Reporter
Oh, the Horror!
The first three Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes were hell to make and hell to watch. Why should the new one be any different?
(Page 2 of 2)
Carson also emphasized the Texas setting: The Sawyers were Dallas' top caterers and chili cookoff champions, and the killing took place over Texas-OU weekend. There's at least one Big Red or Shiner Bock bottle in almost every scene, and Leatherface's first victims are UT frat boys driving daddy's Benz to the Cotton Bowl. Hopper played lawman Lefty Enright, a retired Texas Ranger who happened to be the uncle of some of the victims from the original film. He'd been trailing Leatherface ever since, and he had armed himself for their inevitable showdown with four heavy-duty saws, two of which he wore in holsters like six-shooters. "To make a sequel you have to reinvigorate that original spark," says Carson, "which in this case was to go back and punch the button labeled 'Outrageous.'" Indeed, there was nothing subtle in Chainsaw 2, from Leatherface's Vietnam vet brother Chop-Top, who had a habit of eating fleshy nubbins yanked from the perimeter of the exposed metal plate in his head, to special-effects supervisor Tom Savini's gruesome handiwork—one victim is shown with his head sawed in half, another gets field-dressed.
As a rule, crew members recall the production as the strangest of their careers. When workers opened up the old, abandoned Austin American-Statesman plant, where the interior scenes were filmed, they found black mold growing on the walls so thick that mushrooms had popped up. After a pipe spewed thousands of gallons of funky water, almost everyone on the set got sick and missed a couple days of shooting (set designer Cary White caught walking pneumonia, and another person was diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease). Then came the fire, a small blaze that started accidentally and rushed through the Sawyers' supremely creepy underground lair with enough intensity to send some cast and crew running for their lives while braver souls scrambled to distinguish prop fire extinguishers from real ones. By the time Austin firefighters arrived, the inferno was out, but they still had to be sure things were safe. So with expressions of uneasy disbelief, they trudged through White's set, a multilevel labyrinth of twisting tunnels and chambers filled with dozens of dummies done up to look like barbecued cadavers.
Fire and flood aside, the wrath that doomed the film was fiscal, not biblical. Hooper had to edit the picture while he was shooting so that he could deliver a finished film by the do-or-die deadline set by the production company, Cannon Films, which also demanded that he emphasize the murderous family at the expense of Carson's satire. "We had a test screening," remembers Carson, "and the audience loved it. It made them laugh, but it also moved them. Cannon couldn't handle that. They said, 'Give us the monsters.' So we had to displace some of the emotion from the film." The result was an uneven movie with a first half that lasts about thirty minutes and a second half, all set in that subterranean lair, that drags on for an hour. It also meant that all of my feature film debut except a split-second glimpse of my left shoulder and leg wound up on the cutting-room floor.
Next came a 1990 update, filmed entirely in California, that was a Texan massacre in title only. The sense of place in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is provided by a "Don't Mess With . . ." highway sign and characters with poorly faked rural accents. The unlucky couple at the film's center take their wrong turn off a mountain-skirted desert highway and quickly find themselves at the clan's shack, surrounded by a swamp. Despite one of the most stomach-turning scenes in the whole series (an opening sequence with close shots of Leatherface using a razor blade and scissors to cut flesh for a new mask) and a nice nod to Carson's cartoon (one of Leatherface's brothers gives him a chrome-plated chain saw with Carson's best line, "The Saw Is Family," engraved on the blade), the film is easily the worst of the series.
