Survival Quest was finished and it was time to close up the editing room. My trusty assistant editor Scott Magill was there as we packed up all the leftover supplies, dismantled the editing bench and Moviola editing machine, and loaded them all in the van for return to the rental house. Even today with digital editing, I get a melancholy feeling when the editing room officially closes. It symbolizes that the movie is over, definitively.
On this particular day, Scott was more reflective than usual. He told me that his good friend Roger Avary had flown off to Europe for the summer and that his mom had vacated the rental in Sherman Oaks that he had been sharing with her. She had moved back to the East Coast and Scott found himself alone for the remaining six weeks on the lease. After that he was at loose ends now that his job was over on Survival Quest. What Scott didn’t know was that there had been some rumblings of interest in a sequel to Phantasm—from Universal Pictures of all places. I wasn’t telling anybody about it yet. Until it was solid I didn’t want to get anybody’s hopes up.
I received a call a week later from a friend who had worked on Survival Quest who confided in me that Scott was severely depressed and had mentioned suicide. I immediately called Scott and asked him about it and he told me he had been feeling down but that suicide was not an option for him. I really didn’t know much about depression and suicide back then so my words of encouragement were probably not very sophisticated; I just told him how much I valued his talents and how much I liked him and that at his young age of just twenty years old he had a lot to look forward to. We promised to meet up the next week. I saw him in Hollywood about ten days later and he was riding a brand-new motorcycle. I asked how he was feeling and he said he was good. He looked well and I intimated that we were making some progress on financing a sequel to Phantasm and that we might need to open an editing room again soon. To this day I wish I had told him then and there about Universal Pictures’ interest and that I had been thinking of elevating him to full editor on the project if it went forward. But I didn’t and we said our goodbyes and Scott roared off.
The Fourth of July holiday was the next week and I went with my family to a big fireworks and stunt show at the Rose Bowl. Early the next morning I was awakened by a phone call. A woman was on the line and she identified herself as calling from the coroner’s office. She told me Scott Magill was dead. He had apparently killed himself on the night of July Fourth by leaping to his death from his six-story apartment building. I was stunned, but I remember informing her that I just couldn’t believe this news and told her I needed to verify her identity. God forbid this was a prank call! She gave me her phone number and when I called back, my blood ran cold when the receptionist answered, “Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.” The rest of the conversation was a blur. I remember something about the police finding a note in Scott’s pocket addressed to several people including me, and then the very kind coroner’s assistant reading it to me aloud. Something about how much he enjoyed working on Survival Quest with me and how he had loved watching my film Kenny & Company, that it was a great film, and how he was confident I would be making more good films.
Scott’s death really hit me hard. I had just worked with him in the close quarters of our Survival Quest editing room for over a year prior to his death. Scott was so young. He had so much ahead of him. For years after, I was filled with regret. Why couldn’t I have just said the right thing? Played up the potential new job on Phantasm II? Why didn’t I tell him that I wanted him to be the editor? If only he could have lasted another few months we would have been in the thick of making Phantasm II for Universal, and he wouldn’t have had any time for thoughts of killing himself. As the years passed I learned a lot about suicide, how there are people that threaten it and never do it, and the ones like Scott, who are in genuine pain and make up their mind and no matter what anybody says, they just go out and do it.
To this day, decades later, I still frequently ruminate about Scott Magill. I remember how much joy he was filled with on the day Evil Dead II opened in Hollywood. I gave him the day off and watched as he and Roger headed out from the editing room, bubbling with excitement about the new Sam Raimi movie. Whenever I’m at an opening night of a new horror film, I end up thinking about Scott as I wait for the lights to go down. Every Fourth of July when I’m watching fireworks, I think about whether Scott was watching fireworks from his apartment roof the night of his death. And whenever I go see a new movie by Roger Avary or Quentin Tarantino, I think about Scott and how much he would have enjoyed seeing his good friends thrive in Hollywood. He would have loved watching them win that Oscar together.