Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

  Carpenter described the main character, credited in the film only as “Nada,” as a guy without a place in society, but perhaps because the place for his core values had diminished, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong with him. “He’s a loner and he’s tough, and he’s ugly but he has dignity,” Carpenter said.

  Roddy always expressed surprise that the director saw him as an actor, since to his mind he was “so coarse” at the time. Carpenter cited Roddy’s role on “Piper’s Pit” as more than enough acting to know that he’d found his man.

  “This is what I wanted,” Carpenter said to Roddy in 2014. “You were the character. You weren’t polished. That was what was so appealing. I didn’t try to make you into something you weren’t. I tried to take what you were and bring it to the screen in this character. It was your talent and your ability and your past knowledge. You knew how to wrestle, knew how to fight. And you’d lived life, I could see it on your face.”

  For all the lunatic violence that audiences associated with Roddy, in Nada’s jeans and plaid shirt he looked like the man he had actually been not so long ago: a quiet guy who was willing to work for his supper. Swap the construction gear for wrestling trunks, and Nada’s nomadic character is pretty close to Roderick Toombs when he’d first come to wrestle in LA.

  As well as being a great fit for the role, Roddy also was massively popular with the same demographic that liked clever sci-fi movies. Carpenter didn’t need Roddy’s drawing power as much as the Frogtown producers had, but it didn’t hurt. An ideal fit or not, though, Roddy still had to audition for the part.

  Roddy had resented having Mr. T parachuted into the WrestleMania script. He didn’t want Hollywood actors feeling the same way about him. To be sure that he could carry his weight in front of a movie camera, he began studying with a renowned Los Angeles acting coach named Sal Dano. Dano videotaped Roddy reading lines so the filmmakers could assess his delivery. Proud of the resulting clips, Roddy shared the results with Carpenter. When Dano realized Roddy had jumped the gun, he was furious.

  “What if he didn’t like them? You’d be out of a job!” he said.

  Roddy hadn’t thought of that, but ignorance was bliss. Luckily, Carpenter thought the tapes were fine, and Roddy got the part. What he couldn’t have known was that the project he was about to embark on would become a cult classic.

  —

  They Live was shot in downtown LA, but life on set wasn’t cushy.

  “Every morning while we were shooting, I’d be up at four a.m. I’d climb in the sauna.” Roddy used his time in the sauna to reflect, thinking of himself like a car in the shop, sweating out the old oil and putting in the new. “Then I’d go back to my trailer and John’s wife, Sandy, made me stick my head in a bucket of ice water. When I came up from that I was ready to go.”

  Roddy wanted this to work. As a wrestler, he’d ask himself every year: Am I getting better? If the answer was no, he wouldn’t continue. “I felt the same way about making movies,” he said. “They Live was going to be my third. If I wasn’t becoming a better actor, I would have quit.” Still, They Live’s most memorable scene came straight out of Roddy’s old wrestling playbook.

  Carpenter had Roddy and Keith David watch The Quiet Man starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, about a boxer who retires to the Irish village where he was born. It contained what was then the longest fight scene in cinema. Carpenter wanted to one-up that scene with an even longer one, and he wanted more than just a bigger, longer punch-up.

  “You usually see guys stand up and the hero just quickly whacks the bad guys and moves on,” says Carpenter. “It seems like in the eighties especially, heroes are invulnerable. They just run with a machine gun, they kill everybody and off they go.” What keeps the fight scene in They Live tense is that it’s a fight between two friends, one so desperate to show the other something crucial to their survival that he’ll punch him out rather than let him refuse to look.

  When Nada discovers a discarded box of sunglasses and tries on a pair, he suddenly sees the world as it really is (the box of glasses was left over from Big Trouble in Little China). It’s a startling moment that wouldn’t have worked if Roddy couldn’t tone down his normally arena-sized reactions.

  Seen through the glasses, a billboard for computer equipment reads “OBEY” and another advertising Caribbean vacations says “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” More worrisome is that the successful and wealthy types Nada crosses paths with on the street—“yuppies” in the parlance of the time—are actually skull-faced, bug-eyed aliens. Determined to share what he’s discovered with Frank, his friend from the construction site, played by Keith David, Nada tries to force him to put on the glasses.

