For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
Moonies ~1979 (Warning: contains scenes of regrettably damp violence)
Have you ever noticed those spider webs that sometimes occur in relationships? Sometimes known as the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, this phenomenon suggests that we are all closely connected. And it’s absolutely true.
During the summers, those of us in the Wichita Swim Club would compete in several swim meets. Some were road trip adventures to exotic places such as Bartlesville or Omaha…and some were held at the Wichita East Branch YMCA. Kids would decide which meets to attend based on how tough the competition was expected to be, whether the team needed their support to score points, and how much money their parents were willing to spend in shipping their ungrateful offspring all around the planet just so they could swim back and forth in a cement pond.
Most of the kids only went to the big meets – the Air Capital Meet, the Region 8 Championships, etc. But those of us who weren’t quite up to that rarefied level often attended less competitive meets; Winfield, for example, or maybe Manhattan.
No, not Manhattan, New York – Manhattan, Kansas. Home of Kansas State University, which is where kids went if their grades weren’t good enough to get them in to KU, Wichita State, or Butler County Community College (BuCo JuCo). (OK, maybe I’m being unfair. K-State actually has a pretty good reputation as an agricultural college – in fact my brother in law went there, and his IQ is approaching the double digits.)
Anyway, the Manhattan swim meet was a place where less-than-elite swimmers could go to tune up and gain experience that would come in handy as their expertise increased. Some competition venues would only accept swimmers who had already made certain qualifying time standards (known as “A” times). But Manhattan would let anybody in. Even me.
We got there early, and as was our habit, we wandered around the pool grounds trying to scope out our competition. My little group consisted of myself, the Ant, Doug Smith, and Tom Jackson (no, not the former Broncos linebacker and broadcaster). We were pretty good at strutting around, acting cocky, and giving the evil eye to any other kids we ran into. Most of our opponents, subjected to our haughty glares, would duck their heads and sheepishly wander off in another direction.
But our little gang soon met its match. One group did not back down. In fact, they puffed themselves up and strutted right up to us. “We’re from Lawrence,” their leader bragged.
“I’m sorry,” Jackson said, shaking his head sadly. “Perhaps some day you’ll be able to join a good team.”
I’m pretty sure that the Lawrence spokesman growled a little bit. He was a big fellow, with platinum blond hair, brutishly handsome features, and a chiseled physique. When we talked about him later, we always referred to him as “Muscle Beach”, due to his resemblance to the Hollywood ideal of a bronze god. He responded to Tom’s insult. “I swim butterfly. I have my ‘A’ time.”
Since almost every swimmer from our team had reached the “A” time standard in nearly every event, there wasn’t much reaction to Beach’s proclamation. We smiled, but no one said anything.
“How many ‘A’ times do you have?” asked Muscle Beach.
Tom responded. “Well, all of them,” he said matter-of-factly.
There was a collective gasp from the Lawrence group. “Ha!” said Beach. “No one has all their ‘A’ times.” He snorted, then turned and walked away with his gang following close behind.
We laughed about that one for days afterward. But what does that have to do with Kevin Bacon? Well, the next year at school, I developed an unrequited crush on a goddess in my psychology class named Sherilyn Barnes. She was an angel, and I eventually got up enough courage to make a few misguided attempts to talk with her. She had no use for me, of course, since this was before I discovered the secrets. And besides, she already had a boyfriend; yeah, that’s right…Muscle Beach.
It turns out that his name was Randy Johnson (no, not the pitcher), and he turned out to be a really nice guy. Well, he was really good friends with Sherilyn’s brother Brent, who later swam on the team at KU and became good friends with my buddy, Doug Smith. To make a long story short, Brent came to Wichita a couple of summers later to swim with WSC, and needed a place to live. I was about to move into my own apartment, so Brent and I decided to share the rent.
Brent had very few possessions, and not too many changes of clothes, either. But he did have the “Frampton Comes Alive” double album, and a pressure-operated fire extinguisher. You know the kind I’m talking about; it’s essentially nothing more than a big steel can with a pump handle that you crank to get the water to squirt out. You don’t see too many of those any more, but they used to be in a cubby hole in every wall in every public school. In fact, I think this one might have come from just such a cubby hole…
Though there have been times in my life when I’ve been bored enough to have long conversations with anyone who happened to knock upon my door, I did not have that experience while living with Brent. We always had something going on. And so when a young man and young woman from the Unification Church stopped by to enlighten me regarding their religion, I politely told them I was not interested.
As they were walking away, Brent was just entering the apartment hallway. He glanced over his shoulder at the departing evangelists, and asked me who they were. “Churchers,” I responded. “Moonies, I think.”
“No kidding?” He got excited. “Moonies? Really? Moonies?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, we gotta get ‘em.”
“Get ‘em?”
“Yeah. C’mon. Get the car keys.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant until he opened the closet and pulled out the fire extinguisher. He tucked the can under one arm and grabbed the nozzle in his other hand. “Let’s go!” he said.
“Dude, we can’t go squirting these people. Their all dressed up and stuff.”
