A Blind Date with Bruce Willis at the Center of the Earth

A Blind Date with Bruce Willis at the Center of the Earth

NOTE:  My curious friend from last week has emailed me with some more questions about Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, and an obscure film version of Journey to the Center of the Earth (a strange, hybrid Cannon production made in the late ‘80’s).  So, we will return later to the standby painter Dubois and her minions solving the mystery at the old, deserted insane asylum.  For now, let us travel back to wild and woolly times at the old, not deserted but definitely insane movie studio lot in Culver City, California.

First, our emailed questions:

Renee…Here are some follow up questions for you: ..You said the year of release of QUATERMAIN in the USA was 1986. …According to the IMDB, the movie was released in the USA on May 16, 1987 which concurs with various press articles I have that state the originally “planned” release date (May 86) was postponed several times… Also, you said sets from QUATERMAIN were re-used for Rusty’s JOURNEY. Are you absolutely sure about that chronology? Because I always thought it was the other way around (JOURNEY’s sets being re-used for QUATERMAIN). That’s what I read in some French magazine back in 1987. From what I know, the Zimbabwe shooting of QUATERMAIN took place during the second part of 1985 (right after the shooting of the first movie, KING SOLOMON’S MINES), from June to ??…So, would you say the LA shooting of QUATERMAIN took place around September/October 1985? …problem is: the French article that mentions Newt Arnold filming some QUATERMAIN scenes in LA clearly states that those reshoots took place “one year after principal photography had ended” (!), which would be September/October 1986. It also states that sets from JOURNEY were re-used. From what I know, principal photography on Rusty’s movie began in June 1986, and lasted maybe two or three months… so I guess around September or October 1986, left-over sets from JOURNEY would have been available for QUATERMAIN’s reshoots…Then you have the mystery (at least, for me) of Newt Arnold directing, as you said, 1st unit stuff on QUATERMAIN. If the reshoots/pick ups/additional scenes took place in Sept/Oct 1985, why wasn’t the original director (Gary Nelson) in charge? And why wasn’t the same DP and production designer used? …maybe there was 2 LA shooting “sessions”? The first, in Sept/Oct ‘85, to shoot the gold mine scenes (that you worked on), then another one, one year later, to shoot “additional scenes” (that you did not work on?)… According to the French article, creature effects (including giant earthworms and bats) from JOURNEY’s were also re-used during the QUATERMAIN “cave” reshoots scenes. 

So, to set the record straight, as you worked on both films yourself, could you please confirm… that the QUATERMAIN shooting in LA that you worked on took place *BEFORE* the JOURNEY shooting that you worked on?

And here are my EXCITING ANSWERS with TRUE STORIES to support them!

Oh darn, oh heck, oh my.  Your questions may have forced me to actually watch Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.  It’s only available on Netflix, so I’m waiting on our postal system at the moment.  When I finally watch Lost City in its entirety I will answer the rest of your questions that I have not included in this blog.

Your confusion about the relative dates and usage of the sets for Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold and Journey to the Center of the Earth is understandable.  It’s confusing to me, and I was there.  Let’s start with the things I do know, and how I know them.

You are indeed right about the US release date according to Imdb; it is 1987.  Regarding the length of time between filming in Africa and in the US: could there have been two sets of reshoots?  Possibly, but I only worked on the goldmine set, and the bedroom for the love scene between Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone (more about that in my next blog).

As to the chronology of the sets built and filmed: I am sure that the Lost City gold mine set was built and used before director Rusty Lemorande’s part of the filming of Journey to the Center of the Earth.  How can I be so sure?  Because one of my crew members on Lost City had gone to high school with John Landis, the director of a movie with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short called Three Amigos!  Mr. Landis happened to be filming a musical number for Amigos! on the stage next to ours during the building of the set for Lost City, and my friend and I were invited by Mr. Landis to sit in on one of the takes of the musical number during our lunch hour.  That was a fantastic and unforgettable lunch, so it’s marked in my brain.  In fact, if you so desire, go check out the song and dance, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mw9F5zawRQ .  Three Amgios! shows a release date of December 12^th , 1986 on Imdb.  That’s about right for shooting on the lot at Culver Studios in the late part of 1985.