  For two weeks (some people have said three), Roddy and David blocked out the six-minute fight in Carpenter’s backyard, under the careful eye of stunt coordinator Jeff Imada, who had also worked on Big Trouble in Little China.

  “I brought Jeff Imada in and I brought Roddy in,” says Carpenter, “and we talked about it. About what would make a fight unique….I wanted to use some of Roddy’s professional wrestling techniques and knowledge.”

  There are moments in the fight that clearly have their roots in the physical aspects of professional wrestling. Both actors were proud that they’d shot the scene without stunt men. But it’s the moments rooted in ring psychology where Roddy really shines, and he always called that part of the movie his favourite.

  “There was a place where I took a two-by-four and Keith was by a car and I swung the two-by-four at his head,” said Roddy. “I remember telling him—this is an old wrestling thing—’Hey, brother, you need to move because I’m coming.’ And he was good about moving! It broke the windshield of the car. At that time, the character, Nada, went, ‘Ah, what am I doing? This is my friend, I coulda hurt him.’ At the same time, that pissed Frank off…and he grabs a wine bottle and breaks it to come back at me. He cuts his own hand, and that makes me, as his friend, laugh from concern. Which is a dumbass thing to do, which makes him even more angry, and he comes charging, and we go backwards over a couple cars.”

  After the weeks of rehearsal, Carpenter shot the scene over three days. Initially, he let the actors fight as far into the scene as they could without stopping, an approach that Roddy credited with giving the scene some of its energy. The night before they started filming, Entertainment Tonight showed up on set. Roddy making a major film with one of the hottest directors in Hollywood was newsworthy, and of course people wondered if the infamous heel (his farewell babyface turn had changed no perceptions about his unhinged persona) could restrain himself when fighting on set with a refined actor like David. David called it the most fun he’d ever had, and credited Roddy with teaching him how to react convincingly to a punch. As for getting hurt, David wasn’t the one who needed to worry.

  “When you’re choreographing for fights on film, it’s all about angles,” David said. “I can be ten feet away from somebody; if the camera’s behind me and I swing right and they react right, it looks like I hit him. It was always about the distance. That was always being stressed. So he never hit me. And I almost never hit him.

  “As soon as the camera rolled for ET, the first move was I punch him in the face. And I was standing too close, and I go bang! ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ He goes, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Let’s just start again.’”

  —

  By the time They Live was being filmed, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s loadbearing little sentence from The Terminator—“I’ll be back”—had permeated popular culture. More than thirty years later, the line still resonates. In They Live Roddy delivered an enduring line of his own. People have often speculated that Roddy improvised it on set. Not quite—not that Roddy helped clarify where it came from.

  “I’ve told it many different ways, the line,” confessed Roddy, “but sometimes, when you do as many interviews as I do, you gotta craft!” Until he’d sat down and discussed it in 2014 with Carpenter, he couldn’t act
ually recall how he’d come up with his memorable sentence.

  Roddy had kept notebooks full of one-liners and ideas for wrestling interviews and promos—“Don’t throw rocks at a man with a machine gun,” etc. He handed the book over to Carpenter and said, as the director recalled it, “Take a look at this. Here’s who I am. Here’s what I’ve written. Here’s where I came from.” The best of the bunch was written for a match in Portland against Buddy Rose.

  As part of his heel act, Roddy often sauntered to the ring chewing bubble gum, displaying a juvenile’s lack of respect for the guy he was about to wrestle. It raised the ire of his opponents and their fans. In the movie, Nada, carrying a shotgun stolen from the police as the aliens pursue him, runs into a bank. The bank, of course, is also full of aliens. He decides to put a little fear into the invaders, and before shooting up the tellers’ booths declares, “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all outta bubble gum.”

  Carpenter loved the line and put it in the film.

  —

  Much of They Live takes place in a shantytown, which in one scene is razed by the authorities who suspect there’s rebellion brewing there. Filming in and around Los Angeles’s less prosperous neighbourhoods came with its challenges. But Roddy and Carpenter both had a lot of sympathy for the kinds of people they encountered there.

