“Yaaaaagh! Eeeeee! Oooooo!”
—Audience at “Halloween.”
On a cold, windy afternoon in December, 1978, a couple of dozen people of various ages stood shivering in line on a sidewalk next to a Burger King just east of Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, waiting for the 8th Street Playhouse to open and start selling tickets. Noting the captive audience, a three-card-monte entrepreneur set down his cardboard-box table and began his spiel, the cards flying from hand to hand, but he was met by consumer apathy, and he soon moved on. At last, the box office opened, and the crowd shuffled into the warm theatre. It had been waiting to see a film called “Halloween,” a low-budget horror movie that most people—even those who frequently go to the movies—had probably not even heard of. By the end of the previous week, however, “Halloween” had reached No. 6 on Variety’s weekly list of top-grossing films in America—just below “National Lampoon’s Animal House”—and had earned over three million dollars. (It has now grossed well over nineteen million dollars in this country alone, and has thus become the most profitable independent picture of all time.) A billboard in the lobby quoted Newsweek (“The most frightening flick in years!”) and Andrew Sarris (“The cult discovery of 1978”). The audience settled nervously into seats, and the film began. Almost immediately, four young teen-age girls who were huddled together near the front of the theatre began to shriek. Presently, one of them raced up the aisle and sat down near the back, in order to get farther away from the escalating nastiness on the screen. Soon, realizing she was alone, which was worse, she started back to rejoin her friends, but by then they were running up the aisle to join her.
Rain, sleet and snow, compounded by the Super Bowl telecast, wrecked weekend grosses. But despite such formidable handicaps, “Halloween” bowed to a potent $35,000 at the Sameric. And in 16 other area houses it added $165,000 more.
Los Angeles: In late afternoon, the soda fountain at Schwab’s Pharmacy, on Sunset Boulevard near Crescent Heights, in Hollywood, is packed, and people are waiting in line for booths in the next room. A sign over the fountain says, “Coffee 40c. Limit 30 Min.” Dozens of conversations are taking place. An elderly man leans forward over his coffee cup and calls across four or five other customers to a gray-haired contemporary with a George Brent mustache.
“Lou?” the elderly man calls.
“What ever happened to Glenda Farrell?”
Lou: “She’s still kicking around.”
First Elderly Man: “She was wonderful.”
They discuss Glenda Farrell, who actually died in 1971.
“I assume you were acquainted with her?” says the first man.
Lou nods, with some dignity.
A few minutes later, the first man calls, “Lou? Was Harry one of the Warner Brothers?”
Lou: “Yes. There were four brothers. Harry was one.”
They discuss the Warner Brothers.
Then the first man says, “Those were the days.”
“Those were the days,” says Lou. “Better than now.”
In 1978, one billion one hundred and thirty-three million tickets to the movies were sold (at an average price of $2.34), the largest share of them to people under twenty-one. Two hundred and four major films were released. Forty years ago, M-G-M released forty-eight films, Paramount forty-eight, and Twentieth Century-Fox forty-nine, but the days of the great studios are long gone. In 1978, Universal led the field by releasing twenty-two films; United Artists was next, releasing nineteen, followed by Warners, releasing eighteen. Despite this diminution of what is called in the industry “product,” there remain over three thousand movie directors in the Directors Guild of America, and every year the film schools—N.Y.U., U.S.C., U.C.L.A., A.F.I., and others—graduate many more. The odds against any of the graduates’ ever directing a movie are enormous, and even if one of them does direct one the likelihood that it will succeed (i.e., be distributed widely, make a profit, and enhance his chances of making a second film) is very small. There are exceptions among the aspirants, of course, and one is John Carpenter.
