"Some actors are terrible at being movie stars," says Bruce Campbell, the B-movie icon whose latest film, the horror comedy Bubba Ho-Tep, casts him as an aged but still potent Elvis Presley locked in mortal combat with an ancient Egyptian mummy-demon.
"They don’t go out. They don’t do photo spreads in their homes. You don’t see them at premieres or parties. You have no idea what their kids look like. Then there are other people who are at every premiere, every opening, every gym. They’re living the life, but they’re shitty actors, because they’re not really being actors. They’re being movie stars. Once in a while you find a guy who can do both, but it’s rare."
A skeptic might say Campbell is rationalizing. The 45-year-old actor, who spoke to New York Press via phone from the set of a new horror movie in Toronto, has been acting for over 25 years now, and has yet to reach the upper echelon of the business. He’s a character guy with leading-man looks–he jokingly titled his autobiography If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor–and he’s carved out a specialized niche, playing self-deprecating action heroes in genre projects that cost about as much as Tom Cruise’s hair.
He’s appeared on and directed Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess and other genre programs, and he’s directed some tv shows, including the now-defunct Pamela Anderson action show V.I.P. He’s identified with a couple of key roles: the stalwart, zombie-killing hero of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and the self-deprecating title character of the tv-western spoof Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which ran on Fox from 1993-94.
But in another sense, Campbell is being disingenuous. In a different universe, he is both an actor and a movie star.
His performances rarely get noticed in the mainstream press, but that’s to be expected. With few exceptions–an intensely dramatic two-parter on NBC’s Homicide; a supporting role as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s hardbitten newsroom pal in The Hudsucker Proxy–Campbell rarely appears in anything outwardly respectable. He started out in fright flicks and has returned to them time and again; horror is his blood and butter.
Campbell grew up in suburban Detroit, where he attended high school with future movie director Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan, Spider-Man). They met in 1975 doing a lame improv in a classroom; they were soon shooting and editing Super-8 horror movies and screening them for anyone who would buy a ticket. Even then, they thought like businessmen. Raimi stood at the back of the theaters and listened closely to the audience’s reaction; when the movie ended, he’d go back into the editing room and cut out any part of the movie during which people talked or went to get popcorn.
In 1979, Raimi, Campbell and future producing partner Rob Tapert scraped about $175,000 together from local investors and made The Evil Dead, a perverse and sadistic zombie picture more notable for its shock effects and spectacular camerawork than for any higher dramatic qualities. Released theatrically in 1983, it made a relative fortune, spawning two sequels (Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn and Army of Darkness) and setting Raimi and Campbell down the road toward professional success.
Too bad the road wasn’t paved. Campbell’s first movie after the second Evil Dead installment was an unmemorable slasher picture called "Maniac Cop."
"I was so excited," Campbell says. "I was finally in a non-Raimi movie. I was finally in the business. But as soon as it was over, I was broke again. I had to get work as a security guard. I also worked on a really crappy local soap that shot in Detroit. I got paid $35 a scene to shoot three scenes; I walked out of there with $105 in my pocket and thought, ‘Damn, this ain’t so bad.’"
Since then, Campbell’s career has looked like a waveform graph–a series of ups and downs, slowly trending upward.
"If you stay in the business long enough, the ups and downs aren’t so bad, because hopefully you’ve learned to manage your money. The big discovery you have to make is that it’s all relative. A million bucks doesn’t mean much if you’re a millionaire. A lot of people make the mistake of spending their first big paycheck–25 grand, 50 grand, a million bucks, whatever–because they’ve gone so long doing without, and they feel like they’ve got to make up for all that deprivation. That’s a huge mistake. I remember this one friend of mine, when he got his first big paycheck, refused to change his lifestyle at all. He stayed in the same little apartment. He bought a little sports car, but it was a Miata. He’s way ahead of the curve now."
Campbell is doing all right. If Chins Could Kill has become a minor classic among showbiz types–especially actors, who appreciate its hard-nosed advice and honest stories about Campbell’s misadventures in the screen trade.
"There’s way too much theoretical bullshit out there being fed to young actors, way too much misinformation leading the lemmings to jump off cliffs. I got an email from a guy saying, ‘Bruce, I never wanted to be an actor. Then I read your book, and after reading your book, I definitely don’t want to be an actor.’ That told me the book had done its job."
Campbell is working on a new book titled, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, a combination novel and advice manual in which his fictional alter ego travels the world to learn more about love and sex.
"Sometimes the character is me, and sometimes it’s me in disguise, but only if I’m on a secret mission," he explains, not all that helpfully. "It has nothing to with acting whatsoever. It’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride."
He has been divorced once and is now remarried. He has two teenage kids by his first wife. He lives in Oregon, in the woods. He recently survived a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The other guy crashed through his own windshield and landed on Campbell’s and was badly hurt, but Campbell walked away without a scratch.
Somebody up there likes him.
"Things are working for me," he says. "I’m sick of going to the gym. I have my distinguished grey in this new movie, and I’m playing a father. That works for me. I’m glad I decided to not think so much about the other stuff and just be an actor, because in the long run, it helps you with your career bell curve. Who cares who the director of photography is or how big the distributor is, or if you’ve got a small role in a big movie or a big role in a medium-sized movie? The only questions that matter are, ‘What is the part and does it suck or not?’"
