Hail to the Chin

by Bruce Campbell

  I was still doing Burn Notice by the time shooting rolled around, so I missed that part, but Rob kept us informed of the daily progress. Between Rob’s seasoned production skills, Fede’s pragmatic approach and a great Kiwi crew, filming was completed without any major injuries or feuds. The actors were each put through some pretty fresh hell, but they were all troupers about it.

  I saw my first “director’s cut” down in Miami and was immediately relieved. Young filmmakers generally love their own work and find it impossible to trim or remove their precious material. Early edits are usually exasperatingly long, boring, awkward and amateurish. Fede didn’t seem to have any of those issues, because the version he turned over to us was already a tight ninety-four minutes – with pace, style and impact. What a relief!

  With Fede Alvarez, the new “Boy Genius.”

  The next time I saw Fede was in the dubbing stage for the sound mixing process. Because of my love of all things sound, I got the nod to be the “overseer” of the mix. Fede was a big fan of sound as well and put folks through their paces trying to match effects to his eclectic descriptions.

  “I want the door opening to sound like a baby sighing,” Fede would implore the sound designers. “But a sad baby, who is irritable and weak.”

  A month later, we got what we set out for – a dynamic sound mix that helped establish and maintain the mood and give the gore an unmistakable kick in the pants. Previews went very well, word of mouth was good and the reviews, for an Evil Dead film, were not unkind.

  Passing the torch?

  Fede, of course, was being compared to Sam Raimi, but to his credit he kept the tone of the film similar to the original – not a joke fest – and carved out his own visual style. For a first-time filmmaker, Fede showed remarkable poise and turned in a solid, effective horror movie.

  I always get asked what I thought about the remake. I tell people, “Great, because we produced it!” Some folks assumed that we watched the remake happen from afar, which often happens. At least in this case, we were remaking our own movie!

  As far as box office goes – the great Hollywood barometer of success – the 2013 Evil Dead remake made around $94 million worldwide and because of its modest budget was an unqualified success. Fede’s next film, the taut thriller Don’t Breathe, was even more successful. I think we’ll be seeing more of this Alvarez fellow.

  The only “negative” to be gleaned from doing the Evil Dead remake, aside from feeling a bit like we were “jumping on the remake bandwagon,” was that die-hard fans weren’t 100 percent satisfied. Those familiar with the lighter tone of the franchise found the remake too melodramatic and not as much “fun.” I got the sense overall that fans felt like the movie was “close, but no cigar” – they wanted the Ash character and they wanted Sam Raimi.

  Note taken.

  ASH VERSUS TELEVISION

  Meanwhile, Sam Raimi and his brother Ivan were semi-secretly writing another Evil Dead movie. Sam had become newly energized by the idea and got around to it whenever he and his emergency-room doctor/writer brother could schedule a writing session, which was not very often.

  Scripts written on “spec,” as in “speculative,” tend to take a lot longer because there is no deadline. This was no exception. How much longer would it take? Where would we shop it when it was done? How much would it cost?

  “Too damn much,” was Rob Tapert’s answer.

  Rob has always been the fiscal voice of reason in our three-way partnership. It’s virtually impossible for him to hold his tongue if he feels that financial doom is gathering on the horizon.

  “If Sam directs this as a feature film, it’s gonna cost seventy-five million dollars,” Rob intoned matter-of-factly. “And if it bombs, the series is dead as a doornail.”

  Rob is subtle like that.

  Should an Evil Dead movie cost $75 million? Should it even be a feature? Exploring it in other forms – like as a TV show – caught Rob’s eye and certainly mine. Since Army of Darkness, both Rob and I had spent several decades mainly doing television. We understood it. We liked the speed and the no BS of it all.

  Rob was the first to verbalize it: “How about Evil Dead as a TV show?”

