Hard Core Roadshow - Extracts - Part 30
6 November 1995, Day 12
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In the evening it's off to Danny Novak's place for a party. Tomorrow's a day off, and having just killed Joe Dick, everyone is ready to go crazy. One fun thing about it: we're going to screen the dailies from Bucky's farm in Danny's basement.
It turns into a huge party, with far more than crew people showing. I think Bernie put the word out, so we've got the girls from Lick the Pole here, all these others I've never seen. Tons of beer, practically a full case for everyone here. Crew's in a drinking mood, it would seem. All night long people debate whether this ending will work, whether or not it's a mistake. Most people are excited by it and think it will work, but there are more than a few detractors. I suspect this debate will continue for some time.
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Late at night we drunkenly watch the rushes from the farm - all the Bucky acid movie stuff. Everyone's looking forward to this, thinking we're going to be seeing the raw material for a surrealist masterpiece. It starts well, funny as it should be, one shot coming after another. No sound. There's Hugh with his guts being blown out, there's Callum shooting a flare off his guitar neck, there's Julian dancing around the fire. It's hypnotic to watch, a little stranger than I'd imagined it would be. A lot more disturbing. Several minutes into the sequence everyone has gone deadly quiet. No one is laughing by the time Callum and Pyper are seen leading the goat around the bonfire, wrestling it down, waiting for Bernie to come buzz its head off with a chainsaw. Somehow I thought it would be funnier. Sit there with Bruce and Reg and we all just repeat the words, Holy Shit.
When the lights go up the party-hearty atmosphere has been dragged way down, and things just get weird and ugly. from here to the bitter end. Like coming down off bad acid. Bottles get broken. Someone gets thrown out. Someone pukes on the stairs. Someone passes out. People trickle out. Catch a ride to the hotel with Porteous. Another late end to another night in Hard Core Logoland. I'd hate to wake up to Danny's mess. I feel a cold coming on.
7 November 1995
Day off. Cold's come on strong. Can't breathe. Can barely move. Bruce has a brutal cough of his own now. Was bound to happen. What you get for killing heroes and defenseless animals. Today's weather: near-Biblical rainfall. I do laundry. Hot bath. Call Siobhan. Sleep.
8 November 1995
Still with this ripping head cold. Hearing's a bit off, like my ears are attached to someone else's head.
An alley off Hamilton Street, between Pender and Hastings. Just down from the legion where Joe Dick killed himself the other day. We shoot the opening scene where Joe gives the opening "fuck you" anarchy speech about what HCL stand for. Here Bruce interviews Hugh off the cuff and elicits some great ad-libs. He has discovered that one of the best ways to get natural performances is to add unscripted questions to scripted interview moments. Many of the film's best moments have come out of these extra questions, where the spontaneous answers create an energy and truth such moments might lack if they were being "acted."
In the afternoon we head to North Vancouver and the Capilano Suspension Bridge, a last minute location to replace Wreck Beach, the Vancouver nudist beach where we had planned to have John and his girlfriend Celine facing the camera naked, holding hands, just like John and Yoko. They were to talk about John's feelings about the reunion tour, and we were to get the feeling that Celine is the one who calls the shots in the relationship. There was to be a game of nude beach volleyball going on in the background.
Well, it's just too cold and wet today for this. It'd look far too strange having nude people on a beach whose breath you can see in the air. The advantage of the suspension bridge is that we can show John hanging in mid-air above a dramatic gorge with water thundering below, a perfect visual complement to one of his diary entries about a flying dream in which he falls and graphically anticipates the moment of impact and death. Without Hugh and Bernie around, things are downright tranquil as we spend the rest of the day shooting John talking to the camera on the footbridge.
We finish early. Back to the hotel. In bed by seven.
9 November 1995
The three actors' agents have caught the buzz on what a great movie HCL is going to be. They think that this "making of" film that Danny Salerno is doing is now very important. Now they want money from Danny for their clients to "appear" in his documentary. Christine mentions that one of the agents even heard that I was publishing a production diary, and was exploring ways to wrest some cash from me when I get a book deal. Wish I had an agent like that.
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All parts (and pictures) here.