Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  Revenge of the Nerds might not be a film that would make any critic’s Top 10 list—or top 100 list for that matter—but it was a solid piece of work by everyone involved. It made us laugh.

  It also made some points that a lot of us felt were worth making. The prescient analogy between frat-house bullying and racist and anti-Semitic behavior is sometimes overlooked in a movie that’s better remembered for belching contests and panty raids. Like many comedies of the period the misogyny, both on the screen and behind the scenes, was off the charts. In the case of Revenge of the Nerds it seems a little more extreme because the rest of the film makes such a point of its progressive message. Its treatment of blacks, women and gays certainly doesn’t stand up to scrutiny by today’s standards, assuming today’s standards are that much of an improvement over those of 1984.

  Still, the film does have a positive message at the end, with nerds, African Americans, women, children and gays all joining together as Queen’s “We Are the Champions” swells on the soundtrack—standing as one against the fascist bully boys of the football team and their dictator coach. There is something moving about that last moment where the persecuted and downtrodden claim the epithet so often used against them—“nerd”—as a badge of honor, chanting it in victory over Stan, Ogre and their friends, who chanted it at them in the beginning of the film. In spite of its faults, which are many, Revenge of the Nerds remains a triumphant success because it shows how an ultimately lovable group of ostracized brainiacs and misfits embrace each other, and each other’s differences, and come out on top in the end.

  That message of tolerance and inclusion, along with characters that spoke to people and comedy that stands the test of time, makes Revenge of the Nerds remain after all these years a movie I was proud to put my name on.

  * * *

  Revenge of the Nerds had a quiet sneak preview in Westwood the week before it opened. There was no publicity, but the line for tickets went around the block. Robert Carradine wanted to share his first starring role in a feature film with his legendary father, John Carradine, and brought him along.

  “So I got a couple seats fifth row center,” Bobby told me. “He’s looking straight up, you know, his head is stretched back, like he’s getting a shave. So we watch the movie. After it was over, I said, ‘So, what did you think, Dad?’”

  “Well, son,” said his father, “it isn’t Shakespeare.”

  No, it wasn’t. And Booger wasn’t Hamlet. But it was the role that put me forever on the map as a character actor in Hollywood. Foolishly, there were times when I’d wished I’d never done it. It was some time before I could understand what anyone saw in the guy. It would be even longer before I could get enough distance to realize that my performance as Booger is one of probably the top three in my entire career. And it was only in the last twenty years or so that I could admit to a sneaking fondness for him. In the early nineties I attended the twentieth anniversary of our graduating class at the Academy. All but one or two of the students were there, as was most of the faculty. At one point I found myself in a conversation with Alex Grey, my beloved acting teacher, who had once commented on my “glibness” as an actor.

  I was babbling, basically apologizing for the direction my career had taken, regretting I hadn’t stayed true to my roots as a theater actor, denigrating the roles I’d become famous for, when Alex interrupted me.

  “Curtis, what on earth are you complaining about?” he asked, mildly. “You’re making a living as an actor. That was the idea, wasn’t it? That’s what we trained you to do.” He gave me a warm smile. “For heaven’s sake, congratulations!”

  CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR

  VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1984

  It was 1984 and we were in our third grueling month of production of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, a film so complex and challenging it took five months to shoot, and so bad it destroyed Auel’s epic Neanderthal franchise at a single stroke. The book was an immense, exhaustively researched novel, following the adventures of a Cro-Magnon orphan, Ayla (played as an adult by Daryl Hannah), who is taken in by a clan of the fading Neanderthals and raised as one of their own.

  Aside from Hannah, the film starred Pamela Reed, James Remar, John Doolittle, Thomas G. Waites and a supporting cast of fifteen others chosen because of a general similarity in body type and coloring.

  My audition for Clan happened immediately after returning to Los Angeles following Revenge of the Nerds. As in the case of Nerds, the nature of this picture pretty much precluded a traditional reading: screenwriter John Sayles had written the script in colloquial English (his script was dropped before we started filming), but there weren’t enough lines for most of the characters to attempt that kind of audition.