Partway down the long, very steep slope of Loma Vista Drive, descending through Beverly Hills, with the city of Los Angeles spread out far below the houses of sparkling opulence on either side, there is a sign warning “Use Lowest Gear” and, shortly after that, a sign that says “Runaway Vehicle Escape Lane 600 Feet Ahead.” Just before Loma Vista crosses Doheny Road, it expands on the right into a third lane, composed of a succession of low, uneven piles of loose gravel nestled against cement block set in an embankment. The operator of a runaway vehicle is apparently expected to steer his car into this soft and receptive lane and come to a halt like a baseball player sliding into third. It seems a perfectly reasonable solution; the unsettling aspect is the underlying assumption that automobiles will so frequently go berserk hereabouts that some accommodation must be made for them. Similarly, along the heavily populated canyon roads of Beverly Hills there are signs forbidding cigarettes and matches: these dry hills may burst into flame at any time. The houses above Sunset Boulevard are stuck in the nearly vertical slopes like cloves in a ham; how they stay there is mysterious. It seems likely that, if they do not catch fire first, a good rain will send them tumbling down the mountain; already, earth has slid out from under retaining walls, terraces, swimming pools, driveways, even roads. In some places, tons of concrete have been poured like icing over a section of hillside to hold it back—and the concrete has even been painted green—but the earth has begun to slip away beneath that, too, leaving edges of concrete sticking out against the sky. In addition, of course, the entire area sits close to the quiescent but menacing San Andreas Fault. Gazing up the perilous roads at the plucky, high-risk homes perched in the tinderlike hills near the great rift, a visitor feels that this may be a community where desire and imagination automatically take precedence over danger, and even over reality.
On a bright, springlike morning in winter, warm sunshine slants through the big windows of a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. (Nearby, fifty feet in the air, three men are descending, hand over hand, from the sky—coming down a pole as if from a spaceship. It seems an appropriate and natural way to enter Beverly Hills, but they have merely finished putting up a new movie advertisement on a huge one-legged billboard. Hollywood has a lot of these grand and splashy memos, in which the industry reminds itself of what it has just done.) In one of the booths, his back to the light, John Carpenter sits drinking a cup of coffee. He is a good-looking, slightly built young man with shoulder-length brown hair and a small, Mexican-bandit mustache. He looks and dresses like a guitar player in a sixties rock band (which for a time he was). From a distance, he could pass for twenty-one; he is actually ten years older. His manner is low-key, amiable, and plain, and he speaks with a slight Kentucky accent, which has a distinctive sound, harsher than, say, a Georgia accent, and less runny; it puts a twang on words. There is a certain intensity to him: strength, perhaps even intransigence. Despite his casual appearance and his easy manner, he is precisely focussed. Carpenter is talking about “Halloween,” which he directed; he is also co-author (with Debra Hill) of the screenplay, and he composed, conducted, and performed the score. (The plot of “Halloween” is, briefly and roughly, as follows: In a prologue, a small boy butchers his older sister with a kitchen knife. It is now fifteen years later, and he escapes from the asylum where he has spent the last decade and a half—failing completely to respond to treatment. He heads for his old home town, arriving just in time for Halloween. Wearing a very unattractive mask, he sets out to murder several young women who are babysitting in large houses.)
“‘Halloween’ was shot in twenty days for three hundred thousand dollars,” Carpenter says. “The money was put up by a money man from Libya, who works out of London. For the small-town setting, we used a block on Orange Grove Avenue, just east of Fairfax Avenue, here in Hollywood. ‘Halloween’ is purely an exercise in style. The plot is barely existent; the movie is full of manufactured tricks. It’s a haunted-house movie. You don’t see much violence portrayed. What you imagine is much more horrifying than what I could show you. It’s how the pieces go together—the montage. Timing, editing, pace. Movies are pieces of film stuck together in a certain rhythm, an absolute beat—like a musical composition. The rhythm you create affects the audience. Then you can lay music against the visual to create a third element. I usually write very simple music—its main quality is rhythmic, to match the film. Slowly, you build something emotional. You make the audience live with your characters. Then, at a certain point, you let them get ahead of the characters, and the audience starts yelling, ‘Don’t open that door!’ I went to a preview of ‘Halloween,’ and it was just unbelievable. People were jumping, screaming, running around. When I was a kid, I’d go to the Southern Kentucky Fair and pay twenty-five cents to go into the Haunted House. You’d walk down a dark hallway, and when you stepped on a certain place it would make things jump out at you—it scared the hell out of me! Your expectation built up and up. I went again and again, to learn how it worked. ‘Halloween’ was maybe a way of being young again and scared, and innocent in that way.
