Although it may be hard to believe, well over a decade has passed since the deranged cannibal Leatherface first fired up his chainsaw in a film called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The movie, made on a budget several cuts below modest, went on to become a surprise hit, a cult favorite, and, in the eyes of many, a horror classic of the first stripe. It also launched the career of Tobe Hooper, who would go on to start status himself as a director of horror and fantasy movies.
Now, 13 years later, Hooper's back where it all began, shooting the long-awaited, long-rumored sequel to Chainsaw in Austin, Texas, the first film's location. As might be expected, though, there are some differences this time around. The budget, estimated at $4.7 million, is much larger. The shooting schedule, while far from luxurious, still clocks in at a respectable eight weeks, almost twice the time it took to do the original. And, while the initial file was made by then-unfamiliar actors and technicians, the sequel boasts some well known names. There's Tom Savini doing special makeup FX, L.M. Kit Carson (who wrote the Breathless remake and cowrote Paris, Texas) handling the screenplay and associate producer chores, and veteran actor Dennis (Blue Velvet) Hopper, best remembered by horror buffs for his starring role in the moody Curtis Harrington chiller Night Tide, toplining the cast as Detective "Lefty" Enright, a retired Texas Ranger on the trail of the Chainsaw family. Country musician Kinky Friedman and columnist/exploitation film champion Joe Bob Briggs also appear.
Absent for this chapter are most of the actors from the first Chainsaw, with the exception of Jim Siedow, Chainsaw's cook, who has an expanded role in the sequel. Lou Perry, who plays L.G., a redneck radio engineer, in Chainsaw 2, was a member of the first film's crew. For the most part, thought, new faces abound. (Wayne Bell, who did the sound recording and co-scored Chainsaw, is the only other oldover, as Chainsaw 2's sound recordist.)
"Gunnar Hansen, who now lives in Maine, was approached and was initially unsure if he wanted to do it," reveals Scot Holton over breakfast at the Austin hotel where many of the cast and crew are staying. Holton, a veteran publicist, record preducer and film buff, is unit publicist for Chainsaw 2. "Hansen kept going back and forth, and at the point that Cannon said, 'Here's the money. Go,' he was still making up his mind."
While Hansen was vacillating, Hooper was auditioning alternative actors in Austin. And, Holton says, because the filming had to start, actor Bill Johnson was chosen. Holton praises his "wide dramatic range," and says that in Carson's script, the character Leatherface is now much more defined and detailed.
"The reason that Ed Neal (the original Hitchhiker) is not back is very simple. His character is dead," Holton observes. "The character is in the film, but it's not being played by a human being. It's an old stuffed rag doll, actually, a rather complex type of Muppetized creature that Tom Savini constructed. Because of its disfiguration and condition, there's no way that a person could play it. And Marilyn Burns' character, as related in this script, is bonkers. Gone. That pitch of hysteria you last saw her in has ended her up in the loony bin."
Also in the hotel dining room are Tom and Nancy Savini, along with their 14-month-old daughter. Several of Savini's crew sit at the next table, and all are in high spirits. Savini has a hand-painted kaleidoscope he bought at an Austin street fair, and he moves from person to person, making up spontaneous kaleidoscope effects with names like "the birth of a brain."
The same high spirits prevail after breakfast, when Savini and the crew get down to serious business in his shop. As Savini and four crew members work on various grisly heads and appliances, a tape player in the middle of the room blares out the Three Stooges' version of "Abba Dabba Honeymoon".
Scattered around the shop, which is located in a rented space in a complex of downtown Austin buildings, are heads models and molds, several somewhat familiar from Day of the Dead. The life-size model Holton described as "Muppetized" sits sprawled out in a barber's chair.
"It's called 'the Muppet' in the script, but I hate to call it that," complains Savini, "because it's not a sweet little puppet. Let's call it the Mummy - the Hitchhiker Mummy. They've got marbles in the eyes, screws holding his collarbone together. He has been stitched everywhere."
Working with Savini in the shop this morning are Shawn McEnroe, who has done extensive work with Rick Baker and Rob Bottin; John Vulich, who counts Friday the 13th Part V and Day of the Dead among his credits; and Mitch DeVane and Gino Crognale, both John Buechler veterans.
At the first table in the shop, Crognale works on what has been dubbed "the L.G. effect." Let's draw a veil over the exact nature of the effect; suffice it to say that it involves four sets of 10 separate appliances, and Savini and Crognale agree that it will probably be the most involved effect in the whole film.
"So far, the most complicated one was the driver effect," reveals Savini. "We started with the real actor with an appliance on his head. His head opens up and starts to bleed, and then we cut behind him with the fake head and have it completely open up. It was filled with calf brains. Blood was squirting out. Mitch was on the floor underneath the streeing wheel, holding his hands up against the fake head. A stuntman was on a special platform outside with his legs under Mitch's legs, driving the car so he could make it swerve. Bart Mixon was in the other seat with his hand up the fake head's neck to make the head move, and I was in the back with two sprayers pupming the blood out of the head."
