Apocalypse on the Set Read online

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover the United States and the U.K. in 2012 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2012 by Ben Taylor

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  ISBN 978-1-46830-013-0

  for Holly

  Contents

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The Last Shot of the Night

  Twilight Zone: The Movie

  2. Hollywood Be Thy Name

  Heaven’s Gate

  3. King of the Moon

  The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

  4. “The Idiodyssey”

  Apocalypse Now

  5. Adventure Is Over

  Fitzcarraldo

  6. It’s Good to Be Kim

  Pulgasari

  7. Black and Blue

  The Crow

  8. Welcome to My Nightmare

  The Abyss

  9. Rough Waters

  Waterworld

  CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Introduction

  THERE IS NOTHING EASY ABOUT MAKING A FILM.

  When a production begins to unravel, the brutal rules of a zerosum game take hold. The ultimate accomplishment of completing the picture reflects the reverse image of a relentless struggle. The memories of endured hardships are as lasting as the narrative itself and become linked to a film’s director, cast, crew and studio.

  Each of the films discussed in this book is distinguished by its disastrous production. These films were also chosen for the diverse circumstances of their production troubles, which provide insight into the incalculable combination of problems and dangers that take such a toll on the people involved in the process of filmmaking.

  Many of the dark events that unfurled throughout the making of these films bear an uncanny resemblance to the equally bizarre stories woven into their scripts, accentuating the irregularities and uncertainties of real life in comparison to the balanced plots of fiction. I have endeavored to explore the making of these films and their interior narratives whenever this may provide a deeper understanding of the craft of filmmaking. However, the information in each chapter adheres to published interviews, memoirs, magazine articles, newspaper articles, production footage, documentaries and other published materials.

  This book is not meant to serve as a protracted tabloid exposé. It is my intention to contribute to an understanding of the rigorous nature of creating a story on celluloid and the business of making movies. This is a business that combines art, money, ego and power into productions that are ephemeral and original in nature, thus presenting a unique set of problems. It is these uncommon problems of filmmaking that are found at the intersection of art and money, where the inspiration of ideas and themes must shoulder enormous financial burdens while striving to entertain—from the Latin tenere, to literally “hold” the audience.

  Though all of these films put many people under incredible duress, they were all ultimately completed. Audience response was highly influenced by the sometimes heavily publicized strife of the filming process. The stories of the characters within the film were often secondary to the rumors of disaster and misfortune that enticed many to see these pictures. When applicable, this allure will be discussed more fully. A complete history of some of these films warrants an examination of the forces acting outside the nucleus of the film’s production, specifically how problems unrelated to the film itself can interrupt progress. Often forces within the media, studio politics or tumultuous bad luck shadowed a project from beginning to end.

  Additionally, the allure of many of these productions is not just due to the events that transpired during the making of the film. In many cases, the crisis behind the movie was one of conflicting personalities or a crisis of ego. Despite the multitude of problems that can arise on a set, many of the most troublesome were the personal dynamics between cast, crew and studio. Very often incredible tensions existed between one man’s vision and the interests of the people who carried the burden of realizing that vision.

  Each chapter will explore the variety of strange and unforeseen circumstances that affected the making of these films. The nature of the struggle changes from one film to another, but there is a common fortitude among those who labored so tenaciously to see their projects through to the end.

  The following nine chapters recount the plight of those caught within the storm of a deteriorating production. In the chapter on Pulgasari, a Korean filmmaker is held prisoner and forced to realize the brash visions of his dictatorial captor, Kim Jong II. The making of The Abyss poses the unique problem of completing an entire film under water. The endless production of Apocalypse Now drags a determined director into the darkness and strain of a jungle odyssey. A budget spiraling out of control and holding a studio hostage is the disaster that earned Heaven’s Gate its notoriety. Production is halted after the accidental death of the lead actor in The Crow. Filming abruptly shuts down on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie after a disastrous helicopter crash. The brutality of the lead actor in Fitzcarraldo leads a destitute director to threaten death. An unending array of catastrophes build from the first day of production on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a movie shadowed by special effects problems and studio fury. Interminable expenses and forces of nature cripple a 166-day shoot on the set of Waterworld.

  When strung together, these chapters provide a kaleidoscopic exploration of the unique nature of the movie business. The eras, genres and people that make up each film highlight the common urge that embattled filmmakers increasingly feel to surrender to the fatalistic circumstances of a film held captive by misfortune or outside influences. What remains inspiring is that each of these movies reached completion under the tremendous inertia of despair. Though the motivation to finish the films came in large part from financial obligations, the persistence and bravery of those involved cannot be ignored.

  Just as viewers of the final cut are invited to be captivated by the struggle of the protagonist, those who follow the misadventures of these cinematic endeavors will discover that truth is stranger than fiction, reality more volatile than narratives, and fate more improbable than plots.

