For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women (or any of Terry Heggy's other writing), please visit www.shyperson.com.
Special Effects – Why I’m Bleeding After Jumping Off the Roof, Part 2 ~1973
Read Part 1 (below) First
This may come as a surprise to readers who have never made their own movies, but…sometimes parts of the same scene are shot on different days. At the major studios, the effort to match the shots from different days is called “continuity”. It is someone’s full-time job to microscopically observe every shot and make sure that if the drink is in the actor’s right hand in shot one, it darn well better be there in shot two, also.
For a kung fu film, it’s more about making sure the dead guys haven’t rolled over between cuts. If one of the henchmen went down face first in the Messner’s flowerbed, then he’d better still be eating posies when we finish the shot next week.
This is harder than you might think. When we made “The Tiger and the Dragon”, we were never sure if we could get the actors to come back after lunch, much less after a two-week vacation. In fact, we ended up cutting Chris Bogue out of the film completely, even though he had the most menacing snarl of anyone on the team…but he couldn’t make it to the set often enough.
We solved most of our continuity problems by having all the henchmen wear our swim team T-Shirt. I don’t know who designed the shirt, but I can pretty much guarantee that they aren’t working in the fashion industry today; alternating horizontal red and gray stripes made the wearer look like a sunburned bumblebee. But at least everybody on the team had one. Are you playing a bad guy? Put on your team shirt.
(In later films, we tried to stick with the same sort of technique. When Doug Smith played James Bond, we made sure he wore the same shirt in every scene. The only problem we ran into was when we filmed the first half of the climactic fight scene in August, but were unable to film the rest until December. If you look closely, you’ll notice that at the end of the fight, Doug is wearing the same James Bond shirt, all right, but he has a half-dozen undershirts on beneath it.)
Anyway, this story is about how I got my bloody ribcage wound in the scene right after I jumped off a 30-foot roof to land on Rickey Harris’s head. Here’s how it happened:
Our swim team coach (the amazing Bill Spahn) had left town to go to the National Championship meet with Mike Ulffers and Robin Messner. Normally, when Bill was absent, one of the assistant coaches would fill in for him. If they were all busy, then Ulffers got the assignment. But when they were all gone at the same time, Bill turned the workout over to the person who was not only the next best swimmer, but was also the oldest. You’d think he’d also be the most mature, but…
We’re talking about Roger Neugent, here. One of the most delightfully unique individuals I’ve ever met, Roger is not only an incredibly talented athlete, but also a free-thinking philosopher who was never afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. Either that or he was some kind of brain-damaged weirdo. (I prefer the first explanation, but considering that he once jumped out of a fifth story window holding a fire extinguisher – when there was no fire – has led some people to the second conclusion. But I digress…)
When Roger was put in charge of the workout, you knew that our standard workout format would go out the window. We had filmed the roof-jumping scene a few days earlier, and were scheduled to finish shooting over the weekend. On this particular day, though, we weren’t thinking about the film; we were just looking for something fun to do at swim practice. Roger came up with a dandy idea.
Ever an observer of detail, Roger noticed a couple of things about the pool. One, that the pool deck was nothing more than a long, smooth, stretch of concrete…and two, that the gate at the end of the pool deck was large enough to pass an automobile. The next step was obvious…car skiing!
Roger drove his ancient Buick onto the deck. It was a beat-up pile of cerulean junk that he affectionately called the “Blue-Ick”, but it ran well enough. Somebody found about 35 feet of rope, and we were in business.
One end of the rope was held by a kid riding shotgun in Roger’s car; the other by a kid on a kickboard in the pool. Roger would drive from one end of the pool to the other, and the kid on the kickboard would enjoy the best surfing experience he could possibly get within the confines of an Olympic-sized pool. We took turns, and everybody got a chance for a serious thrill ride.
We thought the only danger was that the kid being towed needed to watch out for the pool wall, since the car was pulling from a significant angle. We were careful to coach everyone on how to avoid a collision with the wall. But we didn’t think the kid in the car had anything to worry about. But he did.
Naturally, I was the one who discovered the problem. It was my turn to hold onto the tow rope from the passenger side of the Blue-Ick. Wearing nothing but a Speedo, I didn’t have much protection when I lost my grip on the rope. There was a soft buzzing sound as the whizzing rope buzzed its way along my side until the entire length had been left behind on the deck outside the car. The kid we were towing was yelling about being gypped out of his ride, and I was bleeding all over Roger’s car. Serious ribcage rope burn.
