Up Till Now: The Autobiography

probably just a little more than lunch on Karamazov . In order to help the Cormans make this film I took a percentage of the gross rather than a salary. There were times I was an embarrassment to my economics degree. In the end I earned about two hundred dollars more than it cost me in expenses.
    What made this project unusually exciting is that for some inexplicable reason Roger Corman decided that we would shoot this movie in the South. This was 1961, when schools throughout the South were still being forcefully integrated. This was less than five years after President Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to escort black teenagers into Little Rock High School. And we went to Charleston, Missouri, which was in Mississippi County, a few miles from the borders with Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee, to film it.
    The entire cast and crew was housed in a small motel just outside of town. The day we arrived we were briefed by a policeman, who advised us, “Now, if I were you, I’d just take a few minutes and plan my escape route.” Escape route? As he explained, the town had found out what this movie was about and they were not happy about it. Really not happy. The only integrated group in the whole town was a prison gang and supposedly this gang had been hired to kill us in the motel. “We’ve got all this spotted,” the policeman said, “but we can’t hold back the waters.”
    Kill me? But I’m an actor! And I was only being paid a percentage of the gross.
    There had been some unpleasant moments in my career, but this was the first time I actually had to make an escape plan. I had a pretty good one. There was a window in the bathroom that looked out on a cornfield. If it became necessary I was going to climb up on the toilet, wiggle out that window, and start running into the corn-field. I figured I could hide in the cornfield.
    I think there were only five professional actors in the cast. To save money the Corman brothers hired local people to play the minor roles. But just to be on the safe side, they gave them a different scriptthan the one we were actually shooting, a script that didn’t include some of the more inflammatory language and scenes. One of the professional actors was Leo Gordon, who had made a nice career out of playing tough-guy roles, but in this film he was cast as a hardworking, kind of average Joe. In fact, Gordon had been a boxing champion in the military and knew how to protect himself. We were talking one day near his car and he casually opened the trunk—and there was practically an arsenal in there. The trunk was filled with guns. He took whatever he wanted out of the trunk and slammed it shut, never even mentioning the trunk was filled with guns.
    Okay, he’s an actor too. But he’s a well-armed actor. I began re-thinking my escape plan.
    Naturally I tried to make friends with as many people in the town as possible. There was one man in particular who showed up almost every day to watch us shoot... filming. He was a big guy, a huge guy, and the word was that he was one of the really bad people in the town. But obviously he was intrigued by the making of a movie and continually volunteered to help. Let me move this lamp for you. You can’t, it’s a union job. But I want to help. He was one of those few people whose offers to help sound suspiciously like threats.
    Somehow I befriended him. Maybe I thought I could manage him by including him in the process. But eventually he actually became a member of our crew, and he was so big that when other grips were carrying one light, he would take two. He did a fine job, but even if he hadn’t it wouldn’t have mattered. Believe me, nobody was going to fire him.
    Eventually he found out that I loved fast cars and horses. “You know, we have a lot in common,” he told me. “I got the fastest car in the whole four-state area. I got a Daytona racer.” He brought it to the set to show me. It truly was a beautiful car, immaculate on both the outside and the inside. He had customized the engine to increase its power by who knows how much. “This is the one I win all the time with,” he explained in the true manner of Southern generosity. “I got my soul in this car, but if you wanna borrow it to take it into town, you just go right ahead.”
    Well, that was extremely gracious of him.
    “Tell you what,” he continued. “I also got me a quarter horse. That boy is faster than lightning. But you can ride him anytime you