  So I went to the Producer Sales Organization building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard one day to have a meeting with director Michael Chapman. Chapman had never directed before but he was already a legendary cinematographer for his work on films with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

  I was shown into a completely empty office and found Chapman sitting on the floor in the corner. He asked me to sit down so I sat down in the corner with him. He picked up my picture and resume from a pile in front of him.

  “Hmm,” he said, after studying it for a while. “You’ve done a lot of theater.”

  I assured him that I had, indeed, done a lot of theater. I pointed out, though, that I had done a couple of movies as well.

  “Yeah, Risky Business!” he said. “Who directed that?”

  “Paul Brickman,” I said. “He also did the screenplay…”

  “Must’ve missed that one.”

  There was a brief pause. Looking again at the resume, he suddenly brightened.

  “Revenge of the Nerds! Is that out?”

  “No, not yet…”

  “I love that title!!” Chapman enthused. “So what is it, like kind of a Mark David Chapman thing?”

  I thought I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.

  “Mark David…?”

  “Yeah!” he said, excitedly. “The guy who shot Lennon. That kind of thing?”

  “Ahhh, no,” I said. “No, nothing like that. It’s more like … a comedy, really. About nerds.”

  Chapman’s face fell.

  “Oh, I was hoping it was about that. You know, nerdy guy killing someone famous for revenge.”

  “No, no. Just about regular nerds.”

  “Chapman was kind of a nerd,” Chapman said, sulkily. “Well, that’s too bad. It should’ve been about that.”

  A silence fell on the room as the two of us sat there on the floor, reflecting: Chapman, I assume, about the tragedy of squandered opportunities, I about how weird it was that I was having this conversation about Mark David Chapman with a guy named Michael Chapman. The meeting never really recovered from Chapman’s disappointment that Revenge of the Nerds wasn’t somehow related to his psychotic namesake.

  Still, I got the job, but only because he thought that beneath Michael Westmore’s prosthetic makeup, I’d make a believable-enough second-tier Neanderthal. The character’s name was Goov and I figured he was at least one evolutionary step above Booger, which was something.

  Michael Chapman had a vision, you could say that for him. The movie was to be about a clan and as actors, we were expected to be a clan. There would be weeks of rehearsal, classes, yoga, high-protein diets and training to prepare ourselves for what he envisioned as a kind of immersive journey into prehistory, by way of Breugel paintings. There were to be no fake fangs stuck on tigers, or shaggy coats attached to elephants. His goal, he said repeatedly, was to have a statement at the end of the credits from the National Geographic Society saying, in essence, “We can’t be positive, but this is probably just what it was like back then.”

  The film was to be shot in Canada, but the American actors began our training in Los Angeles. For a couple of weeks, we went daily to the sports medicine clinic of Dr. LeRoy Perry, in Santa Monica. He started us on
our diet—essentially what would later be known as a paleo diet—and our physical regimen. We had our first yoga sessions, with Siri Dharma, whose impossibly lush physique and exotic beauty provided months of almost painful distraction from the work at hand, even after I discovered she was Italian, not Indian.

  “Can you imagine,” Jean Auel later beamed to a local reporter during her brief visit to our location in Penticton, British Columbia, “a better vacation than being able to drop into a movie set that’s based on a book you’ve written?”

  If she actually believed that at the time, she would be disabused of the notion in short order. But Clan of the Cave Bear was creating quite a stir among those in the feminist fiction/prehistoric nerd fantasy/romance novel crowd, which was a market no one else had even considered cracking before.

  Her second book in her Children of the Earth series, Valley of the Horses, had already been published. The sequel was surprisingly heavy on explicit sex scenes, which led to an awkward incident as the U.S. actors were flying up to Vancouver to start filming.

  We were all in first class, and James Remar had brought along his copy of Valley of the Horses. The sex scenes both tickled and outraged him. At first, we just listened to his hoarse bray of laughter from time to time, until he could take it no longer. He stood in the aisle, laughing, holding the book.