“Yeah, but they’re Moonies. Moonies!”
Well, you gotta admit that there’s no way to argue with that kind of logic. We piled into my Pinto and took off down the street in search of the pious duo. While I shifted gears, Brent pumped the extinguisher like mad.
Our quarry hadn’t gone far. I pulled over to the curb a dozen feet behind them, and Brent leapt out of the car. He tip-toed up to point-blank range and, grinning like a maniac, shouted “HEY, MOONIES!” Then he let fly with everything that extinguisher had.
The Moonies felt the spray on their back, and, of course, turned around to see what was happening. Brent was sort of hopping up and down and laughing while he held the sprayer full on them. I expected his victims to react in some way, but they just kinda stood there watching their clothing turn dark from the water. So he kept spraying. The whole incident probably only took seconds, but it actually went on long enough that Brent became rather bored – especially since his targets had such a deer-in-the-headlights response. Finally, he quit shooting and jumped back in the car. I popped the clutch and peeled out.
I think it’s safe to say that Brent enjoyed that moment more than anything else that happened during that summer. Oh, sure, he easily achieved all his “A” times, and he probably made out with half the girls on our swim team at some point. I also think that his sister and Mr. Muscle Beach became happily married that summer – but the only thing Brent still enjoys talking about is the day he heroically stood up for the honor of non-cult members everywhere in vanquishing the minions of the evil Dr. Moon.
And the town of Lawrence still beams with pride.
Peace be with you, my children.
Next: The Dim-Witted Apartment Manager
Thursday, July 31, 2003
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
How I Became a Country/Western Disc Jockey ~1979
It’s hard for me to imagine this nowadays, but there was a time in my life where I actually experienced boredom. Sometimes (especially on weekends), I’d say to myself, “Gosh, what should I do this afternoon?”
I know…it’s a tough memory for me to grasp, especially since the most common thing I say these days is “Auuggghhh! There’s never enough time! I have too much to do!” But, there was a time in my youth when I would sit in my apartment and pray for anything that could disrupt the tedium of my dull and boring life.
It got so bad that one day I actually invited a door-to-door insurance salesman to come into my apartment.
Good gravy! A door-to-door insurance salesman? C’mon! Now that’s boredom, my friends…when a conversation with an annoying and pushy stranger is more appealing than anything on TV, any book on the shelf, or even another game of solitaire. (Remember, though; this was pre-Internet & Windows® – the only thing we had were those “real” decks of cards with that mutant old-timey bicyclist on the box. It’s a wonder that humanity could even survive in those oh-so-primitive times.)
Anyway, this guy knocks on my door and asks me if I’ve had a recent “Insurance Needs Checkup”. (Such a question ranks right up there with “Have you recently bathed in sulphuric acid?” or “Have you recently spent 12 consecutive hours listening to William Shatner record albums?” – the answer should ALWAYS be “No, I haven’t. Now, begone before I release the hounds!”)
“I have not, my friend,” I said. “Please come in and tell me all about it.”
He was a handsome black kid, probably in his early 20s, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve forgotten his name. He had the kind of charisma that could easily make him a successful insurance salesman, but I don’t think his heart was really in it. After about 2 minutes, he had confessed to me that what he really wanted was a career in radio. “What a coincidence!” I said, “I happen to have an FCC 3rd Class Broadcasting License, myself.”
“Oh, man,” he replied, “If you’ve got your ticket, well then, have I got an opportunity for you…”
Explanatory interlude: One of the benefits of my Radio/TV/Film education at the University of Kansas was that I had passed the FCC exam that allowed a person to go on the air. I’m not at all sure this requirement still exists, but back then, you weren’t allowed to host a radio program unless you had at least passed the “3rd class” test. To obtain this license, you had to demonstrate knowledge of radio basics (the difference between AM and FM, how to perform a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and why the knobs only went up to “10”, for example*). In addition, you had to know how to do all the technical tasks involved in running the transmitter – reading meters, calculating voltages, and finding the “off” switch in case of a meltdown.
(Related question: at one time, the Emergency Broadcast System was tested on a regular basis. And for a while, one of the test spots included a jazzy little song in a “Nelson Riddle Singers” mode. It ended with a duck quacking for some reason, and it was more fun than most of the lame music that was being played at the time. Does anybody know what happened to that jingle? Please let me know. Thanks.)
Anyway, the insiders referred to the FCC license as your “ticket”, and if you had one, then you could be considered for an on-air job. It turned out that my insurance-selling friend knew someone who knew someone who knew that one of the local stations was looking for a DJ. He gave me a name and a phone number, and suggested that I call.
That boredom-induced chat turned out to be the best insurance sales experience I’ve ever had. The kid left feeling good about himself, and I had a solid contact for a potential entry into the exciting world of commercial broadcast radio.
I called the station first thing Monday morning. I got the impression that they were desperate to find someone quickly, because we set up an interview for my lunch hour that very day.
The station was KICT, 95.7 Stereo Country/Western. It was located, appropriately enough, on the western edge of town. It was quite a drive from my office at Boeing, but I told my co-workers that I might be late getting back from lunch, and headed out.
