A FIFTY-THOUSAND-DOLLAR GAMBLE

An important scene in Survival Quest specified that an airplane ferry the various characters up into the mountains and land them on a dirt airstrip. Our pilot of choice, Jan Arvik, owned a beautifully restored twin-engine DC-3, which he had recently purchased from actor and flying fanatic John Travolta. After some scouting, Roberto found us a suitably scenic location in the local mountains near Lake Arrowhead. A gentleman up there owned a large ranch with his own private dirt airstrip. On the tech scout, Jan walked the airstrip and tagged two small trees for removal that might graze his wingtips. Driving home our pilot dropped the bombshell on us. Due to the high altitude and short runway length he would need a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy to rebuild his plane in case he accidentally overshot the runway on landing. He also insisted that the landing must occur no later than 7:00 a.m. as the cold dense air would aid him in making as short a landing as possible under these conditions. We checked with our carrier and were presented with a quote for the insurance. For an up-front nonrefundable premium of twenty-nine thousand dollars, they would provide us a fifty-thousand-dollar insurance policy.

So suddenly, this landing scene went from costing less than three thousand dollars to almost thirty thousand. The only answer for a true indie? Self-insure. Roll the dice. Take the risk. I think I once had three hundred dollars spread out on a Vegas craps table but this was shaping up to be the absolutely biggest cash bet I had ever made in my life. It was going to be like laying fifty big ones down on that crap table and praying I didn’t crap out!

Roberto and I drove up the mountain the night before and were out on the airstrip before dawn, just the two of us with our two Arriflex 35 mm cameras. We set up one camera at the end of the airstrip with a telephoto lens to close in on the action. The other was set up midway down the strip, which would be the wider angle to pan in the landing. Roberto had one of our field walkie-talkies with instructions to monitor channel 2.

Sure enough, at 6:59 a.m. we heard the drone of propellers. Jan came on the radio, informing us he was ready to go for it. I ran to my camera at the far end of the strip. Roberto gave Jan the go signal and we both flipped on our cameras. Jan circled the field once and then dramatically banked the aircraft and dove for the landing strip. As his wheels neared the ground, I was sweating bullets. Did I just put in motion a plan that would blow a huge chunk of our budget?

The wheels touched down and kicked up a cloud of dust as the big plane landed with a concussive impact and raced down the hard-packed dirt runway. It was going too fast! It was going for the cliff! I could hear metal-on-metal as Jan jammed on the brakes. Roberto and I kept our cameras centered, trained on the plane, determined to get the shot. There was no doing it again. The beast finally began to slow and rumbled to a stop—with two hundred feet to spare! The stunt wouldn’t cost us a dime extra. We had rolled the dice and our fifty-thousand-dollar bet paid off, big time! The pilots safely disembarked just as the cast and crew arrived. We had our plane on the location up there in the middle of the forest and we spent the entire day filming some great shots.

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Survival Quest ultimately had a very brief theatrical run and reached most audiences by way of home video. My initial screenplay featured a far more visceral take on the material in which the Survival Quest team squared off against a killer backwoods clan who called themselves “the Breed.” A potential investor promised funding if I softened its raw nature, so I rewrote the screenplay into its current version. In retrospect I think this might have been a creative error on my part, and it also turned out to be a financial one as well, as that investor bailed just prior to production. The final film is a mixed bag, with some terrific performances by cast and superlative cinematography by Daryn Okada. But the writer-director (me!) made some mistakes and over the decades I’ve tried to solve them with a little reshooting and a lot of reediting. They say films are never finished, that filmmakers just finally abandon them. Well, I’ve finally given up on Survival Quest, but boy would I like to go back and start over from scratch on that one.