River came to Los Angeles for the last time on Tuesday, October 26, 1993. He didn’t stay at his usual hotel, the St. James’s Club—the Dark Blood production booked him a room at the elegant, Japanese-themed Hotel Nikko. After two months of staying straight on a stressful movie, River took the opportunity to cut loose, and promptly started a drug binge.
He managed to make a lunch appointment the next day with Iris Burton, who was still trying to sell him on the virtues of doing Safe Passage. River unenthusiastically agreed to meet with director Robert Allan Ackerman, who could fly in from London, where he was directing a play. When he saw Chris Snyder at Burton’s office, River apologized for calling in the middle of the night and swearing at him. They hugged; River was so skinny, Snyder could feel his skeleton.
“He looked like a corpse,” Snyder said. “His skin was pasty and white, almost as if he’d been ravaged by illness. His jet-black hair looked as if he cut it himself without looking in a mirror.” Some of his appearance may have been attributable to playing Boy—he had dyed his hair for the part, and the artichoke-and-corn diet wasn’t packing on the pounds—but not his shuffling affect.
River returned to the Hotel Nikko, and his old habits.
4:30 P.M., FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29: Safe Passage director Robert Allan Ackerman, having spent all day flying from London to Los Angeles, had cleared customs and was on his way to the Hotel Nikko to meet with River. That’s when River called Snyder. Barely coherent, he whispered into the phone, “Chris . . . I can’t . . . the . . . meeting. You have to . . . cancel.”
Snyder tried to stave off disaster, getting Nikko room service to send a large pot of coffee to the room of “Earl Grey.” Hollywood indulged substance abusers so long as they still showed up for work—if people found out that River was missing meetings because he was drunk or stoned, he’d be virtually unemployable.
Snyder patched in Burton and Heart so they could hear River’s condition, and they gently persuaded him to take a shower and drink the coffee before Ackerman showed up. After River hung up, they agreed that Burton would supervise River on the Dark Blood set the following day, while Heart would fly into L.A. on Sunday. As Snyder remembered it, he told them, “This can’t go on.”
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30: RIVER SHOWED up on time for work, but looked exhausted, as if he had pulled an all-nighter. He had taken a Valium to bring himself down for work. “He was not one hundred percent in control of his body movements,” Sluizer said. “But there was no problem with his acting and so there was no reason for me to interfere.” Burton didn’t show up to supervise him.
The scenes that day were set in Boy’s underground fallout shelter, which he had decorated like a religious shrine, with candles, used paperbacks, and handcrafted wooden dolls. Boy gives his visitors a tour; he and Buffy have both consumed datura (an herb with hallucinogenic effects similar to peyote). “Magic’s just a question of focusing the will,” Boy tells her while Harry’s out of the room. “You don’t get what you want because you’re lucky. You get it because you will it.” And they kiss by flickering candlelight.
Davis had told River that she wouldn’t be taking peyote to prepare for the scene; she said that he agreed.
3:30 P.M.: LUNCHTIME. RIVER AND Sluizer discussed their plans for the following day: Sunday, a day off from shooting. They agreed to meet at 10:30 A.M. to go over the scenes for the coming week. After that, River had a 2 P.M. meeting scheduled with Terry Gilliam, the genius director behind Brazil. Pryce had arranged it, and River was almost vibrating with excitement at the prospect of meeting one of his heroes.
4:30 P.M.: RIVER AND DAVIS returned to the fallout shelter. In their second scene, Boy explains how he has created an archive of human knowledge that can be passed down after a nuclear holocaust: “Took a few thousand years just to invent the alphabet! All gonna be flushed down the john. An entire civilization.”
The stage directions in James Barton’s screenplay say, “He looks deep into her eyes, grasps her hand like a rope.”
Then Boy tells Buffy, “I don’t want you to die!”
She assures him, “Nobody’s going to die.”
When they finished the scene, Sluizer called “cut,” but cinematographer Ed Lachman accidentally kept the camera running until the film ran out. Power was cut to the klieg lights, but there was just enough illumination from the candles that the final feet of film in the reel captured River in silhouette.
“He came up to the camera and became total blackness, because he covered up the lens,” Lachman said. “It was like he created an image of his nonexistence.”