Hail to the Chin

by Bruce Campbell

  When I first met Burt, it was during a lunch break on set. We heard a rumor that the man himself was in the building for a visit. Jeffrey and I rode up on our set bikes and I executed a classic backpedal skid stop. I looked up to see Burt smiling and I decided to try my usual “Hey, buddy, this is a closed set…” routine, pretending not to recognize him. Thankfully, Burt ate it up and we quickly established an easy rapport.

  During the run of Burt’s episode, we got to socialize a couple times. One night at The Forge, a Miami institution, Burt explained one of the worst things about being a male sex symbol – encountering drunk female fans.

  “You’d think it would be really fun,” he explained. “Hot chicks throwing themselves at you. But not if they’re drunk. Then it’s really horrible. They’d wrap their legs around you and never let go.”

  Burt did a great job in the episode, his charm and charisma still evident, even after way-too-recent heart surgery knocked him for a loop.

  Before the series ended, Ida and I wanted to see Burt one last time, so we scheduled a trip up to his home in Jupiter, Florida. Valhalla, Burt’s name for his oceanfront estate, was befitting of the icon – masculine, sprawling, a little over-the-top. Burt was a gracious host, giving us the grand tour, which ended in his wonderful version of a man cave, which was even more masculine than the rest of the house with a giant bar, pool table, movie theater and enough dedicated movie star pictures to fill a museum.

  As I scanned the photos, the inevitable questions popped up. “I see you have a picture of Errol Flynn. He was one of my favorites. You must have met him near the end of his career.”

  “Yeah, but he was still at it,” Burt clarified. “I knocked on his dressing room door one day at Warner Brothers and he casually called me in. I stepped inside and he’s being serviced by a young starlet. He carried on talking like it was nothing, like it happened all the time – which it did.”

  John Wayne used to invite Burt over all the time because “Duke” thought he was funny. Richard Pryor also thought Burt was funny – and this was coming from a funny guy. After a concert, Richard invited Burt to ride on his private jet. During the flight, Richard was more than a little amused by “the black man giving whitey a ride in a private jet!”

  One of the ideas I was trying to pitch for Burt’s book.

  Burt could relate stories in a wonderful stream of consciousness from any decade you asked about. He was a great raconteur and I encouraged him to write a book.

  “Hell, Burt, I’ve written a book and you’ve been around twice as long as I have. If anyone has a book in them, it’s you.”

  Burt did not disagree and in 2015 I was pleased to see his autobiography hit the shelves.

  For the most part, the Burn Notice actors got along. Did we have shitty, pissy or even temperamental moments between us? Hell yes – on numerous occasions – but compared to what I’ve witnessed on other sets, I’d give us a B+ for behavior.

  What kept the cast grounded enough to grin and bear it through the heat and long hours was the fact that we all respected the end product – it also didn’t hurt that the ratings were excellent right out of the gate.

  NUMBER TWO ON THE CALL SHEET

  Matt Nix shared a theory he had heard about baboons. The number-one baboon carried the most responsibility, along with the youngest. The top baboon, naturally, had a lot of stress to make decisions, defend the gang and lead by example. The youngest baboon also had a lot of stress because it was always being told to “keep up” and couldn’t help being compared unfavorably to all the other baboons. The least stressed, according to Matt, was the number-two baboon – or me. Being second fiddle, or “number two on the call sheet,” I didn’t have to carry the load like Jeffrey Donovan, who was the face of the show. My character added humor and a wink, but Burn Notice did not live or die by me.

  As a result, I had a pretty damn good time working on the show. Often, I would “open the store” by being in the first scene filmed to give Jeffrey or Gabrielle some time off, go home for some sun and a swim, return hours later to get made-up again and “close the shop” by being in the last scene of the day.

  There were episodes where Sam was all over it (“Sam-tastic episodes”) and there were those where he wasn’t featured. On the “easy” episodes, I would make sure to tell the assistant directors to never announce my early departures over the radio because Donovan would most assuredly hear about it and give me the stink eye all the way to the production van.

  A Sam-tastic wardrobe.