  “Oh my God,” he bellowed, loud enough to be heard at the back of the plane. “You guys are not going to believe this shit! Who the fuck is this woman? Listen…”

  At which point he started, at the top of his brassy, smoke-roughened voice, to read out the sex scenes, in all their tawdry, purple glory. The rest of us started by laughing along, hoping this would be over quickly, but no: Remar had marked all the soft-core passages, and was planning on reading every single one of them.

  “That’s great, Jamey,” I chuckled, weakly, “but maybe you should…” I gestured pointedly to the passengers behind us. One mother was trying to cover both of her children’s ears with only two hands. People were getting angry and uncomfortable. A man who could scream out stuff like this on an airplane, people seemed to think, was capable of anything.

  The flight attendants tried to intervene, but Jamey ignored them, continuing to bellow out overripe descriptions of Cro-Magnon orgasms. His voice was taking on an angry edge, made worse when people were trying to shut him up. Some of us were on our feet, begging him to sit down before he got in trouble. Finally, strangely, he suddenly blushed and looked embarrassed.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, laughing, and returned to his seat. “Jeez.”

  Once we arrived in Vancouver, the training continued, for weeks. Dr. Deborah Kramer, a professor of anthropology, gave lectures and showed films on different aspects of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon life. A highly complex Clan sign language had been created for the film by Lou Fant, a prominent sign-language instructor. To this he added a very small spoken language, key words, to be added to the dialogue, now that John Sayles’s contemporary English-language dialogue had been rejected. We had classes every day in this discipline, and after a while, for tests, had to create stories, which we would then tell to the whole class, using only Clan sign. If they could follow the story, we’d get an A. This actually came in handy. Later during our twice-daily ear-shattering helicopter trips to the set, we could continue whole conversations using Clan sign language.

  Jim Riggs, a primitive-skills instructor, arrived one morning like something out of James Fenimore Cooper. Tall, rail-thin, with long, black hair shot through with silver, we found him one morning leaning against the cast van, dressed from cap to moccasins entirely in animal skins. Skins he had tanned, treated and sewn together from animals, we discovered later, he had killed himself. With a bow and arrows he had made. When we first saw him that day, he was whittling a stick with a knife with an obsidian blade that he had—yes—made himself. He had used that very blade, he told us, to cut his baby’s umbilical cord.

  Among the skills that Riggs taught us were the making of tools and blades out of stone; the identification, preparation and eating of indigenous plants; the making of cord out of plant fiber; the making of fire using sticks or flints; and—most memorably—the disemboweling and skinning of an entire cow, which one morning had been dragged up and dumped outside our studio. Our job that day was to completely remove all the cow’s innards, including the stomach, which we had to then fill with water, plants and vegetables picked by hand, and then stretch over a fire—which we had, of course, started ourselves—and make soup. It actually turns my stomach just to think of it, thirty years later, up to my elbows in viscera, waving off clouds of bluebottles, bathed in the stink of congealing blood and spoiling intestines.

  “Two years at the Academy,” I remember muttering, through clenched teeth, “for this?”

  While half of us were engaged in that, the other half were skinning and scraping the carcass, and preparing it for tanning.

  Riggs then suddenly, like a kind of wilderness magician, pulled a dead hare out from nowhere and threw it on the ground in front of us. Our blood, apparently, was up. Without a word spoken, three of us pounced on the thing with our knives and started hacking away at it like we hadn’t eaten for days. Somehow, this was even worse than the cow for Daryl and a few others. Several of them turned away, moaning objections.

  In almost no time, we had pulled off the skin, cut up the edible bits and thrown them into the cow’s stomach. The soup, oddly enough, was starting to actually smell good. At that point it had been hours since breakfast and I was surprised to discover I had worked up an appetite. Several of us stood around, gazing into the murky mess in the cow’s stomach and exchanging uncertain glances.

