“How do I do that, Roger?” I asked.
“Treat the cars like characters,” he said. “They’re characters in conflict, just like actors.” It was great advice that I put to use again nearly four decades later when I made Rush, my film about the Formula One racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt.
I was finishing up the fourth season of Happy Days while doing all this prep. One day on the Paramount lot, I was intercepted by Jonathan Demme, who had just graduated from the Corman school to making his first studio picture, Handle With Care, a C.B. radio comedy starring my American Graffiti castmates Paul Le Mat and Candy Clark. Demme dressed like a 1950s private eye on vacation: straw Panama hat, Hawaiian shirt, and two-tone spectator shoes.
“I hear you’re doing a movie for Roger,” he said. “Lemme give you a few tips.” In the most gracious way, Jonathan reminded me that a Corman movie is supposed to be fun. “Find the fun and don’t get caught up in logic or technique.” It was a nice way of saying, “Don’t be pretentious.” Another big tip was “Make your days,” meaning complete a minimum of twenty camera setups a day. By “setup,” I mean the positioning of the camera, the lights, and the actors, followed by the execution of the shot. Setups vary in their complexity, depending on the demands of the scene, the number of actors, and the angles involved. A formulaic TV drama can hack its way along at a rapid clip, but most of the studio pictures I had worked on to that date completed about eight to ten setups a day. A Corman film required twice that pace. That’s common now, in the digital age, but it was crazy-rapid for the mid-’70s.
Demme’s last tip was “Get your sleep.” Fat chance on that one. My days were already jam-packed: wake up, work on the shot list, and diagram; go to work at Happy Days; zoom to the production office to meet with Dad and Allan. I got the one and only speeding ticket of my life while busting ass to get from Happy Days to a Grand Theft Auto preproduction meeting. I was pulled over for passing someone on the right. I should have written off the ticket as research for my part.
Dad was obsessed with making sure that Sam and Paula’s route from L.A. to Vegas was visually and geographically correct. He had road maps spread out all over the office, trying to figure out locations true to the scenes in our script: a dirt road; a two-lane highway; a street with potholes. He talked me into taking a scouting trip along the screenplay’s route. We went in two cars, and a good thing we did; at one point, my Volvo wagon got stuck in some soft, silty sand in the desert. We had to use Dad’s Ford Bronco to push my car, bumper to bumper, out of its potential automobile grave. It would’ve made a hell of a Bronco commercial.
TRUE TO HIS word, Roger showed up on our first shooting day. As ever, he wore attire more befitting a Stanford-educated industrial engineer, which he actually was, than a producer of car-crash flicks: smart chinos, loafers, and a button-down shirt.
We had rented a house in Beverly Hills to stand in for the home of Paula and her family, from whom she escapes with the Rolls-Royce, setting the plot in motion. I cast Nancy Morgan, soon to marry John Ritter, as Paula. We had gotten our hands on a two-tone, gold-and-black 1959 Silver Cloud for her to drive. We could only afford to rent it on the days when we needed simple wide shots of Paula driving uneventfully. For chases and stunts, we used a series of clapped-out old Bentleys, which had a body shape similar to the Silver Cloud, and disguised them as Rollers by attaching a grille and a winged-woman ornament to their hoods. I still have that ornament. It’s all that survived of the Bentleys we totaled.
I needed to get twenty-seven setups done that first day. By the time we broke for lunch, I had completed six. My first morning as a director was a disaster. As we shot the interior scenes, the ones in which Paula argues with her parents, I methodically tried to get the lighting correct. But I was working at a snail’s pace. No way was I was going to get a further twenty-one shots done that day.
Roger had spent the morning parked in a chair next to the camera, watching the proceedings without expression or comment. I was convinced that he would fire me at day’s end. A lifetime of yearning, swirling down the drain. My stomach knotted up as I headed to my dressing room, unable to eat. Then Gary Graver knocked on my door. I imagine that either the production manager or Roger himself had sent him in to buck me up. Very calmly, Gary helped me plot out the rest of the day, simplifying the remaining setups so that we could go faster.