“I was raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My father taught music history and theory at Western Kentucky University there. We lived in a log cabin on the grounds of the university museum. The cabin was rented out to faculty members for fifty dollars a month. It had a rail fence, a garden, a man-made pond; there was a creek, an open field, and woods. The university had planted samples of every kind of tree, bush, and flower that grew in Kentucky. I was an only child, somewhat lonely, and I grew up in the wilds of this extremely secluded, extremely beautiful fantasy land. My father is a violinist, and I heard classical music constantly—wall-to-wall string quartets. I learned violin, piano, and guitar. My mother worked in a bookstore. My parents were very encouraging about creative endeavors. We had no TV until I was twelve, and there were always a lot of books and paper and pens around—even a typewriter I could use. I remember once my father gave me a blank sheet of music paper, and I sat down and filled it in with little notes. Then he played it on the piano. It was really atonal!” Carpenter grins. “Their attitude was always ‘Try your hand.’
“The first movie they ever took me to was ‘The African Queen,’ and what I remember most is Humphrey Bogart coming out of the water covered with leeches. But my monumental experience with films was in 1953, when I was five. My parents took me to ‘It Came from Outer Space,’ in 3-D. You had to wear special glasses. The first shot was of this meteor—it came right off the screen and exploded in my face. I couldn’t believe it! It was everything I’d ever wanted! After that, I was addicted to films. I made movies in my head. The cabin and the museum grounds became my movie set, my back lot. I made up little stories. When I was eight, my dad gave me an 8-mm. movie camera—a Eumig, with stop motion, so you could shoot one frame at a time for ‘animation.’ It was a terrific camera. I still have it. It doesn’t run, but I look at it once in a while. I got my friends from school together, and we made a movie called ‘Gorgon the Space Monster.’ It had a lot of special effects—toy tanks running in animation, things like that—and I put classical music (the ‘1812 Overture’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’) on a tape, along with me doing different voices, for a soundtrack. I remember a moment during the shooting when I suddenly understood the process of editing. I was shooting two actions at once: a friend would run up, stop, and react to something; then I’d turn around and shoot what he was watching. I was editing in the camera. But suddenly I realized I could shoot the first kid all at once and then, another day, shoot what he was reacting to, and then I could splice them together. It was like a thunderbolt! I remember thinking, How clever! In another scene, I had a friend running down a railroad track, and I ran after him with the camera. The scene was very jerky, and my father said, ‘You should use a tripod.’ But I said it looked exciting. A titling kit came with the camera: you stuck little letters on a board and shot the titles. When any of my friends came over, they’d have to sit down and watch ‘Gorgon.’ I kept telling my parents that I was going to go to Hollywood and be a film director. My friends quickly got tired of making movies, so I did them myself in a vacuum. I felt I was quite a bit the outsider, a little weird. I was pretty single-minded. As a matter of fact, my movies now are pretty single-minded movies. I’m a little obsessive.”
Carpenter laughs. He continues, “When I was nine or ten years old, my father started taking me on trips down to Nashville, sixty miles away. He’d always played classical music, talked about classical music, but it turned out that at the same time he was moonlighting as a studio musician at recording sessions in Nashville. He played backup violin and viola for Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, all of Brenda Lee’s records. There was this ambivalence in him—teaching classical music, then going down to Nashville and having the time of his life playing country and rock and roll. I watched the sessions sometimes. Roy Orbison would come in wearing sunglasses, and I thought that that was the ultimate cool. I’d wander around the studios. I remember getting lost and blundering into an echo chamber once, and I was so fascinated they had to come drag me out. Sometimes I’d go to the movies by myself in Nashville and then take a bus out to the recording studios for the last few hours.
“Bowling Green was very Southern—a small farm town in the Bible Belt, truly Middle America and nonsophisticated. I had an image of myself as a lonely, isolated person—not ostracized but a loner. In 1964, when the Beatles came along, I grew long hair. It was risky, and I got a lot of flak. Still, it fitted right in; maybe I was perpetuating my own isolation, even though I was always lamenting that I had no friends who were interested in movies. But by the time I was in high school I’d lost touch with making movies. I’d got interested in girls. I would borrow my father’s Cutlass and take a girl driving up and down the bypass, or go to the Lost River Drive-In (they showed second-run movies) and neck, then stop at the Dairy Dip or Jerry’s. The big thing in those days was drinking beer. I thought it tasted so bad, but I did it. Suddenly, one day, my high-school class voted me president. I wondered why for days. It was an indication that I was misjudging myself, and I realized I must be reaching out to people in some way—I must have wanted their acceptance, and to be loved by them.
