Act Naturally
Note: I've moved my blog to my own web site - the new address is:
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.
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My daughter Cyndi thinks I was a pot-head when I was a teenager. I wasn’t - I really didn’t smoke very much marijuana at all and I never did hard drugs - but because of a couple of stories from my past she has the impression that I was a real reefer addict. I do admit, though, that some stories from my teenaged years probaby fueled her imagination. One of these stories is about the time I smoked pot with Don Johnson. Yes, the guy from Miami Vice, although I knew him before the TV show made him famous. It all starts with my high school friend Steve. I always enjoyed blaming things on Steve when we were young, so putting this all on him now is pleasantly nostalgic.
After I left high school mid-term I was out of a job, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do to keep myself busy and make money until my first semester of college started that fall. But Steve had a proposal for me. Steve’s dad is the actor L.Q. Jones, and L.Q. was also a producer. He had previously produced two or three low-budget movies, and in the spring of 1973 was starting production of a sci-fi movie tentatively titled “Rover Blood”. The movie was based on a short story by Harlan Ellison and was being filmed in the Mojave Desert. Steve asked me (and several of our friends) to come out to the filming site and act as extras during Spring Break. I actually wasn’t very interested at first - it was a +2-hour drive to get to the site - but Steve finally persuaded me to go, even lending me a car to drive… an early-70s Toyota Corolla that overheated outside of Victorville and had to be patched together with duct tape. So I found my way to the location, which was out in the desert about 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.
The first day I arrived on the set I recognized the actor who was starring in the film. It was Don - I had seen him in a movie called “Zachariah“, and he was impressed that I remembered him from that movie. I spent the first week helping out around the set, including acting as a sort of ad hoc personal assistant for Don. When the first week was over, the other teenagers headed back to school but since I was an unemployed high school grad, I asked L.Q. if I could stay on as a production assistant, and he hired me. I did everything from making beer runs for the cast/crew to hiding in bushes holding microphones during scenes to playing dead bodies. My biggest scene was towards the beginning of the movie… I was in a gunfight with Don. I had him pinned down, but he shot me in the mouth and got away. It’s a pretty short scene, and there was a longer scene that was shot where my dead body was propped up as a decoy, but it’s like they say in the business, your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.
So for the next 5 weeks I worked on the film crew, and since I was basically a gopher I did whatever anyone wanted me to do. One day Tom the Assistant Director asks me to take a car and drive Don into Barstow, the city closest to our filming location, where Don had left his car for repairs. So I pick up the keys and head for the car, thinking I was going to be Don’s chauffeur into Barstow. But Don walks up to the car and asks “Where’s the keys?”. So I hand over the keys and we get in, with Don driving, and head for town. I would like to point out here that the car we were using belonged to an older female production assstant, and was a very-faded-greenish mid-60s Buick station wagon in a moderate state of disrepair that looked like it hadn’t been driven over 60 MPH in a long time. But Don was a very high-energy type of person, and he got in the car and got it going as fast as it would go, which I believe was around 90-95 MPH, and we headed down the long desert road into Barstow. The faster we went, the louder the old Buick rattled, although at this point I was close to being scared spitless and had stopped paying attention to the random but consistant nuts-and-bolts noises. After we had driven a couple of miles, Don pulls out a plump doobie and lights it up, takes a big toke, and passes it over to me. So we’re crusing along at a high rate of speed in an older vehicle that is in need of maintenance, smoking grass, talking and laughing, when Don suddenly says “Do you hear that?”. I listen, but all I hear is the wind blasting into my open window at almost 100 MPH, and even if there were no wind, the rattling of the car would have blocked out any other noises. I indicate that I don’t really hear anything, but Don insists that he is hearing something, so he slows the car down and we pull over and stop. We get out and circle the car, looking for indications of something amiss, when Don notices a lump on the inside tread of one the rear tires. So we jack up the car and pull the tire off to inspect it, and discover that it is mostly bald and has a spot that had grown a rather large bubble where the tread used to be, and the bubble looked like a ripe zit about to pop. Despite our recent intake of a psychoactive drug, we were very aware of the possible ramifications of the tire’s bubble, which Don pretty much summed up by saying “It’s a good thing I heard that or we’d be assholes and elbows all over this road!”. So we pull out the spare and mount it, throw the bubble tire in the back, and hit the road, again doing 90-95 MPH all the way into Barstow.
So I worked on the set for the next few weeks and then I was unemployed again. And Don and I never got together for more doobie parties, in spite of what Cyndi may think. I believe the next job I took was with a private security company, sitting in their office all night long and watching the alarm panel for a break-in at their subscribers’ businesses while playing guitar to keep myself awake. I didn’t last very long at that job - I was bored to tears, but then again there was no way it could be as exciting as driving with Don Johnson, or as interesting as making a movie, which by the way was finally released in 1975 as
A Boy And His Dog.
www.nonaverage.net/insomanywords/
Comments can only be left at the new location.
