Hollywood Monster Page 9

  As is the case on many movie sets, the catering on Nightmare sucked, so one sunny afternoon during meal break, Johnny Depp, Nick Corri, and I wandered over to the Thai restaurant across the street from the studio for a late lunch. We were seated in a booth in the back of the restaurant, and the kitchen had swinging double doors. I was facing the kitchen, so each time one of those doors opened, the fluorescent kitchen light spilled out onto our booth. Right after the server took our order, an elderly Asian waiter pushed backward through the doors from the kitchen, carrying a tray loaded with food and drinks. He turned in to the dining room, took one horrified look at my face illuminated in the harsh light, and stopped cold—oh, did I forget to mention I was still decked out in complete Freddy drag?—then the swinging door smacked him on the ass, and he dropped the tray. In a clatter of plates and glassware, a three-course lunch special hit the deck. He looked scared, ashamed, and then he scurried back into the kitchen. He wasn’t seen for the rest of our meal, and I felt terrible. I was genuinely concerned that I’d scared the old guy to death or maybe got the poor SOB fired. I thought it might be a good idea to limit Freddy to the soundstage from then on. But my resolve was weak, and Mr. Krueger would still be making unscheduled public appearances.

  During one of our night shoots, I had a lot of time to kill, so, again in full Freddy regalia, I went on a little drive with a couple of friends who’d come to visit me on the set. Right after we turned onto Sunset Boulevard, we passed a couple of hookers. My pal who was driving gave the girls a once-over, then broke into a freaky smile.

  He threw the car in reverse, backed up, opened his window, and motioned one of the girls over to the car. She teetered over in her stilettos; she had teased, distinctly 1980s big hair, a black leather miniskirt, and an acid-washed denim jacket with nothing on underneath. She seductively bent over and asked my friend, “Can I help you boys?”

  He leered at her and said, “Yeah. We have a buddy here, and he served in ’Nam, and he got burned pretty bad there. We were wondering how much it would cost to, um, service him.”

  She said, “Where is he?”

  My friend cocked his thumb at me in the backseat. “Right here.”

  When she leaned in the car to check me out, I let rip the biggest, ballsiest Freddy laugh I could muster, then lunged at the window.

  The hooker screamed, ran down the block as fast as her five-inch heels would allow, tits bouncing, wig askew, stumbling back to her posse of pros.

  I found ways to amuse myself on promotional tours as well. Once in Chicago, after a mob scene at an in-store signing session in the Midwest’s oldest mom-and-pop video store, we escaped in a limo and found ourselves lost in an adjacent working-class neighborhood. We ran into a bunch of kids playing street hockey, and stopped to ask them for directions. After they cleared out of the street to let us through, I sprung up through the limo’s sunroof—still in full makeup—and roared, “You’re all my children now!” One of the kids yelled, “Yo, Freddy, you wanna get in on the game? We got some extra sticks.” Not exactly the reaction I was shooting for.

  Late one afternoon, after I’d finished shooting all my scenes, I tore off my makeup in a rush and headed to NBC in beautiful downtown Burbank for a TV Guide photo shoot to promote the television series V, which was going to commence shooting almost immediately after Nightmare wrapped. It had never been my dream to appear in TV Guide, but now that it was happening, I had to admit to myself that I was kind of excited.

  As I sped through the winding canyon that links Hollywood to the Valley, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror: my entire face was pink and swollen. I realized that in my haste, over David Miller’s vociferous objections, I’d removed the Freddy prosthetics too roughly. When I posed that afternoon with the cast of the V series—which included a young actor named Jeff Yagher, whose brother I’d soon come to know very, very well—I looked like a test pilot for Clearasil sporting a Welcome Back, Kotter Juan Epstein Jew-fro. To this day, that ugly vintage TV Guide publicity photo haunts me at film festivals and sci-fi/horror/fantasy conventions around the world.

