Inside the Star Wars Empire Read online

  After my parents died, I had petitioned my uncle in Marin to let me stay on at summer’s end, and both he and my Anderson Valley aunt agreed it would be a good idea. The local high school was so small that at orientation day in the gymnasium, I asked the fellow next to me if our bleacher held the freshman class. “No,” he said, “this is the entire school.” Ours was the largest freshman class in the school’s history, twenty-eight pupils. Now, when I hear someone say that they came from a small town, I just laugh.

  I call this time my American Graffiti years. Drinking beer, driving hot rod cars, and chasing girls was my primary occupation back then. We even marked off the local highway and drag-raced our cars. Midway through high school, a rumor flooded our gossip channels. Someone had mounted an old jet engine from a WWII fighter plane on wheels and launched it down the Fremont drag strip. When they first fired it up, in front of a howling mob that filled the grandstands, the story went, the jet engine’s force blew the fence down. Stories like this galvanized us; it seemed preposterous, but also funny and cool.

  It was all coming back to me now. This track we were looking at—same track. This could be a movie, I thought: huge fan base, crazy antics, and potential drama by the boatload. It wasn’t Woodstock, but it would have to do.

  We went out for a look-see at the announcement of the next big race. If you lived in California back in the seventies, you will remember the radio ads for these race events. There were always two announcers screaming at the radio audience about dragsters, jet cars, and funny cars and ending with, “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” These ads blanketed the airwaves before every big race and would build crowds in the thousands.

  I had seen surfing films and films on boxing, wrestling, and roller derby, but nothing like this. With nicknames like “The Snake” or “The Mongoose” or “Jungle Jim,” these drivers piloted 2,000-horsepower dragsters with fiberglass bodies on them that just barely resembled the fans’ street cars. They hauled their race cars from track to track around the country, sleeping in local motels and racing against each other for cash prizes, or if their name alone could guarantee a crowd, there would be a bonus payment for just showing up. It was a subculture, and I wanted to explore it.

  My idea was to go out there and just turn on the camera and film what happened. The film theorists called it cinema verité (truthful cinema) or direct cinema. I just wanted to try to represent the subject as objectively as possible. I didn’t want any narrator telling you what to make of all this—I had worked on too many documentaries like that. I wanted to capture this crazy subculture, and to document it right down to the last nut and bolt. This was Americana in the raw.

  It wasn’t easy. We had a little money from a real estate deal I had pulled off, but we had to learn how to capture what was going on in this wild, blue-collar sport that we really knew nothing about. We were all working full-time jobs, using holidays and weekends to film and vacation time for me to start editing it. My brother and I purchased a professional Eclair (a 16mm movie camera) and a Nagra tape recorder, along with editing equipment and a dual-system projection setup that would let us project our work, with sound, while we were still in progress.

  For big races I would hire other cameramen and soundmen so we could cover each race from both ends of the track. We got real close to these cars so it would be authentic—closer than was wise, and closer than anyone would let you get today. Right on top of these nitromethane-burning cars it was so loud you could hardly stand it, and breathing, with the raw nitro fuel belching out of these monsters, was painful. Even with the huge ear protectors we used, the vibrations the sound waves set off in the air were so powerful, they once literally drove me to the ground. It rattled the marrow in my bones. Standing next to a jet plane taking off was nothing compared to this.

  Every shot we took had live sync sound. Nothing was laid in afterwards as sound design. This caused huge problems when we tried to record people working on their cars in what they called the “pit” area of the track. Every driver and every car was spread out across this race-car prep area, into which the spectators and fans were allowed to wander for an extra fee. With the area studded with loudspeakers and huge engines that might erupt at any time, it was a nightmare to try to record the human voice. But through trial and error and a lot of wasted takes, we were finally able to master it.

  What were we making here? My friends were puzzled. One told me that “you can’t make a film that makes light of these people and also attract them as a paying audience.” The screenwriter Terry Southern had warned, “You cannot have both joke and art.” Yet, he went on to make Dr. Strangelove with Stanley Kubrick, and that was exactly what I intended to do. I wanted that very balance, and since we had no sponsors, we could do whatever we wanted. The races were outrageous spectacles, and the personalities were outsized. The crew members had great nicknames. There was the pinstriper whose hands were so incredibly steady that he was tagged “Shaky Jake.” Then there was “Waterbed Fred,” who was known for his accomplishments with the ladies. This was a cornucopia of Americana, and I wanted in.

  Part of making American Nitro was to just try and upset some stuffed shirts in the art world, and I knew it could be done. I had worked with the namesake nephew of the writer John Fante at Palmer’s. His uncle had written a famous book called Ask the Dust, and his work has been described as “dirty realism.” The painters of the so-called Ashcan school were also committed to a populist realism, so I knew I could invade a low-grade exploitation genre to reveal something that had not been explored before in the conventional art world. There were dangers that we would be misinterpreted, but I was willing to risk them.

