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For Joanne
I
INTRODUCTION
BY JOHN HODGMAN
When I first got access to decently fast internet, I did what everyone did: I typed in my own name. It was twenty years ago. I was an assistant at Writers House, an accredited literary agency in New York City, and we had just gotten a T1 line. Prior to this my internet experience had been walled in by the slow, screeching garden of dial-up AOL. Now I had the World Wide Web – indeed, the world – on my desktop. And with new and remarkable speed, Alta Vista told me I did not exist in it.
The next thing I did was to type in “Bruce Campbell.”
I knew about Bruce because in high school Nicholas McCarthy showed me The Evil Dead. Then in college, I watched The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. with Jonathan Coulton before it was briskly cancelled. Bruce was already a cult celebrity by this time, but it is both important and difficult to remember that this time, before Internet had meaningfully saturated our lives, cults still met in the dark. Before YouTube, social media, even blogging, nerds only found their fellow cult members in slow motion, via letter columns and yearly regional conventions. They had not yet mobilized via the Web into a massive, cranky, demanding, and inspiring consumer and cultural force. Since I didn’t exist on the internet, I wanted to know if there was anyone else out there like me. So like any nerd, I typed in some code words – a single ping into all that darkness – and waited for what echo came back. What came back was Bruce.
Along with a half dozen Bruce Campbell fansites was bruce-campbell.com. It didn’t look that great. The design was unflashy and homegrown. There may have been some Comic Sans in use. But because it was so cheesy and charming and great at the same time, I knew it could only be real Bruce behind it. And it was. I am usually right.
Aside from posting the dates of his appearances at upcoming horror movie conventions, Bruce told stories on his Web site. He wrote about the tedium of leaving his family to live in Mexico for months to shoot his few scenes in a movie that no one would remember (unless you happen to be the nerd who runs a Tumblr devoted to Tom Arnold’s interpretation of McHale’s Navy). He wrote about the sweat and fake blood that he and Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert had to pour into The Evil Dead to get it, impossibly, made. He wrote about the strangeness of being like unto a God within the hotel ballroom that is hosting this small horror movie convention, only to step into the hotel lobby, a suddenly anonymous, unfamous Shemp. He wrote about a fox he saw one day when he went out for a bike ride.
I thought it would all make an interesting book. (Well, not the fox part, though I still love that story. There is something unmistakably Bruce – his openness to the world and small pleasures – in his turning to the Internet to report that he saw a cool fox that day). I clicked on the link that was an e-mail address. I typed a few more words into the darkness, and then forgot about it. Until Bruce wrote back.
Of course Bruce checked his own e-mail. At least then he did, because he could. He knew how few of us weirdos were out there – enough to delight with his Web site and fox tales, but not enough to bother him with too much attention or money. I did not understand this at the time. I thought I had hit a gusher. Someone had just sold a Whoopi Goldberg book for almost a million dollars. And since I had the cultural face-blindness of the young nerd that could not differentiate between the fame of Bruce Campbell and Whoopi Goldberg, I thought Bruce’s sudden blind trust in me was not only A) astonishingly kind, but also B) well-placed, and C) the start of a very successful career as a professional literary agent. Only A was true.
Bruce mentioned casually in his own afterword to If Chins Could Kill that it was not easy to find a publisher for that book. I will be less casual: it was rough. Bruce wrote an amazing proposal along with the help of his incredible assistant Craig (who I am thrilled to see back in the byline with this book). But as I called around, I realized I had underestimated how many New York book editors loved Army of Darkness; and equally, I underestimated the sniffy contempt so many New York book editors would have for those nerds who did. Army of Darkness was a cult movie, beloved by a few weirdos, but dismissed by the mass mono-culture that could only be reached by big publishers and studios and record labels and broadcast TV, the same mass mono-culture that was the only way to make money and which would go on forever and ever. The rejections poured in, each a humiliating gut punch: I was not only failing, I was failing my hero.
In 1999 or 2000, I went with Bruce to a horror movie convention at the New Yorker Hotel near Penn Station. Conventions were still like Bruce’s old web site: small, a little ramshackle, and summer-campy. No one was coming to launch a major media property there. It was weirdos who loved weird things, including Bruce Campbell. Seven hundred or so people crowded into the room for his Q&A. Bruce answered every question. He reassured the crowd that they should not be worried: his old high school pal Sam Raimi was the perfect person to bring Spider-Man to the screen. He encouraged them to get out there and make movies just like he and Sam had done. He pointed out that the most profitable movie of that year had been The Blair Witch Project, which had been self-produced, shot on consumer grade equipment, and home-publicized using the Internet. Things are changing, Bruce pointed out.
I had sent out a videotape (a videotape!) of an appearance like this, from an earlier convention, with each proposal. Who knows if the publishers watched it, and if they did, whether they were impressed. All of them rejected the proposal except one, Barry Neville, of St. Martin’s Press.
