They Came. They Sawed.
(Page 5 of 8)
Almost every cast member suffered some sort of injury. Neal had his face burned by hot asphalt. Partain had a bruised and cut arm after rolling down a hill in one of the early scenes. For Partain’s dying scene, Hooper and makeup artist Dottie Pearl stood on either side of the camera lens, spitting red Karo syrup into the air, attracting flesh-devouring mosquitoes. Hansen had no peripheral vision while wearing his mask and had a heart-stopping near miss when his boots slipped while he was running and the chain saw flew up in the air and crashed to the ground, inches from his body. But no one was beaten, cut, and bruised more than Burns. By the end of production, her screams were real, as she’d been poked, prodded, bound, dragged through rooms, jerked around, chased through cocklebur underbrush, jabbed with a stick, forced to skid on her knees in take after take, pounded on the head with a rubber hammer, coated with sticky stage blood, and endlessly pursued by Hansen with his chain saw and Neal with his constantly flicking switchblade. “I was afraid to hit her at first,” Siedow told me. “I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t hurt her. But they kept telling me it looked fake and I needed to really hit her. It took me several tries, but by the end of it, I was really hitting her. It actually got to be kinda fun.”
In retrospect, there’s reason to believe that Hooper was manipulating many of the details, to an almost obsessive degree. The heat, the miserable conditions, and the sheer pain of it all undoubtedly added to the atmosphere Hooper was trying to create. He wanted the actors to feel irritable and off-balance. He probably knew $60,000 wasn’t enough money to finish the film but didn’t want Parsley and the other investors to know that. He was doing whatever he could, day by day, moment by moment, to get as many images on film as possible, because he knew that Chainsaw, like any successful horror film, would be perfected in the editing room. “Tobe really did have a vision,” says Bozman now. “He knew exactly where we were at all times. But the rest of us were flying blind.”
On the final night of shooting, Dottie made brownies for the cast. The starved actors and crew started wolfing them down, only to watch her scrambling around trying to get rid of them because a visitor had come to the set. “It’s Tobe’s mother!” she said. “Get the brownies!” As it turned out, marijuana had been part of her brownie recipe, which was probably not such a good idea, since the scene being filmed required Hansen to cut down the front door of the house with a chain saw that did have teeth in it. “I noticed people becoming more and more bizarre as the evening wore on,” says Bozman, the only crew member who had passed on the brownies. Hansen—experiencing the effect of marijuana for the first time—successfully cut through the door, his pupils big as saucers. “I feel so hot,” he said. “I’m so dizzy.” An exhausted Hooper said, “It’s a wrap.”
The movie was finished. The bizarreness had just begun.
Fade In
FIVE YOUNG PEOPLE, traveling in a van, winding down strange country roads, encountering increasing levels of hostile gothic weirdness as they move farther into the wilderness—it would be a cliché were it not for the fact that it was the first real youth horror film. Before Chainsaw, horror films were about adults dealing with the terrors of modern science (Frankenstein), nineteenth-century virgins dealing with supernatural predators (Dracula), middle-class normalcy discovering madness in its midst (Psycho), or modern families fighting the devil himself (Rosemary’s Baby). Chainsaw was the first baby-boomer horror film, in which pampered but idealistic suburban children, distrustful of anyone over thirty, are terrorized by the deformed adult world that dwells on the grungy side of the railroad tracks. There had been other films that treated rural America as a place of seething, barely contained violence—notably Deliverance—but never one in which the distinction was so clearly made between an old America, of twisted, deranged adults, and a new America, of honest, right-thinking children. Hooper and Henkel had finally made their counterculture film.
The first voice you hear is John Larroquette’s, who would go on to TV fame in Night Court and The John Larroquette Show but who in 1974 was an unemployed actor. Hooper heard about him from a friend of a friend while trying furiously to finish the film in Los Angeles. He asked only one question about Larroquette: “Can he do an imitation of Orson Welles?” Too naive at the time to know that an unemployed actor will claim he can do anything, Hooper hired him for the famous opening crawl. It was recorded in one voice-over session:
“The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them, an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
That preamble—hokey, overlong, with clichéd words like “annals”—proves by its very ineptness just how good a filmmaker Hooper was. For it’s not the purple prose that sticks in the mind but the empty black screen, the heavy silence before the crawl begins, the official-seeming type, Larroquette’s authoritative voice, and then, after the announcement of the ominous title, a series of blinding flashes, the sounds of chopping, ripping, heavy breathing, images of red meat, the drooling face of a calf, grating electronic sounds, old lifeless hands and grinning skulls, all of which pass so quickly that you can’t quite be certain what you saw or heard. A date comes up on the screen—“August 18, 1973”—then the faint sounds of a car radio fade in and out as a news announcer reports grave-robbing incidents in a certain Texas county. Before a single actor has appeared, before anything has happened at all, the film is pregnant with menace.
It took Hooper the better part of eight months to finish the film. Like most directors, Hooper loved the editing process—“But that made it agonizingly slow,” said Bob Burns. Parsley kept calling to find out when he could view the film. Hooper kept putting him off. He was spending much of his time trying to figure out what he’d be able to get away with. “I called the MPAA a lot,” he recalls, referring to the organization that awards movie ratings. “I wanted to get a rating that would allow kids to see the movie. I would just call up the ratings people and talk to whoever answered the phone. I would say, ‘I know you can’t really decide anything over the phone, but I have to know. I have this scene where a girl gets hung on a meat hook.’ Long silence. ‘What could I do?’ Long silence. ‘I guess it would help me if there was no penetration shot.’ ‘That would be correct.’ ‘And no blood?’ ‘That would help.’”
In the spring of 1974, though, Hooper had more-immediate problems: He had nothing left to get his film out of the lab. The original $60,000 was long gone, and there were debts piling up. So he and Henkel went back to Parsley, asking him to buy 19 percent of Vortex, the company they had set up to represent their half share in the movie. Of course, by this time they had given away so many Vortex shares to cast and crew that the additional sell-off of 19 percent would seriously cut into whatever profits they could conceivably make. (Hooper and Henkel would end up with matching 7.5 percent shares in the movie they created.) But Parsley turned them down. In a gesture not unlike the Lionel Barrymore evil-banker character in It’s a Wonderful Life, he reminded them that if they didn’t deliver a completed picture, he would own 100 percent of everything anyway. And he could finish it himself, using an editor who was a little faster than Hooper. “He had us by the short hairs,” says Henkel.
Then, at their moment of maximum desperation, another group of Austin politicians got involved. Henkel had confided his dilemma to Bill Wittliff, the Austin screenwriter best known for Raggedy Man and Barbarosa. Wittliff called his buddy Joe K. Longley, an attorney and the former head of the antitrust and consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office, and a meeting was arranged at City National Bank for everyone who played in his weekly poker game. Hooper and Henkel put together twelve minutes of the best footage from the unfinished movie and screened it for the poker players. At the end of the screening, six of them agreed to put up $23,532 in exchange for 19 percent of Vortex. When the agreement was drawn up, the number of people with shares of ownership had risen to somewhere around 35, although only Henkel and Hooper knew the real number. (Longley called the new investors’ corporation P.I.T.S. It stood for “Pie in the Sky”; to this day, a few members of the poker circle get regular royalty checks from Chainsaw.)