  1

  The Last Shot of

  the Night

  Twilight Zone:

  The Movie

  Brink of Eternity

  FILMMAKING is a pursuit often undertaken in a search for supremacy. Each movie must be greater than the last; it must be louder, more explosive and more daring than any other. If this bravado could be manifest in a physical form, it would undoubtedly look a lot like a man named Joe Bonomo, one of Hollywood’s earliest stuntmen. His father immigrated to the United States from Istanbul, Turkey, and Joe was born in Coney Island. Joe would later joke that when his father arrived in America he must have mistaken the torch of the Statue of Liberty for an ice cream cone, thus inspiring him to start Bonomo’s Ice Cream. While forgi
ng his business, his father fell in love with a French woman who operated a family candy store with her father. They eventually married, believing their life together to be as natural a union as the joining of their confectionary businesses.

  Bonomo’s scrawny build as a child gave no indication of his parents’ sugary livelihood. Mercilessly teased for his thin frame, Joe aspired to become a perfect physical specimen from an early age. This aspiration was not at all uncommon in the family. His great uncle Yousiff, known to many as “The Terrible Turk,” was once a champion wrestler and had earned a respectable fortune. Yousiff never trusted banks, so he kept his winnings with him in the form of gold pieces secured within a pocketed belt that he wore at all times. However, Yousiff’s refusal to ever part with his winnings eventually brought about his demise. He was traveling aboard the S.S. La Bourgoyne when a fierce storm hit. The ship began to sink, and he leapt into the water, allowing others to take safety in the few lifeboats available. With his considerable strength, he certainly could have swum to safety, but only if he had released the hefty pouch from his waist. For Yousiff, the gold was far too dear to part with. He sank into the icy waters of the Atlantic with his shining coins still anchored to his waist. In his memoir, Joe reflected, “I think I learned a great lesson from that … the accumulation of money has always been a secondary consideration.”1

  After being shuffled from one high school to another, and earning varsity letters in football, basketball, track, wrestling, swimming and hockey, Joe finally decided to drop out. He continued his bodybuilding, and he soon became the prototypical image of virility. He appeared in one photo series wearing nothing but a leopard-skin loincloth, single-handedly hoisting a barbell into the air. In time, he discovered that his physical prowess could lead to a rewarding career, just like it had for his great uncle Yousiff. But he wasn’t interested in being a career prize fighter. Instead, he became entranced with the glamorous life of stuntmen. His cavalier attitude and kinesthetic intelligence led to numerous jobs leaping from buildings and jumping from speeding trains on Hollywood sets. These brave feats contributed to the mystique of his personality. As Bonomo himself put it, he was a man who “teetered on the slippery Brink of Eternity.” In the opening chapter of his memoir, he warns, “The story of my life is going to make such a crazy, mixed up, impossible sounding affair that you either won’t believe it and catalogue me as a congenital liar—or you will believe it and recommend me for psychiatric treatment.” While the story of his life does not seem quite as “impossible” as he makes it out to be, it certainly is unusual.

  Bonomo’s greatest asset was his judgment. He was never one to shy away from a challenge, yet he always remained committed to the exhaustive calculations and professionalism required to complete a dangerous stunt safely. One day, he was called upon by a director to leap from a rope ladder dangling from an airplane onto the top of a speeding train. The stunt was not unusual for him, but he recalled, “I just didn’t like the looks of the guy who was to pilot for this stunt.”2 Joe declined to do the jump. The agitated director jabbed, “What’s the matter with you Bonomo, running out of gas?” Instead, another stuntman, who was a close friend of Bonomo’s, came in to do the scene, but Joe warned him, “Don’t go up. I’ve got a bum hunch about this pilot.” He said, “I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. It seemed to tell me that he knew I was right.”3 The stuntman ignored his own misgivings and agreed to do the job.

  First, the inexperienced pilot flew next to the train instead of above it, as he was directed to. The stuntman was slammed against the side of the carriage several times as he tried to climb the flimsy ladder to safety. He may well have survived those injuries had the pilot not made another attempt at the stunt, oblivious to the hysterical shouts of the cast and crew on the ground. Without any radio communication to the pilot, they could only watch in horror. The second pass was too much for the battered stuntman to endure. After being dragged against the metal siding of the train at seventy miles an hour, he let go and fell to the ground with “almost every bone in his body sticking out through his flesh in jagged splinters.”4 As the cast and crew rushed toward him, he uttered his last words to the director, “I’m sorry I missed, Bill.” The pilot, still circling in the air, undoubtedly saw what he had done. Joe looked up to the sky and watched as “the plane just flew away.”

  The day of the accident stayed with Bonomo all of his life, through a career that left him with numerous film credits and thirty-seven broken bones. The stuntman’s death was an early indicator of the insatiable appetite shown by Hollywood directors as they increasingly urged actors to inch a little closer to the “brink of eternity.” Though Bonomo wrote of the incident in 1968, it was virtually ignored by anyone outside the production. The public and many members of the filmmaking industry remained ignorant of the dangerous, sometimes negligent, attitude of directors in relation to their stuntmen until 1982, when the horrific events surrounding Twilight Zone: The Movie became national headlines.

