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  Wes gave me a quick rundown of the film’s plot, stressing that it would be a surreal, dark, suburban fairy tale, a contemporary myth, an urban legend in the spirit of an uncensored Brothers Grimm story. The horror would be embodied not by Rumpelstiltskin, but by a disfigured bogeyman who haunts the dreams of his victims. This nightmare-dwelling specter: Fred Krueger.

  Whoever played Freddy was going to be stuck wearing a ton of special effects makeup, and Wes asked me if I thought I could handle it. I told him that between the theater and V, getting into the makeup chair was second nature to me. (I was only fibbing a bit.) As the interview drew to a close, I continued trying to stare at Wes without blinking, not wanting to break character. I really wanted the part now, but didn’t think I was going to get it; hearing Wes describe Freddy in depth, I assumed that they wanted a big stunt guy for the role. And honestly, that’s how I envisioned Freddy too; I didn’t really believe a blond-haired surfer who was just over five feet ten could portray this dream stalker.

  But apparently Wes Craven believed. Two days later, a message was on my answering machine: the role was mine. Robert Englund was going to be Freddy Krueger. They hadn’t given me a single line of dialogue to read, so I don’t know what cinched it for me. It might’ve been the whole not-blinking thing. It might’ve been that Annette went to bat for me because she felt bad for making me audition for every fucking part in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion. It might’ve been the hair plastered to my skull and my dark, sunken eyes. It might’ve been that they thought my thin face, when covered with layers of FX makeup, would still look like a normal-size head. Or it might just be that Wes saw something in me that I didn’t even know existed.

  After we worked out all the legalities, it dawned on me what I might be in for. I liked Wes, but I was a little concerned. Despite the Ralph Lauren attire and professorial attitude, this was the guy who’d bloodied the screen with Last House on the Left, and somebody with that dark of an imagination might not be right in the head. I also knew that the makeup could be a challenge. But I embraced it, because a little bit of the Teenage Drama Workshop–era Robbie Englund was still in me, the kid who liked to put on false beards and fake noses, the fan who liked to leaf through the Life magazine coffee-table books with pictures of Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, in all his silent film FX makeup incarnations. Even though I was in my midthirties, I understood that Nightmare might be a chance to rediscover the imagination of my childhood, to plug into that creative innocence. Also, I remembered that Laurence Olivier liked to change his look with every role—e.g., experiment with makeup, wear a humpback, or walk with a limp—so I figured if it was good enough for Sir Larry, it was good enough for me.

  A COUPLE WEEKS BEFORE we were to start shooting, I drove way out in the Valley, to the home studio of one David Miller. David was a young FX makeup artist who’d only been in the business a few years, but had already made a significant splash with his work on the ultimate music video, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” David’s job that day was to make a cast of my head with liquid latex so he could use it to begin creating the mold to sculpt Freddy’s face. To prep me for the day’s work, he showed me some preliminary sketches of Freddy, and some medical textbooks with photos of burn victims. Ironically, I got nightmares from those graphic images.

  Getting my head cast was just about as much fun as getting whacked in the nuts with a pool cue. First, they jammed straws up my nose. Next, my skin was lathered with Vaseline, then they basted my head, neck, and shoulders with a cold goop called alginate. As the goop began to solidify, the makeup crew covered it with strips of wet plaster bandages to form a helmet. (I thought I was playing Freddy Krueger, not the fucking Mummy.) As the goop hardened it got hotter and hotter, trapping me in my own hellish sauna. Then, blind and practically deaf, hyperventilating through straws, I heard the muffled whine of a chain saw. (First the Mummy, now Leatherface? What was I getting into?) After they surgically sawed the helmet in half, David told me to lean forward, wrinkle my face, and gently retract my head from the mold. And there, imprinted in the plaster shell, was a perfect negative of my facial features. This would now be used as a mold to cast a bust of me that David would transform into Freddy Krueger.

