Professor Gasm: I don’t know why, but seeing you, well it makes me feel complete again.
Professor Org: I know just what you mean. Do you come here often?
Professor Gasm: Frequently, more than is good for my health, I fear.
Professor Org: Coffee?
Professor Gasm: Don’t mind if I do.
Professor Org: Cream?
Professor Gasm: Oh, yes, please, one can never have too much.
And on it went.
I’m not sure the sensitive Mrs. Reynolds ever really recovered from the two professors; she was more appreciative of the girls who did complex studies about motion and modern interpretations of Middle Age plays.
Fortunately, it did go down rather better with our female classmates who, surprisingly to us, laughed along quite merrily, and it was this very response that saved us from being booted out. It also inspired us to do lots of other daft things, like reenacting scenes from the Twilight Zone movie for our graduation tests, and overdubbing the Star Wars movies with silly voices and giving the films a very different plot.
Although an extrovert, I could still be pretty awkward in some social situations and would often run out of things to say. Daniel, on the other hand, was just brilliantly social and he always broke the ice, even if it was with a window-rattling fart.
He was also very lucky with the ladies. While most teenage boys stared awkwardly from across the classroom, Daniel adopted the fearless approach of asking out girls he liked immediately.
I had no success whatsoever. I couldn’t understand it – I mean, what’s not to love? I was a good-looking movie star, if I say so myself . . . just a little bit below average in height. No different from Tom Cruise. But the teenage ladies at school wanted to fit in with all their friends and so they dated tall people. The height thing was hugely important to them. While most girls were more than happy to be my friend, none were prepared to go that extra mile (or two feet) and become a girlfriend.
Daniel, however, was never short of a girlfriend. It was a complete mystery to me; he was lanky, had disgusting habits, listened to awful music, and had ridiculously long hair (by this time I was sporting a particularly fine and fashionable mullet).
There was one occasion where we both fancied the same girl. Blinded by a combination of her beauty and my own hormones, I resorted to dastardly methods to sabotage Daniel’s advances. I wrote a letter explaining why Daniel didn’t like her and couldn’t go out with her and that I, on the other hand, would be delighted to take her out. At the last moment, I couldn’t bring myself to slip it into her desk, so I ripped the letter up and threw it into an empty locker.
It was around this time that Daniel said, “Do you realize we’ve just had a conversation without either of us mentioning Star Wars once?”
Bloody hell, I thought, we’ve only gone and become friends!
a A large chain of roadside restaurants famous for their “Olympic Breakfast.” I don’t think you’d win a gold medal immediately after finishing one, however.
b Apparently, Ewokese was inspired by the dialect spoken by a remote Central Chinese tribe. Having said that, some fans have noticed that one of the songs sung by the Ewoks sounds like “Det luktar flingor här,” which is Swedish for “It smells of cereal here.” I must admit that some of the Ewok costumes did smell a little like stale Rice Krispies.
c No, I wasn’t.
d I know, I know.
e Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
f Their names escape me. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
Chapter Five
Return of the Ewok
I made a special guest appearance at George Lucas’s four-year-old daughter’s birthday party. The kids got a tad overexcited and almost fed me to death.
A thank-you note to Wicket from Amanda Lucas.
Wake up, Warwick!”
It was my sister. What the hell was she doing in my bedroom and waking me up? “Go away!”
“Someone’s throwing stones at the house!”
“What?” I sat up. Sure enough, I could hear what sounded to me like gravel being thrown at the window. Except the sound wasn’t quite right. It sounded more like popping. I ran to the window and looked out. Smoke was everywhere.
“The house is on fire!”
At that moment Mum and Dad burst into the room.
“Stay calm,” Dad said. “It’s in the garage, not in the house, but we have to get out now.”
We quickly played the game of “If your house was burning down what would you grab?” I tried to gather all the important stuff that shouldn’t go up in smoke. But by the time I got outside I realized with no little horror that I’d forgotten Jabba the Gerbil.
On his way out, Dad ran his palm over the living room wall that adjoined the garage. “Ow!” He whipped his hand away, shaking it. If the door from the utility room to the garage had been open we would have lost the house.
All thoughts of the gerbil were quickly put to one side as I realized that my most prized possession was in that garage. “My motorbike!”
While my sister was into horses, I was into horsepower and was now the very proud owner of a Yamaha PeeWee 50 motorbike, which – as the name implies – was tiny. I used to fly around the field that adjoined our house impersonating Evel Knievel and would spend hours collecting and arranging cardboard boxes to crash through.
I used to love Kick Start, the TV motorbike talent show. Contestants riding trials bikes would attempt to complete an obstacle course against the clock. My favorite part was when they rode over a VW Beetle and I tried to replicate that and as many of the other stunts they did as possible, such as riding in and out of ditches, bunny hops, and pulling wheelies.