  Finally, the only one who had the nerve to actually taste the stuff was James Remar, who had long enjoyed a reputation as someone who would try anything. He retched a little, but got it down.

  “Hm,” he grunted, shrugging. “Could use some salt.”

  * * *

  The shoot was a blur. Time ceased to have any meaning at all. We were up before dawn to put on makeup, flown to distant locations, filmed until the light went, then taken back to begin the long process of removing makeup, wigs, prosthetics and body makeup. By the time we were done there was barely enough time to drink before collapsing in a kind of coma until the next day. Apart from the five lead roles there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to act, and the animal skins, from the day cameras first rolled to the bitter end, remained unwashed.

  By that time we had long since ceased feeling remotely civilized. By month two, only the most fastidious among us could be bothered to bathe more than once or twice a week. My body makeup was basically touched up every few days because I couldn’t be bothered to remove it. All the men grew impressive beards. We looked like a bunch of snowbound settlers on the verge of eating each other. Endless days in blazing summer heat when we were on our mountaintop location in Penticton to bitterly cold snowy days on a glacier in an isolated area near Tungsten, accessible only by helicopter, had left us ragged and exhausted. The four-hour makeup sessions in the morning began at 3:00 a.m. and went in shifts. Simultaneously, there was the shuttling of the entire production from base camp to the mountaintop by helicopter every day. By the time the last helicopter had deposited the last crew member on set, it was noon, so we’d break for lunch. So accustomed were the cast at that point to seeing each other without clothes, we stopped worrying about it and many of us just wandered about naked.

  In our tent encampment in the mountains, with an ice-cold river running through it, cast and crew members paired off, humping the long nights away in sleeping bags for warmth and comfort. Within days, they would change partners and start the whole process over. Two sets of couples, recognizing a good thing when they saw it, wound up moving in together for the remainder of the shoot once we returned to Vancouver. In a desperate bid to hold onto his humanity, John Doolittle read and reread Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, while I penned a retelling of Clan of the Cave Bear, meticulously written in the
style of P. G. Wodehouse. Meanwhile, guards walked the perimeter of the camp all night with guns as bears were drawn to us by the scent of food. The women of the cast realized all their menstrual cycles had started occurring at the same time and all of them had to leave whenever Bart the Bear, our massive, titular cave bear, was on the set. At one point, Daryl and I realized we were having the same dreams. Not similar dreams. The same dreams. On the same nights.

  On first viewing the film, even friends and spouses couldn’t tell the Clan apart. And no one could bear seeing the movie more than once, so they were left wondering why we had abandoned our lives and careers for that length of time. It was, by September, a question we had asked ourselves repeatedly.

  On paper, Clan of the Cave Bear looked like a winner. It seemed to me to be a definite step up from my first two films. Which just goes to show that in this line of work, you never know.

  BETTER OFF DEAD

  LOS ANGELES AND UTAH, 1984

  Better Off Dead, starring a young John Cusack in his breakout role, is, next to Revenge of the Nerds, the most fondly regarded movie of any on my resume. It is, as they say, a fan favorite. Two generations of enthusiasts know the film by heart and will recite chunks of dialogue at the drop of a top hat. It isn’t, though, the most critically regarded of my movies. Like Revenge of the Nerds, Better Off Dead is one of those films that went straight into the hearts of millions of people—both nerd and non-nerd alike—while somehow bypassing the collective heart of the reviewing fraternity entirely, assuming they had one. After five years of a deluge of “teen sex comedies” of varying degrees of awfulness, the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate’s Arts and Leisure sections had had enough. Almost to a person, they inveighed against these films in general—and this one, it seemed, in particular—with a bloody-minded ferocity.

  And the critics were not alone. Studio executives, as well as other genre directors, producers and cineastes in general, received the film, at best, ambivalently. Others actively hated it. It was considered badly constructed, embarrassingly juvenile, unfunny, artless, in poor taste (whatever that is), derivative, badly acted, execrably scored and reactionary. And that was just John Cusack’s opinion.