Once again, I spiraled into despair: How will I even end up with a coherent film? Joe Dante talked me off that ledge, explaining that Roger’s comments were general marching orders, not edicts to be followed to the letter.
One last personal crisis reared its head when Roger decided that the movie wasn’t quite zany enough to wow a New World Pictures audience. I was powerless to object to this, and, against my wishes, he had Allan direct two new action sequences. Through most of the movie, Sam and Paula are pursued not only by bounty hunters but also by a ratings-hungry disc jockey named Curly Q. Brown, who was played by a legendary L.A. deejay known as The Real Don Steele. Roger wanted Curly to receive a comeuppance, so he added a new scene in which the deejay decamps from his news helicopter and pursues the couple in a car, only to lose control of it, drive clear through a house, launch into the air, and crash into an aboveground swimming pool.
The other addition was an embellishment of a brief chase scene in which two hillbillies throw sticks of dynamite at Sam and Paula’s car. Roger and Allan expanded that moment into a rootin’-tootin’ farcical routine in which the hillbillies start heaving the sticks willy-nilly, including at a roadside fruit stand, resulting in a multicolored melon explosion. I hated this idea with a passion. The chase and explosion scenes that Dad and I had written were grounded in some version of reality. This? This was Wile E. Coyote shit. I was so upset that I briefly considered taking my name off the movie and threatening not to promote it.
Fortunately, cooler heads—mainly, those of Dad, Allan, John Davison, and my new agent, Larry Becsey—prevailed. They explained to me that adding new scenes after principal photography has been completed is, in the movie business, normal. I have since done it many times. The twenty-three-year-old redhead with the unearned auteur complex still had a lot to learn.
BUT HERE’S THE thing: that redhead had succeeded in making a film—an honest-to-God, theatrically released film. His benefactor, Mr. Corman, was mighty pleased with it. A small premiere was held for Grand Theft Auto at an independent theater in Beverly Hills. The Happy Days people and the New World Pictures people all turned out in support. And the movie and its director were the beneficiaries of a ton of goodwill. The press lapped up the story—Richie Cunningham grows up to be a filmmaker!—and everywhere I walked on the Paramount lot, I was heartily congratulated.
We received remarkably positive reviews upon the movie’s release on June 18, 1977. Though I consider the making of Grand Theft Auto to be one of the formative experiences of my adult life, I have to admit that I can’t get through a viewing of the film. I see all the rookie mistakes and hear all the corny jokes and I just have to shut it off. But in Roger Corman terms, the film was a success. It cost $650,000 to make and earned $6 million at the box office. In Ron Howard terms, it was a beginning. I knew that I was still a babe in the woods, but now I had something to build on.
Cheryl and I went to see the movie on the night of its release at one of the finer theaters it played at in the greater L.A. area, the Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank—where we had steamed up the windows of my VW Bug many a time back in our high school days.
Five long years later, we steamed them up once more.
And I never did work for Roger again.
CLINT
The funny thing is, I did. In fact, I’ve got a dozen Corman movies on my résumé. About a year after Grand Theft Auto, I was cast in Rock ’n’ Roll High School, which Allan directed with Joe’s help. I played Eaglebauer, the slick, wide-lapeled, medallion-wearing fixer of Vince Lombardi High School. Operating out of a plush office located in a stall in the boys’ bathroom, Eaglebauer did a bang-up trade in fake IDs, bootleg liquor, and the discreet arrangement of romantic assignations.
If you set aside my appearance as Balok in Star Trek, this marked the beginning in earnest of my career as a character actor. Towhead Clint had disappeared into a swirling vortex of adolescence and self-doubt. But out of that vortex shot Character Clint, the versatile, eccentric guy you could cast as a psycho in a horror movie, a comic supporting player in an Adam Sandler movie, or a flight controller in a Ron Howard movie . . . you name it, I’ll give it a spin.