  Convinced that this was the way to go, I called Sam and arranged to come to his house. It may not seem like a big deal, in this age of texting and e-mail, but sitting in front of a person is still different, still way more real, impactful and immediate. Sam and I have known each other for four decades, but we still had the ability to get “all businessy” if the situation arose. This was a business call – not a personal one.

  Sam had produced plenty of television in partnership with Rob, but always once removed, with other directors, writers and production types doing much of the day-to-day. This time, we were asking him to create a story “bible,” which lays out multiple seasons’ worth of plot, direct the pilot and generally dive into the TV world headfirst.

  I’m happy to say that Sam got on board and we began retooling Evil Dead as a TV show, framing the action in a much larger context and filling the gaps in what had been a twenty-five-year absence for the character Ash.

  What had he been up to? What was he doing now? Let’s face it, I wasn’t any younger or skinnier by this point, so we would have to play Ash as more of a middle-aged loser than the hero type he was decades ago. Would that new approach work?

  Script issues aside, putting a deal like this together would be even more daunting in that all three previous Evil Dead films had been made by three different companies – each with different or overlapping rights to the original material. This was going to take some sorting out and it was all “on the clock,” which might go a long way toward explaining why Hollywood lawyers live in big houses and drive shiny, fast cars.

  Once the legal stuff was sorted out, it came time to “pitch.” Pitching is a frenzied period when agents put the word out about your amazing new project and you make the rounds, trying to persuade potential buyers to part with millions of dollars.

  Personally, I like pitching. Back on the original Evil Dead, we pitched to Detroit investors who didn’t know anything about movies and they were hardly receptive. At least network execs were in the same industry and we spoke the same language, so pitching to the suits was never a hassle to me. In the room, I always felt that the network needed us as much as we needed them. Television is the great gaping maw and the vast blank spots have to be filled in somehow.

  Sam is always great at pitches. He’s very charming and P. T. Barnum-ish, with bold statements and unending enthusiasm. Rob, as the money guy, would give them the bad news – we wanted to be paid adult money and have an adult budget. Asking for specific monetary commitments and creative control quickly weeded six potential suitors down to three – Starz among them.

  The plot thickens: scanning the storyboards.

  Budgets are one thing. Creative control is another issue entirely. Sam, through vast box office success and tough negotiating, had won the right of “final cut” on his movies – meaning that he would be the final arbiter of what went in the movie or what did not – a coveted and rarely assigned privilege in Hollywood. Maybe a dozen directors have that much clout. Hell, Sam had it – why not use it to our advantage?

  At one particular meeting, Sam broached the topic of creative control, gingerly explaining that final cut was a right he now had – and asked if that network would extend the same rights. The CEO leaned back in his chair and said magnanimously, “Sam, we’ve been doing some amazing television here. We’re really good at what we do.”

  Mr. Executive didn’t elaborate further, but it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines. His answer was a big fat “no” couched in corporate speak. From the moment I heard that condescending line, nothing else out of the guy’s mouth mattered.

  Another suitor was wildly enthusiastic but offered us a budget of exactly half of what we were asking for – which left us less than wildly enthusiastic.

  Aside from money and control, anoth
er big issue was “content restrictions.” What could we show on a given network? On broadcast television, there are “Standards and Practices,” a lengthy guide to what you can and can’t show or say – as in boo-boo words or excessive sex or violence. On cable television, you have more leeway. You can say some spicy words and characters can be slightly unsavory and drink or smoke to their hearts’ content. Burn Notice was a good example of that. We had some flexibility, but it was certainly not unrestricted.

  Of all the interested parties, Starz was the only one to offer up “zero” content restrictions. That was amazing to consider. From a true horror fan’s perspective, it’s even more appealing than an R-rated movie, something Evil Dead would surely have been subjected to had it been released in feature film form. Through Starz, we had the creative control, the right budget and no restrictions.

  How fast can we close this deal?

