I also got into the great antihero movies of the time, such as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. And I loved the exploitation flicks that Roger Corman churned out by the bushel through his New World Pictures production company. Dad and Hoke Howell actually wrote a script tailored to Corman’s sensibilities called Arkansas Wipeout, in which a pair of country-boy moonshiners outwitted some stuck-up city sophisticates. Corman didn’t go for it, but this shows you how aligned Dad and I were in our tastes.
I lost myself in movies and became an ever more dedicated student of them. In that prestreaming, precable, pre-VCR era, I was a particularly avid watcher of Million Dollar Movie, a syndicated program that over the course of a week ran the same vintage movie over and over, like a repertory cinema house. This allowed me to study King Kong （the 1933 original）， Damn Yankees, and The Time Machine the way that Egyptologists study hieroglyphs, decoding them and breaking them down into their component parts.
It was on my third viewing of Henry Levin’s 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth that I first stumbled upon an exercise I still use today. I had left the living room with the TV’s sound turned low, and when I returned for the “exciting conclusion” that the program’s announcer always promised, I came upon my favorite action sequence, in which the protagonists encounter a convincingly real-looking dimetrodon dinosaur. I had long wondered how the filmmakers pulled this off. With the sound down, I could more easily decode the techniques and effects at work. I noticed that the monstrous dinosaur was actually an iguana of some kind with a spine sail glued to its back. I figured out that the ruins of Atlantis were really carefully rendered matte paintings. I identified the camera setups that the filmmakers used to stage the sequence and make the audience believe every second of it. Thereafter, I lowered the sound whenever there was a scene that I wanted to study closely.
With my own money, I bought a Bauer Super 8 camera, intent on putting my newly accumulated filmmaking knowledge to use. I would make a Peckinpah-style splatter pic with a few Old West nods to Leone and a killer title: Cards, Cads, Guns, Gore, and Death.
The plot of this two-minute silent masterpiece-in-the-making was simple. Three cowboys are playing poker in a dusty saloon. One takes exception to the other’s winning hand and shoots the winner dead. Then the third guy shoots the shooter dead. A fourth guy, the sheriff, comes upon the scene and shoots the third guy from behind, killing him. Then he shakes his head in disgust, lamenting the waste of it all. The end.
That was the easy part. The hard part was authentically portraying the carnage on a nonexistent budget. In my curiosity about filmmaking, I took to bending the ears of everyone with a specialized job on the sets I worked on. A special-effects guy gave me the intel on how they did gunshot wounds in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.
They put a patch of leather on the bare skin of an actor, he said, and, on top of that, a steel plate. They wired a small electrical charge to the plate and fed the wire down through the actor’s shirt and pantleg. The length of wire that trailed out of the actor’s pants was buried in the dirt so the camera wouldn’t pick it up. Then they put a little balloonlike blood packet on top of the plate and made a small, unnoticeable tear in the actor’s shirt where the packet was, so that when the effects guy sent a current through the charge, the shirt would give when the packet exploded. Result: a convincing splatter!
I had neither the pyrotechnic equipment to duplicate this system nor the capability to try anything involving wires without electrocuting myself. So I worked out an alternative. Clint and I had a Mattel Switch ’N Go, a really cool set of battle tanks that came with an air pump and slender, flexible yellow tubes. The tubes, when hooked up to the pump, allowed us to fire little plastic missiles from the tanks. I rigged up a system in which I fed watered-down ketchup into the tubes and then concealed them under the actors’ shirts. The other end of the tube was attached to a bicycle pump, which, if you slammed it down hard, would sorta-kinda spurt out the ketchup solution in gory fashion.
All good. But I still needed actors to play my violent, doomed cowboys. Guess who I called upon?