At another table, McEnroe works on a wig for actor Bill Moseley, who plays Chop-Top. "He's going on the set today," notes McEnroe. "He'll have this Beatle wig on, with a hat and glasses. Later, the wig gets pulled off and it reveals all this stuff." He displays a Polaroid shot of a test makeup that shows the top of a head with a metal plate the size of a baked potato exposed.
Explains McEnroe, "He was somewhere in Vietnam and got his head caved in, so they put a metal plate in it. Over the years, he kept picking at it, so, eventually..." He holds the photo up again. "He takes wires and heats them up and sticks them under his wig. Toothpicks. Anything to get rid of the itching. So, you finally end up with this giant hole with the plate showing through."
A little later, Moseley himself comes in for makeup. Moseley, a lean and humorous East Coast actor, sits down in the barber's chair and begins telling how he got the Chainsaw 2 part, while McEnroe trims his close-cropped hair and beard and begins applying makeup. "I did a four-and-a-half minute parody called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure with some friends of mine about two years ago. I did it partly for fun, and partly to try to exorcise the incredible influence that the original Massacre had held over me for many years. The Texas Chainsaw Manicure was set in a beauty parlor in Staten Island. I ended up sending a copy to Tobe."
Later, Moseley called Hooper about the film. "He said, 'I especially like the hitchhiker character. Who did that?'" Moseley recalls. "I said, 'Well, that was me,' He said, 'If I ever do Chainsaw 2, I'm going to keep you in mind.'"
True to his word, Hooper did just that. And now, two years later, Moseley got the nod. In the interim, Moseley worked as a writer (for magazines that include Omni and Interview) and actor, doing "mostly cable TV stuff and independant films." One of those films was Osa, which Moseley describes as "a female Road Warrior movie."
"It was shot in Mexico last spring and opened in France, but I don't know if it has the arms and legs to swim the Atlantic," he says. "I played a bad guy called Quiltface. And I was in another movie, Nightmare Angel, based on a science-fiction book called Crash. I keep playing these scarface parts. From Quiltface to Chop-Top, by way of the Nightmare Angel. My brother keeps giving me some good-natured jesting. He says I'm gonna be Zinc-Lips the next time, or Bulb-Neck, or Shit-Head," he laughs. "That would be a challenge for Savini."
A mile or so away from the shop is a large building that once housed a newspaper office. Now abandoned and scheduled for demolition, its three floors and various-sized rooms make it an excellent location for filming. On the sexond floor, a hotel and radio station set have been constructed. There are a couple more sets on the first floor, then a big hole in the floor that leads to what once was the newspaper's press room. Now, it has been turned into the inside of an amusement park mountain, matching the exteriors of the abandoned Prairie Dell Amusement Park, where much of the film's action takes place.
The cavernous basement has been built up and covered with spray insulation, netting hangs from the ceiling, and huge pipes jut out at crazy angles all around, making the set look a little like something from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
At one end, a spiral slide has been constructed, leading down deep into the bowels of the room. At its end sits a low building. "That's the smokehouse," art director Cary White reveals. "The idea is that the Chainsaw family built it with mortar and instead of rocks, they used bones. The panels were cast out of plaster."
Next to that set is a smaller room that White calls the bone room. It's full of, as might be expected, bones. Lots of bones. Piles and piles of bones, some crafted into furniture and decorative objects, some in full skeletons, hanging from a rack in the middle of the room.
"A very talented guy named Daniel Miller is in charge of all the bone furniture," White says. "There are some really amazing pieces. As you can see, there's a real sense of humor about it, but it's still very grisly and macabre."
Upstairs, Tobe Hooper and several technicians, along with screenwriter Carson, are crowded into a small, dark room that opens onto the brightly-lit radio station control room set. Hooper sits on a tall director's chair behind a TV monitor, setting up a scene with actors Caroline Williams and Lou Perry. Williams plays Stretch, the film's female lead, a live-wire DJ on a rock 'n' roll station given to wearing ZZ Top t-shirts and cut-off blue jeans decorated with metal studs. In the scene being shot, Perry, (who will later be the object of Savini's dreaded "L.G. effect"), asks Williams out for a date and gets rebuffed, after which time Williams gets a strange call on the request line.
Hooper, smoking a cigar, watches intently as the scene is shot, and then calls for another take, giving instructions to his cameramen and actors. After some more takes, Hooper calls for a lunch break. He has brought in a Southern Californian caterer, but Williams and Perry, along with a group that includes wardrobe designer Carin Hooper (Tobe's wife), her assistant Karin Miller and publicist Holton, decide to go to a local bagel shop for a change of pace.
Williams, a Houston native, has appeared in several films, including Legend of Billie Jean and Getting Even. "When I went up and read," she remembers, "there were about five other actresses up for it.
"I could tell it was going to be a very physical role. So, when we were going to tape the scene where Leatherface corners me in a room with a shainsaw, I went out into the hall and I ran all the way down it, ran into the room, slammed the door, yanked the chairs our from under Tobe and Kit, and piled all the furniture in the office up against the door. I'm sure they thought I had lost my mind.