  In 1978 I saw a film by the celebrated documentary filmmaker Errol Morris called Gates of Heaven, a near-comedic account about people, their pets, and those that exploit them. It was a fine and sophisticated art film, much praised. I saw it in Berkeley near the UC campus and the audience roared with laughter at the people depicted in the film. If anyone featured in that film had been in the audience, they would have been mortified. He made fools of them. I vowed that I would never make a film that I couldn’t show to the people in it. It is so easy to set someone up in a documentary like this that I think the filmmaker has a duty to fairness. If someone makes a fool out of himself, that is one thing; you don’t have to egg him on and then celebrate it.

  After we filmed enough races, we went on to document the guy in the jet car that I had heard about so many years ago in high school. It turned out that the driver had by now lost both his legs in a horrendous jet-car crash, yet having survived it, he continued to race with artificial legs. There were also many other so-called exhibition vehicles, like wheel-standing cars that ran down the track on their rear tires only, a motorcycle fitted with a hang glider that could jump huge distances over semitrucks parked end to end, and—the wildest of them all—mock military vehicles designed to look like tanks and howitzer transports that raced each other sporting blown nitro engines under the sponsorship of the United States Army. Part circus, part dangerous sport, we recorded it all.

  We interviewed one major driver, Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen, at his home in Fountain Valley, California, where he kept his race cars in his suburban backyard. When we asked him if his neighbors ever complained about him tuning up his race cars there, he said, “If they did, every kid in the neighborhood would run away from home.” Tom was the mastermind in bringing big-time sponsors, like toymaker Mattel, to the sport. Kids loved the model cars with their colorful names like The Mongoose and The Snake, and Tom was also behind the Mongoose bicycles that are still found in stores. But more than this, when other sports impresarios saw what Tom had accomplished—attracting sponsors other than sport-specific ones, like motor oil, to racing—they started to pile in, eventually redefining what sponsorship could be for all sports. It started with Tom.

  We went to the engine builders and body and paint shops that fabricated the race cars and documented it
all. This racing game was getting expensive, as the nitromethane fuel that both powered and exploded these engines at every race cost $340 per drum, and Tom had used thirty drums in 1978. This was at the height of the first American gas crisis, and the cars were burning six gallons of nitro fuel on a single quarter-mile run. It was all craziness, but I thought if we could just get this down on film, something could be made out of it. It was going to be our version of an art film disguised as a drive-in movie exploitation film, which I thought the hard-core fans would pay to see.

  My only shot at art film status for this film came from the author Tom Wolfe. In 1965 Wolfe published his first book, which was a collection of essays. One of the essays, originally published in Esquire magazine in 1963, commented on L.A. car culture and was titled “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” This article is noted for having changed American writing, introducing what was called “the new journalism.” What Wolfe wrote was in response to what he saw:

  The educated classes in this country, as in every country, the people who grow up to control visual and printed communication media, are all plugged into what is, when one gets down to it, an ancient, aristocratic aesthetic. Stock-car racing, custom cars—and, for that matter, the Jerk, the Monkey, rock music—still seem beneath serious consideration, still the preserve of ratty people with ratty hair and dermatitis and corroded thoracic boxes and so forth. Yet all these rancid people are creating new styles all the time and changing the life of the whole country in ways that nobody even seems to bother to record, much less analyze.

  Well, we were recording it in our movie, which we decided to call American Nitro. When we thought we had a good rough cut of the movie, we took it to some high school auto shop classes to screen it before our intended audience of adolescent males who were interested in cars. Boy, they did not want to watch a movie, and I didn’t blame them, having seen so many bad instructional films in high school. But we convinced them that nothing like this had ever been shown in a school before and would never be again. They watched it. We had them fill out preview cards listing what they liked or didn’t like. What did they like? “The fiery wrecks and crashes.” We had plenty of those. What didn’t they like? “The fat chick.” We had a girls sequence as well as a crash sequence and we showed all the girls, not just the beauties, although there were plenty of those.

  Our good or excellent scores were quite high, so we thought it was working. But my gut told me the movie was peaking too early. Rather than asking questions, sometimes your best clues to whether a movie is working or not is to just watch it with a fresh audience. If it drags you will sense it and soon start looking for a scissors to fix it. Because I was still running it on my interlock projector with separate picture and sound, I was able take it apart and fix it. I moved the high point as close as I could to the end of the movie. Following that climax, I showed the final race and brought up the music as we headed into the tail titles.

  We were not going directly to film festivals—we were going to try our luck with Hollywood distributors. We set up screenings for several major studios and they all passed. It was too late, they had already done Endless Summer, the hit surfing movie, and now wanted to place their “A” pictures in the drive-ins. They had realized how much more money they could make going very wide and not discriminating between upscale and downscale theater venues.