Kim Henkel brought the franchise back to Austin in 1994 for the sequel that came to be known as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. This was the famous but seldom-seen Matthew McConaughey-Renée Zellweger edition, filmed when the two were considered stars only by their parents and friends from high school. The action tracked the original's with slight twists and a handful of new characters, but the only truly new development was a suggestion that the family was responsible for assassinating JFK. Like the other two sequels, this one would have died a quick, quiet death were it not for the budding careers of the leads. But any help that might have meant at the box office was squandered when the film showed in only nine cities nationally. In a lawsuit later filed in Los Angeles, Henkel and his production company alleged that the scant distribution was part of a conspiracy to protect the investment that Hollywood was making in its young stars. Although the suit names McConaughey and not Zellweger as a defendant, it seems more likely now that the starlet would be the one who wanted the film forgotten. McConaughey's performance as the handsome, charming rogue of the family of killers plays like a screen test for a remake of Hud. Zellweger, on the other hand, plays essentially the same character she did in that movie about the chunky British girl with the diary. She might not have pulled so many Oscar votes if the Academy had seen that she wears the same pout whether she's worried Leatherface is going to dismember her or Hugh Grant is going to dump her.
"HIPPER?" SCOFFS HARRY KNOWLES. "Like a movie about a cannibalistic family running a barbecue stand in Texas could be any hipper." Of course Austin's number one professional film fan is critical of Bay's production. Not only has Knowles seen Hooper's original many times, but he even owns the chair made of bones that sole survivor Sally Hardesty was tied to during the famous dinner scene. What's more, Hooper is a Knowles family friend, old enough and close enough that the wrap party for the first film pulled double-duty as little Harry's second birthday party. "My earliest memory is of Gunnar [Hanson, the actor who played the original Leatherface] running through our house with a chain saw and pretty girls with baskets of bones and body parts that they passed around as party favors."
Still, when the project was announced, Knowles was inclined to give Bay's low-budget approach the benefit of the doubt. "It would be retarded to shoot this for fifty million dollars," he says. But alarm bells went off when the director was announced: music video and commercial auteur Marcus Nispel, who had never shot a feature film before. Likewise the cast. "They're WB kids—acne-free genetic miracles." His primary beef, though, is with Bay's "gore versus thrills" distinction. "I'm worried about the whole concept, because calling the first one gory means they have no idea what they're talking about. They must have seen it twenty years ago and forgotten it entirely." For Hooper, who spent hours on the phone with the Motion Picture Association of America during the filming of the original to make sure he understood what he could get away with—he was hoping for a PG rating but settled for an R—Bay's dissing of the original as a gorefest is hard to fathom. "I think someone's confusing it with the slasher films that came later," he says.
Producer Form has seen the original enough times to agree that it's not as bloody as Bay remembers, but there is plenty of other scuttlebutt that would concern Knowles and Hooper, and I was able to confirm much of it with crew members who talked to me privately. The production indeed needed a second Leatherface. Apparently the first one had difficulty lifting the chain saws over his head. But before the special-effects crew was asked to make new saws light enough for him to lift, he threw his back out trying to drag a victim through a hallway in the farmhouse.
And, I'm told, the special-effects crew did threaten to quit after a row between effects coordinator Rocky Gehr and the director. Nispel was unwilling to address safety questions that Gehr thought were necessary on a set with running chain saws, causing the effects team to pack their things. Only a threat from Bay to pull the plug on the whole production if Gehr's instructions weren't followed kept the crew in place. (Form denies that this was anything more than a misunderstanding over scheduling.)
The level of friction between Nispel and Gehr, a veteran of sixteen features, including Bay's Pearl Harbor, is reportedly atypical for most movie sets. "There's tension from the budget and from the heat," another crew member told me, "but also from the commercial people being used to doing things one way and the feature people wanting to do it another." While Nispel is used to telling his stories in thirty-second bites shot in three-day blocks, the crew member explained, the feature veterans expect more time to get the shots and the story right.
Toward the end of shooting, the official word was that any earlier turmoil had been cleared up. The second Leatherface hit his marks, and all the members of the creative team were on the same page. Nispel's dailies are said to look great, and there should be no problem wrapping by the mid-September deadline. Then, whether Bay's "reconceptualization" makes a mint at the box office or jumps straight to curiosity-rental status, Austin can sleep safely. At least until that old Chainsaw gets revved up again.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
