Up Till Now: The Autobiography

it in Esperanto!”
    Rather than realizing that this idea was frenezla, crazy, I thought it sounded interesting. Perhaps I was frenezla. I had a vague awareness of Esperanto; the universal language invented in 1887 by Dr. Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof, using the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. It was supposed to be a second language in which the various cultures of the world could come together and truly communicate with each other to reach worldwide peace. Supposedly, Leslie Stevens told me, “There are seven million people around the world who speak Esperanto, and there has never been a picture made in Esperanto.”
    Never been a film made in this language? Seven million people speak it? Wow, it did seem like a very good idea. Seven million people would want to see it, that’s great box office. Of course, at that point it did not occur to me that of those seven million people who spoke this language, eight of them lived in Cleveland, five were in Cedar Rapids, and there was one guy in Syracuse. There was apparently a large contingent in Liberia but we couldn’t reach them because there were no telephones. So it would probably have been less expensive to make individual copies of this film and send them tothe Esperanto speakers than show it in a theater. But nobody had thought about that; instead we were all very excited, we were making history!
    Obviously no one in the cast actually spoke Esperanto. So we were taken to Esperanto camp, deep in California’s redwood forest. We camped outside and in the evening Leslie would lean against a giant redwood, smoke his pipe, and tell us about this movie. We had tutors in Latin and Greek who taught us the proper pronunciation of the words. I was given a script in which the Esperanto was written phonetically on one page and the English translation was on the facing page, so I would have some idea of the emotional context.
    During the making of this film Leslie Stevens insisted that everyone, the crew as well as the cast, speak only Esperanto. And naturally that created some difficulties. For example, if Leslie said to a grip, “A la lumeina puse a sar,” put the light up there, the grip was like to reply, “Mi fluido ca˜car poop-poop,” thank you but my car doesn’t need carburetor fluid.
    This was the only film shoot in history in which no one making the film actually spoke the language in which the film was being made. Leslie directed in Esperanto. Nobody understood anyone else, which accounted for the marvelously strange tone of the film; the somewhat desperate looks on the actors’ faces in the meaningful scenes which invoked Fellini or Bergman or Kurosawa, scenes in which the actors looked as if they were attempting to comprehend fate or understand the magnificent works of God—but it wasn’t that at all. We were simply trying to figure out what the hell Leslie Stevens was trying to tell us.
    The cinematographer was Conrad Hall, who was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won for Butch Cassidy . Incubus, as he described it, was “A metaphysical witchcraft picture. Lots of mists and people with horns.”
    Perhaps the one area in which we did not have any trouble was that no one forgot his lines; although that may have been due to the fact that no one knew their lines, no one understood their lines, and no one knew if anybody else was saying their lines correctly.
    My co-star was a truly beautiful young woman named Allyson Ames, who played the role of Kia—the demon, not the car company. She was living with Leslie Stevens, which made my love scenes with her a bit awkward. During those scenes I was never quite certain if Stevens was urging me, “Show more passion, hold her tightly,” or warning me, “Keep your hands off her if you know what’s good for you.” But I will never forget the day Allyson stopped me as I was walking back to the set and said softly, “Bill, kie estas la necesejo. ”
    She was speaking our language. So I directed her to the PortO-Johns.
    The story takes place in a wooded land known as Nomen Tuum. I played a good man who is confronted by a gorgeous succubus who seduces men and then kills them, thus claiming their souls for the devil. But when she truly falls in love with my character, all hell breaks loose. Actually, in this film, literally. That’s when they called in the horrible incubus.
    Generally, when principal photography on a film is completed it takes a minimum of six months to a year for it to be edited into its final form.