  STARZ IN OUR EYES

  I had only heard of Starz in passing at that point. I knew that they were a premium channel and had plenty of subscribers, but they were foreign to the new network mantra: own the intellectual property (although costing considerably more cash up front) instead of airing someone else’s intellectual property. AMC pretty much invented that dynamic. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and a slew of others quickly followed suit.

  Rob had worked with Starz before on the TV reboot of Spartacus. Often in the film business, when a new Head Honcho arrives, they will bring in their own “people” and they can be ruthless in shuttering existing projects (even beloved ones) that didn’t bear their personal imprint. Chris Albrecht was new at Starz and Spartacus wasn’t his baby. He had great programming success at HBO and wanted to repeat that with his new company, so he cleaned house and began to develop projects from scratch.

  Thirty Years Later …

  Timing can be important to a project. A network on a downward path is always nerve-wracking, because they are more prone to be cautious, cheap and regimented. New networks can be great, because they are filled with hope and cash – initially – but they can also be prone to wild mood swings as they try to carve out an identity.

  The USA Network is a good example of this. They started with a perfectly plausible “blue sky” concept behind all their shows – upbeat concepts with attractive people in nice, mostly exterior locations. That formula worked great for probably five years and Burn Notice was certainly a main benefactor of this approach – hitting the air just as USA was growing and establishing a cable format that was working.

  But, as happens with all things, change came knocking, and soon USA seemed a little tired, doing the same thing over and over. Viewers seemed to sense that this was all a big “branding” thing and began to check out other viewing options.

  The timing with Starz seemed just right and we got the coveted “green light” to make the show – a pilot episode directed by Sam Raimi, followed by nine half-hour episodes.

  But where would we shoot it?

  Naturally, since I had moved back to Los Angeles, I assumed we would shoot there. Reality dictated that we get the most bang out of our buck and all signs pointed back to New Zealand. Rob had pretty much laid the foundation of a permanent existence in Auckland. He’d married Lucy Lawless, had two Kiwi sons and has produced a half-dozen shows in his adopted homeland. I still love tormenting Rob that his children talk with a “funny” accent.

  Although I was averse to going back down to the Southern Hemisphere, it made the most sense. On top of a healthy “rebate” from the Kiwi government to boost production, the monetary exchange rate was very favorable: Every U.S. dollar was worth $1.25 Kiwi and it made just enough difference in the budget to seal the deal.

  BACK WITH THE OLD MAN

  Twenty-five years had passed since we made Army of Darkness. Sam Raimi had since become one of the biggest directors in Hollywood and I had learned a few new tricks myself. One of the best things about getting the band back together was to share how each of us had grown into our current selves.

  Sam had become a master director – cajoling, joking and bullying his way to what he needed and demanded from the crew. Rob was completely comfortable in his own skin and with the talented people he assembled from all of his past shows, such as Spartacus, Legend of the Seeker, and even alumni from the Hercules and Xena days. Since Army of Darkness, I had put in my leading man time on big and small screens, working with directors such as John Carpenter and Don Coscarelli, so I was eager to see and share what we each had learned.

  The overriding joy of this undertaking was in knowing that we were still, after all these years, together as partners and friends. The family reunion was further fleshed out with Sam’s co-writer/ brother Ivan on the writing staff, original composer Joe LoDuca doing the music and Army of Darkness editor Bob Murawski to keep everyone in line.

  But reality soon descended. Sam was not a “typical” TV director. He doesn’t shoot wholesale – he’s a meticulous, detail kind of guy, who has never had a keen sense of shooting time. In order for Sam to get the days he needed to pull off a believable pilot episode, we had to effectively “steal” a shooting day from each of the remaining episodes – a horrible price we would pay further down the line.

  Working with Sam was a treat. The time melted away and you never really thought about the shooting days, mostly because he didn’t either. But once Sam left town, the atmosphere devolved into a low-grade panic.