  “We had to pay off two different gangs to leave us be,” said Roddy. To get to the shantytown location every day, he walked down a lane filled with homeless people and always stopped to talk with a few of them on the way. “I gave a guy a few bucks—that I’d borrowed from John,” he said with a snicker. For a scene where the police raze the shantytown with heavy equipment, Carpenter hired some of those homeless people for the day.

  Carpenter felt an affinity with working-class heroes. “I think everybody is potentially heroic,” he said, “depending on what they’re presented with in life. A lot of people who commit themselves to an ideal, raise children, work loyally, are heroes. I think we all have a little bit of that in us.” He was charmed when Roddy, his working-class star, wouldn’t take off his wedding ring while shooting.

  “The thing that was interesting with Nada staring over the LA skyline,” said Roddy, “was you didn’t know anything about him, you didn’t know where he came from, he wore a wedding ring, you didn’t know why, you didn’t know where he was going. He was that lost America.”

  In a quiet moment, as Nada and Frank speak reflectively in a dark hotel room while drinking a beer, Nada gives a hint about where he came from. Exactly how much of this background came out of Roddy’s notebook is hard to determine, but Carpenter revealed that he came up with the scene after long conversations with Roddy about his past, and he guarded Roddy closely on set in the hours before they shot it, sensing his star’s discomfort with the character’s emotional openness and vulnerability. It’s easy to imagine hundreds of nights on the road with Roddy’s gang or on a hotel window ledge with the likes of Kerry Von Erich that looked a lot like this scene. Men whose unrelenting days don’t allow them to look anywhere but forward, who gather late at night in their hotel rooms to share stories over a quiet drink. Sleep is best postponed until they’re exhausted and pass out so quickly their demons can’t catch up to them in the unguarded twilight that comes before dreams.

  “My old daddy took me down to the river,” says Nada, “kicked my ass, told me about the power and the glory. I was saved. He changed when I was little. Turned mean, started tearing at me. So I ran away when I was thirteen. Tried to cut me once. Big old razor blade. He held it up against my throat. I said, ‘Daddy, please.’ Just kept moving it back and forth, like he was sawing down a little tree.”

  Frank wonders aloud if the aliens like seeing humans tear into one another.

  “I got news for them,” answers Nada. “Gonna be hell to pay. ‘Cause I ain’t Daddy’s little boy no more.”

  —

  Roddy hoped to take fewer bumps in the movie business, but in filming the finale of They Live he learned pain wasn’t so easy to avoid. Standing on the roof of the Bank of America Plaza in downtown Los Angeles, where Nada would have his final confrontation with the alien-directed police, a special-effects technician was hooking Roddy up with squibs, tiny explosives filled with gunpowder and fake blood to make him look like he’d been shot.

  “This guy warned me the charges might sting and said he was worried I might black out,” said Roddy. “Black out? Not a chance. So the scene starts and these things go off on my arm and he’s not kidding—they hurt. Even more than I expected.”

  Carpenter yelled “cut” and the dust settled. The guy who rigged up Roddy’s squibs looked surprised when he sees a tear in Roddy’s sleeve but no “blood.”

  “Damn,” he said, “I must have put them on backwards.”

  —

  They Live debuted as the number-one film in the United States.

  “After the two weeks, you couldn’t find it anywhere,” said David. So he asked one of the producers—Carpenter’s wife, Sandy King—why she thought that was. “She said, ‘Obviously it pissed somebody off.’”

  When David tells that story today, he’s no doubt playing to his audience. Part of the reason the film continues to be screened is its appeal to conspiracy theorists. With its portrayal of a secret power running, and ruining, America (at one point, Nada gazes over the LA skyline and says, “I still believe in America,” a line Roddy loved), it’s easy to see where that appeal comes from. Roddy himself took to calling it “a documentary,” a sentiment with which Carpenter agreed. Neither thought the film was literally true, but its portrayal of power and the wilful blindness of runaway consumerism cleverly reflected forces that were undeniably at work in America.

