As casting continued our first crew hire was my UCLA roommate Paul. Now entering his second year at college, Paul volunteered to help for free whenever he could to assist us in getting the production organized. Craig and I were working like crazy trying to figure out how to actually make a feature film. We put some ads up and started interviewing tech crew who had worked on low-budget movies. We stumbled onto some other low-budget filmmakers including a director named Paul Leder (I Dismember Mama) who introduced us to some of his favorite crew members. I remember sitting in a meeting with Leder in which he valiantly tried to dissuade us from filming our script. Mr. Leder believed that the only way to succeed in the low-budget game was to make more exploitive films that had sex and violence, sizzle that would sell. It was his fervent belief that we should be making a teen sex comedy or a horror film instead of our simple drama. This was some sage advice from a veteran, which Craig and I, of course, promptly ignored as we were committed to our script and making a story that was honest and genuine. It wasn’t until a bit later in my career that some of this low-budget director’s advice rang true for me.
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Today, indie filmmakers have it easy in that the digital cameras and technology to make a feature film are readily available. Back then, shooting in 35 mm was a major dividing line between amateur and professional. Having access to 35 mm film stock, cameras, and crew to operate them was a very significant entry barrier to the indie filmmaker. We were lucky to quickly assemble what we thought was a competent low-budget camera, lighting, and sound crew who had a certain level of experience, mostly on exploitation films and even some pornography of the era. Pornography was big in the seventies, and the nearby San Fernando Valley was a hotbed of porn production and a good place to hire tech talent and rent camera equipment on the cheap.
We put together a full paid crew and then surrounded those hired hands with a supporting crew of unpaid friends and other film student volunteers. We brought in two great film students from UCLA, Bob Del Valle and Phil Neel, who had a lot of tech savvy. My next door neighbor Janis Gabbert enlisted as our script supervisor and was an immense help in organizing the production. Also, a good friend of Paul’s from high school, Richard Christian Matheson, joined up to work in the sound department as assistant to our hired sound man. (Richard would later go on to a very successful writing and screenwriting career himself—his 1987 film Three O’ Clock High being a personal favorite of mine.) One of our loyal high school friends, Jim Catti, rounded out the volunteer team along with E. G. “Manny” Culman, Steven Thrift, and Jim Hagopian.
The day of September 23, 1972, production began on our epic. Craig and I were both still eighteen years old, and this would be both a blessing and a curse. Simply put, the older hired crew members had no respect for us. Absolutely zero! From that first day, we would line up a shot and as the lighting commenced, all we would hear was grumbling from the crew about us and also about our inexperienced unpaid student friends. Yes, we were inexperienced and yes, we frequently did not know what the heck we were doing. But our intentions were good and we were so eager to learn and experiment and to make a good film.
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Craig and I had never really worked with actors. To say we were clumsy was an understatement. Angus really suffered at first from our inexperience. We scheduled a rehearsal of the major dramatic scene in the film, what we referred to as the “father confrontation scene.” With good intentions, Gregory Harrison had invited along his acting coach, Wayne, to assist. As the rehearsal unfolded there were difficulties with the scene and the frustrations of everyone mounted. At one point Gregory had the youthful temerity to tell Angus how he should play a line. Angus was a more classically trained actor and having another actor giving him direction simply pushed him over the edge. Angus stopped in his tracks, turned, and affixed this intimidating glare at all of us (he would use this to great advantage later as the evil Tall Man in Phantasm) and growled, “Do I take direction from you (he looked at Gregory), you (he looked at Wayne), you (he looked at Craig), or you?” His powerful visage landed on me and I just stuttered out a lame response that Craig and I were the directors and we alone would give him direction in the future. But this too was a problem: frequently Craig and I would give the actors conflicting directions, and again, Angus was the most frequent recipient of this. About halfway through shooting we finally figured out that we must speak with one voice and only one of us would give direction at a time.
It was extremely disheartening that our paid crew started to take advantage of our inexperience. When the camera assistant would call for a film magazine to be reloaded, production would shut down for a full half hour or longer, while this guy laboriously removed the empty magazine, checked out the camera movement, and then loaded up a full one. This was a hidden signal to the rest of the crew to take a nice long break at the expense of their naïve student directors. Later, on subsequent movies, both Paul and I became completely proficient at swapping out 35 mm Arri film magazines and could do it competently in less than sixty seconds.
On the second day of shooting, one of our student friends was going on the lunch run and the gaffer casually asked if they could have some beers for lunch. In retrospect it was sheer lunacy to accede to that request, but not knowing any better, I approved it and we brought back four six-packs of Coors beer for the grip and lighting crew. When we started up after lunch we couldn’t find them. They had disappeared! Paul scouted around the apartment property, then came and got me and brought me down under the rear staircase, saying, “You’ve gotta see this.” There among the trash cans was our entire electric crew, all drunk on their asses, unable to walk, let alone come back to work. Beer was never provided again.
Another problem was that our so-called professional crew had a hard time taking direction from two eighteen-year-olds. Any time we were uncertain, or made a mistake, the cameraman or even the paid script supervisor would ridicule us, and our creative choices, right in front of the rest of the crew. Looking back I can only guess there must have been some frustration on the part of these crew members toward Craig and me, that we were directing a feature film at such a young age and that they had to work for us.