Well, if you know anything about teen-agers, you know that if it didn’t require hospitalization, it wasn’t serious enough to stop the current activity. But we weren’t stupid; we figured out that the rope-holder was actually a flaw in the system. Solution? Tie the rope onto the door handle. OK, who’s next?
I jumped back in the pool, figuring that a good dose of chlorine would heal that gash right up. And it was a big enough pool that the blood didn’t really tint the water much at all. No worries.
But for the next couple of weeks, I had a big, red, welt across the side of my body. Even if we’d have had makeup (which we didn’t), it would’ve been hard to disguise the wound for those shirtless close-up kung fu scenes we needed to film. Time to improvise.
When we returned to the Messner’s house to film the remaining fight sequence, we hastily wrote up a scene where I entered the front door of the house. The camera does not follow me in, but the audience can hear the sound of an attack with some sort of weapon. When I come out of the house, I’m dripping blood from the wound in my side. We never explained what happened inside, and no one ever asked.
We used a product called “Vampire Blood”, which I believe was left over from the filming of “The Return of Nocto, the Boy Vampire”. It was a bit too bright to be believable, but hey, I’d just jumped off the dang roof, so deal with it, OK?
(A couple of years later, Doug and I started a project called “Hit Man”. It was a true splatter-fest, so we needed gallons of blood. The Vampire Blood product was too expensive in those quantities, so we did some experimentation and learned how to make realistic blood out of food coloring and Karo Syrup. It was sweet and tasty, too.)
There are no longer any signs of my car-surfing wound; I’m all healed up. Roger was never again allowed to coach unsupervised. And we did get the rest of the fight scenes shot before the rainstorms moved in. But that is another story.
Moral of the story: Surround yourself with creative people, and there will never be a dull moment.
Live a full life, my friends.
Terry
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women (or any of Terry Heggy's other writing), please visit www.shyperson.com.
Special Effects – Why I’m Bleeding After Jumping Off the Roof, Part 1 ~1973
For most of my life, I’ve been considered to be “the Creative One” in just about any group I’ve been a part of. I’m usually the one who’s asked to come up with wild ideas and bring them to life. I’m usually expected to provide the humor, the “outside the box” thinking, and the skewed perspectives – while the others in the group provide the grounded and stable viewpoints. But not always.
When I’m with my son Tanner, I’m obviously outclassed. The kid is brilliant, and oozes creativity out of every pore. He’s one of those rare people who’s creative with words, with music, and with images all at once. But I’ll rave about him elsewhere…
The situation I’m speaking of today is my collaboration with Douglas R. Smith, also known in Hollywood as Gillatino Bertolucci, and Dougimontis, the Philosopher.
Doug and I made movies together when we were in high school and college. And there was never any doubt who was the creative force behind our projects; Doug was (and still is) a genius.
My job within our duo was to gently nudge Doug back to the planet earth when necessary. You see, Doug is a genius…but he sometimes has some trouble with a concept most of us know as “reality”. He came up with ideas, all right, but he regularly failed to consider how much they were going to cost, and how many innocent bystanders were likely to be injured as a result.
Our first project was the kung-fu epic titled “The Tiger and the Dragon”. Doug had made movies before (most notably working with Lee McCroskey in the fabled “Nocto, the Boy Vampire” series), and I had spent considerable time as the cinematographer for our family’s posterity documentation. (In other words, I shot some of our home movies. I took over the duty when I noticed that everything my father shot used a technique known as “pan across everything as fast as you can”, which meant that everything passed by in a frenetic blur. He explained the technique to me; “Film is expensive. If I pan really quickly, everything gets recorded on at least one frame, and we save tons of money.” Well, OK, but it guaranteed that relatives, neighbors, friends, and people we didn’t even know would run for the hills when we pulled the projector out of the closet.)
The plot of “T&D” was modeled on Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon”. In fact, most of the character names were pulled directly from the film, as well as a good percentage of the dialog. The story had our hero avenging the death of his best friend, who’d been killed by a mob boss after winning a ping pong tournament. I played the lead, Doug’s brother Steve played the boss bad guy, and Doug was his head henchman. All the other characters were played by our teammates from the Wichita Swim Club.
Most of our stunts were simple karate fights, with the actors’ lack of martial arts skill disguised by clever camera angles and tricky editing. But we had two extra-special stunts; 1) a police inspector falls off a 10-story parking garage, and 2) I jump from a 30-foot roof and crush the skull of one of the bad guys.