The interview didn’t last long. They asked me to do a cold-reading of some news copy, demonstrate that I knew how to use the audio board, and how to cue up a record on the turntable. Basically, I turned a few knobs, said a few words into a microphone, shook a few hands, and drove back to my office. During the drive, of course, I thought about all the mistakes I’d made during the interview, and mentally listed all the reasons that they wouldn’t hire me.
There was a message waiting on my phone when I returned to my desk. “This is David over at KICT”, it said. “Can you start this Saturday? Call us back. Thanks.”
How ‘bout that? And I didn’t even have to display my vast knowledge of the Emergency Broadcast System. Pretty cool. I called David and told him I’d be happy to start whenever they needed me. And thus began my illustrious career as a country & western DJ.
I’ll share my KICT tales of hilarity and depravity in other installments. But for now, I’ll conclude by saying this: If you’re ever bored to death on a weekend and an insurance salesman drops over, by all means, invite him in.
Next: Moonies
* Licensed radio stations are only permitted to have knobs that go up to 10. Why? Because "11" would just be too darn loud.
How I Became a Country/Western Disc Jockey ~1979
It’s hard for me to imagine this nowadays, but there was a time in my life where I actually experienced boredom. Sometimes (especially on weekends), I’d say to myself, “Gosh, what should I do this afternoon?”
I know…it’s a tough memory for me to grasp, especially since the most common thing I say these days is “Auuggghhh! There’s never enough time! I have too much to do!” But, there was a time in my youth when I would sit in my apartment and pray for anything that could disrupt the tedium of my dull and boring life.
It got so bad that one day I actually invited a door-to-door insurance salesman to come into my apartment.
Good gravy! A door-to-door insurance salesman? C’mon! Now that’s boredom, my friends…when a conversation with an annoying and pushy stranger is more appealing than anything on TV, any book on the shelf, or even another game of solitaire. (Remember, though; this was pre-Internet & Windows® – the only thing we had were those “real” decks of cards with that mutant old-timey bicyclist on the box. It’s a wonder that humanity could even survive in those oh-so-primitive times.)
Anyway, this guy knocks on my door and asks me if I’ve had a recent “Insurance Needs Checkup”. (Such a question ranks right up there with “Have you recently bathed in sulphuric acid?” or “Have you recently spent 12 consecutive hours listening to William Shatner record albums?” – the answer should ALWAYS be “No, I haven’t. Now, begone before I release the hounds!”)
“I have not, my friend,” I said. “Please come in and tell me all about it.”
He was a handsome black kid, probably in his early 20s, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve forgotten his name. He had the kind of charisma that could easily make him a successful insurance salesman, but I don’t think his heart was really in it. After about 2 minutes, he had confessed to me that what he really wanted was a career in radio. “What a coincidence!” I said, “I happen to have an FCC 3rd Class Broadcasting License, myself.”
“Oh, man,” he replied, “If you’ve got your ticket, well then, have I got an opportunity for you…”
Explanatory interlude: One of the benefits of my Radio/TV/Film education at the University of Kansas was that I had passed the FCC exam that allowed a person to go on the air. I’m not at all sure this requirement still exists, but back then, you weren’t allowed to host a radio program unless you had at least passed the “3rd class” test. To obtain this license, you had to demonstrate knowledge of radio basics (the difference between AM and FM, how to perform a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and why the knobs only went up to “10”, for example*). In addition, you had to know how to do all the technical tasks involved in running the transmitter – reading meters, calculating voltages, and finding the “off” switch in case of a meltdown.
(Related question: at one time, the Emergency Broadcast System was tested on a regular basis. And for a while, one of the test spots included a jazzy little song in a “Nelson Riddle Singers” mode. It ended with a duck quacking for some reason, and it was more fun than most of the lame music that was being played at the time. Does anybody know what happened to that jingle? Please let me know. Thanks.)
Anyway, the insiders referred to the FCC license as your “ticket”, and if you had one, then you could be considered for an on-air job. It turned out that my insurance-selling friend knew someone who knew someone who knew that one of the local stations was looking for a DJ. He gave me a name and a phone number, and suggested that I call.
That boredom-induced chat turned out to be the best insurance sales experience I’ve ever had. The kid left feeling good about himself, and I had a solid contact for a potential entry into the exciting world of commercial broadcast radio.
I called the station first thing Monday morning. I got the impression that they were desperate to find someone quickly, because we set up an interview for my lunch hour that very day.
The station was KICT, 95.7 Stereo Country/Western. It was located, appropriately enough, on the western edge of town. It was quite a drive from my office at Boeing, but I told my co-workers that I might be late getting back from lunch, and headed out.
The interview didn’t last long. They asked me to do a cold-reading of some news copy, demonstrate that I knew how to use the audio board, and how to cue up a record on the turntable. Basically, I turned a few knobs, said a few words into a microphone, shook a few hands, and drove back to my office. During the drive, of course, I thought about all the mistakes I’d made during the interview, and mentally listed all the reasons that they wouldn’t hire me.
