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SET STORIES
July 2000
Jack Angelo is a trusting and conciderate director .
I had the pleasure of working with him for two days as a principle on Xenia My Love and Supermarket Rapist for a new T.V. series called Arrest and Trial that should come out in October on UPN.
The two shows were reinactments of two crimes prosecuted by district attorney
Thomas Leen.
I played the part of Leen and had to make his plea to the judge and jury to convict a farm boy stalker from Iowa for shooting an exotic dancer with a high powered rifle and a double barrel 410 shotgun.
"Ladies and Gentlemen . Wayne Wentz was obsessed with Xenia Davis.
So obsessed that when she refused his affection he tried to kill her. Not once
but twice."
That was part of my AFTRA principle contract for two days. One at the Lincoln Heights Jail and the other at the Los Angeles Court House.
Quick paced cast and crew...low budget production...booked thru Central.
The most impressive thing about the set of The Salton Sea being produced by
Castle Rock Pictures at Los Angeles Center Studios with Val Kilmer is Craft Services. Starbucks expresso frappicino, smoked salmon, and strawberries 1/2 dipped in dark chocolate with white chocolate swirls,etc etc etc thanks to Josh Mott and Tony Gomez.
Val Kilmer is sort of a heavy metal punker with vermilion flames tattooed on his arms and spiked hair.
Good cast and crew. Background booked by Sharon at Central Casting.
Nastassja Kinski is back.
Richard Aveidon had her, years ago, lay on her side naked and caress an anaconda coiled around her body as she serenely stared thru the lens and deep into our souls with her spirit spinning like a breeze thru smoke.
In Cat People she had an incestrious incubus/succubus affair with her brother
like satanic cats in a coffin.
In American Lover, directed by Dennis Dimster-Denk thru Diary Productions,
she shoots her boy friend , Josh Holloway, when he tells her that he loves her.
Josh tells me the story when he is thrown into my jail cell. I silently smoke
and stare, frameing the zoom into Josh's face as I wipe camera right. Just
another visual transition but, I had another transitional idea.
I felt Nastassja could pass my character, out of jail, sitting on a log in
Griffith Park. Just close into her eyes as a breeze rustles. I look up as she
brushes my shoulder with her chin. Her cold breath on the back of my neck
sends shivers down my spine as she backs off and continues down the path to her next scene. Her actions were those of a cat on a strole. My character could
stay catatonic stareing and frameing her path.
But, the director said, "That has nothing to do with the movie. Now shut up
and stare. Speeding. Action. Cut. Check the gate. Thank you Jimmy Joe, you
are wrapped."
Good crew. Good cast. Cheap production. Background booked by Axium
Casting and the Wild Bunch of Hollywood.
June 2000
Rock Star Rob Zombie is directing House of 1000 Corpses.
It seems to be a documented nightmare about sadistic spiritual slashers from the graves of the future or some sort of similar supernatural nonsense where shattered slivers of disassociated consciousness torment mortal beings for fun in the name of Hell and Rock'n'Roll.
Christopher at Central Casting is accepting photos for SAG background...send
demented redneck shots, Goth Zombies,mental patients, big people, little people, and others that can go "bump in the night." ...it's pure character stuff.
The flashback scene that I was in at the old Ambassador Hotel in LA as a
mental patient in a dilapidated asylum opens with a slow steady cam swing
close up wide angle shot at 20 fps to suggest a tinge of surreal zippiness.
I push a raggedy teddy bear in an antique wheelchair down a deteriorating
corridor in a panic eye to eye ...dead on the lens...the flasher's POV.
I pass a short fat retarded woman nervously scribbling on children's
drawings of Halloween jack-o-lanterns and skulls tacked to the old wall. Her face is distorted and twisted with her bloody tongue out in a curl.
Down the hall are more maniacs. One is pretending to be a nurse stabbing
a pencil in his arm while crying on the phone he cradles between his chin and shoulder.
A short fat bald headed man is attacking a piano like a spastic Jerry Lee Lewis phantom. On top of the piano is a plaster of Paris statue of Jesus
dragging his cross and next to Jesus is a mechanical toy monkey playing drums to a dead gold fish in half a glass of water next to a plastic parrakeet on it's broken conch shell perch.
A miniature red headed woman looking like some sort of wounded voodoo or animated Q.P. doll is spinning around on the couch, jumping up and down, and laughing hysterically.
The camera continues to arch back to me frantically protecting and hugging
my teddy bear until hideous screams spin us into a torture chambered operating room where a masked Dr. Satan is ripping the tongue of a wild eyed
straight jacketed patient out in pieces with a savage pair of jagged jawed forceps.
The screams and final convulsive gurglins of life were truly scary.
The silence that followed was chilling.
We shivered.
It took at least 155 people over 10 hours to produce 10 or 15 seconds of film yet to be edited.
Then "Cut ! Print ! Check the gate ! "
I missed the martini when a pretty young virgin sex slave is thrown into a cage to be molested by ghastly half rotten carnivorous lesbian zombies...
like strobing slow motion sharks viciously rendering living flesh into raw meat.
The frenzy...and the grace. It's dark art.
How much will carpet the cutting room floor is uncertain but, this flick will be a
TRIP...if you enjoy being struck in the face with a blinding bolt of lightning from a
thundering reverberating vortex that sucks you in and slam dances your senses until virtual coma.
RATING: Good food. Good crew. Good cast. Good deal.
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