  The easiest workday I recall had Sam, in a single shot, walking to the end of a driveway, checking his watch and walking back – about fifteen minutes of work. I literally raced off the set that day, urging my driver, Olga, to “step on it, in case they change their mind!”

  That’s not to say that I didn’t do my time or put in some gruelingly long hours. As we were shooting, on average, for fourteen hours a day, our call times would get pushed back day by day and come Friday, with an 11:00 a.m. crew call, we wouldn’t wrap until well into Saturday morning – hence the term “Fraturday.” There was no shortage of those.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!

  The diversity of Miami continued to enlighten me as production rolled on through the years. As covert do-gooders, we infiltrated virtually every upper-class venue in Dade County. But, for every extravagant nightclub, restaurant, marina and mansion we wormed our way into, we also got stuck in a host of abandoned sugar factories, chemical plants, storage containers and what I coined “shit-wipe” alleys. I’m pretty sure we filmed in every abandoned structure in the nearby town of Homestead.

  I once shot an entire scene in a municipal garage stairwell with a homeless guy camped out on a landing directly beneath me. Like some sort of metropolitan troll, he had rooted himself and refused to move. A crew member assured me, “It’s okay. He promised to stay quiet.”

  We even managed to find an abandoned four-story parking garage to shoot in. You’d think a city would always be able to find a use for a “vacant” parking structure, but this one in Miami was a ghost town – even the former homeless camps on each level had been vacated. Maybe the building had become unfit or too much of a health hazard to maintain – and if that was the case, why the hell were we filming there? The tricky part was getting up to set via stairwells choked with decomposing clothing, used syringes and makeshift toilets.

  Jimbo was the father of all squatters. In 1954, Jimbo Luznar was evicted from his waterfront shrimp place in downtown Miami. In return, he got a lifetime free lease from the city if he moved to a place on Virginia Key, which was basically a swampy bog across from the sewage treatment plant. Jimbo took the deal and he kept the city to its word – much to their chagrin – for over fifty years. Jimbo and his two sons, Bubba and Bobby, changed their business model from shrimping to alcohol and maintained one of the funkiest down-and-out bars in the Northern Hemisphere.

  Over the years, the place began to look like Gilligan’s Island – if Gilligan were a drunken crackhead. The truly bohemian vibe attracted every weirdo, drifter, pirate, squatter and freak in the area. Jimbo’s was a visual treat – if decrepit, dangerous island life was what you were after. When we filmed scenes there, the art department rarely had to add any dressing. Obviously, it was perfect and we weren’t alone in our thinking – Jimbo’s had been a film location since 1964 when Flipper was shot there and as recently as The Fast and the Furious.

  A [trailer] room with a view.

  Proximity to the sewage treatment plant gave Jimbo’s a wonderful perfumed stench all day long. The treatment plant installed a line of sprayers, emitting some god-awful odor-neutralizing fragrance, but the combination of industrial-strength Febreze and human waste was a bit much on the olfactory senses. I would have preferred the pure smell of crap.

  Ultimately, a family squabble ended the long run of Jimbo’s Place. Burn Notice returned to the site one last time after it had been basically bulldozed and fenced. Oddly enough, as sleazy as Jimb
o’s was, it was an original and I was sad to see it go.

  Cities can be bipolar places, and the history of Miami explains a lot about its spectrum of glamour and grime. We filmed in an area called Coconut Grove, a touristy, ritzy little shopping neighborhood where a person could stroll from the beach to grab an iced latte or a Tommy Bahama shirt. However, if that same person were to walk a couple blocks farther, they’d stumble into Little Bahamia – an area that was noticeably poorer. A CVS drugstore on the corner of Grand Avenue and Margaret Street marked a harsh but invisible boundary between relative affluence and abject poverty.

  I often wondered why there was such a distinct difference between two sides of the same street. After a little research, I found out that much of Coconut Grove was built in the late 1800s by laborers from the Bahamas. Apparently, Bahamians were the best of the best when it came to assembling and maintaining thatched structures. Starting with what was considered one of the first hotels in Florida, the Bahamians kept building. Many of the laborers decided to cut down their commute by literally building their own neighborhood next door.