There was a message waiting on my phone when I returned to my desk. “This is David over at KICT”, it said. “Can you start this Saturday? Call us back. Thanks.”
How ‘bout that? And I didn’t even have to display my vast knowledge of the Emergency Broadcast System. Pretty cool. I called David and told him I’d be happy to start whenever they needed me. And thus began my illustrious career as a country & western DJ.
I’ll share my KICT tales of hilarity and depravity in other installments. But for now, I’ll conclude by saying this: If you’re ever bored to death on a weekend and an insurance salesman drops over, by all means, invite him in.
Next: Moonies
* Licensed radio stations are only permitted to have knobs that go up to 10. Why? Because "11" would just be too darn loud.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
Special Effects – Exposure to “Creative Geography” ~1974
I actually liked most of my college teachers. (In fact, I had a major crush on my Spanish Composition teacher, but that’s another story…) Oh, sure, there were a few weird ones, like the Calculus teacher who wore the same pair of pants every day for a year without washing them, and the philosophy professor who had the strange obsession with Stonehenge…but most of them were pretty cool, and pretty decent teachers.
Two of my favorites were Dr. Gadd and Dr. Dart of the Radio/TV/Film Department. Dale Gadd was the radio expert, and he had a memorable catch phrase that we’d often beg him to rattle off for us. In his most mellow top-40 DJ’s voice, he’d introduce himself as “The Round Mound of Sound, with More Sound per Pound than Any Mound Around”. He said it really fast, and we were all impressed. Most of us worked on our top-40 DJ voices until we could say just about anything at 100 miles per hour, while keeping our voices perfectly melodious. It really is an art, and Gadd was one of the masters.
Dr. Peter Dart was the film guy. Oh sure, he could do radio and TV, but it was the celluloid that brought out his highest energy levels. And, like Gadd, he had a wonderful sense of humor, even sharing with us the story of his tormented childhood nickname of “Peter-Eater Dart-Fart”. Kids can be so cruel…
Which reminds me, don’t you think that almost any toupee looks WAY worse than a nice, shiny bald head? Nothing wrong with a clean head. The only thing a toupeé doesn’t look worse than is a comb over, right? Well, I’m usually pretty quick to notice when a guy is wearing a rug. And I’ll usually find myself wondering why he has made such a poor fashion choice when a clean scalp can be a thing of beauty.
Anyway, there was this one lecture where Dr. Dart was showing us slides that demonstrated the subtleties of lighting technique. He was talking about how a cinematographer must watch his frame for shiny objects that might reflect studio lights with too much intensity… “Like this,” he said, yanking off his hair to show his sparsely populated skull. I just about fainted. I wasn’t prepared for that – I almost thought he had pulled off his entire head. I had no idea that he was wearing fake hair. I don’t remember any of the rest of the lecture, since I was in shock trying to deal with the fact that my favorite professor had purposefully deceived my fashion sense for almost an entire semester…could I ever trust anything else he said from then on?
Well, eventually I got over it, and I started paying attention again. I learned an awful lot from Dr. Dart, but the one thing that I subsequently used in just about every film I ever made was the concept of “creative geography”. It’s based on a simple idea; that a film audience doesn’t know the details of the location you’re shooting. In other words, the building exterior you show doesn’t have to be the same building as where you shoot the interior scenes. The audience won’t know the difference, and won’t care.
Doug Smith and I used this technique in each of our films. The exterior shot showed Detective Breathwaite walking into the Police Department building, and the next shot showed him at his desk (which happened to be in my dad’s life insurance office). The house balcony I climbed seemed to lead into the inside of an office building, which actually was in a completely different part of town. When James Bond and Felix Lighter walked into the gas station bathroom, we next saw them inside the Smith’s garage. Nobody ever cared or questioned these geographic inconsistencies, because they had no way of knowing the difference.
So what does this have to do with special effects, you ask? Well, this: we used the concept to soup up James Bond’s car.
The exterior of the car looked like a standard 1960-something Toyota Corolla. You may remember those – very small, very boxy – one of the crummy el-cheapo cars that were imported when “Made in Japan” was still an insult. The one we used belonged to Doug’s dad, and it was totally white, and in a word, bland.
The manufacturer was inordinately proud of the fact that this “modern” model of engineering excellence featured an automatic transmission, which had been given the brand name of “Toyoglide”. And since the word "Toyoglide" was emblazoned on the size panel of the car using larger letters than the actual model name, we all referred to the vehicle by the transmission’s brand name. “Dad?” Doug would ask, “May we use the Toyoglide for our movie?”
“Why, certainly, son,” DuaneR would say in his best Ward Cleaver voice. “Just bring it back in one piece, heh, heh.” He didn’t smoke a pipe, but if he did, that would be the point where he’d put the pipe back in his mouth and return to reading his newspaper. (Doug was later to cause his father no small amount of stress through his reckless disregard for the structural integrity of the Toyoglide, but that’s another story.)
