Up Till Now: The Autobiography

cable was to run the cable down the side of the engine through the window. But then we realized if we did that and I fell the cable would just drag me alongside the train. A bad second choice. So we couldn’t use safety cables. I decided to do it anyway.
    Really? The director was thrilled I was willing to do this stunt. Finally I got up on top of the train. Admittedly, I was scared. As it rolled along at five miles an hour the director was in a car driving alongside with three cameras in it. We shot the whole fight scene. I took a deep breath when I got down to the ground. “How was it?” I asked the director.
    He frowned. “Well, it looks like we’re going five miles an hour.” Then I heard myself thinking, Hey, I’m the star. Stars don’t get hurt. And then I heard myself saying to him, “Okay, let’s try it again. We can go a little faster.”
    Now why would I say that? Why would I risk my life for a Sunday Night Movie? What could I have been thinking? Directors had been shooting similar scenes since the early days of film without it being necessary for an actor to stand on top of a moving train. There weremany ways of getting that shot. “Really?” the director said enthusiastically.
    I climbed back up on top. Seven miles an hour became ten, became twenty... suddenly I was standing on top of a diesel locomotive going almost forty miles an hour and we were approaching a sharp curve in the track and beyond that was a low bridge. Wait a second, I’m an actor. What am I doing standing on top of a diesel locomotive racing forty miles an hour toward a trestle? At that speed the wind was so strong I had to bend forward into it just to remain upright. The wind was coming right up my pants legs, trying to lift me. The helicopter was starting to swoop down on me. In my role I was supposed to be frightened. Believe me, in that situation it did not require a lot of acting ability to look scared.
    When we finished the scene the director told me proudly, “I got it.” Reviewers wrote that the scene “looked real.” Looked real? It looked real?
    But when it comes to real stunts, absolutely nothing I’ve ever done was more realistic than co-starring with actress Tiffany Bolling and five thousand live tarantulas in the classic horror film Kingdom of the Spiders . Oh, the things I’ve done for my art.
    It was a typical horror film plot; thousands of angry and hungry tarantulas attack an isolated town. I played veterinarian Rack Hansen, who desperately tries to warn the mayor that we needed to bring in the tarantulas’ worst enemy, rats and birds, and lots of them, to save the town. Unfortunately, the mayor protests that letting loose legions of rats to attack thousands of tarantulas might affect business at the forthcoming country fair. As it turned out, that was a fair to remember.
    We filmed in the small town of Cape Verde, Arizona. Just imagine the reaction of the townspeople when they found out a motion picture was being made there: Wow! That’s incredible, a film being made in our small town. It’ll be great for business...
    . . . and they’re bringing thousands of what with them? Often when making a movie on location the crew has difficulty keeping interested spectators out of the background. This, however, was not aproblem on this particular shoot. Lock up your families, five thousand tarantulas are coming to town.
    Before being given this role I had to sign an agreement that I would work with spiders. I didn’t mind that—tarantulas don’t kick you in the pants, bang you on the shoulder, or refuse to speak their lines. Besides, as I learned, tarantulas have had very bad PR. They’re actually not very dangerous, a tarantula sting is a little less painful than a bee sting—although they do make you itch. But I had a good concept for a stunt, I wanted to fall into the shot with a tarantula on my face—and then have it walk off so the audience would know that it was alive. The problem was how to keep the tarantula on my face as I fell. I began experimenting with glue, trying to determine precisely how much glue it required to keep the tarantula on my face as I fell, but still allow it to walk off my face.
    It’s an interesting question for an actor: Which is worse, standing on top of a speeding locomotive without any kind of safety cable or gluing tarantulas to your face?
    It took me six tries to figure out how much glue I needed to make it work. And when we shot the scene it worked perfectly.