They Came. They Sawed.
(Page 4 of 8)
Ed Neal was exactly what Hooper had hoped for as the “hitchhiker,” even though they met more or less by chance. Neal was on his way back from Scholz Garten, where he had been tanking up for a drunk role in that day’s drama class, when a girl outside the classroom said, “Are you gonna try out for the movie?” He said, “Sure,” wandered in, and saw Hooper chewing on an unlit cigarillo. “Can you be weird?” Hooper asked him. A friend of Neal’s piped up, “He’s always weird.” Neal did a few crazy gestures, consciously imitating his nephew, who he says is a “certifiable paranoid schizophrenic—all he does is wander around the country”—and shortly thereafter got the part. In his dirty and torn green T-shirt, clutching an animal pouch, slick greasy hair caked with God knows what, he was the very essence of the hitchhiker you don’t want in your car.
The six-foot-four Gunnar Hansen, born in Iceland but raised in Austin and San Antonio by his naturalized mother, was putting his graduate classes in Scandinavian studies to good use by working as a carpenter and a bartender. While sharing a hamburger on the Drag with his co-star in a small production of Of Mice and Men, someone mentioned that there was a horror movie in town and he’d be “great for the killer, but they already cast it.” “Two weeks later,” recalls Hansen, “the same guy calls and says, ‘The guy who was hired as the killer is holed up drunk in a motel and won’t come out. There’s a lot of bad karma surrounding this movie, and I’m quitting.’ So I called Bob Burns and told him I was interested.” Burns took Hansen over to see Hooper. “I was sitting in Bob’s office,” says Hooper, who was still looking for his Leatherface, “and I saw Bob bringing him across the street. He got the part before he came through the front door.”
Finally, for reasons no one remembers, Hooper was required to hire at least one card-carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild, and that turned out to be Jim Siedow, who plays perhaps the most complex character in the film, a man on the edge of insanity trying to exercise control over his two clearly insane younger brothers. His leering, cockeyed visage, as the “cook,” would become famous the world over. Siedow had worked with the WPA Theater before World War II, touring with Eva La Gallienne, then served his war duty in the Army Air Corps, ferrying war planes, cigars, and perfume from Alaska to the Soviet air force. (“For some reason the Russians didn’t want our whiskey.”) After the war he met Ruth, his wife of 57 years, while both were working on Chicago radio soap operas. They knocked around New York together, toured regional theaters, and finally settled in Houston, where he worked as the resident director at Theatre Suburbia and a supporting player in several filmed-in-Texas projects. He had met Hooper, Henkel, and Bozman a couple years earlier on yet another long-forgotten Texas film called The Windsplitter, an attempt to do, as he put it, “the Texas Easy Rider.” “It was a hippie biker movie,” he told me. “Tobe acted in it; he was a roughneck. I was the lead’s father. I didn’t see Tobe again until he calls me and says he needs a SAG actor; he has to pay union scale to one actor and one or two union technicians. Later on they asked me if I’d like to take a little of my money in shares of the movie. I told ’em, ‘No, thank you. I’ll just take the cash.’”
Chaos Reigns
UNDER A BLAZING, white-hot Texas sun, principal photography for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre began in July 1973. The house where most of the filming took place was southwest of Round Rock on Quick Hill Road, which was not so much a road as a caliche path dead-ending in a mesquite break. It was the original home of the Quick family, owners of pharmacies in Round Rock and many other Central Texas towns, but it had been rented out to a hippie named Smokey, and its Victorian charm had begun to fade. There was only one restroom for a cast and crew of forty people. As the working days became longer—the inevitable result of an underfinanced film—crew members would occasionally walk off the job. Henkel assumed the role of co-producer, cajoling them into staying with the help of Bozman, the production manager. Parsley, who spent sleepless nights obsessing about the money Hooper and Henkel were wasting, came to the set every day to check on his investment. But most of the time Hooper didn’t make an effort to talk to him. Parsley was regarded as a member of the “establishment”—even if he had put $40,000 of his own money into the film—and though Henkel would normally have acted as a peacemaker between the investor and the director, he was just too busy with rewrites and other chores.