So how does a car qualify for “creative geography”? Well, when it came time for our version of "Q" to show James Bond the engine compartment of the Toyoglide, we cut in some footage of Bruce Brown’s 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE sports car, making it appear that the tiny Corolla had a massive hi-tech engine with gleaming chrome pipes and complicated electronics. (Bruce understood money. When the rest of us were looking for our first entry-level post-collegiate jobs, Bruce bought himself a Porsche dealership. But that, too, is another story.)
Well, once we’d established that this innocent looking tin can of a car had a powerplant worthy of NASA, we were morally bound to write a chase scene into the script. We decided that after 007 had used his plastic explosive to escape from Dr. Thunderfinger’s giant closet-sized microwave oven, he would discover the clue that revealed the evildoer’s hideout. By the time we filmed the scene, we were running low on time, money, and creativity…so we just had Bond pick up a matchbook that had been dropped by an evil henchman. And, of course, that matchbook just happened to have Thunderfinger’s home address printed on it. (Hey, all megalomaniacs have everything monogrammed, don't they?). So, with the crucial clue in his possesion, our intrepid secret agent makes a quick check with Directory Assistance to get directions, then hops in his Toyoglide and takes off to save the world.
The original plan was to shoot the drive at slow film speed, which would make it look fast when shown at the normal frame rate. But then Doug showed up with a new toy.
He’d paid $45 for a suction-cup camera mounting device. And since $45 was about equivalent to the entire budget for the rest of the film, we figured we’d better get our money’s worth out of the device. We stuck in on the front fender of the Toyoglide, pushed the camera’s "start" button, and drove. Then we stuck it on the hood of the car and shot some more driving. In fact, we stuck it on just about every surface we could find, the less horizontal, the better. We had to get our money’s worth, you know.
Well, we ended up with thousands of feet of film of, well, driving. We had the Toyoglide going east, the Toyoglide going west, and an interminable close-up shot of the Toyoglide’s front tire zipping past blurry pavement. We risked the $500 camera by sticking it onto the side of a speeding vehicle with a $45 suction cup, and we risked lives by having the camera operator hanging out the window during the filming. Somehow, both equipment and personnel survived.
Our “fast-motion” shots turned out pretty good – it really looked like the Toyoglide was going over 100 mph. The only problem was that all of the other cars on the road were zipping by with equal enthusiasm. If we’d have shot on an isolated road, we’d have had some good stuff…as it was; we had a lot of cartoonish footage that was destined for the trashcan.
Some of the suction-mounted stuff was of sufficient quality, but after watching it for just a few minutes, it became obvious that we didn’t need very much of it to make our point. The vast majority of our fancy camerawork ended up on the cutting room floor. In the finished film, Bond spends about 15 seconds in his super-duper car, which was just about right. What’s really important is the big fight scene that follows; nobody really cared much how he got there.
I have no idea if Doug still has his suction-cup camera mount. It’s probably in the back of a closet somewhere. So I can't make any guarantees, but if you ever need to cinematically demonstrate the speed of a boxy little foreign car with a 12-cylinder fire-breathing engine, well…give Doug a call.
Special Effects – Exposure to “Creative Geography” ~1974
I actually liked most of my college teachers. (In fact, I had a major crush on my Spanish Composition teacher, but that’s another story…) Oh, sure, there were a few weird ones, like the Calculus teacher who wore the same pair of pants every day for a year without washing them, and the philosophy professor who had the strange obsession with Stonehenge…but most of them were pretty cool, and pretty decent teachers.
Two of my favorites were Dr. Gadd and Dr. Dart of the Radio/TV/Film Department. Dale Gadd was the radio expert, and he had a memorable catch phrase that we’d often beg him to rattle off for us. In his most mellow top-40 DJ’s voice, he’d introduce himself as “The Round Mound of Sound, with More Sound per Pound than Any Mound Around”. He said it really fast, and we were all impressed. Most of us worked on our top-40 DJ voices until we could say just about anything at 100 miles per hour, while keeping our voices perfectly melodious. It really is an art, and Gadd was one of the masters.
Dr. Peter Dart was the film guy. Oh sure, he could do radio and TV, but it was the celluloid that brought out his highest energy levels. And, like Gadd, he had a wonderful sense of humor, even sharing with us the story of his tormented childhood nickname of “Peter-Eater Dart-Fart”. Kids can be so cruel…
Which reminds me, don’t you think that almost any toupee looks WAY worse than a nice, shiny bald head? Nothing wrong with a clean head. The only thing a toupeé doesn’t look worse than is a comb over, right? Well, I’m usually pretty quick to notice when a guy is wearing a rug. And I’ll usually find myself wondering why he has made such a poor fashion choice when a clean scalp can be a thing of beauty.
Anyway, there was this one lecture where Dr. Dart was showing us slides that demonstrated the subtleties of lighting technique. He was talking about how a cinematographer must watch his frame for shiny objects that might reflect studio lights with too much intensity… “Like this,” he said, yanking off his hair to show his sparsely populated skull. I just about fainted. I wasn’t prepared for that – I almost thought he had pulled off his entire head. I had no idea that he was wearing fake hair. I don’t remember any of the rest of the lecture, since I was in shock trying to deal with the fact that my favorite professor had purposefully deceived my fashion sense for almost an entire semester…could I ever trust anything else he said from then on?