  * * *

  THE LAST WEEK OF shooting, we did a scene in which I drag Amanda Wyss, the sexy, blond actress who played Tina, across the ceiling of her bedroom, a sequence that ultimately became one of the most visceral from the entire Nightmare franchise. Tina’s bedroom was constructed as a revolving set, and before Tina and Freddy did their dance of death, Wes did a few POV shots of Nick Corri (aka Rod) staring at the ceiling in disbelief, then we flipped the room, and the floor became the ceiling and the ceiling became the floor, and Amanda and I went to work.

  As was almost always the case when Freddy was chasing after a nubile young girl possessed by her nightmare, Amanda was clad only in her baby-doll nightie. Wes had a creative camera angle planned that he wanted to try, a POV shot from between Amanda’s legs. Amanda, however, wasn’t in the cameramen’s union and wouldn’t legally be allowed to operate the camera for the shot. Fortunately, Amy Haitkin, our director of photography’s wife, was our film’s focus puller and a gifted camera operator in her own right. Being a good sport, she peeled off her jeans and volunteered to stand in for Amanda. The makeup crew dabbed some fake blood onto her thighs, she lay down on the ground, Jacques handed her the camera, I grabbed her ankles, and Wes called, “Action.”

  After I dragged Amy across the floor/ceiling, I spontaneously blew her a kiss with my blood-covered claw; the fake blood on my blades was viscous, so that when I blew her my kiss of death, the blood webbed between my blades formed a bubble, a happy cinematic accident. The image of her pale, slender, blood-covered legs, Freddy looming over her, straddling the supine adolescent girl, knife fingers dripping, was surreal, erotic, and made for one of the most sexually charged shots of the movie. Unfortunately it got left on the cutting-room floor. If Wes had left it in, the MPAA—who always seemed to have it out for Mr. Craven—would definitely have tagged us with an X rating. You win some, you lose some.

  Subscribing to the Roger Corman school of getting the most bang for your buck, the revolving room was to be redressed and reused for Johnny Depp’s death scene, the scene in which the Artist Soon to Be Known as Edward Scissorhands is swallowed, then regurgitated by his bed, accompanied by plenty of blood and guts. To get the effect right, the room had to slowly revolve so that gravity would cause the FX blood and guts to explode from Johnny’s bed. To capture the sequence on film, Wes and Jacques had to be strapped into bucket seats that had been welded to the ceiling so that they and the camera would remain in a fixed position while the room rotated. I wasn’t in the scene, but it was going to be one of the cooler moments of the shoot from a technical standpoint, so I hung out. This was can’t-miss stuff.

  I was standing off to the side backstage, barefoot, wearing a wifebeater T-shirt, jeans, with about half of my Freddy makeup removed; right next to me stood Heather, in those cute little pajamas she had on for most of the shoot. Wes called action, and the effects team spun the house clockwise. Unfortunately, they were supposed to have turned it counterclockwise, so a torrent of fake blood poured from the bed and began to fill the revolving room. The blood flood then overflowed through the door and windows of the set and all over the soundstage. Wes and Jacques got covered with the stuff, and we were afraid they might drown. But the more immediate problem was that like every film soundstage, the entire floor was littered with all kinds of electrical wiring and power boxes, which started hissing and sparking. Heather and I stared at the bloodbath, looked at each other, and then, like the big pussies that we were, hightailed it off the set, toward the exit. It was every monster for himself. I just hoped I wouldn’t step on a nail and wind up with tetanus.

  Freddy’s climactic scene, when Nancy torches the monster, was the first fire stunt I’d ever been involved in. My stunt double, Tony Cecere—who, earlier that year, played the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters—was going to do all the fire work, but I had to be on the set for close-ups of me before a
nd after Freddy got burned. It was to be one of the lengthiest interior fire stunts ever attempted, and I learned pretty quickly that even if the effects team is prepared to the max, indoor fire gags can be problematic. Any high school student who shows up for science class can tell you that fire eats up oxygen. So if you don’t open up the stage door to let in oxygen while shooting a fire, stuntpeople can get a little loopy. And believe me, you don’t want to be hanging out with a loopy stuntperson.