The crew was green; the cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, had never shot a feature. “I had never managed a movie,” says Bozman. “We had no prop man, so I found the props. We didn’t even have a chain saw. I found one. Of course, today I would know that if you’re making a movie with ‘chain saw’ in the title, you should have ten, not just one. But we had one. A McCollough. I had to take the teeth out of it so it wouldn’t hurt anyone. I remember we wrote a letter to McCollough, thinking they might want to invest in the movie. They never answered us.”
The whole production had a ragtag look about it. The whole production looked like, well, like hippies trying to make a movie. Hooper shot seven days a week, working anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours a day. Salaries ranged from $50 up to $125 for the entire shoot, plus another $125 in deferred payments or small percentages of the movie’s profits, and cast and crew didn’t always feel compelled to show up on time or do extra work. It was an especially wicked Texas summer, over 100 degrees most days, and inside the “cannibal house” it would get up to 115, baking the offal and animal carcasses and rotting meat that had been painstakingly assembled by Bob Burns. “We would do a scene,” says Neal, “and then all run to the window so that we could throw up.” To create a realistic slaughterhouse atmosphere, Burns indulged his lifelong fascination with animal bones by rounding up eight dead cows, two deer, three goats, one chicken, an armadillo, and two human skeletons, one real and the other made of plastic. Everyone lived constantly with this grotesque menagerie, and since the whole story takes place in a 24-hour period, everyone wore the same clothing for the entire five weeks. “I’m a big man,” says Hansen, “and we were afraid to send my clothes to the dry cleaners because we didn’t want to lose the butcher’s blood on the apron. I was running and sweating the entire time. By the end of the shoot, no one would sit next to me at lunch.”
But then nobody was making friends on the set. Most of the actors had never met before filming began, and few would see each other after filming ended. Cast and crew grew increasingly resentful of Marilyn Burns, who started taking her breaks in Parsley’s air-conditioned red Cadillac while everyone else continued to swelter. “But I don’t think they knew how mad he was,” she says today. “I calmed him down. I convinced him that maybe things would go smoother if he didn’t show up so much. He thought the movie was a catastrophe, and he wanted to step in and take it over.”
For one of the film’s most famous scenes, in which Burns’ Sally and Partain’s Franklin argue over who’s going to hold the flashlight, Burns was so genuinely angry at Partain that they didn’t speak between takes. “Yeah, she was pissed,” he says. “She thought I was screwing up the scene. But they were writing me new dialogue on the spot—I think on purpose. The batteries went out on the sun gun. The batteries went out on the camera. We had all these problems. We kept doing it over and over.”
In later years, cast and crew would say that Hooper acted confused on the set, frequently changed his mind, and seemed to be making things up as he went. Most of the actors would have welcomed more direction. Neal had toured with Sandy Duncan and was accustomed to being consulted by his theater directors, and he thought Hooper was a lightweight: “All he would ever say is ‘Do some more of that Strother Martin stuff.’” Hansen, who visited the Austin State Hospital several times to study the behavior of the mentally ill, was annoyed that all his dialogue had been cut and his part reduced to a squealing, grunting butcher. “They wanted me to squeal like a pig,” he says. “I didn’t know what a pig squeal sounded like, but I did come up with a howl. It just burst out of my throat. I was frightened.” Taking his job seriously, he trained by running a mile every day, so as to make it more believable when he chased Burns through the woods. “You know the chain saw dance?” he says. “The swinging the chain saw over my head? That happened because of an earlier scene, when she reaches safety at the barbecue stand. Tobe wanted me to be pissed. So I started swinging the saw around. I was swinging the saw at Tobe! And he ducked! I wanted to scare him. I wanted to be in control.”