  They Live lives on. Roddy’s bubble gum line has been echoed in many places, possibly first in the popular 1996 video game Duke Nukem 3D. The cartoon South Park mimicked the fight scene, blow-by-blow, in a 2001 episode called “Cripple Fight.” Roddy wouldn’t watch the parody for ten years, thinking it too cruel, until a child on crutches in an autograph line mimicked the South Park scene while mugging with Roddy for a photo. Provocative artist Shepard Fairey (designer of the iconic “HOPE” poster for Barak Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign) based a public art campaign on the film’s use of “OBEY,” pairing it with an illustrated close up of Andre the Giant’s face. Stickers of that design slathered streets across the globe.

  “That was a movie that really could have made him a big star,” said Ackerman. “He got really good reviews. I remember, I think it was Film Comment magazine, just wrote this rave about him. One of the reasons he did shine in They Live was he had a major director, and a director that was major in that genre also….The rare times that he would work with a good director, you could see it in the film that he did. He was a really good actor.” Despite this, Roddy struggled to find the right next role to build on his success with Carpenter. “The problem was,” said Ackerman, “that he didn’t have the right people surrounding him in order to use [They Live] as a stepping stone towards the future.”

  They Live was a slow burn. It has remained a cultural force—but not of the kind that earns a man a living. Some kind of a return to wrestling was the inevitable result of projects that capitalized on the casting of Rowdy Roddy Piper and not Roddy Piper’s evolving talents as an actor.

  At home, Roddy’s evolving talents as a parent were getting him further.

  —

  Roddy was away working so much that to his daughters he was often reduced to the voice on the other end of the phone or the reprimand on the other end of the old threat: “Wait ‘til your dad gets home!” But his oldest daughter really couldn’t wait. His reprimands rarely lived up to expectation anyway.

  “My father and I were born two days apart,” recalled Anastasia. “We’re pretty much the same.” At heart Roddy was a homebody and an independent thinker, and his oldest daughter was turning out just like him. She was still a child, but already other kids and their par
ents understood who little Stacia’s father was. Even as a child she didn’t care who her dad was on television or what other people knew or thought about him. She just wanted him there.

  As one birthday approached, Roddy had an idea about how to be there and keep Rowdy Roddy Piper from intruding on his daughter’s big day.

  “My mom invited my entire kindergarten class for my sixth birthday and everyone was so excited to come over because,” Anastasia paused, feeling the old disappointment, “of my dad.” Roddy made an appearance at the party, but not the one anyone was expecting. “He dressed up as a rooster and played the piano in front of my entire class.”

  Roo-Roo-Rooster became the stuff of legend throughout Anastasia’s school years. She has no idea why Roddy dressed like that—it was likely just the costume he could get his hands on most quickly. But even if it sometimes seemed like the Toombs kids down the road had a superhero for a father, truth is, Roddy really did have a knack for saving the day.

  —

  The Morton Downey Jr. Show lasted only three years (Downey was bankrupt by 1990), but while the talk show was on the air, its chain-smoking reactionary host was hard to ignore. Blowing smoke in his guests’ faces, Downey noisily excoriated whatever and whoever caught his interest, and viewers loved the controversial racket he generated about politics, social issues and, yes, even professional wrestling. Somewhere between “Piper’s Pit” and The Morton Downey Jr. Show, the line between irony and reality was crossed. A collision between the original and the imitator was a tempting prospect to Vince McMahon.

  Here, Roddy’s story intersects with the other one of those teenage brothers who had watched him wrestle as a twenty year old in Houston. The younger brother, Bruce Prichard, was hired by the WWF after WrestleMania 3 as a producer. In yet another “Piper’s Pit” knockoff, Prichard portrayed a southern-preacher-like character, Brother Love, host of “The Brother Love Show.” With his face painted red as if his blood pressure were going through the roof, and dressed in a starched white suit, he cozied up to the heels and mocked babyfaces with his dragged-out opening phrase, “I loooove you,” spoken in an exaggerated southern drawl. Early in 1989, Roddy returned to the WWF. Like Adrian Adonis before him, Brother Love was waiting in the bully pulpit Roddy had once called his own.