  Wes and Bob Shaye, the head of New Line Cinema, who was producing A Nightmare on Elm Street, joined me on my second trip to David’s place to check the progress of the makeup. The fourteen pieces of the Freddy face needed to be colored (they were still in their pale pink powdered-latex condition) and assembled on my neck, ears, nose, lips, cheeks, forehead, and all the way down to my chest. It was like a huge Freddy Krueger puzzle. Once all the pieces were glued to my face with medical adhesive—the stuff used for colostomy bags—the cohesive mask needed to be painted. When the coloring was complete, Freddy emerged. As a finishing touch, David rubbed K-Y jelly onto the makeup so Freddy would seem to be covered with oozing, suppurating, pus-filled burn wounds. Mmm, yummy, lunchtime.

  Wes and Bob wanted Freddy to have thin flaps of translucent flesh peeling from his face. Wes knew it would be difficult for continuity—think about how hard it would be to replicate a penny-size piece of skin hanging from my chin day after day—but he loved the image and gave it a try. He quickly realized that wrangling little pieces of latex flesh consumed too much time and opened a can of continuity worms. So, much to Bob’s disappointment, the idea was bagged.

  The first time I had the finished version of the Freddy makeup on—which took over three hours to apply—I realized that to activate the mask, to bring Freddy to life, I’d need to animate my own face more than I had in any other acting job before … well, except for maybe when I mugged my way through that Molière play in Detroit. To make the Krueger grimace work, and to allow my discolored teeth to be visible, I had to exaggerate. We also concluded that it would be effective if I kept the face passive sometimes and just exploited my eyes; if shot from the right angle, a fixed stare, a slow blink, or a malicious glare could be just as frightening as animated anger.

  Wes had a concept for wardrobe, but was happy to turn its execution over to Team Nightmare. In the original script, he described Freddy’s claw glove in great detail, and a mechanical special effects designer named Jim Doyle, and his assistant, Lou Carlucci, realized Wes’s vision. (Initially, the claw was unwieldy and difficult to maneuver, and I used to wear it around the set so I could practice moving it naturally. My favorite thing to do was go over to the craft services table and spear a cocktail weenie or a cheese puff, then eat it right off the razor.)

  Remembering the lesson I’d learned about sensible shoes during the filming of Bloodbrothers, I wore comfortable, broken-in work boots with thick heels, to give myself some extra height. Freddy’s pants were described simply as work pants, and Wes decided that it would be appropriate for Freddy to wear neutral brown slacks covered with oil stains. After a week of greasy thighs at the end of each day, I put the kibosh on the daily lube job by the wardrobe girls.

  Freddy’s red-and-green-striped sweater was pure Wes; my contribution was the suggestion to fray it around the collar and the wrists. I asked that it not be as baggy as Wes had initially wanted because a tighter fit made for a stronger, more recognizable silhouette for Freddy. Wes never explained why he chose the colors red and green; my guess was that those two colors strobe on-screen, which is kind of nauseating, like the effect from 3-D glasses. It certainly had nothing to do with Christmas.

  Then there was the hat, Freddy’s venerable fedora. The day before shooting, I was in full makeup standing in a tiny room at the studio while David applied final touch-ups. Wes and Bob were in the room with us, parked on a cheap futon, throwing in their two cents’ worth, making sure that Freddy was Just Right. Bob was still arguing for the flaps of flesh on Freddy’s face, and our director of photography, Jacques Haitkin, was in Bob’s camp, and Wes, ever the pragmatist, was reminding them that continuity would be a bitch. I was hot and tired, so I didn’t give a shit.

  On the floor of the small ro
om sat a huge box of hats that I figured the wardrobe people had stuck in there just to get out of everybody’s way. That wasn’t the case: with shooting only one day away, everybody was panicked and had started second-guessing the hat choice for Freddy. So Bob and Wes made me plow through this entire box and try on hat after hat after hat, the worst of which was a 1930s-era hat that made me look as though I should be selling newspapers on a street corner during the Depression. I told them, “I swear if you guys make me wear this one, I’m getting on camera and saying, ‘Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The villain from A Nightmare on Elm Street is wearing a stupid fucking hat!’”

