, I was beginning to feel a little typecast as Lizard Boy on V, and this might be an opportunity to remind audiences I had a darker side.

  Joe said, “Terrific. Annette might just have something for you. There’s a director she wants you to meet. Today.”

  So that afternoon, I hopped into my 1968, powder-blue Datsun 2000 convertible—she wasn’t cherry but was a great car to zoom around L.A. in—and drove across town to speak with Annette about a little project called A Nightmare on Elm Street, written and directed by Wes Craven.

  * * *

  WES’S FIRST MOVIE, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, was released in 1972, right when I moved back to California. A cross between Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring and a contemporary, no-holds-barred horror movie, Last House on the Left was about a couple of hot girls, a rock band called Bloodlust, some psychotic escaped prisoners, sex, rape, and, most disconcertingly, a blow job gone awry. (At the time of its release, I was on my rediscovering-classic-America-cinema kick, so it wasn’t really on my radar.) Five years later, Wes made his second feature, another horror flick, called The Hills Have Eyes, for a grand total of $230,000. It made money hand over fist and achieved cult status. Wes could put asses in theater seats, scare the shit out of you, and turn a pretty penny, so it was little surprise that he’d become a legitimate Hollywood player.

  My contemporaries and I saw Wes as more of a David Lynch type. I was a huge Lynch fan, in part because one of my favorite new wave/ska bars in L.A. played a loop of scenes from David’s 1977 weird-a-thon Eraserhead for hours at a time on their tiny black-and-white television behind the bar. When the bartender got tired of hearing Jack Nance’s wailing mutant baby, he would fire up bootleg videos of The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left. After a couple of Bushmills, all three movies fused together in my subconscious. I wasn’t exactly frightened—I looked at these movies less as horror films and more as art-house cinema—but I was creeped out nonetheless.

  All those bizarre movie images were running through my mind as I parked in the lot of the building where the production office was located. So I sat in my little Datsun convertible for a minute, gathering my thoughts. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw my tanned face staring back at me, not exactly the kind of face that would scare your average moviegoer. When I pushed back my long blond hair and noticed that my forehead wasn’t as dark as the rest of my face, I came up with an idea.

  I hopped out of the car, opened up the hood, pulled out the oil dipstick, touched it with my finger, then used the oil to slick my curly hair straight back. Then, remembering that my buddy Demetre habitually left his cigarette butts in my ashtray, I slid back into the front seat, licked my finger, poked around in the ashtray, and gently dabbed some ash under my eyes. Again, I checked myself out in the mirror; with a greased-back receding hairline and dark circles under my eyes, I no longer looked like a sun-kissed California surfer. Feeling far scarier, I headed to the audition.

  I had no idea what Wes Craven looked like. Considering his movies and his thematically appropriate last name, I guessed he might be some kind of arty Goth guy, with pale skin, long hair, and dressed head to toe in black. I walked in the room and was introduced to a tall, slender gentleman with an articulate, charming demeanor, and a sartorial style that would make Ralph Lauren proud. Wes was one class act.

  Now I tend to be a motormouth, but I consider myself a pretty good communicator, so I went into that office, shook hands with Wes, sat down, and prepared to launch into what I hop
ed would be a fascinating dissertation on the horror genre. But before I could utter a single syllable, Wes began speaking. Thank God I kept my big mouth shut, because the guy is a hypnotic storyteller, a mesmerizing raconteur with a wonderful sense of humor, and I was spellbound. In the midst of his story, when I was about to interrupt with what I thought might be a relevant observation, a bell went off in my head: Robert, zip it and just listen. And look scary.

  How did I accomplish that? Simple: I didn’t blink. I stared at Wes and did everything I could to keep my eyelids frozen, as if I were trying to win a staring contest. I’m not sure he noticed, because he kept right on talking, waxing poetically about how the concept for A Nightmare on Elm Street originated.

  It all started back when he was a kid. Wes and his brother were home alone. When they were getting ready for bed, as Wes went to close the curtain in their bedroom, he glanced out the window and noticed a man walking slowly down the sidewalk, alone, wearing a misshapen hat. From Wes’s perspective, the guy looked kinda dirty; he might’ve been a hobo. The man passed beneath a streetlight, stopped, snapped his head up, and stared directly at little Wes in the window. It scared the shit out of him, so he violently jerked the curtains shut and told his brother what he’d seen. A few minutes later, they gathered their courage to peek through the curtains again. The bum was still there, staring up at the window. They shut the curtains, then, after a while, tiptoed down the stairs and peered through the front-door peephole. The man was standing on the Cravens’ front walkway, and the brothers were scarred for life. The seed for one of the most successful, iconic horror franchises in showbiz history had been planted.