  EVIL DEAD VERSUS US

  We still had the same challenging material to do but way less time to do it. While the pilot was filmed in twenty-four days, each subsequent half-hour episode had to be done in roughly six days with a few special effects and stunt days tacked on the end, but it was a cruel change of pace. From what started out as a country club atmosphere under Sam, life on set became a furrowed brow of buzzing activity, with department heads smiling tightly while they figured out how in the hell to pull this new reality off.

  I was an old hand at the TV pace by this time, but I was not ready for the shift into ultrahigh gear – right after Sam had just put us through our serious paces – and I had a rough couple of episodes. I pitied the incoming director, Michael Bassett, but he did a great job under enormous pressure to keep the creative bar up where Sam had left it.

  Like any TV show, the first few episodes or half season or even a few seasons are needed to establish what a show is – the tone, the pace and, in our case, the gore factor. Ash vs. Evil Dead was no different.

  Show runner Craig DiGregorio and his team of writers had their work cut out for them – tasked with compellingly telling the updated story of Ash reengaging the Evil Dead. It wasn’t a perfect season, but we launched the ship and it was staying afloat.

  PARTNERS IN GRIME

  I was delighted to witness the generally good behavior of newcomers Dana DeLorenzo and Ray Santiago. When you get involved with a group of actors for an extended period under trying circumstances, you get to know each other real quick and sometimes those people aren’t who their cheery auditions led you to believe. In this case, both actors were not only talented but also patient and very tough.

  Lucy Lawless is the silent queen. On a film set, particularly a Kiwi set, she is the calm, easygoing professional, knowing everyone’s name and asking about family members – some of whom she has known for two decades.

  Ironically, before Xena started filming, Rob Tapert made me spend an afternoon with Lucy, jogging along a local Auckland causeway and tutoring her about what makes a good TV star. I had just finished a stint as a leading man on an action-oriented TV show, so I had a lot of “intel” to share that was relevant. I’m not sure what she thought of my all-knowingness, but she was very gracious about it.

  Flash forward to twenty years later. We now get the great Lucy as an addition to our show as the character Ruby – a strange and untrustworthy character. Honestly, I didn’t much care who Lucy played – I just wanted her on the show.

  “Rob, at dinner tonight, ask your wife to do the show, will you?” I implored R
ob, who has been married to Lucy since Xena.

  Ray and Dana lent me a hand.

  I’m grateful to Lucy for reminding me about set etiquette, particularly with the often overpolite Kiwis. Lucy is very careful with her words so as not to offend, no matter how pissed off she gets. I’m a little different. I consider myself plenty professional, but I can get prickly and impatient if things get bogged down. After getting pissy about something, I have often caught Lucy out of the corner of my eye. Her look of calm cheeriness always mellows me out.

  ALL HAIL THE KIWIS!

  The New Zealand film crews are amazing. It’s always said at acceptance speeches: “Our crew is the best in the world!” On Ash vs. Evil Dead, you could make a strong case for it. These skilled men and women from the likes of Lord of the Rings, Avatar and Hercules could do special effects, build special props or re-create rural, low-budget Michigan like nobody’s business.

  We called upon some of the original Herc and Xena team to help launch our wobbly ship. Michael Hurst, formerly Hercules’ sidekick Iolaus, pitched in to direct. Charlie “Hole in One” Haskell became the hardest working man in show business, keeping our action and special effects unit in top shape. Last but not least, Rick Jacobson, who first directed me on Xena, became a great keeper of the franchise flame, directing our most ambitious episodes.

  The Kiwis even got “The Classic” back.

  Sam’s beloved 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and three identical triplets were all put in a shipping container and sent to New Zealand for the shoot. Identifying the actual car was not that hard – all you had to do was open the driver’s side door and listen to the sound. With a key in the ignition, when the door opens you hear a very anemic eeeeee-uuuuu-gggg-heeee sound – like it’s trying to tell you that the key is still in the ignition, but it doesn’t have enough strength to do it.