Well, eventually I got over it, and I started paying attention again. I learned an awful lot from Dr. Dart, but the one thing that I subsequently used in just about every film I ever made was the concept of “creative geography”. It’s based on a simple idea; that a film audience doesn’t know the details of the location you’re shooting. In other words, the building exterior you show doesn’t have to be the same building as where you shoot the interior scenes. The audience won’t know the difference, and won’t care.
Doug Smith and I used this technique in each of our films. The exterior shot showed Detective Breathwaite walking into the Police Department building, and the next shot showed him at his desk (which happened to be in my dad’s life insurance office). The house balcony I climbed seemed to lead into the inside of an office building, which actually was in a completely different part of town. When James Bond and Felix Lighter walked into the gas station bathroom, we next saw them inside the Smith’s garage. Nobody ever cared or questioned these geographic inconsistencies, because they had no way of knowing the difference.
So what does this have to do with special effects, you ask? Well, this: we used the concept to soup up James Bond’s car.
The exterior of the car looked like a standard 1960-something Toyota Corolla. You may remember those – very small, very boxy – one of the crummy el-cheapo cars that were imported when “Made in Japan” was still an insult. The one we used belonged to Doug’s dad, and it was totally white, and in a word, bland.
The manufacturer was inordinately proud of the fact that this “modern” model of engineering excellence featured an automatic transmission, which had been given the brand name of “Toyoglide”. And since the word "Toyoglide" was emblazoned on the size panel of the car using larger letters than the actual model name, we all referred to the vehicle by the transmission’s brand name. “Dad?” Doug would ask, “May we use the Toyoglide for our movie?”
“Why, certainly, son,” DuaneR would say in his best Ward Cleaver voice. “Just bring it back in one piece, heh, heh.” He didn’t smoke a pipe, but if he did, that would be the point where he’d put the pipe back in his mouth and return to reading his newspaper. (Doug was later to cause his father no small amount of stress through his reckless disregard for the structural integrity of the Toyoglide, but that’s another story.)
So how does a car qualify for “creative geography”? Well, when it came time for our version of "Q" to show James Bond the engine compartment of the Toyoglide, we cut in some footage of Bruce Brown’s 12-cylinder Jaguar XKE sports car, making it appear that the tiny Corolla had a massive hi-tech engine with gleaming chrome pipes and complicated electronics. (Bruce understood money. When the rest of us were looking for our first entry-level post-collegiate jobs, Bruce bought himself a Porsche dealership. But that, too, is another story.)
Well, once we’d established that this innocent looking tin can of a car had a powerplant worthy of NASA, we were morally bound to write a chase scene into the script. We decided that after 007 had used his plastic explosive to escape from Dr. Thunderfinger’s giant closet-sized microwave oven, he would discover the clue that revealed the evildoer’s hideout. By the time we filmed the scene, we were running low on time, money, and creativity…so we just had Bond pick up a matchbook that had been dropped by an evil henchman. And, of course, that matchbook just happened to have Thunderfinger’s home address printed on it. (Hey, all megalomaniacs have everything monogrammed, don't they?). So, with the crucial clue in his possesion, our intrepid secret agent makes a quick check with Directory Assistance to get directions, then hops in his Toyoglide and takes off to save the world.
The original plan was to shoot the drive at slow film speed, which would make it look fast when shown at the normal frame rate. But then Doug showed up with a new toy.
He’d paid $45 for a suction-cup camera mounting device. And since $45 was about equivalent to the entire budget for the rest of the film, we figured we’d better get our money’s worth out of the device. We stuck in on the front fender of the Toyoglide, pushed the camera’s "start" button, and drove. Then we stuck it on the hood of the car and shot some more driving. In fact, we stuck it on just about every surface we could find, the less horizontal, the better. We had to get our money’s worth, you know.
Well, we ended up with thousands of feet of film of, well, driving. We had the Toyoglide going east, the Toyoglide going west, and an interminable close-up shot of the Toyoglide’s front tire zipping past blurry pavement. We risked the $500 camera by sticking it onto the side of a speeding vehicle with a $45 suction cup, and we risked lives by having the camera operator hanging out the window during the filming. Somehow, both equipment and personnel survived.
Our “fast-motion” shots turned out pretty good – it really looked like the Toyoglide was going over 100 mph. The only problem was that all of the other cars on the road were zipping by with equal enthusiasm. If we’d have shot on an isolated road, we’d have had some good stuff…as it was; we had a lot of cartoonish footage that was destined for the trashcan.
Some of the suction-mounted stuff was of sufficient quality, but after watching it for just a few minutes, it became obvious that we didn’t need very much of it to make our point. The vast majority of our fancy camerawork ended up on the cutting room floor. In the finished film, Bond spends about 15 seconds in his super-duper car, which was just about right. What’s really important is the big fight scene that follows; nobody really cared much how he got there.