  I remembered my albino contact lens debacle from Buster and Billie, so I said, “Wes, the fedora was in the original script. I like it, and you dreamed it up, so why change it? And besides, it kind of reminds me of Lamont Cranston’s slouch hat in The Shadow. ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Freddy Krueger knows.’ Y’know?” Then I put on the fedora and tipped my hat to them a couple of times, demonstrating to Bob, Wes, and Jacques the advantage of the hat with different lighting, how it could hide Freddy’s face and also reveal his scarred baldness in all its glorious naked horror. Then I put the hat on and pointed to my shadow on the wall: “Check out that silhouette.” I believed in the hat, so I fought for it and, fortunately, won the battle. The fedora would become integral to Freddy’s signature look.

  A COUPLE WEEKS PRIOR, way deep down, on a gut level—while I was sitting in that fucking barber’s chair in David Miller’s garage studio, the kind of chair that I’d eventually spend hundreds of hours in—I knew that we’d come up with something special, something more than just a mere monster, and that even though I’d never done anything like this in my career, I’d be able to physicalize this character to a T and make it work. I didn’t know that the child killer whom Wes, David, and I brought to life would become a pop-culture icon and survive for twenty-five years, but if you’d told me that would be the case, I wouldn’t have been completely surprised.

  After David tweaked the makeup to his satisfaction, I stared in the mirror and started messing around with different voices for Freddy; I could’ve tried to figure out something on my own, but it was far easier when I could stare at the Krueger face. I came up with a combination of guttural attack and mocking attitude. Later on, in postproduction, Wes and his sound mixers slowed down the voice track a tad, which gave Freddy’s voice more bass and resonance. We were among the first films to control the pitch of a character’s voice using some hardware called Varispeed, but they couldn’t quite nail the process down, and at times the sound guys dialed it down too low and Freddy sounded distorted and lethargic, like an android that was running out of juice. However, some believe that the extra scootch of slow-down added to the creepiness factor and worked in our favor. (In later Nightmare movies, I spoke even deeper and a bit faster during the takes, so after the editors worked their magic, the pitch and cadence would sound more natural. Such as, if I said, “Welcometoprimetimebitch” at warp speed in front of the camera, it could come out sounding like “Welcome … to … prime … time … bitch …” after the final mix. There was a lot of trial and error, but we eventually solved it.)

  And then, the shoot.

  In one of those weird juxtapositions that makes Hollywood such a wonderful place to work, A Nightmare on Elm Street was shot at the old Desilu Studios, the very same Desilu Studios named for Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, the very same Desilu Studios that was home to I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show. The irony of our horror flick being housed under the very same roof where television’s classic comedy sitcoms originated wasn’t lost on any of us. This same soundstage was also where The Andy Griffith Show was filmed. I shudder to think what Freddy would have done to little Opie.

  Since most of the cast was young and inexperienced, I was only familiar with a few of the actors, but there was one person in particular I was looking forward to working with: John Saxon, who was playing the heroine Nancy’s father, Lieutenant Don Thompson. John had been starring in movies since 1954 and had worked with Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, and Robert Redford in War Hunt and Electric Horseman, and Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, and, most impressively to me, Marlon Brando in The Appaloosa. (One of my most prized possessions is my Appaloosa lobby card, which John autographed and hangs in a place of honor in my little Santa Fe adobe.)

  Ronee Blakley, who played Nancy’s mother, was no slouch either. She was nominated for an Oscar for her vulnerable performance in one of the seminal movies of the 1970s, Robert Altman’s Nashville, and she’d dated the brilliant German director Wim Wenders, so, with one foot in the independent-film camp, and one in Euro-cinema, I thought she was the height of cool. She was flattered when, on one of the first days of shooting while we were sitting next to each other in makeup, I mentioned to her that soon after I wrapped The Last of the Cowboys, one of the actresses from that film and I trekked out to the venerable Palomino, a country-and-western bar deep in the Valley to hear her perform some of the songs from Nashville. I don’t know how Ronee felt about having Freddy Krueger as a county-western fan; maybe she would’ve been more at home if I’d worn a cowboy hat instead of my fedora.

  I was almost always the first actor at the studio because I had to endure the three-hour makeup application. On the third morning of the shoot, I was trying to get comfortable in one of the old Desilu makeup chairs, as David once again cold-glued the Freddy puzzle pieces to my mug, when in walked our star, our Nancy, the lovely Heather Langenkamp. Heather was twenty, and looked like a petite version of Brooke Shields. A bright, delightful girl and talented newcomer, her biggest role to date had been an appearance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders; unfortunately, her work had been left on the cutting-room floor.

