Did I sometimes catch a buzz during production? You betcha. I brought a small canister of weed with me on location in Victorville, California. But I made sure to keep the nose candy back in Burbank.
RON
It’s true that I carry around some residual guilt about how oblivious I was to Clint’s addictions. Or maybe I mean that I didn’t take the warning signs seriously enough. When Mrs. Trempe spoke to me about Clint, I heard her out and appreciated how much she cared about him. But I also kind of dismissed her worry as a generational overreaction by an older person who didn’t get how commonplace pot had become. Like I said, my college roommate grew it and my American Graffiti castmates smoked it.
I had no idea at that point that Clint had started to use cocaine. Even if I had, I don’t know that I would have taken drastic action to stop him. In the 1970s, cocaine was still considered a party drug. I remember a somewhat frothy New York Times Magazine trend piece whose headline was COCAINE: THE CHAMPAGNE OF DRUGS. There was a prevailing notion that coke was naughty but not that naughty or even particularly dangerous.
Cocaine was all over show business in the Happy Days era. I never saw anyone take it, at least not knowingly, though I did notice that some people had grown out their pinky fingernails for scooping and snorting. And in various bathrooms at parties, I saw the remnants of rails on the counters and spent vials on the floor. People were careful around me, though—I always got treated like Father Ron with the collar, the person you wouldn’t dare take a toot in front of.
I never once tried cocaine. I had a vivid dream about trying it, though. This was right at the peak of its late-’70s popularity. It was like the Al Pacino version of Scarface before that movie existed: I was at a party, surrounded by girls in gold-lamé miniskirts and guys with shirts open to their navels, and there were mounds of cocaine being passed around on trays. People kept offering me some and I kept saying “No thanks.” But my fellow partygoers were so persistent that I finally said, “Okay, all right, screw it.” I dipped my nose into one of those mounds and took a good snort. I actually, in the dream, felt a euphoric rush. Someone next to me was waiting to hear my reaction, saying, “Well?” And what I said was “Yeah, I know that feeling. That’s the feeling I get every time I roll the camera and say ‘Action!’”
I guess you just heard my film-nerd TED talk. At any rate, you can imagine how excited I must have been in real life when, on March 2, 1977, the day after my twenty-third birthday, I shouted “Action!” for the first scene of Grand Theft Auto.
23
Filming, Flying, Crashing, Burning
RON
Ron, here’s the way it works at New World Pictures,” Roger Corman said to me a few days before we began shooting. “I’m going to come to the set the first day and maybe the second day. If things are going well, you won’t see very much of me after that. But if things are not going well, you’re going to see one hell of a lot of me.”
As ominous as this declaration sounded, Roger had taken care to surround me with his finest Cormanites. My second-unit director was Allan Arkush, a still-young but already seasoned guy who, with his friend Joe Dante, had directed a $60,000 kitsch-comedy classic for Roger called Hollywood Boulevard that repurposed footage from other New World movies. Dante was tapped to serve as Grand Theft Auto’s editor. Joe, you probably know, went on to direct the Gremlins franchise, while Allan’s next step was to make the Ramones movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School for New World; he is now a major TV producer-director. Our cinematographer was a fascinating, intellectually astute man named Gary Graver. Gary had been a combat photographer in Vietnam and had worked with Orson Welles on his later films, F Is for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind. He also had a thriving career, under a pseudonym, as a director of porno films.
I did a ton of prep work to make sure I was worthy of this crew—and because I didn’t want to blow this chance. A couple of months before we started, Roger ordered me to compose a complete shot list for the movie, instilling a habit that I retain to this day. I was no good at storyboarding because I can’t draw, but he told me that I also needed to diagram the car chases on paper.