To a lot of folks, starring in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 probably sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. Palling around with Tobe Hooper, hanging out with Tom Savini, chasing around with Leatherface and the boys-all that, and a paycheck besides.
Caroline Williams, the Dallas-based actress who stars as the rock 'n' rolling disc jockey Stretch in the movie will tell you that she did have a great deal of fun. She'll tell you it was a great experience and everyone on the set was wonderful and that Tobe Hooper is a masterful director, unparalleled at evoking terror and fear. And she'll also tell you that being around all that terror and fear got pretty doggone scary sometimes.
"I had never been around a chainsaw before this film, and for some reason, it never registered with me that this guy would be chasing me with a chainsaw and it would be running," she explains. "The first time I had an encounter with a chainsaw, I was being chased. I was running down the corridor in this underground shaft, and I didn't know what was chasing me. I thought something might be chasing me, but at that point in the storyline, Leatherface hasn't been seen yet. So, I come to the tunnel's end, and Leatherface jumps out going full-blast - with the chainsaw running.
"The first time that happened, I turned so quickly to run out of frame that my body literally made a 180-degree turn in two frames (of film). For the second take, Tobe, who had been watching on a monitor, moved in closer to where I would be for some reason. I think he figured that would help keep me there. But on the second take, when I turned and ran, I grabbed him and the camera and took them with me. I absolutely flipped out. Tobe said, 'Caroline, you're missing the point. You've got to stand there and react.'
"So then, I stood there and reacted, and when Tobe finally told me I could run out of frame, I was in tears. I mean, this man is huge! This chainsaw's running! It scared the shit out of me!"
For that scene, the stunt Leatherface, played by Bob Elmore, was wielding the chainsaw. Williams hadn't yet gotten acquainted with the stuntman, adding to the scene's real-life uneasiness. "I didn't know him at all," she affirms. "He kept assuring me, 'Everything's OK. I'll kill the gag if anything happens.' But, you know, a person's imagination is incredible, and I simply could not permit myself to get too comfortable with that chainsaw. Besides, one of my favorite acting exercises is 'What if?' If I get completely into that, I can make myself crazy.
"The beauty of the role," adds Williams, "was that I played with two Leatherfaces. I played with the one who swung the chainsaw, and I played with the one who was in love with me. So, I got that dichotomy, that multiplicity of emotional changes, between those two actors, because they were both excellent, and they could do each other's act. The actor Leatherface was Bill Johnson. Bill had this incredible sweetness and comic timing, and Bob Elmore had this incredible viciousness. In the running scenes with Leatherface chasing me, there's obvious malice there. There's something to fear there. Then, Bill would come in to do Leatherface's actual acting, and there was such humanity there, a human-type character. So, that gave me a lot to work with."
The role of Stretch, who runs the boards at radio station K-OKLA, is, in many ways, a logical one for Williams. Before she began her film career, she paid the bills by working in radio and TV commercials in her native Texas. "I used to do a lot of radio and TV voiceovers - I still do - so I've spent a lot of time in the studio, and that really came in handy with this character because I had mike confidence, and I know disc jockeys and people who work in radio," she notes. Even before that, Williams was a singer, spending quite a bit of time with various Texas-based bands.
"But that is really a heavy-duty lifestyle," Williams says, "and after a while, I thought I would try working in some offices - job security and all that stuff." But she found out she didn't particularly like office work. One day, she heard that a movie was going to be filmed in Houston, and decided to try out for it. "I thought, well, hell, I'll try acting," she chuckles, "so I went to go read for a part. I didn't have an agent, and I hadn't had any acting lessons, except what I knew from high school.
"I showed up at his office, and it was really a mess. They were so disorganized. There wasn't anything I could read because they were only going through agents, so I said, 'Listen, you guys obviously need some help in your office, so why don't you just let me go to work?' So, I did that for two years. They made TV commercials and industrial films, so I did production work, and all sorts of technical things."
After several years behind the scenes, Williams decided one day that she would rather be before the cameras. So, she sought out Chris Wilson, whom she calls "the top acting teacher in the region," and immersed herself in acting lessons.
Before long, WIlliams had an agent. Then, she began doing commercial voiceovers, after making her own tape and shopping it around the area. Six months after signing on with Chris Wilson, she nabbed her first movie rold, a small part in Louis Malle's Alamo Bay. "I just kept my mouth shut and my mind open, and many good things happened for me on that film," she recalls. After Alamo Bay came parts in two independent productions lensed in Texas. One was a kung-fu number called Pray For Death (Fango #53); Williams describes the other one, Rigged, as a "film noir." Directed by Matt (Hundra) Cimber ("A brash and brassy mogul-type, but what a neat guy," according to Williams), the film has yet to find a theatrical distributor.