Guess what? Both stunts were Doug’s ideas.
The first one wasn’t too hard. We weren’t going to show the actual fall – he just went over the edge and the camera moved to show his splattered corpse 10 stories below. The “edge” our cop leaped from actually only dropped him about 4 feet – he had to duck after the jump so that we wouldn’t see his head floating there as he was supposedly plummeting. But it looked exactly like the edge for the establishing shot. It was simple, but was pretty effective.
We got some pretty funny looks from spectators as we set up the shot. Our cop (Lee McCroskey) had to lie in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the circular ramp while we filmed from the top of the building. Since we didn’t have walkie-talkies, he had to remain perfectly still with his arms and legs “dislocated” and an “extremely squashed” look on his face until we took the elevator down to where he could hear us shout the All Clear.
Lee did a great job as a corpse, but it wasn’t until we got the film developed that we discovered that he’d looked over his right shoulder when he jumped on the ledge during the establishing shot – but over his left in the close-up where he jumped off. Oh well, on our limited budget, we just had to cut it in and hope no one noticed.
(One other flub crept into this scene. Before he jumped from the building, Lee was supposed to turn and run from the evil henchmen who had been waiting to ambush him…but he fell flat on his butt as he turned. We just kept rolling and told him to get up and get moving. He did it well; it looked natural. But my brother, who was playing one of the henchmen can be seen in the back of the frame, rolling on the ground, laughing at Lee’s clumsiness. Due to Lee’s on-screen magnetism, though, no one in the audience noticed.)
OK. I admit that I had no problem when Doug suggested that Lee fall 10 stories to his death. But when he said that I should leap onto a guy’s head from a 30-foot rooftop, well, I balked.
I calmly explained that he was out of his friggin’ mind, but Doug wasn’t listening. “No, look,” he said, “we can fix it in editing. You only have to jump off the 15-foot roof peak. It’ll look like you went off the top. No problem.”
“Nobody’s gonna buy that,” I said. “It’ll look fake, and besides,” I added, “I ain’t jumpin’ off no 15-foot roof, either!”
“You gotta,” he said. “It’s the only way to sell the stunt.”
“Leave it out. It’s gonna make us look stupid.”
“No, we gotta do it.”
Deep breath. I looked at the house* again. It had 3 peaks to the roof – the center was the 30-footer, while the ones on the ends of the house were about half that high. Still, even the lower peaks were high enough to seriously injure anyone stupid enough to jump off. We didn’t even have a bunch of pillows, or a pile of leaves; much less a professional stunt cushion. If I were going to jump, I’d land in the yard. And the rest of the movie would go unfilmed while its star sat in a hospital bed with his leg in one of those casts with wires holding it up.
I’ve never been a particularly brave or adventurous person. I explained to the crew that the jump was simply too dangerous, and I wasn’t going to do it. Well, my brother was listening to this exchange. “Oh, it’s not so bad”, he said. Then he climbed up on the courtyard wall that attached to the lowest point of the roof. A minute later, he had jumped off the 15-foot peak.
“See? No injuries. No problems.” Crap. If my stupid little brother can do it, then I’ll look like a total dipwad if I don’t do it. Fine. I started the climb.
First we took the establishing shot of me standing on the top peak, where it was obvious how high I was. Then I walked over to the lower peak. Doug zoomed in so that no one could see that the roof continued to go upward just behind me.
To this day, I don’t know what possessed me to think we needed a test run. Doug looked through the camera and gave me the thumbs up. I jumped.
It hurt. Bad.
But the camera hadn’t been rolling. Gotta do it again. Taking a deep breath (and using part of it to curse my stupid little brother’s bravery), I mounted the roof again.
Of course, Doug was right. The scene was a big hit in the movie. Practically everyone who’s ever seen the movie comments on how cool it was that I jumped off that really high roof and landed on that guy’s head. That one scene transformed the movie from an amateur effort into a pretty good little film.
So how did I land on the guy’s head, you ask? Well, with a little help from editing and camera trickery. We filmed the shot with me standing on Ricky Harris’s shoulders. The camera started at Rick’s shoulder height and then tilted upward quickly. On a stationary screen, it appeared that I’d come down…fast. We cut that in right after the shot of my jump, and followed it with a shot of me stepping off of Ricky’s crushed body.