I have no idea if Doug still has his suction-cup camera mount. It’s probably in the back of a closet somewhere. So I can't make any guarantees, but if you ever need to cinematically demonstrate the speed of a boxy little foreign car with a 12-cylinder fire-breathing engine, well…give Doug a call.
For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.
Special Effects – Turning Knobs and Flipping Switches ~1974
Prior to my accidental discovery of the “Secrets to Success with Women”, the only useful things I learned in college all came from my Radio/TV/Film curriculum. For example, in my radio classes I learned how to turn volume knobs up and down. They’re really called “potentiometers”, you know – we insiders call them “pots” – so when you wanted something to be louder, you’d “pot it up”. We also learned how to “cue up” records and how to play looped eight-track cartridges, which we called “carts”. The transition between songs was called a “segue”, which is pronounced “segway”, and is French for “transition between songs”. Those of us who went “on the air” were known as “DJs”, which was industry jargon that meant “annoying loudmouth with an over inflated ego”.
(Note to slack-jawed young gen-x whippersnappers: back then, there were no CDs or MP3s. Music was recorded onto vinyl “phonograph records”, which were played on a spinning platter known as a “turntable”. A sharp, pointed device – known as a “needle” – was inserted into the record’s spiral “groove”, and would pick up and translate the groove’s fluctuations back into sound waves. It was this process that was the genesis of the hippie term “groovey”, which meant “good music”, or something like that.)
(Note to un-hip old farts: Ooops, I forgot that all the kids today still know about turntables because of that infernal “rap” music and the sacrilegious practice of “scratching”, where guys with names like “Baa Das Dood” and “Slick 5 Koolmaster” ruin records by putting their fingers on them and pushing backward against the turntable’s spin, creating the hideous screeching sounds that pass for music among this decadent and morally-deficient generation. Sigh.)
The radio station where I interned was originally an AM station using the call letters “KUOK”. (Some said that it meant that KU was “OK”…others claimed that it meant “Kool University of Kansas”, but I’m not sure which was true.) During my Freshman year, they didn’t actually have a transmitter, but somehow used the University phone system as their antenna. If you lived in one of the dorms, you could receive the station by wrapping your phone cord around your radio receiver. (Yes, I’m serious.) Very few people knew about this, and even fewer were actually willing to do it, so the audience was tiny (or as we in the “biz” called it, “highly targeted”).
The next year, the school applied to the FCC for a license to use the airwaves instead of the phone system. It turned out that the letters “KUOK” belonged to a small station in the Gulf of Mexico that broadcast 3am wave height readings, or some such nonsense, and they refused to give up the letters. So we went with our second choice and became KJHK (short for “Kansas Jayhawk”, but you knew that, didn’t you?). Working mostly under cover of darkness, the station “engineers” (ie, interns whose voices were not suited to being DJs) climbed up one of the local telephone poles and “installed” our transmitter. Shortly thereafter, KJHK went live, broadcasting in the FM band with a full 9 watts of power. Now the station could be heard across the entire campus, and if the atmospheric conditions were right, all the way down to the Gibson’s store on Iowa Street. Our audience grew into double digits.
I hosted the early morning jazz show from 6am until 8am. No one else was in the station at that hour, so I had the freedom to play any kind of jazz I wanted. The station had an entire wall full of album-covered shelves, featuring Herbie Hancock, Yngvie Malmstein, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sun Ra, among others. I sometimes played those artists, but mostly brought in my own Maynard Ferguson, Benny Goodman, Les Brown, and Glen Miller records. Heck, there were even times when I’d play a little Blue Oyster Cult, Roy Clark, or BTO. (Seriously, BTO had some jazzy stuff on some of their records. Check it out.)
No one ever complained about my eclectic definition of jazz. One morning, I found out why.
The station was running a call-in contest. The grand prize was quite attractive – something like 30 albums of your choice from the station’s collection – so I assumed that interest among listeners would run high. When it came time for me to run the contest, I went on the air and said, “OK, it’s time to unlock the KJHK ‘Mystery Prize Vault’. The tenth caller will have a chance to unscramble the secret combination and win the 30-album library. The number is …” Then I put on “ME-262” by BOC, and reached over to answer the phone.
It didn’t ring.
After the song, I flipped on my mike and potted up. “OK, I’ll take the first caller to play the Mystery Prize Vault game.”
When the next song finished, I said, “Look, folks, your chances of winning are pretty darn good. Somebody call in, and take your shot.”
“My”, I thought to myself, “these early morning jazz aficionados are not the aggressive, outgoing folks I had thought them to be.” Perhaps they were simply shy about appearing on a radio show with such a wide-ranging listenership.
Or perhaps nobody was listening at all.
After another 10 minutes of on-air pleading, cajoling, and promising to allow cheating, well, I finally picked up the phone and dialed my brother’s number. He wasn’t really awake yet, but he agreed to go on the air and play the game.
Needless to say, after that day I no longer lived under any illusions about my massive popularity as a media icon in the city. And I was able to let go of my dreams of being mobbed by DJ groupies whenever I popped over to Texas Tom’s for a Giant Tenderloin® sandwich.