  But I had another idea: Why not go to the theater owners themselves? These guys were the real showmen—they knew what would work and what wouldn’t. But the distributors had them over a barrel. The distributors controlled all the product and made the theater chains bid for the new pictures without ever getting a chance to see them. It was called “blind bidding.” All they knew was that they were bidding against other large chains for the new James Bond film, for instance, sight unseen. And for this privilege they would have to return 90 percent of the first month’s box office to the studios. They got the candy sales and the hope of reaching a 50 percent split if the film stuck around long enough. And there were some theaters that refused to replace films like Star Wars even after a year because they had reached the 50 percent split and were making so much money.

  So I took our film and screened it for one of the largest theater chains in the western United States, Syufy, which later became Century Theatres. At the same time I was talking to sub-distributors that represented the local interests of many smaller national film distributors. The buyer for Syufy took one look at our movie and said, “I’ll take it.” This started the subs angling for it, and we chose one that represented a New York company called Cannon Releasing. They had one major hit, a picture starring Peter Boyle titled Joe, which made them a lot of money. The minute I stepped into their New York office, I knew they were crooks, but crooks with a distribution pipeline that would get our movie into at least one theater in almost every city in the United States, and following that, most of the rest of the world. It was a tradeoff: Either accept this bad deal now, while someone wanted to invest money in it and release it, or risk it sitting on a shelf like every other filmmaker’s homemade movie.

  Departing from the normal sequence of festivals to distribution, we did the opposite. Now that the film had distribution, we went to a couple of festivals. The first, in France, was the Deauville American Film Festival. France has a history of celebrating American cinema. We sent our film but we were too poor to fly over and attend, so I have no idea how they reacted. I did get a few letters from foreign distributors, but Cannon had foreign.

  The other festival was the huge Filmex festival in Los Angeles. For this screening, against the wishes of the L.A. fire department, we put a AA top fuel dragster in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion theater. I don’t know what Dorothy would have made of it, but we got reviews in all the L.A. papers, including the trade magazines Variety, the bible of show business, and the Hollywood Reporter. But it was the description of the film in the Filmex catalog that we liked the best. It read: “It is an exercise in asphalt anthropology, capturing the rowdiness and violence of a Roman spectacle: high-speed crack-ups, men afire, semi-nude maidens in attendance, and the legions of racers and fans who have pledged their lives to timing records—and intangibles harder to define.” Finally, someone got it.

  One of the high points for me was walking down Madison Avenue in New York in 1979 and reading the Variety review of Nitro. I was thirty-two years old and had somehow gotten my movie into national distribution. It had been seven years since I got my Jack Johnson movie into distribution and I now had another one, but on a much larger scale. Exploitation film or not, I did it. There are many fine screenwriters in Hollywood that make lots of money selling screenplays for movies that never actually get made.

  By now Cannon Distributing had been sold to some real shysters named Golan and Globus. They took our film and several others (one was called Gas Pump Girls) and bundled them like sub-prime mortgages, raising millions of dollars on the potential of the bundled films to generate cash flow. This was a neat trick and it propelled Cannon to great heights. What we got out of it was a full-page ad displaying our movie poster in Variety and a worldwide release.

  The Cannon distribution strategy was to go into an area like Sacramento or the San Francisco Bay Area and blanket the radio and television media with the movie trailer and radio spots and hope to fill theaters. We sold out the theaters in some places and usually lasted a week, sometimes two weeks. But it was a new world. We were opening against major studio pictures like The Deer Hunter and Escape from Alcatraz. It was like walking amongst elephants. One wrong step and you would be crushed.

  It was actually quite a rush. We ran around to every city we could reach, from San Francisco to Los Angeles, peeking over drive-in movie theater fences to see our movie playing on the huge screens. We even had the local distributor call an indoor “hardtop” and the manager came down to his theater on a Sunday to let us into a screening there. No filmmakers had ever shown up at his movie ho
use in all the years he had been in business, and he was intrigued. So were we.

  Friends sent me photos of movie marquees displaying American Nitro in towns all across the country. The movie generated about $1.2 million in ticket sales, which was pretty good for a kind of outsider art film posing as an exploitation picture. Our end of this should have been about 40 percent since we had financed it. Getting paid was another matter.

  When I first started looking for a distributor, I called a guy I knew that had directed some low-budget films. I told him I was thinking of writing letters to distributors about my film. He said, “That would be like sending a postcard to Stalin.” I had no idea how rough the movie business could be. When Cannon was bought out by two Israeli cousins named Golan and Globus, they raised enough money to launch a renewed Cannon Films and eventually built the company to near-major-studio status. That is, until they were brought down by a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that torpedoed their stock price. I hope we had some small hand in that because we amply supplied the commission with reams of paperwork. Subsequently we got a rather large check and the rights to our movie were returned to us. The last time I saw either Golan or Globus was in a photo not long after our settlement—they were being introduced to the Queen of England.

  I learned that if anyone ever does get paid on one of these percentage-of-profit deals, it is because the studio wants his next project. We didn’t have another project yet, so it took several years and a lot of legal expenses to become whole again, but we did it just in time for the home video revolution.