Up Till Now: The Autobiography

thing. You come up with something better.” But I didn’t have the strength of character to stand up to him. I was so intent on getting this movie made and not ruffling any feathers that I stood there and accepted his abuse.
    Half of directing is politics and in my first attempt that was the aspect I’d failed. If I was going to be successful as a director, I’d learned, I had to take complete charge. And so, several years later, when I wrote and directed and starred in the feature film Groom Lake, I had almost complete control.
    Do me a favor, please, don’t tell that to anybody. Let’s just keep it between us.
    This was a film I wanted to make in the worst way, and that’sexactly what happened. This was a wonderful story of love and life. A dying young woman travels with her husband to Groom Lake, which is another name for Area 51, the super-secret military installation ninety miles north of Las Vegas. Investigators into UFOs and alien visitations have long maintained that the U.S. government base there is the center of our investigation into extraterrestrial activities—and that at least one alien was captured and lived there. The young couple go there to try to find some evidence that there is life beyond what we know, and that someday, in some form, they will be together again.
    It was a movie about the mysteries of life and death, a film with an ambiguous but hopeful conclusion. I had a very difficult time finding the money I needed to make it. But finally a man named Charles Band, who had produced numerous C-movies, including Bimbo Movie Bash, Teenage Space Vampires, Femalien, Beach Babes from Beyond, and Horrorvision, offered to make it as a low-budget film. I guess he figured that my name attached to a science-fiction film would be enough to recoup a small investment. I initially had it budgeted at $1.5 million. If I had to squeeze everything I probably could have made it for a million. But at half a million dollars it’s almost impossible.
    One advantage we did have was that because I was involved we were given permission to shoot inside the biosphere just north of Tucson, Arizona. Outside it was a weird and strange-looking building— perfect for my needs—and inside it was even more bizarre. We had permission to use it so we rewrote the script around it.
    I didn’t know how I was going to make this film for only half a million dollars. But rather than being discouraged, I looked at it as a challenge. I was going to get this film done and it was going to be good. The beautiful story and the extraordinary performances I would get from my actors would cover up what we lacked in production values. But what I didn’t know when we started was that Charlie Band was telling the executive producer he actually intended to get it made for $250,000. The producer was caught between Band telling him not to spend any money and me trying to make a decent movie. He pulled all kinds of shenanigans to try to stop us fromwasting money on things like film stock and actors. When we were scheduled to shoot at night, for example, the cable from the generator had to be laid in the daylight. No cables, no lights, so you can’t shoot. It turned out he’d forgotten to order the cable. Whatever we wanted to do, he was prepared with a reason we couldn’t do it: there’s no film stock. We can’t get actors. There’s no money. There was no food for the company. Finally I ended up using my own credit card. We ended up paying the extras in pizza.
    It was insane. It made Roger Corman look like a spendthrift. Several key scenes had to be shot from the air. After a lot of screaming the producer finally agreed to rent a small two-person helicopter for four hours. We couldn’t even afford a camera mount for the helicopter, a basic piece of equipment. The cameraman was going to rope himself in and hold the camera in his hands. We had to shoot every scene we needed in those four hours. That was okay, we could do it if I planned every minute. In preparation I lined up a series of shots on local roads several miles apart. We’d use two units: while the cameraman was shooting with the first unit the second unit would move into place. When he was working with the second unit the first unit would race to the next setup. If everything went perfectly, we could get all the shots we needed. It required a tremendous amount of organization but it could be done.
    Do you think there was any chance at all of everything going perfectly? The