ROGER RETURNED FOR a visit when I was working on the last big set piece for the film, in which nearly every car in the movie gets totaled in a demolition derby. （Between the Malachi Brothers and Grand Theft Auto, I was the face of the mid-’70s demolition zeitgeist.） We were shooting at Saugus Speedway, a stock-car racetrack and former rodeo arena in Santa Clarita, half an hour north of Burbank.
Roger arrived with a separate filmmaking crew in tow; he was the subject of a documentary-in-progress and was being followed around by a camera. He was in good spirits and was pleased with how Grand Theft Auto was going. I tried to leverage this into a request. The demolition derby was supposed to end in a riot, with people jumping out of the stands and running onto the midway. We had only been budgeted to hire fifty extras for this scene, which struck me as stingy. I wanted to at least create the illusion of thousands of people wreaking havoc and causing chaos. Nowadays, my team can accomplish this by using digital extras, but that wasn’t an option on the table then. Besides, on such films as Far and Away, Cinderella Man, Backdraft, and Rush, I have used anywhere from five hundred to two thousand extras on certain days.
“Roger, we’re coming in on schedule and under budget, so I was wondering if we could hire a hundred extras instead of fifty,” I said. “I could do a much better shot where I pan across the crowd and make it seem like it’s huge.”
He was unmoved. “Why don’t you just do a cut of the fifty people getting up?” he said. “They all run in at once and you have what you need.”
“Well, yeah, but I could do something much more fluid and believable with more extras,” I said. “Even if I had seventy-five, I could have them sit in the stands in a pie-wedge shape and frame the shot so there’s a bigger sense of scope and scale.”
Roger clapped a hand on my shoulder and smiled. “Ron, let me tell you something. You finish up this picture and do a good job with it, and you’ll never have to work for me again,” he said. “But all you’re getting from me are fifty extras. Make it work.”
And so I did, more or less. I framed a series of tight shots of my “crowd” and explained away the vast tracts of empty seats in my wide shots by having the speedway’s PA announcer say, “Due to the extreme danger of this event, remain clear of the north section of the bleachers.”
The derby sequence took two days to shoot. Allan Arkush and I apparently combined to hold what was, for a time, the Guinness World Record for the greatest number of camera setups ever executed in a single day, eighty-one. That’s a dubious distinction, though I must sheepishly admit that I have since exceeded that number, and I bet Allan has as well.
As the sun went down on our last day of shooting, I still had to capture the scene of our fake Rolls-Royce getting wrecked at the derby, and of Nancy and me gleefully fleeing the vehicle. The final setup had four cameras covering our sprint and a slow-motion shot of the iconic Rolls-Royce grille falling off the ruined car. Frustratingly, the timing of the grille-fall was off and needed to be reshot. Using just one camera, Gary Graver and I oversaw a retake in which a rival car bumped the Rolls’ grille and our effects team perfectly timed their yank on the hidden wire rig. The grille bounced to the ground in slow motion, twisting in the air like the stricken gunfighters whose balletic deaths I had so admired in The Wild Bunch. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best!
Once we had that shot, we followed the usual protocol, in which the camera assistant checks the camera’s gate to make sure it hasn’t been compromised by hair or dirt. After a beat, the assistant shouted, “The gate is good!”
At that, the entire production team cast its eyes toward me. I had the presence of mind to savor the moment before I called out the words I had been waiting the better part of my life to say: “That’s a wrap!”
A cheer went up and my shoulders went down, relaxed for the first time in weeks.
That night, we had a spontaneous wrap party at a dive bar nearby. There was a band playing rockabilly music and we were all doing flamers—shots of vodka that you light on fire and then tip back into your mouth while they’re still burning—to celebrate.