“I went to Western Kentucky University, and I played bass guitar and sang with a rock band. We called it Kaleidoscope, and we played at high-school and fraternity dances. If I’d stayed in Kentucky, I’d still be playing rock and roll today. I have a tremendous love for music. When I get in a down mood, I’ll listen to a cut from the Rolling Stones over and over again, and I’ll come out of it. If I’ve got a problem that I’m thinking about, I’ll walk around the house playing a guitar—I’ve got a twelve-string Mossman and a six-string Gibson—and I’ll sing, and work it out. Or I’ll sit at the piano and play ‘I Knew You When You Were from Hollywood’—that’s a rousing number I can bang out.”
Carpenter laughs again. “In my senior year, I did a little acting. We did ‘Queens of France,’ by Thornton Wilder My technique was totally mechanical—nothing to do with real emotion—but I began to know what actors were going through. I started getting interested in making films again, and I started researching film schools. The best seemed to be U.S.C., and I told my father I’d like to go there. He didn’t say too much. He probably thought I was making a silly move, but he supported me. I wish I could describe the naïve kid who got off the plane in L.A. I had two suitcases and a map. U.S.C. didn’t look that far; I thought I could walk it. An hour later, I’d only moved a fraction of an inch on the map. U.S.C. was fifteen miles away.”
The U.S.C. film school is housed in a group of modest cream-colored old bungalows next to some tennis courts on the campus, and is surrounded by larger and mostly newer buildings. The school offers five different degrees and a hundred and seven courses. Around five thousand students have graduated since 1929.
“In 1968, the country was in turmoil,” Carpenter says. “I could have got into political action, music, drugs—anything—but I started film school and for four years, twenty-four hours a day, all I did was learn about film. I made every single kind of movie there was, starting with 8-mm. I did everything—learned from the bottom up. You had to learn how to thread a Mitchell, how long it takes to set up a shot, sound, editing—everything. U.S.C. was a place where they wanted meaningful, personal films. Visual tone poems; alienation. This was what they expected and encouraged, and this was what got you the grades. Hollywood was frowned on. But here was ambivalence again: at night they’d have John Ford or Howard Hawks or Roman Polanski come to talk, and they’d have retrospectives of their films. What you didn’t learn was about the realities of Hollywood. They never taught us much about what it was like to be a professional filmmaker, what to expect. They’d say, ‘That’s not our job. We’re not a training school; we’re an art school.’ U.S.C. was the best school for learning; it was not a placement center. But I was going to be a Hollywood director, by God.”
When Carpenter first arrived at U.S.C., he saw a science-fiction short called “THX 1138,” which George Lucas had made while he was a student there. Lucas was soon developing his short into a feature-length movie. “I thought, This is how I can make it work,” Carpenter says. “So in 1970 I started to make a feature film. It was the kid in the log cabin going out with his friends to make a movie again. I had a thousand dollars from U.S.C. It began on the sound stage at U.S.C. and ended on a sound stage in Hollywood four years later. It cost sixty thousand dollars. I raised the money from my parents, friends, investors. We’d make ten minutes and show that, try to get some money, then make ten more. Five years after we started, the film—‘Dark Star’—was released for a multiple run in L.A. ‘Dark Star’ was one of the most difficult, brutalizing, devastating, and satisfying experiences of my life. It was not successful. It was a weird little science-fiction movie, with a lot of imagination and energy but a cardboard spaceship. I wanted it to be slick and professional, with suspense and a sense of humor; it was youthful, naïve, and innocent. It was exactly what I was—it reflected my cares and concerns. People said, ‘What is this?’ It was a tremendous disappointment, and a kind of hinge in my life: from ‘Dark Star’ on is a saga of getting into the film industry. I’ve blocked out a lot of the details, because it was so painful. I had so much faith in what I had done. Now I know the truth. I didn’t listen to people; I didn’t believe them. For a year and a half, I was so depressed. I got an agent, but nothing happened. When you’re looking for work, your agent will tell you to ‘take a meeting and pitch an idea.’ I went to a lot of meetings, and it was like being on Mars. The fringes of Hollywood: hustlers who had a project but no money; gamblers. It was puzzling and frightening. They’d be very hostile. ‘Why are you here?’ they’d ask, after they’d invited me. Or they’d say, ‘I’d like to make a movie with you,’ but the undercurrent was ‘You’ll never make it, because you’re not good enough or big enough.’ I’d get anxiety when an agent told me to ‘take a meeting.’ It all comes down to selling, and I’m the worst salesman in the world. It was my first encounter with the realities. I thought, I have created this work—don’t I have some credibility? I had no credibility. I never got a job. Most people treated me in a straight and businesslike way, but to me it was cold and brutal. I was living in an apartment off Beachwood Drive, in central Hollywood. No money. My father was sending checks; he came right through. ‘Dark Star’ was the end of youth for me. It didn’t work. I had to find some way to cope with reality and do what I wanted to do.”