Then, it was back to major studio productions, first with a small role in Legend of Billie Jean, shot in Corpus Christi, and then in Getting Even, with Joe Don Baker.
In Getting Even, Williams was on the receiving end of makeup artist Larry Aschlimen's FX, an experience she recalls with relish. "My part was a woman named Molly, and Molly was a scientist from MIT who had been hired by Baker's character to discover an antidote to a very corrosive gas. She goes into the lab one day to fool around with this gas, and it gets out and kills her. It's a really gory scene. Larry fashioned blisters out of condoms as appliances to go on my face. These things were connected to a very small rubber tubing, and the tubing was connected to these gigantic syringes. They looked like guns, they were so big. He put the appliances on my face, covered it with latex, and made it up to where it was almost indistinguishable from my skin. Then, he filled these syringes up with chicken blood, and we went to town. As I was going through my transformation, these things would rise up."
After Getting Even, Williams played a splashy part as a "drug addict-hooker-informant" in a made-for-TV movie called Thompson's Last Run. "I had a real hot scene that got me a lot of attention out in LA," she elaborates. "It was a very powerful, heavy dramatic scene, with lots of screaming, running, retching, sobbing and fighting." That sounds much like what she was called upon to do in Chainsaw 2 - and, indeed, when she auditioned for that film, she hoped that Tobe Hooper had seen Thompson's Last Run. He Hadn't, but as it turned out, it didn't make any difference.
"Tobe and Kit [Carson, Chainsaw 2's writer and associate producer] told me later that they knew I was the one the minute that met me," she says. "But they needed to be sure because it was such a big responsibility. They really put me through my paces, but it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it. For me, there's no such thing as an audition. It's just work. Some days, I go to work, some days, I don't go to work. But most days, I do."
Once filming got underway, Williams found herself working once again with special makeup FX, this time courtesy of Tom Savini (Fango #56) and company. "Oh, gosh," she says, considering Savini's FX. "I just couldn't get over how original they were and how incredibly real everything seemed. I don't know how Tom does what he does. I'm absolutely in awe of him."
About Stretch, Williams offers, "It was obvious to me that she was a woman on her own - she had tried many different things in her life, and she had settled on the one she wanted, but her ambition still wasn't sated. She was a disc jockey, but her ambition was bigger. She wanted to get out and do something important. Everything's a big deal to her, and she's an adventurous type. So, when this little adventure presents itself, she wants to take it to the max. And she does.
"In a way, this movie is such a send-up," she continues. "And Stretch is basically a send-up of your cliche horror movie heroine, an upscale '80s version of your classic horror movie victim. The thing is, she keeps trying to het herself out of trouble, and, in doing so, she gets herself into more trouble."
Williams saw the first Chainsaw at a post-football game party in Austin in 1974. Like Kit Carson (Fango #58), she wasn't able to watch the whole thing. ("I thought, 'It could be bad if I watch all this. My children could be deformed or something!'") Once she found herself cast in the sequel, she used a statement of Carson's to help guide her portrayal. "One of the things Kit told me is that there is a ferocity in women that comes out at certain times, and it's just there under the surface in many women all the time. That gave me a lot of insight into what I could do with her, how far I could go with her, and I just decided to max out with her, to do whatever I wanted to do. Tobe's direction was, 'If it feels like you're doing too much, you're doing just right.' So, I figured I could be the little kid at the playground, and I could just go do anything I wanted, and that's what I did.
"It was such a fantastic experience to be let loose like that," confesses Williams. "Tobe treated me like a very indulgent father would, and I didn't know if I could trust it or not, because he was telling me to go so far over the edge, and I thought, 'Gee, I want to be this great dramatic actress. What am I doing?' But I got the point. About 10 days into filming, I finally got the joke. And from then on, whatever he wanted me to do, I did with gusto."
Williams will get a chance to do her "dramatic actress" turn in a pair of upcoming movies, The Eagle and Folks. Meanwhile, there's her first starring role in Chainsaw 2 to look back upon - and she looks back upon it with fondness.
"It's a comedy, an incredible black comedy. It's The Three Stooges Go Grand Guignol. And it was fun. It was a lark, it was a laugh. And it was difficult at times. But my motivation every day was to be as useful to Tobe Hooper as I could possibly be, because I could see the love he has for this movie."
~Fangoria, Issue #60, January 1987~ |