Barry was there with me now at the New Yorker Hotel. It was the spring before If Chins Could Kill would be published. We watched the fans line up, hundreds of them, to bring their T-shirts and Ash figurines and bared chests for Bruce’s signature. In a few months they would come back with books in their hands. This would happen in dozens of cities across the country. I’m sure its sales did not rival Whoopi Goldberg’s, but it was enough to put it on the New York Times bestseller list. And I guarantee it made the publisher a profit, because I know what the advance was.
Barry was brave to have fought to acquire the book, but his was a bravery of love, not of business. Neither of us knew the book would succeed. We only guessed based on what Bruce had told and shown us: you can cultivate a good and profitable artistic career by knowing your audience and keeping them close; that soon we would all have to do that, because mass mono-culture was largely not going to exist anymore; and that Sam Raimi would do a good job at Spider-Man. By the time Spider-Man opened to almost 100 million dollars in one weekend, it was becoming clear: what mass culture would remain would be nerd culture.
Was Bruce ahead of his time? Yes. But the success of Chins, like all his successes, stems more from the fact that he is an old-fashioned good dude. Before he signed with me I had to meet his manager. It was a hot summer Sunday. He was in town for some premiere, and I had just bought a blazer to
make myself look like a grown up. It just made me sweat, and that sweat grew cold in the a/c of the Au Bon Pain where we sat as I tried to figure out how I was going to convince this man to put his client into my soft, inexperienced hands.
But I didn’t have to worry. The manager was bemused, a living sigh of “what’s Bruce gotten into now?” He told me a story about how a major director wanted Bruce for a big mini-series, but Bruce turned him down. He had promised Rob Tapert he would do Xena this year, and Bruce kept his word. So when Bruce was armed with the technology to reach the whole world, of course he would keep it personal, straightforward and groovy. To help people reach out to him, and to give people chances. If some kid wrote to him about writing a book, he’d take it seriously. And if he went insane or got drunk and accidentally agreed to let John Hodgman represent him, he wouldn’t go back on his word now.
When Nicholas McCarthy showed me The Evil Dead in high school, all he wanted to be was a horror director. He is that now (his movie, The Pact, is one of my favorites). When I watched Brisco County, Jr. with Jonathan Coulton in college, all he wanted to be was a musician who wrote songs about technology and feelings. He is that now. All I ever wanted to do was become a semi-famous person like Bruce Campbell. Bruce’s hard work and legacy of awesomeness and decency allowed this to happen, and we are but three data points among the people he has inspired.
I am grateful, always, for his faith in letting me join him at the beginning of his book-writing career, and also for his understanding when, once Chins was published, I realized I would be a terrible literary agent and thus had to quit. I looked back on the book this morning and remembered all of this and wrote it down, and I am grateful to you for letting me air these memories out. I also noticed in the latest edition of Chins Bruce corrected the spelling of my name from HODGEMAN to HODGMAN. I guess I’m grateful for that too, though it did rob me of a chance to make fun of him.
Thanks, Bruce.
That is all.
John Hodgman
P
PRE-RAMBLE
Back in 1997, a literary agent named John Hodgman contacted me and asked if I had ever considered writing an autobiography. I guess he read a few early, primitive “blogs” on my Web site and found them amusing. But writing a book about myself? No, I hadn’t ever thought about it, but it was an intriguing possibility. I did love reading biographies about actors, but there weren’t too many out there about the so-called B-listers.
“That’s exactly the point,” John explained. “Tell the story of the underexposed working stiffs of the silver screen.”
I set about scrawling outlines, anecdotes and notes on the backs of screenplays. Within a few years, I had managed to come up with enough words and dig up enough old photographs to tell the story of my life. If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor was unleashed upon the literary world in 2001, and I’m proud to “confess” that it became a New York Times bestseller.
That was fifteen years ago. As I looked back I realized that if this were a movie, the first book would really only be Act One, where you meet your hero and follow him through his formative years. This might very well be part two of a three-act story. This book has a little more of the “meat” of my life as an experienced actor, with more “adult” experiences.
I had originally intended to write a travel memoir titled Vagabond: An Actor’s Gypsy Life, but my stories were so intrinsically tied to my ongoing career that it all just worked better as my “further confessions.”
If you’ve already read If Chins Could Kill, the following few pages are a breezy reminder of my life from my childhood in Michigan to my “legendary journeys” with a “warrior princess.”
If you’ve never read If Chins Could Kill, your life is as dull as toast, but it’s still available in four different editions: the hardcover, trade paperback, audiobook (read by yours truly) and full-color, gently updated e-book.
Regardless, I’m about to recap my first tale at the beginning of the new one. Why not? It worked for Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness …
PREVIOUSLY ON …
The youngest son of Charlie and Joanne, I was born in 1958 outside of Detroit, Michigan. I spent my happy childhood digging tunnels, building forts and creating UFO scares with my brothers, Mike and Don. I was your typical suburban kid until one fateful day in 1966 when I saw my father performing onstage as part of a local theater troupe. The thespian seed was planted and it wasn’t long before I landed my first acting role in The King and I at our beloved St. Dunstan’s Theatre.