  Indian Dunes

  In the early morning hours of July 23, 1982, producer and director John Landis was preparing to shoot the final scene of a short film that would be one of four vignettes that collectively made up the feature film Twilight Zone: The Movie. It was a complex action scene designed to look like a wartime aerial attack on a Vietnamese village. The shoot was in Indian Dunes Park, located thirty-five miles north of Los Angeles. A Bell UH-1B helicopter N87701, registered to Rocky Mountain Helicopter, Provo, Utah, had been painted dark green to give the chopper the authentic look of a U.S. Huey warship.

  The lead actor, Vic Morrow, was to portray a soldier making a final gesture of bravery by carrying two young Vietnamese orphans across a shallow body of water as the village behind them was obliterated by the explosive firepower of the helicopter above. It was the last day of shooting and the final scene in the film. Numerous delays had pushed the production over schedule; everyone was tired and anxious for a wrap. Among those most desperate to complete the scene were Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Le, the two children playing the young orphans. Only a little darkness remained; in a few hours the sun would rise, the shooting would be complete, and they could all go home. Earlier in the night, Morrow tried to ease Chen and Le’s anxiety about their upcoming scene by making silly faces. They both giggled.

  A cluster of eleven bamboo huts, representing the village, was rigged to explode by the special effects technician. In response to a crew member’s concern about the dangerous size of previous explosions filmed during the shoot, Landis responded, “You think that was big? You ain’t seen nothing yet!”5 The camera operator warned Landis about debris from the final explosions hitting the helicopter. Landis quickly dismissed the remark by responding sarcastically, “We may lose the helicopter.”6

  Six cameras were placed around the action, and Landis, armed with a megaphone, gave the directive to begin the scene. The helicopter began to hover over Morrow as he made his way across the water with a child in each arm. Landis shouted for the helicopter to fly lower and then gave the order for the technician to explode the mortars hidden within the village huts. As the fireball explosion rose into the air, the tail rotor of the helicopter was engulfed in flames and the pilot began to lose control. The helicopter’s searchlight swung in all directions as the pilot wrestled with the craft. It began to spin wildly, descending toward the water where Morrow and the two children struggled to reach the safety of the shore. As the explosion of the village continued behind it, the helicopter’s fuselage crashed into the water, crushing Renee. Then the spinning blades struck Morrow and Le, decapitating both of them.

  In an instant, three lives were lost. One of the most horrific accidents in the history of film had just occurred, and the mock village continued to burn. Filming was shut down. Ambulances and police arrived at the scene. The parents of the children were distraught and screaming. The pilots emerged with only a few minor injuries, mostly cuts and bruises.

  As the days passed, many of those involved sl
owly realized the scope of the disaster and the significance of those lost lives. The lingering question was simple, though the answer was elusive: Where exactly did things begin to go wrong? As the sun began to rise over Indian Dunes, the lamentable outcome of the previous night became a clear and terrifying reality, which would echo through years of protracted litigation.

  An American in Yugoslavia

  Like so many other directors, Landis’s filmmaking career was built upon a tremendous amount of resourcefulness in working the Hollywood system, and a little bit of luck. He was born in Chicago in 1950 and raised in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. While living in this epicenter of the film industry, he became intrigued with motion pictures. Perhaps while sitting in the darkness of the movies, he realized that writing and directing was to be his station in life. He was a restless, volatile young man, and his education included stints at several different public schools. “I’d get A’s and F’s,” Landis recalled.7 The chain of unsuccessful academic ventures concluded with John’s brief tenure at the Oakwood School, a private institution in North Hollywood. John’s lasting mark was renaming the school newspaper the Oakwood Gorilla. Decades later, the paper still retains Landis’s title, now simply referred to as the Gorilla. For John there was no sense in waiting to embark on the career he was determined to have. Landis first landed a job in the mailroom of 20th Century Fox, and determined to make it to the top through sheer force of will.

  Landis took steps to ensure that if the opportunities did not come to him, he would go to them. He did exactly that when he learned that a Clint Eastwood war movie, Kelly’s Heroes, was going to begin production in Yugoslavia. Landis reassured family and friends that he had been offered a job on set, when in actuality no one attached to the production knew who he was. He assumed that appearing on the set would earn him a menial job, so he made his way to Yugoslavia. The producers were duly impressed with Landis’s resolve and hired him as an assistant. Landis recalled, “My time on Kelly’s Heroes was full of adventure.” One day a friend brought him to meet his old friend Salvador Dali. “Dali drew a sketch of me in felt-tip on a pink linen napkin! I asked if I could have it. He said yes, for $800—impossible on $60 a week and no expenses. So he kept it, and I was devastated. On the drive back to Umag, Gabby told me not to be silly and always to ‘separate the art from the artist.’ This advice I’ve put to good use since.”8