As an homage to Bruce Lee’s big fight in “Enter the Dragon”, I wasn’t wearing a shirt (It had been ripped off by the effeminate bouncer henchman played by Dave Feld. Feld wasn’t effeminate at all, but she didn’t show up for our vocals dubbing session, so we dubbed his lines with our best stereotypical limp-wristed lisp. The audience loved it.)
The next scene was supposed to begin the final fight sequence leading up to the climactic meeting with the mob boss. But we had to explain the bloody gash across my ribs first. Stay tuned.
Terry
*The house belonged to the Messners. Robin was one of the best swimmers in the world, and I was madly in love with her at the time. (I thought her mom was pretty hot, too, but that's another story.) Robin's dad is Roe Messner, who is most famous (or infamous) for dumping Robin's mom in order to marry the former Tammy Faye Baker. But that was later...at the time of this film, Roe was still around the house in Wichita. It was a great house, and it was awfully nice of their family to let us stage murders in the yard and jump off the roof, etc.
Special Effects – Why I’m Bleeding After Jumping Off the Roof, Part 1 ~1973
For most of my life, I’ve been considered to be “the Creative One” in just about any group I’ve been a part of. I’m usually the one who’s asked to come up with wild ideas and bring them to life. I’m usually expected to provide the humor, the “outside the box” thinking, and the skewed perspectives – while the others in the group provide the grounded and stable viewpoints. But not always.
When I’m with my son Tanner, I’m obviously outclassed. The kid is brilliant, and oozes creativity out of every pore. He’s one of those rare people who’s creative with words, with music, and with images all at once. But I’ll rave about him elsewhere…
The situation I’m speaking of today is my collaboration with Douglas R. Smith, also known in Hollywood as Gillatino Bertolucci, and Dougimontis, the Philosopher.
Doug and I made movies together when we were in high school and college. And there was never any doubt who was the creative force behind our projects; Doug was (and still is) a genius.
My job within our duo was to gently nudge Doug back to the planet earth when necessary. You see, Doug is a genius…but he sometimes has some trouble with a concept most of us know as “reality”. He came up with ideas, all right, but he regularly failed to consider how much they were going to cost, and how many innocent bystanders were likely to be injured as a result.
Our first project was the kung-fu epic titled “The Tiger and the Dragon”. Doug had made movies before (most notably working with Lee McCroskey in the fabled “Nocto, the Boy Vampire” series), and I had spent considerable time as the cinematographer for our family’s posterity documentation. (In other words, I shot some of our home movies. I took over the duty when I noticed that everything my father shot used a technique known as “pan across everything as fast as you can”, which meant that everything passed by in a frenetic blur. He explained the technique to me; “Film is expensive. If I pan really quickly, everything gets recorded on at least one frame, and we save tons of money.” Well, OK, but it guaranteed that relatives, neighbors, friends, and people we didn’t even know would run for the hills when we pulled the projector out of the closet.)
The plot of “T&D” was modeled on Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon”. In fact, most of the character names were pulled directly from the film, as well as a good percentage of the dialog. The story had our hero avenging the death of his best friend, who’d been killed by a mob boss after winning a ping pong tournament. I played the lead, Doug’s brother Steve played the boss bad guy, and Doug was his head henchman. All the other characters were played by our teammates from the Wichita Swim Club.
Most of our stunts were simple karate fights, with the actors’ lack of martial arts skill disguised by clever camera angles and tricky editing. But we had two extra-special stunts; 1) a police inspector falls off a 10-story parking garage, and 2) I jump from a 30-foot roof and crush the skull of one of the bad guys.
Guess what? Both stunts were Doug’s ideas.
The first one wasn’t too hard. We weren’t going to show the actual fall – he just went over the edge and the camera moved to show his splattered corpse 10 stories below. The “edge” our cop leaped from actually only dropped him about 4 feet – he had to duck after the jump so that we wouldn’t see his head floating there as he was supposedly plummeting. But it looked exactly like the edge for the establishing shot. It was simple, but was pretty effective.
We got some pretty funny looks from spectators as we set up the shot. Our cop (Lee McCroskey) had to lie in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the circular ramp while we filmed from the top of the building. Since we didn’t have walkie-talkies, he had to remain perfectly still with his arms and legs “dislocated” and an “extremely squashed” look on his face until we took the elevator down to where he could hear us shout the All Clear.