And I never again felt guilty about playing Jimi Hendrix during the jazz program.
Next: How I Learned About “Creative Geography”
Special Effects – Turning Knobs and Flipping Switches ~1974
Prior to my accidental discovery of the “Secrets to Success with Women”, the only useful things I learned in college all came from my Radio/TV/Film curriculum. For example, in my radio classes I learned how to turn volume knobs up and down. They’re really called “potentiometers”, you know – we insiders call them “pots” – so when you wanted something to be louder, you’d “pot it up”. We also learned how to “cue up” records and how to play looped eight-track cartridges, which we called “carts”. The transition between songs was called a “segue”, which is pronounced “segway”, and is French for “transition between songs”. Those of us who went “on the air” were known as “DJs”, which was industry jargon that meant “annoying loudmouth with an over inflated ego”.
(Note to slack-jawed young gen-x whippersnappers: back then, there were no CDs or MP3s. Music was recorded onto vinyl “phonograph records”, which were played on a spinning platter known as a “turntable”. A sharp, pointed device – known as a “needle” – was inserted into the record’s spiral “groove”, and would pick up and translate the groove’s fluctuations back into sound waves. It was this process that was the genesis of the hippie term “groovey”, which meant “good music”, or something like that.)
(Note to un-hip old farts: Ooops, I forgot that all the kids today still know about turntables because of that infernal “rap” music and the sacrilegious practice of “scratching”, where guys with names like “Baa Das Dood” and “Slick 5 Koolmaster” ruin records by putting their fingers on them and pushing backward against the turntable’s spin, creating the hideous screeching sounds that pass for music among this decadent and morally-deficient generation. Sigh.)
The radio station where I interned was originally an AM station using the call letters “KUOK”. (Some said that it meant that KU was “OK”…others claimed that it meant “Kool University of Kansas”, but I’m not sure which was true.) During my Freshman year, they didn’t actually have a transmitter, but somehow used the University phone system as their antenna. If you lived in one of the dorms, you could receive the station by wrapping your phone cord around your radio receiver. (Yes, I’m serious.) Very few people knew about this, and even fewer were actually willing to do it, so the audience was tiny (or as we in the “biz” called it, “highly targeted”).
The next year, the school applied to the FCC for a license to use the airwaves instead of the phone system. It turned out that the letters “KUOK” belonged to a small station in the Gulf of Mexico that broadcast 3am wave height readings, or some such nonsense, and they refused to give up the letters. So we went with our second choice and became KJHK (short for “Kansas Jayhawk”, but you knew that, didn’t you?). Working mostly under cover of darkness, the station “engineers” (ie, interns whose voices were not suited to being DJs) climbed up one of the local telephone poles and “installed” our transmitter. Shortly thereafter, KJHK went live, broadcasting in the FM band with a full 9 watts of power. Now the station could be heard across the entire campus, and if the atmospheric conditions were right, all the way down to the Gibson’s store on Iowa Street. Our audience grew into double digits.
I hosted the early morning jazz show from 6am until 8am. No one else was in the station at that hour, so I had the freedom to play any kind of jazz I wanted. The station had an entire wall full of album-covered shelves, featuring Herbie Hancock, Yngvie Malmstein, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sun Ra, among others. I sometimes played those artists, but mostly brought in my own Maynard Ferguson, Benny Goodman, Les Brown, and Glen Miller records. Heck, there were even times when I’d play a little Blue Oyster Cult, Roy Clark, or BTO. (Seriously, BTO had some jazzy stuff on some of their records. Check it out.)
No one ever complained about my eclectic definition of jazz. One morning, I found out why.
The station was running a call-in contest. The grand prize was quite attractive – something like 30 albums of your choice from the station’s collection – so I assumed that interest among listeners would run high. When it came time for me to run the contest, I went on the air and said, “OK, it’s time to unlock the KJHK ‘Mystery Prize Vault’. The tenth caller will have a chance to unscramble the secret combination and win the 30-album library. The number is …” Then I put on “ME-262” by BOC, and reached over to answer the phone.
It didn’t ring.
After the song, I flipped on my mike and potted up. “OK, I’ll take the first caller to play the Mystery Prize Vault game.”
When the next song finished, I said, “Look, folks, your chances of winning are pretty darn good. Somebody call in, and take your shot.”
“My”, I thought to myself, “these early morning jazz aficionados are not the aggressive, outgoing folks I had thought them to be.” Perhaps they were simply shy about appearing on a radio show with such a wide-ranging listenership.
Or perhaps nobody was listening at all.
After another 10 minutes of on-air pleading, cajoling, and promising to allow cheating, well, I finally picked up the phone and dialed my brother’s number. He wasn’t really awake yet, but he agreed to go on the air and play the game.
Needless to say, after that day I no longer lived under any illusions about my massive popularity as a media icon in the city. And I was able to let go of my dreams of being mobbed by DJ groupies whenever I popped over to Texas Tom’s for a Giant Tenderloin® sandwich.
And I never again felt guilty about playing Jimi Hendrix during the jazz program.
Next: How I Learned About “Creative Geography”