Later, when I was on the lot working on Journey to the Center of the Earth, a similarly unforgettable incident took place which pairs working on the Journey set with the filming of the movie Blind Date, starring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger.  I was the lead sculptor on Lost City, but had become a standby painter for Journey.  I know Journey filmed very soon after Lost City, because I still had not used my paint gun since someone had borrowed it and then “cleaned it” on Lost City.  As a result, when I was asked by the production designer to spray a section of the tunnels black when the crew was off the set during lunch hour, I plugged the gun into the air hose, squeezed the trigger and a quart of black latex paint sprayed out of the back of the gun into my face and hair.  The painter who had borrowed my gun had put it back together without any gaskets.  The gun was unusable.  This was one of my first days on the job for Rusty, and only my third film.  I was in tears when I told the designer I had to find another gun from another painter somewhere on one of the other stages.  After wiping my eyes so I could see, I started down the main drag of the studio complex in search of a gun.

Unfortunately, everyone seemed to be at lunch in the commissary, and the lot appeared deserted.  Except for one guy walking toward me with a wardrobe person in tow.  It was Bruce Willis.  He stopped me and said, “Don’t tell me, you’re a painter, right?”  I told him yes, that I was a sorry mess, and that I needed a paint gun—fast.  He pointed me to the stage next to his, where he said there might be someone painting, then told me, “ And don’t worry about being a mess, honey.  You look just fine to me.”  It went from the worst day of my life to the absolute best day of my life, just like that (imagine me snapping my fingers).

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I came back to the bemused production designer still covered in black paint, still without a working paint gun, but glowing with good will and wearing a big, dopey smile, determined to paint the tunnel section out by hand.  I never explained what had brightened my mood.  The next day I was heading down the main drag during lunch again, when Bruce Willis strolled past on the far side of the street, now flanked by his entourage.  He saw me and stopped to call out, “Hey, you ever find that gun you were looking for?”

Blind Date shows a release date of March 27, 1987.  So, the release dates of the two movies filming during each of my jobs support the sequence of: Lost City first, then Journey.  I also remember that we were only on the stage at Culver Studios for Journey a short time.  Directly afterwards we moved from there to Long Beach where we would be filming from then on, until Rusty’s part of the show shut down.  Also supporting the dates I’ve outlined is the fact that Rusty had already directed Captain Eo, which was released in1986.  Word was, his writing and producing Captain Eo was his entry into the job as director on Journey, and during our shoot he was still in contact with Michael Jackson, who visited the set on the Culver Studios lot one afternoon where, afraid to make eye contact and wearing a surgical mask, he watched us curiously as we went about repainting the old Lost City tunnels.  This I remember because that day, I, personally, began to wonder if Michael Jackson might not be a little odd.

You might be right about a second reshoot of Lost City.  The Lost Reshoot, if you will.  It could be possible.  After Rusty’s filming was stopped, the film faded into limbo.  I never even knew what had happened to it, other than hearing rumors that Rusty was trying to put it together himself in his garage.  I think that was an exaggeration, but whatever happened next, another director was eventually attached to the film and he rewrote everything (Rusty says nothing of his script was used, and only a few minutes of his footage made it into the finished film).  Meanwhile, the tunnels sat empty down in Long Beach, and if there had been another reshoot of Lost City, it may very well have been done there.  But nobody mentioned it to me.

I think that our reshoot, though, even being so close in time to the African filming, would not have necessarily had the same director in place when it came here.  Les Dilley, our production designer, was hired because the crew working on the African shoot had wrapped already.  Many times Cannon shoots would go far over time (and budget) on shoots, sometimes losing their crew to other, prior commitment jobs when they went over.  There were always re-writes, along with creative changes (and often resulting infighting) from the production side of the equation on every Cannon show, it seemed.  It could be, also, that the shooting in LA was the result of additional pages added to “fix” something that Cannon thought the original script lacked, even though the shooting was supposed to have been completed in its entirety in Africa.

So, it wouldn’t surprise me if the director or any of the other crew stepped off to do another project for one or more of the reasons mentioned above.  Now, I may remember the director as being Newt Arnold, and be wrong.  Maybe he was only the first AD, but I seem to remember he was in charge.  However, I was new to the business, as I’ve said, and maybe I didn’t get the hierarchy correctly at the time.  Or my brain cells have begun to misfire after all these years and I have forgotten all about meeting Gary Nelson.  In that case, I’m sorry for forgetting about you, Mr. Nelson.

You have several other interesting questions, and this blog is already longer than expected, so I’ll address those in the next entry.  I also want to send a long-belated shout out to Rusty Lemorande, because almost a year after filming ended on his version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I got a call from someone to confirm my mailing address, and a few days later received a beautiful leather and cloth jacket embroidered with the production’s title and my name from Rusty.  Thanks, Rusty.  I still wear it.