Thanks for the Memories

Hi everybody!  I am going to keep you in suspense as to the ending of my multi-part super-scary mostly-true story about the old, deserted insane asylum for another week.  Why?  Because this week I received an interesting request for information about an old movie I worked on and I would like to share the answers with you.  Here are the questions:

 Renee, …could you possibly tell me on which ALLAN QUATERMAIN sets you worked…? And was it in LA or Africa? I know that the movie was first filmed for the most part in Zimbabwe, but I assume you worked on the later scenes shot in LA, right? Maybe the underground gold mine set? Also, I heard about some reshoots/additional scenes done in LA by another director (Newt Arnold) than the original director (Gary Nelson)? Do you know anything about that? According to some source, parts of another Cannon production (Rusty Lemorande’s JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, which you also worked on) sets were recycled/re-used during some of those reshoots! (Cave sets, I assume?)…

And the answers are:

Thank you for your interest in the 1986 (that’s the year of release here in the US of A) film version of Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  It was, of course, based on the classic novel of the same name by the famous writer H R Haggard, and it did star Richard Chamberlain and a then-unknown Sharon Stone.  It was one of those movies produced by Cannon in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s that were turned out in a hurry, and made to make money, fast.  For example, one of the executives from Cannon who was supervising a picture I worked on (which involved Martians who were living on Earth in a small town’s sandpit) was constantly annoyed at our DP’s painstaking care in lighting for a high production value.  Several times the exec would be pacing the set and could be heard muttering, “Hurry up already!  We’re not here to win any awards!”

And this was, in fact, a fair depiction of Cannon’s moviemaking philosophy at the time.  Critics almost always panned their releases; sometimes I think they did so unfairly—they heard “Cannon” and went for the throat.  However, there were certainly some questionable results on the Cannon roster.

They signed on big name stars—that was where their biggest money was invested; their crews were almost always non-union.  They figured that people would be so crazy to see, say, Sylvester Stallone, that they would pay good money to see him in a movie (I am not making this up) as a trucker who travels the country winning arm-wrestling contests.  The resulting film was as great a vehicle for Mr. Stallone as you might expect.

Cannon cranked out movie after movie with name stars and fantastic premises, often derivatives of tried and true adventure formulas or books.  And it is true that they would reuse their sets, especially if they were big builds which they could re-dress, re-plaster and re-paint to become something else.  So, to be fair, I guess you could say that Cannon set an early example for recycling materials.

They also tended to hire the same people from show to show and that, combined with the multi-tasking sets, was how I came to be standby painter for, first, the movie about Martians living in tunnels under a sand pit, which was filmed at an old airplane hangar in Long Beach, then eventually returned to the same tunnels and repainted them for Rusty Lemorande’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.  I will always be grateful to Cannon, myself, for keeping me working constantly at the beginning of my career and giving me a chance to hone my skills.

The old airplane hangar was Rusty’s second location with tunnels during Journey to the Center of the Earth. The first location with tunnels for Journey was the gold mine set left over from Allan Quatermain and the City of Gold, just as you suspected.

Which brings us back to Allan in the City.  By the time I got on to the show, it had finished filming in Africa, and was back in the US to shoot the grand finale in the gold mine.  We built the gold mine set first for Allan Quatermain, and afterwards we reused it for Rusty’s show.  I worked on the gold mine set and we also built a bedroom, for a private (closed set) love scene between Sharon and Richard.  Both sets were built on a large stage near Los Angeles, Culver City to be specific, in the old Culver Studios, which before that were the studios where they filmed Gone with the Wind, among many other Great Films.

At the time we were working on Alan Quatermain, there were different shows filming in all the other stages on the lot, and it was a very exciting place.  Plus, the lot wouldn’t usually allow outside catering trucks, but instead had one cafeteria for all the many productions going on at the same time, which made it possible to stand in line next to Steve Martin or Bruce Willis or Richard Chamberlain and, among other things, see exactly what they were ordering for lunch that day.  I’d say that was my favorite lot to work on in Los Angeles, with its history and bustling excitement.  They even had a few ghosts in residence there, with tragic show business stories behind each one.

For Allan Quatermain I was in charge of sculpting and making molds from our sculptures for the carvings and bas relief statuary framing the temple platform on the edge of the pit of molten gold.  We also sculpted the huge double doors that open into the mine tunnels.  My crew also carved the tunnels to look less like the spray foam that they were made of, and more like worked rock.  This is really very hard to do, and to this day in any movie or television show, I can spot spray-foamed “rock” caves and tunnels instantly, no matter how much they’re carved, coated or gussied up.

It was a dirty, hot, dusty job to carve out the tunnels and I shudder to think about the toxins we must have been exposed to, even with our respirators and protective gear.  Luckily, Les Dilley, the production designer for this part of the film, insisted on sculpting all the artwork in clay and plaster rather than carving green foam, which was used more often at the time.  Otherwise, we would have had that nasty stuff floating around as well.

The molten “gold” in the big pit inside the mine was some kind of oil (vegetable, maybe?) mixed with color and metallic powder, but I wasn’t a part of that concoction, so I don’t know much more about it.  However, whatever it was, it ended up leaking through part of the set eventually, which was a nightmare for the prop department, who had set up right under the leak.  Most of us on the crew really, really wondered about that awful stuff, which got all over everything…

I also sculpted and then had my crew produce hundreds of “gold ingots” out of plaster from fiberglass molds.  They’re the Egyptian-looking oblong gold blocks imprinted with a lion’s head on either end.  They look really exotic and cool, don’t they?  Everyone on the show thought so, too—at first.  In the beginning, everybody asked if they could take one the golden bricks home as a souvenir. However, they all started to turn green after a day or two (the ingots—not the crew) and the gold needed to be constantly repainted, and there were so many of the ingots that they were EVERYWHERE, always underfoot, getting bumped into and moved around, then crumbling and turning black due to some chemical reaction between the gold paint and the still-curing plaster— In the end, nobody wanted to take one of those oxidized, corroded things home.

Finally, in answer to your directors question: yes, they did shoot the LA sequences with Newt Arnold as the director.  He took over from Gary Nelson and was in charge of the entire shoot in LA as far as I remember.  He was an interesting guy, who wore an eye patch, and who had mostly done first assistant director work, so this was a higher-ranking position for him, and even though they call it “second unit” in the credits—which is considered not nearly as exciting and important as first unit—the fact that Richard and Sharon, the principles, were there made it essentially a splinter first unit.

I hope I’ve covered your questions.  Write back if you have more.  Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold was one of the first films I ever worked on, and I was so new to the whole film business that I spent a great deal of time just being amazed at everything I saw and worked to create.  It brings back a lot of memories—mostly good ones—of excitement and challenge and just plain star-struck encounters.  I’ll share more of those in another blog, though.