The fire brigade rolled up just in time to save the house and extinguished the fire without too much difficulty. It turned out that Dad had left the car battery charger on and it was this that had caught fire.
One of the firemen took us around to inspect the damage. He explained how lucky we were that the main house hadn’t caught fire. There was a slight buckle in the ceiling. The fireman pointed to it and said, “That steel girder must have been heated to over three thousand degrees, it’s expanded into the adjoining wall and is now poking into your utility room.”
By then I was looking down at my bike in horror. All the plastic parts had melted into a smoking puddle on the garage floor, leaving a tiny metal skeleton behind.
Dad shared my look of horror but for different reasons. The fire had reached the paint cupboard, which was full of pots that Dad had collected over a lifetime of DIY; every color imaginable had lined those shelves. But they had exploded in the heat and had turned his car (a vintage Sunbeam) into Joseph’s Technicolor Dream Car.
Miraculously, both vehicles worked fine when we turned their respective ignitions a few days later. They really knew how to build things to last in those days. Luckily, it was possible to order replacement parts for my motorbike and, although Dad looked like a wild rainbow hippie for a few weeks, he eventually had the car resprayed.
One day, while I was re-creating Kick Start on my newly stuck-together bike, Mum, obviously terribly excited about something, called me inside.
“Lucasfilm want you to play Wicket again!”
My face lit up. “No way!”
I know some Star Wars fans don’t like them, but the public response to the Ewoks was overwhelmingly positive, so George Lucas had decided to produce a TV special with me reprising the role of Wicket. It would mean eight weeks in San Francisco filming near the Skywalker Ranch.
This was my first lead role but I took it in my stride. I knew the character inside out by then and I was bursting with enthusiasm. In the film Wicket had learned English and was able to communicate with the human stars, a pair of space kids. I was delighted to see that Ewok-suit technology had improved somewhat – the mouth could actually move this time, although it was a little stiff, a bit like the Monty Python mouths in the Terry Gilliam animations.
Anoth
er new development was that I could now move the Ewok eyes using a wrist mechanism, which was weird at first but I soon got so used to it that I started to move my wrists in anticipation of where I was going to look – even when I was out of costume.
The main problem hadn’t yet been dealt with, however; the eyes would still mist up within seconds. So, once again, I had to memorize the set layout and use the glare of the studio lights to judge whether I should turn left, right, or keep going straight ahead. The suit was a lot heavier as well and I fell over a great many times. Luckily it was so thick I never hurt myself, but it was also much harder to stop myself rolling down a hill once I’d started.
To my dismay surfer dude Ray had been replaced by the Snow Queen–esque Mrs. Ramsay. She was a woman’s woman and was pretty scary. She held an unshakable faith in education over every other one of life’s pursuits and was an obsessively strict timekeeper who held no fear of film directors. She once marched onto the set while the cameras were rolling and commanded: “Warwick Davis, put down that spear immediately, modern political history awaits you!”
“Please, just one more take!”
“Absolutely not,” she’d say, tapping her watch with barely contained fury. “Lessons should have started ten minutes ago.”
The one exception that did halt Mrs. Ramsay in her tracks was the sudden appearance of the King of Pop. Apparently Michael Jackson was a big fan of the Ewoks and had dropped by to see us in the fur, so to speak. This was 1984, two years after Thriller and his legendary world tour. Jackson was at the absolute height of his godlike fame.
“Hi,” he said. “Can I have my picture taken with you?”
My reply probably sounded like Ewokese but I gave the distinct impression that this would be more than OK. He put his arm round me, leaned in, and “snap,” the moment was over.
“Well, it was lovely meeting you, I gotta run, I’m going to the White House now, I’m late for my meeting with President Reagan.”
And he was gone.
It was then that I realized I’d forgotten to remove my head.
“Oh no! No one will ever know it was me!”
Tony Cox and Debbie Carrington played my Ewok brother and sister. They’d both been Ewoks in Jedi and have since gone on to have incredibly successful acting careers of their own. Tony was actually a stunt Ewok in Jedi, and acted as a double for Kenny in the scene where Paploo was struggling to keep a grip on the speeder bike he’d just stolen. To get the shot the crew positioned the bike so it was vertical and filmed Tony dangling from the handlebars with the camera tilted to match the on-screen perspective. Tony was also the fabulously brilliant little limo driver in Me, Myself and Irene and has been in dozens of Hollywood films, while Debbie has appeared in Bones, Dexter, Nip/Tuck, Boston Legal, ER, and many more famous TV dramas.
We stayed in a Holiday Inn in Marin County, very near the Golden Gate Bridge. I leapt out of bed every morning and greeted the day with a twenty-step sprint and dive into the swimming pool, which was just outside our door.