  Everybody on the project worked around the clock and was happy to do so because we all believed in Wes, and our movie. Even near the end of the shoot, when we found out that New Line was running out of money and we might have trouble completing the film, we stuck with it, despite the pressure from the studio to hurry the fuck up, and the possibility of a bounced paycheck. To finish the movie, New Line had to sacrifice and sell off Nightmare’s potentially lucrative video rights, an expensive decision about which I’m certain they’re eternally bittersweet.

  In the end, Bob Shaye might have been the only studio boss who could’ve brought the Nightmare franchise to fruition. When I first met him, I thought, This is a producer I can relate to. He was young, good-looking, long-haired, and charismatic, far from your typical suit. I don’t know what went on behind closed doors, but my dealings with him were genial and professional, and when we nearly ran out of money, I was practically the last person on the set to find out about our budget problems because I think Bob was trying to protect me.

  Eventually, we got Nightmare in the can. After some good ol’ R&R, it was back to V for me. Now that I was a pop-culture phenomenon, I decided to embrace it; so much for the classically trained Anglophile.

  THERE MIGHT NOT HAVE been any Oscars in my future, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be other awards. The Italian TV guide magazine called Telegatto—which, loosely translated, means “television cat”—nominated me for Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries for Willie in V. They flew me out to Milan first-class and expected the nominees and their dates to dress black tie for the award show. My girlfriend, Roxanne, forgot to pack anything formal for the event, so our hosts whisked her off to the Armani flagship store in the shadow of Milan’s duomo, where she was given a beautiful navy blue silk dress. Me, I’d packed a rented tux, so I was good to go.

  When we arrived in the piazza adjacent to La Scala opera house for the event, our limo was instantly surrounded by rabid Italian fans. I was pulled from the car, separated from Rox, and lifted above the crowd. Like a rock star in some giant mosh pit, I crowd-surfed to the entrance of the venue, where that evening I would beat out Richard Chamberlain for my first acting award ever. The cherry on the gelato would come later that night when Roxanne and I were seated between Catherine Deneuve and The French Connection’s Fernando Rey for the postawards reception dinner. Pretty good company for a supporting alien. And if I ever find the Italian voice actor who dubbed my dialogue on V, I’ll give him joint custody of my Telegatto award.

  WHAT WITH ALL THE domestic and international success, NBC wisely offered Ken Johnson a weekly series, and Ken accepted. The network committed to twenty-two shows, and since my character Willie had attracted so much attention in the miniseries, my role was bulked up for the weekly show. While shooting an early episode, I was doing a stunt sequence with my costar Michael Ironside. We were driving in a van with the side door open, and in the scene we were supposed to haul a stuntman dressed as one of the storm-trooper aliens into the van, slam the door shut, and peel away. Sounds simple. And it was.

  On the first take, I nailed it. Second take, nailed it again. Third take, ditto. On the fourth take, Oooooooh shit.

  I don’t know why we needed to do it a fourth time because the first three felt perfect. But we were pros, and if Ken Johnson’s people wanted a fourth take, then Ken Johnson’s people would get a fourth take, and we wouldn’t complain. And that take was a problem from the get-go. Maybe the stunt driver was a little burned-out, because he pulled in noticeably faster and with a little more gusto than he had in the earlier takes, then he braked and we all slid across the van floor and crashed into the back of the front seat. Michael and the stunt-man hung on to the front seat, but I couldn’t get a grip, and when the stunt driver shifted into gear and floored it, the van lurched forward and I slid back toward the rear of the van. My head hit the unlocked back door, making contact with the door handle at a perfect angle—the perfect angle, that is, if I were trying to open the door with my face. The doors flew open, and I crashed onto the street.

  Surprisingly, I was more or less okay, aside from a huge gash on my forehead. Michael stared at my face, pointed at the nasty scar on his cheek, and said, “You see this? I got this up in Canada. They took me to some Eskimo hack who sewed me up with a whalebone or something. Let’s not mess around here. If you don’t get this fixed now, and get this fixed right, you’re going to have a big scar forever right on that forehead of yours. We’re getting you to a plastic surgeon immediately.” (Michael was absolutely right. Plastic surgeons stitch you up differently from the doctors at the emergency room so that you heal with minimal scarring. This is excellent advice for anybody who doesn’t want a permanent scar on their precious kid’s face.)

