checks totalling $20,000 in the hands of the crew and the actors... Thank God, most of the actors were sending
their checks to the States, so they took a few weeks to clear, but the crew knew pretty quickly what was going on and a revolt set in. They wanted to quit. There was an enormous amount of fighting. One of the producers was tied up and thrown into the lake you see in the film; he almost drowned. The crew didn’t mean to kill him, and they pulled him out at the last second. The crew was tough, a bunch of French-Canadians from Quebec—they drank a lot of wine, looked like lumberjacks, worked like dogs. Great guys, but money-hungry. To make a long story short, the producers
put up an extra $10-15,000 to cover the pay- checks until we finally latched onto Bellevue/ Pathé, a big Canadian production outfit, the same as the other place, making films under a tax shelter. They eventually put up $60,000 cash, to complete the film, and in return they took the right to distribute the film all over the world. So, in effect, our $90,000 investment was sold out, put into second position [by the lesser
amount], and the American investors took a beating right then and there. Toward the end, during the last four or five weeks, the actors’ performances suffered, because they were tired, run-down and demoralized. And I couldn’t spend any time with them because of 101 other prob­ lems during the film—like the bad checks, tech­ nical problems (the breakdowns, power would go out). One day, the French crew started a strike because they were unhappy with the over­ time rates. They wanted double. The special effects man and I hated each
other. I found his work despicable. I came close to violence several times with him. One day, he tried to kill me with a machete, but he was so drunk that he fell down the stairs and almost broke his skull. He woke up the next morning and, seeing that everybody was asleep, broke every window in the house. He was Jewish and he did Hitler’s Nuremberg speech on the lawn. He was sick. 1 couldn’t fire the fucker because the producers had neglected to get a special effects release form, which gives you the right to use a man’s effects in a film. He warned us that, if we
Mikki (Mary Woronov) at Kali’s mercy, after losing the knife fight with Edmund.
40
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