"To me, this part is a female Indiana Jones," she explains, as others around the table laugh. "Really. Because she really gets into danger, and she's running all around, and she's crazy. That's what I like about it. There's a lot of derring-do involved. It's a great part."
Back at the set, Hooper and his crew prepare for another scene with Williams and Perry. Through a dark hallway and down some stairs, L.M. Kit Carson sits at a desk, typewriter in front of him.
"Tobe and I worked together before, in '78, on a project for Bill Friedkin called Dead and Alive, a script that I wrote," says the softspoken, thoughtful Carson. "That didn't get it made, but it extablished a link between us. So, at Christmas, Tobe asked me if I would write the sequel, and I told him I would think about it, but the first thing I said was, 'You're going to have to find the right victims.' One of the things the first movie had going for it was that people were really sick of hippies and wouldn't mind seeing a Volkswagen full of 'em squashed.
"So, I went home to Dallas and went to the Galleria, which is an elaborate shopping mall just stacked with yuppie stores. It's like a yuppie feeding ground. And I saw all these people buying piles of things, you know? Seven sweaters at a time. The whole thing just made you cringe. I called Tobe up and said, 'I've found the victims.'
"A funny thing is that Tobe says the original Chainsaw came to him at Christmas, when he was shopping at K-Mart. The place was packed, and he got stampeded by the mobs into the heavy equipment department. And he looked up on the wall and saw these chainsaws and thought, 'You know, if I could get one of those, I could cut my way out of this place.'"
Carson says he decided to take several of the movie genres he despises and combine them for Chainsaw 2. "The revenge-vigilante genre, the teenage culture clash genre-like Pretty in Pink- and the coming-of-age genre. The culture clash is, of couse, with the Chainsaw family, a lost tribe in America in the middle of the contemporary, overconsuming society of yuppies. The vigilante is the ranger (played by Carson's old friend Dennis Hopper), whose brother's kids were killed in the first film. He has been tracking the Chainsaw family for the past 13 years. And this movie is about Leatherface in love. It's Leatherface's coming-of-age picture. The great thing was that Tobe and Kim Henkel had created this magnificent family in the first film. You couldn't do better than that. So, I was handed these people and the chore was to explore them a bit further.
"What Tobe says," Carson continues, "is that we'll have the audience confused between screaming and laughing, which'll be great. But I don't think it's one of those films they call horror comedies. It's much crazier than that."
Toward the afternoon's end, Hooper calls for a break. On his way to look at dailies, he stops to talk a moment about Chainsaw 2, beginning with an explanation of the long interval between films.
"The rights to Texas Chainsaw Massacre were held up in court for most of those years," Hooper explains genially, easing himself into a beat-up chair beside Carson's desk. "Between the original investors stinging all of us who were parners on it and getting the partners back together after all these years to make the sequel-it took some time. Chainsaw 1 came out before sequels were ordinary. We started out a couple years ago trying to structure this picture, and I was going to just oversee the production until, really, just a few weeks before production, when I couldn't put the director part of the package together. So, I decided to do it myself, and perhaps I would have fun doing it. It looked like fun at the onset. I was coming off a very hard picture (Invaders From Mars), and it seemed like a vacation."
"But," he adds with a chuckle, "it hasn't turned out to be a vacation. It turned out to be equally as hard to make. Movies just somehow find a way to become more complex."
Hooper says that the relatively short shooting schedule results from the film's being pre-booked for late summer release. However, there were other factors involved. "It started out being an eight week schedule, which was twice the first film's schedule, and it just seemed like I should be able to do it in eight weeks. I didn't want to get involved in another six-month shoot, and it's the kind of film where a rapid shoot serves the picture better. But as it ends up, you get extremely involved in making a movie, and it is a very complex piece for an eight-week shoot."
Even for Texas in early summer, the weather has been uncharacteristically bad. There have been several straight days and nights of thunderstorms, forcing Hooper to shoot at alternate interior locations when the schedule called for outdoor lensing. Still, he says, the film is "within a few days" of the original schedule.
Hooper says that the sequel's combination of "straight horror and black humor" is similar to its predecessor. "In this one, we get a little closer to the Chainsaw family, whereas in the original Chainsaw, the plot unraveled, like in Hansel and Gretel, until all the pices connected. This one is organically the same, with all the interwoven connections and destiny placing our characters in the right place and the right time-or the wrong place and the right time, however you view it.
"It's set in a derelict old park, a very strange place. On Texas roadsides, there are many snake farms, and 'The Thing,' and 'Come see the Giant Rock' and all of that, and this is one of those many off-the-road Texas amusement parks that have gone bust, as far as the public driving along the highway can tell. During Chainsaw 1, Chop-Top was in Vietnam, and he got a little wedge cut out of his head with a machete, and he got a government settlement. So, he purchased this thing at a good price. Deep in his heart, he wants to turn this old derelict amusement park into Nam-Land. That's his ambition," Hooper says.
"Grandma's with us this time, and so is Grandpa. Grandpa's still alive, in fact. He's about 130 years old now. They take care of their family." Hooper grins again. "And," he adds, "it's not that important if a family member's alive or not. They're very loyal to their own kind."
~Fangoria, Issue #57, September 1986~ |