Local theater was only the beginning. There was something else brewing during my adolescence. Over the years, I met and amassed a tight group of friends, like-minded “Shemps” who rallied together under the banner of Super-8 filmmaking. Super-8 was a grainy, primitive medium, but it was a shared passion in my group (along with the Three Stooges) and we all took turns with the various duties making numerous screwball comedies.
My buddies Mike Ditz, Scott Spiegel, Josh Becker, John Cameron and Dave Goodman were all serious about pursuing the dreams we cultivated together, but one kid named Sam Raimi was “a different bird entirely.” Sam and I met in drama class in 1975 and bonded immediately over our embarrassing failures at improv. He brought a lot to our filmmaking troupe, including a creative fire, a devilish sense of humor, a goofy little brother and a 1973 Oldsmobile Delta Royale.
High school ended and, thanks to my mother’s encouragement, I interned at the Cherry County Playhouse. A valuable learning experience, this was my first time working among professional actors, with all their wisdom and quirks. My college career lasted all of six months because I already knew what I wanted to do. I believed the best education would be to actually start working in the entertainment industry. I became a production assistant for local commercials and got to see how a “real” film set operated.
The “boys” and I continued to get together at every opportunity to make more Super-8 shorts. Only now we had a new member: Sam’s roommate, Rob Tapert. As we grew, so did the scope (and cost) of our projects. Sam and Rob’s “The Happy Valley Kid” cost $700 but actually made about $5,000 at the box office/college’s campus theater. We began to think that our films might actually be able to make some money.
Up next was Sam’s ambitious flop, It’s Murder! This time, he wanted to produce a feature-length story, complete with a large cast, stunts – even a car chase. It cost over $2,000, which was a huge amount of money in 1978. Alas, for all our effort and expense, It’s Murder! bombed, but within the film was a surprising silver lining that sealed our fates. In one scene, a character lurched forward from the backseat of a car so unexpectedly that it scared the audience – every time we showed it. Maybe pratfalls and slapstick weren’t the keys to success. What if the path to fortune and glory was paved with shock and horror?
Sam, Rob and I started officially working toward making a feature-length horror film. We started with the production of a “proof of concept” short called “Within the Woods” that we could screen for potential investors. For all of our inexperience, we were committed to getting our feature funded, made and distributed.
After many months of shooting and several years of effort, expense, injury and near-sex experiences, our film was finished. With the help of marketing guru Irvin Shapiro and the endorsement of horror authority Stephen King, we were a hit at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Soon after, Evil Dead was released in England, but a domestic distributor had yet to be found.
Thankfully, the movie took off across the big ditch – second only to the blockbuster E.T. in some areas – and it awoke New Line Cinema’s interest here in the United States. The film was released in 1983 and did very well – for New Line Cinema. We got an “advance” of $125,000 and it was the last penny we ever saw.
The emergence of home video came to the rescue and Evil Dead ultimately sold more than a million VHS tapes through Thorn EMI, an astonishingly reputable video distributor. None of this happened overnight. The film was shot in 1979,
released in 1982/3 and took six years to break even. In this case, it was the rights fee to make Evil Dead II that put the original movie partnership in the black.
Fishing for distributors.
Based on the strength of foreign sales for the first film, the sequel came together very quickly. We were happy to get back to a world we understood after our second film, Crimewave, died a thousand deaths. Evil Dead II was so sought after, partner Rob Tapert walked on the set during pre-production and announced that the film was already in profit due to pre-sales of various rights around the world.
When Evil Dead II came out in 1987, it did moderately well at the box office, but it didn’t seem to matter – we already made what we were going to make, profit-wise.
By then, I was a working actor, living in Los Angeles with my family: wife, Cristine, daughter, Rebecca and son, Andy. The Evil Dead movies had established me as a “horror guy” and I was cast in a slew of B movies, ranging from psycho slasher flicks to sci-fi adventures.
As the 1990s approached, I joined Josh Becker and Dave Goodman in producing Josh’s indie comedy Lunatics: A Love Story. Alas, with repeated extended absences, the film industry can be brutal to families and I returned home from shooting Lunatics to discover that Cris wanted a divorce.
Despondent, I burrowed back into my B movie pigeonhole. There, on the set of Mindwarp, I met a feisty costume designer named Ida who took pity on me and my rusty efforts to woo her. Ida and I were married in 1991 and are still going.
The next time Evil Dead reared its ugly head was that same year, when Sam, Rob and I convinced Dino De Laurentiis and Universal to team up and make Army of Darkness. This third installment was, to us, epic in proportions. The budget went from 8, to 11, to 13 million. In the process, we put a boatload of our own money in the flick, lost creative control of the editing and generally had a miserable time making the thing.
Hail to the Chin Page 1