Carpenter began writing screenplays, one of which ultimately became “Eyes of Laura Mars,” a Columbia picture directed by Irvin Kershner. Then a retired stock-market investor from Philadelphia came along who wanted to invest in a film. “He was a gutsy guy,” Carpenter says, “and he put up cash. He trusted me, and said he was not going to interfere. I took his money and made ‘Assault on Precinct 13.’ I wrote, directed, and edited it, and did the music. I used my friends I had worked with before. One of them, Tommy Wallace, had been a friend of mine since the fourth grade in Bowling Green, and had worked on ‘Dark Star.’ He played organ and sang in Kaleidoscope, and later was art director and production designer and film editor on ‘Halloween.’ A kind of family started to take shape. ‘Assault’ was a modern-day Western. I couldn’t afford to do a real Western, with Indians attacking a fort, so I had a youth gang attacking a police station. It had what is sort of a theme in my films—people trapped in a place. The picture was not realistic; it was very stylized. There were a lot of homages and allusions to Howard Hawks, my favorite director. It’s wrong to copy, and I don’t do that, but I put in subtle references, and I get some sort of pleasure out of it. It warms my heart. I often write my old friends’ names into scripts. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a way of using them in a film again. ‘Assault’ didn’t do a thing. The majors weren’t interested in it; it was a strange movie, and they didn’t know how to sell it. It was the second time I’d had a film make no money. I tried not to get too upset or take it too personally, but no one wanted me as a director. I went back to writing. Writing was opening a door to another door to another door—it was keeping me alive and paying the bills. But I was programmed for failure. A year later, I was in the commissary at Warner Brothers, where I’d just finished directing my first TV movie, when a stranger came up and told me that ‘Assault’ was breaking attendance records in England. The news and reviews filtered back, and there began to be interest in me as a director. But it all came so long after I’d made the picture; I’d got used to the idea the film was going to fail. There’s a disconnection between what you’ve put in creatively and the final response of the audience. Very strange.
“Then came ‘Halloween.’ When success comes, it’s a frenzy—wham! People start running; they get a fever. I remember a producer saying to me, ‘You’re hot!’ Everybody’s overreacting. I haven’t changed that much; the only difference is that the film has made money. This is how you’re judged here.”
Near the intersection of Loma Vista and Doheny Road (and the Runaway Vehicle gravel pit), there is a stone gatehouse and an imposing wrought-iron gate. A brick driveway winds uphill across an enormous lawn, and past stables off to the left, to a huge stone mansion. From the summit, at night, one can see the lights of Los Angeles below—green, yellow, red, blue—shimmer and tremble to the horizon: a wondrous, futuristic, incomprehensible electronic marvel that glitters, shivers, changes constantly. The stars above the great stone house are, by comparison, pallid and irrelevant. At eight-thirty, guests are moving through the courtyard into the front hall of the house. This is Greystone, which was once a home of the Doheny family (oil; Teapot Dome), set in the middle of a four-hundred-acre ranch. Now the estate is a public park, and the house is rented to the American Film Institute.
