Special Features

Below is an excerpt from a book I'm working on that recounts (in part) some of my experiences as a fledgling actor back in the 1970s, when I was appearing in some really bad movies.

Here I am, fresh from the hinterlands, standing on the set of an actual movie. Actually, I'm standing in the background where it's appropriate for those of my cast to stand, a mere extra player, far from the cameras and their attendant technicians, and the stars, who include David Carradine, and a former Playboy bunny turned somewhat actress named Claudia Jennings (her real name is Mimi Chesterton).

The title of this movie is Deathsport, and combines the cheap attributes of a space movie so popular in the mode of Star Trek, with the added thrills of car-motorcycle racing.  

I'm in a leather costume formerly worn by a guy in a monkey suit in a picture called Planet of the Apes (costumes like scripts circulate and re-circulate widely in Hollywood. That hasn't changed from the old days).

My personal objective on this picture as an unknown, is of course to find a way to make love to the leading lady in her trailer so I can advance in importance in the film, and maybe even become a supporting star. I didn't kid myself that I would supplant Carradine, the former TV actor coming off a hit show (Kung Fu). But all I had to do was get Jennings interested in me and who knew what would happen.

And why wouldn't she fall for me? Didn't I look gorgeous in my black leather futuristic suit?

I'm called down into a pit along with five other bit players, a hole dug into the ground, for my first scene. This is it. My entry into pictures. This is my big moment. The scene calls for me to look menacingly while Carradine mutters some words to the girl Jennings. She is hot looking. She has a great little body, skimpily clad in a me-Tarzan type leather bikini. All I have to do is glower and look tough.

I figured she noticed me already, and as I stand in the pit with the others, she approaches from above, to climb down to join us. I turn slightly, glancing away from her, and with supreme confidence and arrogance, offer my gloved hand by holding it out, palm up, for her to use to step down. I don't look up at her. I hold my hand out for her, and look at my hand, expecting to see her soft palm grasp it.

My hand remains empty.

She doesn't use it.

She is down in the pit with us. She ignored me.

I feel a little deflated. But that's only a minor body blow to what follows. After the scene is shot and re-filmed a dozen times from every possible angle (there is no more boring and tedious work than film making…even ditch digging). After we're all sick of it, and I from my endless scowling and grimacing. After all that, she makes a disparaging flip remark about my looks. I get a reaction from her. But the wrong one.

Okay you bitch! I'm crestfallen for a moment, then save grace by convincing myself I was so beautiful she just had to go and put me down into what she believed was my proper place. She didn't pick on anybody else. That must be it. She is really hot for me, but has to maintain some kind of dominance. She'll probably get me in her trailer and make love to me later.

She never does.

I guess in my own way, I'm just as ignorant and shallow as she is. That's why we should have hit it off. But even I'm taken aback by her behavior. She is perhaps the most vain, egoistical person I have ever seen. She meddles in the production when she isn't being used on camera, flirts with the cameramen, complains and whines. Finally, ordered angrily off the set by the director, she throws a full scale tantrum, and runs in a huff to her trailer.

She is scary (Claudia Jennings would go on to achieve a kind of petty, tawdry fame as the queen of the B-grade cheapo science fiction and exploitation flicks until she is killed in her Volkswagen convertible in a head-on collision with a truck on Highway One near Malibu in 1979).

Carradine, on the other hand, is the opposite, likeable, willing to talk with the extras, laid-back and relaxed.

The film is a flop.


©2007, SammonSays.com. Reprinted with permission.