*********************************************************
My daughter Cyndi thinks I was a pot-head when I was a teenager. I wasn’t - I really didn’t smoke very much marijuana at all and I never did hard drugs - but because of a couple of stories from my past she has the impression that I was a real reefer addict. I do admit, though, that some stories from my teenaged years probaby fueled her imagination. One of these stories is about the time I smoked pot with Don Johnson. Yes, the guy from Miami Vice, although I knew him before the TV show made him famous. It all starts with my high school friend Steve. I always enjoyed blaming things on Steve when we were young, so putting this all on him now is pleasantly nostalgic.
After I left high school mid-term I was out of a job, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do to keep myself busy and make money until my first semester of college started that fall. But Steve had a proposal for me. Steve’s dad is the actor L.Q. Jones, and L.Q. was also a producer. He had previously produced two or three low-budget movies, and in the spring of 1973 was starting production of a sci-fi movie tentatively titled “Rover Blood”. The movie was based on a short story by Harlan Ellison and was being filmed in the Mojave Desert. Steve asked me (and several of our friends) to come out to the filming site and act as extras during Spring Break. I actually wasn’t very interested at first - it was a +2-hour drive to get to the site - but Steve finally persuaded me to go, even lending me a car to drive… an early-70s Toyota Corolla that overheated outside of Victorville and had to be patched together with duct tape. So I found my way to the location, which was out in the desert about 50 miles past the middle of nowhere.
The first day I arrived on the set I recognized the actor who was starring in the film. It was Don - I had seen him in a movie called “Zachariah“, and he was impressed that I remembered him from that movie. I spent the first week helping out around the set, including acting as a sort of ad hoc personal assistant for Don. When the first week was over, the other teenagers headed back to school but since I was an unemployed high school grad, I asked L.Q. if I could stay on as a production assistant, and he hired me. I did everything from making beer runs for the cast/crew to hiding in bushes holding microphones during scenes to playing dead bodies. My biggest scene was towards the beginning of the movie… I was in a gunfight with Don. I had him pinned down, but he shot me in the mouth and got away. It’s a pretty short scene, and there was a longer scene that was shot where my dead body was propped up as a decoy, but it’s like they say in the business, your best stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.
So for the next 5 weeks I worked on the film crew, and since I was basically a gopher I did whatever anyone wanted me to do. One day Tom the Assistant Director asks me to take a car and drive Don into Barstow, the city closest to our filming location, where Don had left his car for repairs. So I pick up the keys and head for the car, thinking I was going to be Don’s chauffeur into Barstow. But Don walks up to the car and asks “Where’s the keys?”. So I hand over the keys and we get in, with Don driving, and head for town. I would like to point out here that the car we were using belonged to an older female production assstant, and was a very-faded-greenish mid-60s Buick station wagon in a moderate state of disrepair that looked like it hadn’t been driven over 60 MPH in a long time. But Don was a very high-energy type of person, and he got in the car and got it going as fast as it would go, which I believe was around 90-95 MPH, and we headed down the long desert road into Barstow. The faster we went, the louder the old Buick rattled, although at this point I was close to being scared spitless and had stopped paying attention to the random but consistant nuts-and-bolts noises. After we had driven a couple of miles, Don pulls out a plump doobie and lights it up, takes a big toke, and passes it over to me. So we’re crusing along at a high rate of speed in an older vehicle that is in need of maintenance, smoking grass, talking and laughing, when Don suddenly says “Do you hear that?”. I listen, but all I hear is the wind blasting into my open window at almost 100 MPH, and even if there were no wind, the rattling of the car would have blocked out any other noises. I indicate that I don’t really hear anything, but Don insists that he is hearing something, so he slows the car down and we pull over and stop. We get out and circle the car, looking for indications of something amiss, when Don notices a lump on the inside tread of one the rear tires. So we jack up the car and pull the tire off to inspect it, and discover that it is mostly bald and has a spot that had grown a rather large bubble where the tread used to be, and the bubble looked like a ripe zit about to pop. Despite our recent intake of a psychoactive drug, we were very aware of the possible ramifications of the tire’s bubble, which Don pretty much summed up by saying “It’s a good thing I heard that or we’d be assholes and elbows all over this road!”. So we pull out the spare and mount it, throw the bubble tire in the back, and hit the road, again doing 90-95 MPH all the way into Barstow.
So I worked on the set for the next few weeks and then I was unemployed again. And Don and I never got together for more doobie parties, in spite of what Cyndi may think. I believe the next job I took was with a private security company, sitting in their office all night long and watching the alarm panel for a break-in at their subscribers’ businesses while playing guitar to keep myself awake. I didn’t last very long at that job - I was bored to tears, but then again there was no way it could be as exciting as driving with Don Johnson, or as interesting as making a movie, which by the way was finally released in 1975 as
A Boy And His Dog.
Labels: A Boy And His Dog, Don Johnson, movies
posted by Ruben at
1:14 PM
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