Lee did a great job as a corpse, but it wasn’t until we got the film developed that we discovered that he’d looked over his right shoulder when he jumped on the ledge during the establishing shot – but over his left in the close-up where he jumped off. Oh well, on our limited budget, we just had to cut it in and hope no one noticed.
(One other flub crept into this scene. Before he jumped from the building, Lee was supposed to turn and run from the evil henchmen who had been waiting to ambush him…but he fell flat on his butt as he turned. We just kept rolling and told him to get up and get moving. He did it well; it looked natural. But my brother, who was playing one of the henchmen can be seen in the back of the frame, rolling on the ground, laughing at Lee’s clumsiness. Due to Lee’s on-screen magnetism, though, no one in the audience noticed.)
OK. I admit that I had no problem when Doug suggested that Lee fall 10 stories to his death. But when he said that I should leap onto a guy’s head from a 30-foot rooftop, well, I balked.
I calmly explained that he was out of his friggin’ mind, but Doug wasn’t listening. “No, look,” he said, “we can fix it in editing. You only have to jump off the 15-foot roof peak. It’ll look like you went off the top. No problem.”
“Nobody’s gonna buy that,” I said. “It’ll look fake, and besides,” I added, “I ain’t jumpin’ off no 15-foot roof, either!”
“You gotta,” he said. “It’s the only way to sell the stunt.”
“Leave it out. It’s gonna make us look stupid.”
“No, we gotta do it.”
Deep breath. I looked at the house* again. It had 3 peaks to the roof – the center was the 30-footer, while the ones on the ends of the house were about half that high. Still, even the lower peaks were high enough to seriously injure anyone stupid enough to jump off. We didn’t even have a bunch of pillows, or a pile of leaves; much less a professional stunt cushion. If I were going to jump, I’d land in the yard. And the rest of the movie would go unfilmed while its star sat in a hospital bed with his leg in one of those casts with wires holding it up.
I’ve never been a particularly brave or adventurous person. I explained to the crew that the jump was simply too dangerous, and I wasn’t going to do it. Well, my brother was listening to this exchange. “Oh, it’s not so bad”, he said. Then he climbed up on the courtyard wall that attached to the lowest point of the roof. A minute later, he had jumped off the 15-foot peak.
“See? No injuries. No problems.” Crap. If my stupid little brother can do it, then I’ll look like a total dipwad if I don’t do it. Fine. I started the climb.
First we took the establishing shot of me standing on the top peak, where it was obvious how high I was. Then I walked over to the lower peak. Doug zoomed in so that no one could see that the roof continued to go upward just behind me.
To this day, I don’t know what possessed me to think we needed a test run. Doug looked through the camera and gave me the thumbs up. I jumped.
It hurt. Bad.
But the camera hadn’t been rolling. Gotta do it again. Taking a deep breath (and using part of it to curse my stupid little brother’s bravery), I mounted the roof again.
Of course, Doug was right. The scene was a big hit in the movie. Practically everyone who’s ever seen the movie comments on how cool it was that I jumped off that really high roof and landed on that guy’s head. That one scene transformed the movie from an amateur effort into a pretty good little film.
So how did I land on the guy’s head, you ask? Well, with a little help from editing and camera trickery. We filmed the shot with me standing on Ricky Harris’s shoulders. The camera started at Rick’s shoulder height and then tilted upward quickly. On a stationary screen, it appeared that I’d come down…fast. We cut that in right after the shot of my jump, and followed it with a shot of me stepping off of Ricky’s crushed body.
As an homage to Bruce Lee’s big fight in “Enter the Dragon”, I wasn’t wearing a shirt (It had been ripped off by the effeminate bouncer henchman played by Dave Feld. Feld wasn’t effeminate at all, but she didn’t show up for our vocals dubbing session, so we dubbed his lines with our best stereotypical limp-wristed lisp. The audience loved it.)
The next scene was supposed to begin the final fight sequence leading up to the climactic meeting with the mob boss. But we had to explain the bloody gash across my ribs first. Stay tuned.
Terry
*The house belonged to the Messners. Robin was one of the best swimmers in the world, and I was madly in love with her at the time. (I thought her mom was pretty hot, too, but that's another story.) Robin's dad is Roe Messner, who is most famous (or infamous) for dumping Robin's mom in order to marry the former Tammy Faye Baker. But that was later...at the time of this film, Roe was still around the house in Wichita. It was a great house, and it was awfully nice of their family to let us stage murders in the yard and jump off the roof, etc.