When the film, called Caravan of Courage, aired it broke U.S. TV records. It was so successful that George decided to show it in cinemas in Europe. I was invited to the special media screening in Leicester Square, so I took my Nan. She loved it and appreciated the fact that I hadn’t forgotten who started it all.
During filming it happened to be George Lucas’s daughter’s birthday. Amanda was four years old and she loved the Ewoks, none more so than Wicket. She was one of the reasons the Ewok movies were made. George saw that she and her friends couldn’t get enough of the little furballs.
George appeared on the set one day and asked me to come to Amanda’s party in costume at his house and be Wicket for the day. “Sure!” I said, “that’d be cool!”
I arrived at George’s fabulously enormous house just as all the kids were playing in the pool. They screamed when they saw me. “Let’s see if Wicket wants to go swimming!” one girl with pink cheeks and pigtails said.
I was under strict instructions not to ruin things by talking (at this stage Ewoks didn’t speak English, neither did they sound like fourteen-year-old boys), so I backed away quickly, even though I was sorely tempted to risk drowning. It was a hundred degrees and I was melting inside that costume.
As soon as the chance presented itself, I dashed back inside for a brief “heads off” moment before returning again in my highly flammable costume carrying the cake complete with four burning candles. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and I cut a slice for the birthday girl. She then generously decided to share her cake with me. Of course, my costume wouldn’t allow me to bite and eat but that didn’t prevent the little girl from shoving the cake straight through the costume’s mouth hole. Suddenly all of the little angels wanted to feed the Ewok and so they rammed cake into my mouth until my Ewok head was full and I started to suffocate. Fortunately the parents rescued me – “Wicket’s feeling a bit tired and full now, children, time for his nap” – and carried me away as I started to cough urgently. When they took the head off about a pound of cake slopped onto George’s lounge carpet.
The Battle for Endor quickly followed the success of Caravan of Courage. The plot involved a grumpy old spaceman and Wicket becoming friends. I was thrilled to bits to be Wicket once more; it was becoming a yearly treat and this time I was allowed to bring Daniel.
Daniel and I had an amazing time. To us, back in 1985, America really was the greatest country in the world by far. It was still a world of dreams and its image – among young people – had yet to be tarnished. It was the land that had everything your heart could possibly desire, from frozen yogurt to Disneyland, with a Dunkin’ Donuts and a McDonald’s on every street (most English towns didn’t have McDonald’s back then). But most of all it was the land of movies and back then you could see new films ages, sometimes years before they came out in the UK, conferring upon us substantial bragging rights for months after we returned home.
“Oh, we saw that when we were in America, didn’t we, Warwick?”
And then I’d torture them by saying, “Yeah, it was brilliant, you have to see it.”
While we were in the States, Mum got another call from Elstree, this time from Jim Henson Productions.
“Do you think Warwick would like to be a goblin?” they asked. “We’re making a movie called Labyrinth with David Bowie and we need experienced little people.”
Chapter Six
Starman in My Caravan
My father-in law, Peter Burroughs, with David Bowie on the set of Labyrinth. I was probably in my trailer when this was taken.
Sam with the Goblin King.
Battle for Endor and Labyrinth were being made at the same time but with a little clever synchronization of schedules, made easier by the fact that George Lucas was executive producer on each of the movies, I was all set to appear in both. My role in Labyrinth was more in the background and, thanks to animatronics, I was able to play two goblins called Bumpot and WW2. The film starred David Bowie, directed by Jim Henson, puppeteered by Frank Oz, and written by Terry Jones. You couldn’t get any better than that. My life cast was made at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in leafy Downshire Hill (which ran off Willow Road!) in Hampstead, North London.
Jim’s studio wasn’t as big as I’d imagined and was both warehouse and workshop. It was packed floor to ceiling with Muppets, all sorts of weird creature creations, and casts of famous people’s bits and pieces. Powerful odors of glue, clay, and fiberglass fought for supremacy. It may have been me but the glue seemed to be winning – the puppet makers all walked around in a happy, dreamy daze.
Jim Henson used to live right opposite the studio. So afterward, covered in Vaseline and goodness knows what else, I was sent to have a shower in his house. He wasn’t there at the time, so I had the place to myself. Like the studio, it was packed full of Muppets. Kermit sat on a window ledge in the bathroom while Beaker and Gonzo the Great propped each other up on a chair in the hall and a collection of Miss Piggy’s wigs was
piled on a hallway shelf.
It was brilliant but kind of freaky. I half-expected the characters to spring into life and start singing the theme song to The Muppet Show. I even protected my modesty by turning Kermit’s head away from me while I was in the shower.
The life cast done,a it was time to begin filming. Labyrinth was shot at Elstree, on one of the stages used in Jedi. Now it’s all gone and a Tesco stands in its place (some would say that’s another empire to be fearful of). The Ewok Village set once stood right where the fish counter is today.
Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis Page 6