  Ironically, many of the Bahamian homes have proven more resilient than the wealthier ones built since. The Caribbean-seasoned Bahamians built their homes low to the ground so high winds just blew overhead and they chose yellow pine, a type of wood that termites avoided.

  CAR CAPERS

  While in Miami, I wasn’t sure which car stunts were more spectacular – the ones on our TV show or the random recklessness I witnessed on the Southern Florida streets every day. Driving there was unsettling, since the diverse inhabitants all drove according to the laws of their home countries. On average, once per day, driving back and forth to set my driver Olga and I would experience what I called “holy shit moments,” whereby a driver – usually a hopelessly lost tourist from another country – would do the most unexpected or unthinkable maneuver directly in front of us.

  Whether it was the shirtless dude in flip-flops, flying down the freeway on his Lawrence of Arabia era motorcycle, weaving in and out of traffic with reckless abandon, or the two ninja motorcycle riders who whizzed past our car on either side – driving in Miami wasn’t something you did casually. Add to that a flotilla of scooters (driven often by champagne-swilling out-of-towners), a mostly clueless pedestrian population and you’ve got yourself the Wild West of traffic scenarios. Driving to set every day was a great way to prep for our own shenanigans behind the wheel.

  The character Michael Westen drove a bitchin’ black Dodge Charger that became iconic over the life of the show. That car was good news and bad news, all wrapped up into one hot package – “hot” being the operative word. A black car being blasted with light on an asphalt parking lot in August in Miami is a combination that should never go together – but there we were, week after week, year after year, filming long dialogue-fests inside this 1973 motorized Easy-Bake Oven. Mercifully, right around season three, due to Mr. Donovan’s insistence, the AC crisis in the Charger was solved. The transpo department installed a unit that would easily have cooled a tractor trailer.

  I didn’t get to drive the Charger much, but when I did I always had a blast. Nineteen-seventies American vehicles, for all of their shitty features, had balls. Any time I had to peel out after some bad dude, I’d slam that sucker into low gear and lay rubber all the way out of frame. I would routinely get applause from the crew after an action take because that car made it look so easy.

  Unfortunately, my character, Sam, drove a different car – a modern Cadillac. Not to disparage a great American brand (I grew up in a “Chevy family”), but modern Caddies suck raw eggs. Invariably, Sam would have to stomp on the gas and race out of a shot. Not in the Cadillac. I’d bury that pedal to the floor and the engine would heave before engaging – as if thinking over what it was about to do before it did it.

  Charged up!

  “Bruce, we need you to give it some juice on this next one,” the director would invariably radio to me.

  “I’m juicing, believe me. This Caddy is shooting blanks, man!”

  I tried every trick in the book – turning the AC off, pre-revving and popping into gear, but nothing spun out like the ratty old Charger.

  Police escorts are a beautiful thing. You can’t help but feel presidential as you race down the street, cars parting like the Red Sea before Moses. I got to participate in one such escort when Sam was trying to catch up with some random scumbag. I pretty much had two lanes to myself to race, skid and swerve, while actual traffic zoomed past me on the opposite side of the road. With cameras strategically placed, the end result looked like I was driving like a maniac in the middle of traffic.

  I consider Burn Notice to be a contemporary TV show, but in all but one season our characters never wore seat belts. Nothing is less sexy than a good guy sliding into his car in hot pursuit – then stopping the action cold to buckle up.

  I am aware of how completely irresponsible it was for us to perpetuate the bad habit of not wearing protective harnesses in large, fast-moving vehicles, but early on all the actors just jumped in the cars and took off. Realistically, we never had to do any driving that really required seat belts. When we squealed off in a car, it was only for about a hundred feet, or until we were out of the shot.

  Season seven, the seat belt thing changed. Enter Hyundai – a sponsor! In Hyundai’s cars, drivers had to be safe, so a nervous director approached Gabrielle and me before a scene, sitting in the new Hyundai, ready to do a bit of driving.

  “Uh, hey, guys, when you get in the car, this time we really need you to buckle up. It’s a Hyundai, sponsorship thing.”

  “Are you fucking kidding us?” Gabrielle asked, never one to hide her raw emotions. “Bugger off.”