Seth Pinsker, a tall, bright, cheerful twenty-four-year-old from New York City, is standing inside the front door, greeting people he has invited to see a film he has directed as a member of the Conservatory Program. There are three showings tonight—it is a half-hour movie—and the guests flow in and out, up and down the broad marble staircase, overlapping; Pinsker welcomes the arrivals and accepts the congratulations of those who are leaving. “I went to U.S.C. film school for a while,” Pinsker says during a lull in handshakes. “Then I came here, because I thought it would be more free. It’s great to learn here—you do your own thing, and the faculty is terrific.”
Pinsker’s film is called “Strange Fruit” and is based on the Lillian Smith novel. It seems thoroughly professional in every respect. It is a smooth, strong, and moving film, shot in color on location with professional actors. “I couldn’t have made a film like this anywhere else,” Pinsker says. “A.F.I, gave us ten thousand dollars to start, and two thousand more to finish the sound. Everything from food to raw film stock was donated by friends, but I still had to put in a lot of my own money—I don’t want to say how much. Since the first screening, earlier this week, I’ve had agents knocking on my door.”
Pinsker’s mother is the head of an advertising agency in New York; his father is in the clothing business. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Collegiate School. When he was eleven, he made an 8-mm. documentary about a neighborhood shoe-repair man; his second film—about teen-agers and love—won some awards and was distributed around the country. “Then I made a cinéma-vérité film about my grandparents,” says Pinsker. “It was called ‘See No Evil.’ My grandmother was living with a man—they were both in their eighties—and it was about their difficulties in relating to each other.” Pinsker went on from Collegiate School to Brown. “I was supposed to be a math whiz, but I lost interest in math and graduated with a degree in theatre arts, and after graduation I went to U.S.C. for my master’s.”
He breaks off to say goodbye to three acquaintances who are leaving; they tell him how good the film is, and why. Then they go out into the night. Pinsker goes on, “When I was younger, I wanted to do quiet, personal films. I saw Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ when I was very young, and I came out of the theatre totally changed. But when I got out here my scope enlarged, and I loved it. This is the best film industry in the world; the talent and the facilities are incredible.” He pauses. “I don’t know. I may come to hate it. I used to look down on Hollywood, but the films they make here are the ones that excite me now. I want to move people; if I didn’t move people, I’d feel I was wasting my time. Right now, I feel pretty confident. Most of the people who made good films here at A.F.I. are now working in the industry. It’s awfully hard to break in, but this film is my calling card. Either people will want to hire me or they’ll decide ‘He’s a schmuck.’” Pinsker grins, and goes to shake some more hands. (“Strange Fruit” was later nominated for an Academy Award.)
In real-estate ads, a four-bedroom house at Malibu will list for two million dollars, but the small houses packed shoulder to shoulder along Pacific Coast Highway here, facing the sea, look like Sheepshead Bay. Restaurant windows project out over the surf, and at night floodlights are turned on, so that diners may watch the rollers come in toward them. On the other side of the highway, dirt cliffs rise vertically and uncertainly hundreds of feet. There is a lot of traffic, and cars swerve to avoid the droppings of dirt and rock that lie on the pavement. In a shopping center set back in a small valley, Carpenter and his wife, Adrienne Barbeau—a short, pretty, perceptive young actress with curly black hair, who has been a very successful performer (she did six years in the TV series “Maude,” among other things)—are having lunch with an acquaintance on a shady restaurant terrace. Carpenter is talking about his work. “I have a great feeling for physical movies. I don’t like intellectual films. I love suspense. I want the audience to laugh and cry—an emotional response. The medium is emotional—not so much like a book or a play, really, as like music. I write a scene the way a composer writes a score. Then I take the baton and I conduct it, as director. I’m the happiest I can ever be when I’m on the set, directing. This is where I want to be. Shooting is always fun. It’s a challenging and intense experience. You’re really being tested. I’ve come to like actors in the last year or so; I like people more now than I used to. I’ve come out of a shell. I like to have everybody on the set know what’s going on. I’m easygoing, and I like to be not too pretentious. I don’t like a lot of conflict. Let’s do the job, let’s have fun at it, and let’s go home.”
“You take it much too seriously for your own good most of the time,” Adrienne remarks.