  We’d been filming in the foothills near the Santa Anita Race Track, in San Marino, just east of Pasadena, right by where the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shot. Fortunately, it was an upscale area, and upscale areas in Los Angeles tend to be filled with plastic surgeons, so within minutes after the accident, thanks to Michael, I was sitting in the waiting room of a famous plastic surgeon, about to get my gash repaired. Once I learned that this doctor was the same plastic surgeon who had worked on Michael Jackson after his hair caught on fire during the filming of that Pepsi commercial, I knew I was in good hands. If he fixed the King of Pop, he could fix Willie the alien lizard, no problem.

  The doctor took us into his office and explained the procedure, which sounded fine to me. He then pulled out a bottle of Scotch, poured me two fingers, gave me a local anesthetic, and went about the business of making me beautiful again.

  The surgery took place on Friday evening. By Sunday morning, my forehead was so black-and-blue and ballooned up that I thought I’d never get offered a role for the rest of my life. I looked like Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I had a meltdown and yelled at Roxanne, “I’ll never act again! I’ll have to become a director. Or, God forbid, a writer!” I was whining like a big baby. But as the week progressed, the swelling gradually went down. The surgeon had given me some vitamin E, and a couple of my hippie friends had given me some aloe vera plants to rub on the wound, and by the following Sunday, it was mostly gone. Thirty-seven stitches, and only the faintest trace of a scar. (So now the misshapen nose that both Kris Kristofferson and Richard Gere had contributed to was accompanied by that faint thread of a scar over my left eyebrow. I was beginning to look like a punch-drunk welterweight.) Thanks, Doc, thank you vitamin E oil, thank you aloe vera juice, and thank you, thank you, thank you, Michael Ironside.

  A week later, the phone rang: “Is this Mr. Englund?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Robert Englund who was injured on the set of V?”

  “Um, who is this?”

  “Don’t worry about who this is. The only thing you should worry about is suing Warner Bros.”

  “Why would I sue Warner Bros.?”

  “Negligence. You shouldn’t have been anywhere near that van. You’re not a stuntman. You’re an actor. Warners didn’t look out for you. They don’t look out for any of their actors. I’ll help you put together a case. You initiate a suit, and I’ll cut you a check for a million dollars.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Don’t worry about who this is. You in or not?”

  “Not.” I’d developed a great working relationship with Warner Bros. over the years, and I had no interest in suing them, especially since my injury had all but disappeared. I slammed down the phone.

  The nex
t week, he called again, and I didn’t let him get three sentences into his pitch before I hung up. I never heard from him again, but I have a suspicion of who he was. The scandal and litigation over the Twilight Zone: The Movie tragedy—in which actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed—still permeated the industry. I think some ambulance chasers were trying to get me to be part of a class-action suit against Warners. Hollywood had always been good to me, so it didn’t occur to me to sue; besides, I didn’t want to bite the hand that was feeding me.

  * * *

  THE STAR OF V, Faye Grant, was one of the most savvy TV actresses I’ve worked with, something that some of the actors would get a little frustrated with. For example, in a scene, Faye would occasionally avoid eye contact, sometimes turning her back to the camera and busying herself with props. It was almost as if she were trying to hide from the prying lens. I didn’t know what the hell she was up to and didn’t bother asking, because I figured it was her business and she probably wouldn’t want to discuss it.

  I was just as confused as the other cast members, until I started paying close attention to her performance when I watched our show every Friday night at home. I realized that Faye was cherry-picking “moments.” She wished to highlight certain lines of dialogue, but instead of emphasizing those lines, she would underplay or throw away her other dialogue. Then when she had a moment she wanted to pop, she would look up for the camera, and letting her light hit her face and her eyes just right, she would literally own the moment. Faye was so in control of what she was doing that when it came time for the editors to piece together the show, they had no choice but to use the takes and angles that she’d silently dictated. It wasn’t about a lack of generosity; it was about protecting her work and making it rise above standard television acting. This wasn’t the kind of thing that was taught at ADA, or anywhere else for that matter. Faye’s TV technique helped me understand that I still had plenty to learn.