  I was more diplomatic, perhaps, but I, too, declined the invitation to buckle up for the shot/sponsor. Neither of us saw any reason to change now. The director gulped and turned away. They filmed the scene “as is” but later digitally added seat belts in several interior shots. Thankfully, I only had to ride in that car once.

  LAW AND DISORDER

  A guy came up to me at a convention recently and said, “Bruce, I suppose for Burn Notice you have to go to the gun range regularly – just to stay on target, right?”

  “Uh, no,” I said, correcting him gently. “As actors, we never actually have to hit anything.”

  It’s safe to say, being a spy/action show, guns were a big part of Burn Notice and guns on set, even if non-lethal, were something you had to pay attention to. Guns shooting fake rounds were still explosive and emitted wadding that was unsafe at close range. Tragically, a few actors have died because of sloppy, albeit “fake” gun handling.

  Charlie, the prop master/gun wrangler and I forged a great relationship. He was always prepped, professional and chipper in executing his duties. Charlie and I got along well because he knew I wasn’t cavalier about gunplay. I dick around on sets all day long, but not when it comes to cars, stunts or guns – any one of which can put a person out of commission.

  Staging gunplay is like choreography. You duck out from behind a wall and fire three rounds, then dive back as ricochets pepper the area around you. It’s a lot of back-and-forth. The problems arise when somebody loses count on either end. You don’t want to be jumping into the line of fire when an effects guy is shooting “bullet hits” at your face. These tiny plastic balls are filled with a sparking agent and when they’re shot out of the equivalent of a pellet gun they shatter into a million pieces. They look great exploding on a brick wall but aren’t so fun when high-velocity sparkle dust and plastic shards are raining down on your moneymaker.

  Squibs, or body bullet hits, are tricky as well. The mechanical effects guy rigs a thin protective metal plate on wherever an actor is going to get hit, straps a small explosive charge to that, then lays a sealed blood pouch on top of that. Wires are then run down the actor’s leg to a power source. On cue, the effects guy hits a button, the charge blows and the blood is blown across the room, in a glori
ous, gory spectacle. When a person is shot in the front, the real mess is when the bullet comes out the back, but filmmakers tend to ignore that and insist on blood spraying out the front as well.

  In one scene, Jeffrey is facing an informant, who was to be killed, seconds before critical information is shared. It was the climax of an episode, so they milked the hell out of it. At the fateful moment, the actor is shot, the blood flies – and Donovan grabs his face, wincing in pain.

  That was not part of the script. Needless to say, filming stopped immediately. Anxious crew members and stunt guys rushed to his aid. Jeffrey’s upper lip was struck by the wadding blown out of the other actor’s shirt and was now the size of a golf ball. I always get the most frightened after a close call like that. What if that was his eye, or gonad or whatever? That’s the star of our show. If he went down, we were all unemployed. Donovan was a trouper and completed the scene – which required him to talk on the phone – by hiding his obvious wound with the prop.

  By all accounts, gun ownership in Miami was very robust, which added to my general malaise. I soon drew the morose conclusion that I would be shot to death in Southern Florida – on the job no less! Why? Because I was Sam Axe, Michael Westen’s gun-savvy buddy who was always watching his pal’s back. That meant I’d routinely be filming scenes that had me carrying rifles and automatic weapons in plain sight. One scene called for me to dump half a dozen automatic weapons into the Miami River. In order to get a dramatic wide shot for the scene, the entire crew, everyone, had to be kept a certain distance away from me – preferably hidden or otherwise out of view. So, for all some local “hero” knew, I was just some creepo dumping illegal guns.

  My sense of dread was much worse when Sam was actually firing weapons. Another scene had me alone, armed with a sniper rifle, situated on top of a four-story building downtown, firing “full-load” blanks, whose powerful report echoed off buildings like canyon walls in an old Western. Normally, I would be surrounded by camera equipment, lighting rigs and crew members, but this was also a wide angle. From street level, I was just a lone psycho taking potshots at pedestrians. I was legitimately concerned that some espresso-fueled off-duty cop or a knee-jerk do-gooder would look up, spot the perpetrator, yell, “Shooter!” and unload his clip of real bullets into me.