Carpenter nods. “I care about what I do. I care a lot. And, truly, it’s work—very, very hard work. It’s a little too hard. I look at other high-tension professions and I understand them. I think there was less pressure in the old days of the big studios, when they made lots of films every year. Today, every single movie has to be a hit. You have to do event after event after event. It’s draining. Maybe it’s the nature of the business, but what makes the difference in a film isn’t always your own talent and creativity. A film is a collaborative effort, with a lot of elements. It’s mysterious. You might find that the casting is wrong, or that there’s a problem in the story, or you might suddenly just lose energy on the set. For me, the high point emotionally is when the film is over, it’s in the can; you finish it, make it as good as you’re able to, and then it’s like sending a child you’ve fathered out into the world. You wait to see how he’s going to do.
“Part of me wants to make films within the studio system. When I was in film school, the studio seemed to be the best way for me to express my fantasy. The kind of films that are made in this particular place are the films most people see and are affected by. But you never know when the ground’s going to fall out from under you here. There’s very little honor here—maybe anywhere. People lie, cheat, and steal. All the clichés about Hollywood have a basis in truth. It can be very disgusting. But I live by my decision to make Hollywood films. I just don’t want to become one of them. The part of Hollywood that’s politics, glamour, and hustle—that’s not movies. I have a single purpose in my life: to make some movies, and to make them in my own way. I was ready to give up everything for this. I don’t fail—or when I do, it’s very difficult for me. The answer seems to be to make films with my ‘family’—the friends I’ve worked with before. I’m just beginning to realize how much of what I do goes right back to Kentucky. I’m still doing what that kid was doing. I wonder about myself. I’m not well rounded. All I want to do is go back to the log cabin, but do it for a living, and be successful. The catch is, you become successful here on numbers, not talent. ‘Halloween’ makes money: suddenly I get a lot of offers.”
Carpenter pauses. “It’s wonderful to get good reviews and make money, but I look at it on a big scale, and I figure there will be a lot of ups and downs. I don’t go crazy when it’s great, and I don’t go crazy when it’s not. I try to keep a balance.”
Adrienne laughs. “I think the operative word is ‘try,’” she says.
From Sunset Boulevard, the roads of Laurel Canyon go twisting up into the Hollywood hills like kids’ footpaths. Porsches and Rollses and Mercedeses whip around their blind S-curves and through dirt ravines and jungle vegetation, and peel off onto side streets that ascend to various peaks. These narrow streets are stacked with houses—the roof of one flush with the floor of its neighbor—half buried in bushes and trees. The area has the random planning of a slum in Hong Kong or Caracas, but it is a neighborhood of some opulence, and in the diminutive yards are blue swimming pools; the front wheels of parked Cadillacs are jammed against the curbs, lest they roll away down the hill. In one of these houses, with one of these Cadillacs and one of these blue pools, lives John Carpenter. In late afternoon, he is standing by the desk in his small study, his shoes off. On the desk are a typewriter, lots of papers and notes, and an income-tax form, shoved to one side. Near his feet on the floor are two thick copies of a script he has written, with Debra Hill, and hopes to direct for Avco Embassy—“The Fog.” From where he stands, Carpenter can look out the window and across his yard and small swimming pool to the San Gabriel Mountains, twenty miles to the northeast—huge, wrinkled like elephant hide, and dusted with snow. (The mountains seem very distant; it never snows in L.A.) A few moments earlier, Carpenter and Adrienne watched a short promotion on TV for “Elvis,” a three-hour special that Carpenter directed and that will be on ABC the following week. Now the phone rings.
It is an important moment for Carpenter. On the other end of the line is an executive, a woman, at Avco Embassy Pictures. The Avco people have previously agreed to put up all the money for “The Fog”—if they like the script that Carpenter has written and submitted. Now they have read it, and the executive has called to tell Carpenter what they think. Carpenter listens, moving this way and that, as she talks.
“I hadn’t thought of that before,” he says into the phone. “Let me examine it over the weekend. . . . You mean, why would a fourteen-year-old be up at midnight? . . . I was going to have packs around, as if they were camping. . . . I think it will come out to be a PG. I’m not going to show any specific violence, or anything like that. . . . The lighthouse is going to be hard to find. We’re going to build the top of it. . . . I’m really delighted you like it. . . . Okeydokey. . . . Bye-bye.”
He hangs up, beaming. He turns and calls excitedly to Adrienne in the next room. “You know what she said?” he shouts. “She said, ‘Let’s just go make the film’!”♦