  A few minutes later, Johnny Depp strolled in. Johnny was a baby-faced twenty-one-year-old who, in the right light, could’ve passed for sixteen—which probably helped him land the lead in John Waters’ Cry-Baby six years later. He was still three years away from becoming a TV star thanks to 21 Jump Street and was clinging to his rockabilly roots. He’d had a band back in Florida, and with his slicked-back hair, long sideburns, pointy-toed boots, and fifties shirts he certainly looked as if he should be fronting a rock group. He was a bit shy and polite, and everybody on the set took to him instantly, especially the ladies.

  So there I am getting glued and painted by David Miller, once again getting basted with that damn K-Y jelly so I’ll appear nice and shiny under the lights, just like a pervert who’d been burned alive by a bunch of pissed-off vigilante parents.

  I nodded hello to Heather and Johnny, then stared back at myself in the mirror. I was unrecognizable. I didn’t see Robert Englund, a thirty-six-year-old veteran of a score of films and dozens of TV shows. All I saw was some guy whose face was buried under mounds of crap, parked between two of the most attractive young actors I’d ever seen, wondering if I’d made the right decision in taking this part. Here I was approaching forty, playing a monster who had barely any dialogue … and feeling completely envious of these kids. Heather and Johnny had their entire careers, their whole journey through Hollywood, ahead of them. And there I sat, cooking like a soft-boiled egg, and itching under that foam latex shit, while Heather and Johnny had little, personal electric fans keeping them cool and perspiration-free as they were gently powdered and pampered. As if they even needed any makeup.

  I realized I could use this envy. No, Freddy could use it.

  I could take my jealousy and resentment of their youth, beauty, and potential and give it to my character. During the more gruesome scenes and difficult special FX sequences, that envy would be the perfect Lee Strasberg sense-memory substitute to call upon. In my new interpretation, Freddy hated kids because they represent the future, something he’d never have. This could help me understand why Freddy was the way he was, why he was compelled to torture and murder children. I didn’t need to feel sympathy with Freddy to play him, just a modicum of empa
thy. This realization unlocked a door for me to understand the character Fred Krueger. I had the key now. This was an approach I could sink my claws into.

  In fact, both Heather and Johnny were consummate professionals, whose company I enjoyed, and vice versa. Despite the gap in our ages, Johnny and I hit it off, and once in a while he would confide in me. One night after we wrapped at the same time, we went out for a beer, and he shared a story about his rockabilly band. They weren’t scoring many gigs, so Johnny decided to make a few exploratory trips out to California and give acting a try. He told me, “I knew it was time to move for good when I realized it was March and my Christmas tree was still up in my apartment.” I flashed on an image of Johnny, with his Elvis hair, wearing a leather jacket, tight black jeans, and rockabilly boots, smoking a cigarette, staring sadly at a pile of brown pine needles on his apartment floor, sighing, “Time to move on. Yep. Time to move on.”

  IT BECAME SO MATTER-OF-FACT for everyone to see me in the Freddy makeup on the set every day that people started having a blasé attitude toward the character. They weren’t scared of him, because it was my personality behind the mask between takes, and I’m not a scary guy. Still, I was committed to the role, but not to the degree that I’d run around the set slashing my fellow actors with my claw blades; I just wanted to keep them a little on edge, keep them wondering if maybe I was a bit wrong in the head. One thing I did to keep Heather off-balance was regale her with off-color jokes in the makeup room. I cadged fresh material each morning from the Teamsters over breakfast burritos. When I ran out of jokes, I playfully teased her until she either laughed or blushed or glared at me and said, “Knock it off, Robert, I mean it!” I wanted her to be at ease with me because we had several fight scenes and stunts together, and she needed to trust me and know that I’d zig when she zagged, and I’d zag when she zigged. If the trust wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be able to go all out, and the scene wouldn’t work, so I was careful never to cross the line with Heather or make her feel uncomfortable. Over the years, however, I am sure I left enough thumbprint-size bruises on her that she probably qualified for extra stunt pay. I hope she’ll forgive me.