Just Make It Scary with Bruce Campbell

There's a unique hierarchy of celebrity within the realm of cult movie fans. Hollywood heavy hitters like Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, or Ron Howard are treated with relative indifference, while such subversive low-budget luminaries as John Carpenter, Julie Strain, or Clint Howard are held as examples of cinema royalty. However, perhaps no B-Movie personality has reached the level of fame and adoration within the genre as one Mr. Bruce Campbell.

Bruce emerged as a horror movie icon in director Sam Raimi's first feature, Evil Dead (1981). Audiences quickly latched onto Bruce's portrayal of the zombie-fighting lunkhead Ash, spawning enough interest for two sequels, Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1993). The Evil Dead movies have proven to have so much continuing cache with cult movie fans that there are currently multiple toy lines, t-shirts, comic books, and video games all based on the series, all featuring Bruce's grimacing, chainsaw-wielding face.

Between Evil Dead movies, Bruce developed a reputation as one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood, starring in a variety of low-budget genre fare (Maniac Cop, Moontrap, Mindwarp) and taking smaller roles in larger Hollywood projects (The Hudsucker Proxy, Congo, Escape from LA). In 1993, Bruce played the lead in the short-lived Fox cowboy show, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and later won a fan-following as the recurring character Autolycus on the Hercules and Xena TV series. 2001 saw the publication of Bruce's autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, a humorous look-back at his career so far.

But for a guy who has already published his memoirs, Bruce Campbell still has more than his share of irons in the fire. In June, he released his second book, a novel titled Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, and September 10 at 9:00 PM, ET/PT will see the premiere of The Man with the Screaming Brain, a made-for-the-Sci Fi Channel movie, that marks Bruce's feature film directorial debut.

The Deadbolt caught up with Bruce during his recent promotional tour for both projects. As Bruce explains, "We're trying to do a two-for-one deal this time around, where people can get a book, see a movie, whatever they want to do." (The full tour schedule can be found here.)

Aside from directing Screaming Brain, Bruce also stars in the feature, which he co-wrote with his writing partner, David Goodman. According to Bruce, "The kernel of the idea was given to [David Goodman] in a rowboat in 1986. And we've sort of been diddling with it ever since and trying to make it on and off really over all this time. Sci-Fi Channel got involved with some German tax money and away we go." However, Bruce admits that finally getting a greenlight for the long-gestating project wasn't as easy as it sounds. "We pitched it to everybody. There's a whole DVD extra where my partner and I get in front of a chalkboard and we list in the eighties, the nineties, and beyond who we took the movie to to get it made."

Bruce's website describes The Man with the Screaming Brain as "a story of greed, betrayal and revenge in the former Eastern European block. William Cole, wealthy industrialist, goes looking for a tax shelter in the wrong part of the world and winds up the guinea pig for a mad scientist, having his brain merged with that of Yegor, a former KGD operative. The two couldn't be more different, but they share one thing - both were killed by the same woman."

Throughout its development, the screenplay went through a number of significant revisions, including completely rewriting the script for Bulgarian locations after the producers realized how much cheaper it would be to film in Eastern Europe. "I didn't want to fake Miami USA for, you know, having shot in Bulgaria. So I rewrote it for Bulgaria and convinced the Sci-Fi Channel to let me do that. Because, otherwise, what are you going to do - have the gypsies play Latinos? It doesn't work. In the low-budget world, all I needed for the story was a fish-out-of-water, sort of culturally-different thing anyway, so that was fine."

Though Bruce found shooting in Bulgaria difficult due to the often non-existent infrastructure, he remains cheerfully pragmatic about the concessions that independent filmmakers are frequently forced to endure. For example, "98% of [Screaming Brain] was set at night. Now the movie is 100% set at day. So that's a big concession. They don't want to pay for extra wardrobe, so instead of two story days, you make the movie take place over one day, so nobody changes anything. In the low-budget world, you're constantly giving crap up."

Bruce maintains that, despite the Sci-Fi Channel's involvement, he shot Screaming Brain as a feature film, drawing on his past experience directing episodes of the Hercules and Xena TV series and the independent documentary Fanalysis. He does acknowledge that coming from an acting background has definitely strengthened his directing ability. "I'll see if an actor's struggling and I'll know it more than some other director. But in the same sense, if you know why they're struggling, you're either going to help them or slap them in the face. So I'm more aware of what actors need, but I'm also more aware of what actors try to get away with. I'm a pretty good watchdog."

Continued