The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(107)
Dad and I created a part especially for Hoke Howell, his pal and frequent writing partner, as a sleazy preacher who steals a police car to pursue the young lovers and get the $25,000 reward. Hoke, a native of South Carolina, was in his element, gleefully chewing the scenery like it was pulled pork.
As it happens, food became a major issue during the shoot: the subject of my first managerial crisis. By our eighth day, the crew was in open revolt about the quality of the grub they were being served. Our production was feeding them a steady diet of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Unlike the old-timers on The Andy Griffith Show, who were all too happy to subsist on cigarettes, stale coffee, and donuts, my young crew actually cared about its health and well-being. The unyielding onslaught of greasy fast food was bringing down morale, something that Cheryl, more than anyone else, had picked up on.
She went to our line producer, a man named John Davison, and asked him what the daily budget was for catering. The number she got was two dollars per person. “Ron,” she told me, “for that amount, I can feed everyone a whole lot better than what we’re settling for.”
At that point, we had finished shooting our L.A. scenes and were about to head out to the hinterlands of Victorville, California, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where the majority of our smash-’n’-crash action sequences would be filmed. It so happened that Cheryl’s maternal grandparents, Les and Lillian Schmid, owned a one-room, cinder-block vacation cabin—so spartan that its bathroom was an outhouse—in the same area. Cheryl got their permission to use the house’s kitchenette and began to compose a menu with my blessing.
Mom was worried about this scheme and made her feelings known. “Cheryl, men and their stomachs are monsters,” she said. “You are setting yourself up for disaster. For the love of God, don’t do it!”
But Cheryl was determined. She went food shopping with her grandparents and set to work in their little kitchen. Our first day in the desert was cold and windy, with gray skies. Yet all workplace discontent evaporated when, shortly before lunchtime, our maroon Volvo wagon appeared from over the horizon with twenty-three-year-old Cheryl at the wheel. She had prepared a lunch of rack of lamb, roasted vegetables, and a fresh green salad! The members of our crew were beside themselves with gratitude. Mom dove in to help bring service with a smile to the catering line. She happily conceded that she was wrong to have doubted her can-do daughter-in-law.
Allan Arkush and Joe Dante still talk about how Cheryl saved my ass by feeding the crew properly. But I was so caught up in every last detail of the film that I was not sufficiently partaking of the quality catering. Grand Theft Auto had only twenty-three shooting days, with Sundays off. Yet in that short span, I was wasting away. I began the shoot at 150 pounds, which suited my five-nine frame. A few weeks later, Joe, concerned for my well-being, confronted me about my gaunt appearance and urged me to take better care of myself. When I got on a scale, I discovered that my weight was down to 136 pounds. Yikes.
ROGER RETURNED FOR a visit when I was working on the last big set piece for the film, in which nearly every car in the movie gets totaled in a demolition derby. (Between the Malachi Brothers and Grand Theft Auto, I was the face of the mid-’70s demolition zeitgeist.) We were shooting at Saugus Speedway, a stock-car racetrack and former rodeo arena in Santa Clarita, half an hour north of Burbank.
Roger arrived with a separate filmmaking crew in tow; he was the subject of a documentary-in-progress and was being followed around by a camera. He was in good spirits and was pleased with how Grand Theft Auto was going. I tried to leverage this into a request. The demolition derby was supposed to end in a riot, with people jumping out of the stands and running onto the midway. We had only been budgeted to hire fifty extras for this scene, which struck me as stingy. I wanted to at least create the illusion of thousands of people wreaking havoc and causing chaos. Nowadays, my team can accomplish this by using digital extras, but that wasn’t an option on the table then. Besides, on such films as Far and Away, Cinderella Man, Backdraft, and Rush, I have used anywhere from five hundred to two thousand extras on certain days.
“Roger, we’re coming in on schedule and under budget, so I was wondering if we could hire a hundred extras instead of fifty,” I said. “I could do a much better shot where I pan across the crowd and make it seem like it’s huge.”
He was unmoved. “Why don’t you just do a cut of the fifty people getting up?” he said. “They all run in at once and you have what you need.”
“Well, yeah, but I could do something much more fluid and believable with more extras,” I said. “Even if I had seventy-five, I could have them sit in the stands in a pie-wedge shape and frame the shot so there’s a bigger sense of scope and scale.”
Roger clapped a hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Ron, let me tell you something. You finish up this picture and do a good job with it, and you’ll never have to work for me again,” he said. “But all you’re getting from me are fifty extras. Make it work.”
And so I did, more or less. I framed a series of tight shots of my “crowd” and explained away the vast tracts of empty seats in my wide shots by having the speedway’s PA announcer say, “Due to the extreme danger of this event, remain clear of the north section of the bleachers.”
The derby sequence took two days to shoot. Allan Arkush and I apparently combined to hold what was, for a time, the Guinness World Record for the greatest number of camera setups ever executed in a single day, eighty-one. That’s a dubious distinction, though I must sheepishly admit that I have since exceeded that number, and I bet Allan has as well.