In a fair world, Bubba Ho-Tep would be Campbell’s breakthrough. It’s the best performance I’ve seen him give and my favorite lead performance of the year so far. Written and directed by Don Coscarelli, who’s best known for the freakish, bloody Phantasm movies, it’s a B-picture par excellence. But it works on more than a midnight-movie level. It has a surprisingly emotional core and many valid things to say about Americans’ tendency to worship pop-culture icons like graven images.
Equal parts horror comedy and rueful character study, Bubba finds Elvis wasting away in a rural Texas nursing home–a deposed King who’s a prisoner in both body (he’s missing a hip and has a scary bump on the end of his penis) and spirit. The plot, such as it is, is sheer comic- book nonsense–something about a reawakened mummy who was buried without a name and thus cursed to be a soul-sucking beast of evil. The evil manifests itself in spooky apparitions (the mummy drifts through the hallway like a rotting ghost) and biblical plagues (flesh-eating scarab beetles the size of wingtip shoes). Of course there’s a bumper crop of Elvis-themed catchphrases, clearly designed to pander to Campbell’s fan base. ("Nobody fucks with the King!" and "TCB, baby!")
But Elvis himself is a real character, brought to life in a world-class performance by Campbell. He plays Elvis both as an old man and a sad remnant of a once-vital culture; an aging trickster who tried to cheat death by swapping identities with an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff. Elvis lived for decades under the impersonator’s name, but now he’s gotten old enough to realize that while one can delay death, one can never defeat it.
Coscarelli’s script is obsessed with long-gone potency and squandered potential. Elvis hates himself for becoming a prisoner of his fame, then fleeing it without regard for his family’s feelings. His possessions include a medicine bag that contains, among other things, a portrait of his daughter, Lisa Marie, whom he never really knew, and with whom he can now never reconnect with. While battling the evil that’s stealing the souls of nursing-home residents, Elvis befriends JFK (Ossie Davis). The former president’s room is filled with photographic mementos of his life and legend, including pictures of Jackie O. and a framed reproduction of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mug shot. Together, the men are pop-culture fathers who fear that they abandoned, or at least failed, their children.
"We weren’t there for our kids when they needed us, were we?" JFK asks Elvis, in one of many unexpectedly tender exchanges. Then he corrects himself: "I guess we were the best fathers we could be under the circumstances." The president and the King share a preoccupation with sex–and lost sexual opportunity. Elvis reawakens emotionally and physically when a bored nurse applies healing salve to his kingly scepter and it unexpectedly rises to life. Later, in a bold moment, the King, who otherwise treats his president with proper deference, asks what it was like to sleep with Marilyn Monroe.
JFK scowls at him. "That is classified information," he says. Then he adds, "But between you and me? Wwwww-wow!"
There’s another pop-culture legend in the old folks’ home, too–the Lone Ranger, identified here only as "Kemo Sabe," presumably for copyright reasons. In what might become the movie’s most enduring image, JFK and Elvis march into battle against the mummy in a longshot looking down the nursing-home corridor. Elvis is leaning on a walker; JFK rolls along beside him in a wheelchair.
"You’ve got JFK as an old man in a wheelchair and Elvis Presley, the stud of studs, as an old man whose hip is gone. He’s got cancer on his dick and he’s dying," Campbell says. "It’s a story about what happens when pop culture gets old."
Bubba Ho-Tep is based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, a Texan who’s a cult figure in his own right. He’s a switch-hitting genre ace who’s published science fiction, horror, crime thrillers and just about everything else; he’s also a martial arts expert, drive-in movie aficionado and self-described "Mojo Storyteller" who posts a new piece of short fiction on his website (joerlansdale.com) every couple of days. The script’s crazy-quilt quality preserves Lansdale’s smiley-faced, everywhere-at-once vibe.
Fans of sci-fi marginalia may also be reminded of Howard Waldrop, the pop-culture-obsessed author who wrote "A Dozen Tough Jobs," a retelling of the labors of Hercules set in the South, and "Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen," a Sherlock Holmes western with vampires. Which is to say that the movie has a grubby yet intellectually legitimate pedigree, yet it’s 180 degrees from pretentious. It makes its statements quietly, without stopping the show. Much of its substance is contained within Campbell’s fearless, intense, often moving performance, which is augmented in voiceover with monologues that could be stripped out and reformatted as a one-man play titled Last Tango with Elvis.
In a grotesque, touching scene, Elvis disgustedly applies salve to his prick, then collapses on his bed and turns on the tv, which happens to be showing an Elvis film festival. "Shitty pictures," he mutters, watching the clip reel, "every last one of them."
Then he thinks to himself, "Here I was complaining about loss of pride and how life had treated me, and I realized I never had any pride, and much of how life had treated me had been good. The bulk of the bad was my own damn fault. I should have fired Colonel Parker about the time I got into pictures. Old fart had been a shark and a fool and I was an even bigger fool for following him. If only I had treated Priscilla right. I could have told my daughter I loved her. Always the questions, never the answers. Always the hopes, never the fulfillments."
Even if Bubba Ho-Tep does not find crossover success, it’s guaranteed an audience of Campbell fans–a core group of science fiction, horror and fantasy buffs who will see (or rent) anything he appears in. These are the folks who attend conventions armed with publicity photos and Sharpies. There’s one in every family.
Campbell satisfies their curiosity with his detailed website (bruce-campbell.com), which keeps tabs on everything he’s ever done and has yet to do. (There’s even an updated page providing showtimes and channels for any Campbell performance airing on broadcast or cable tv.)
"I went to one convention with an actress who’d never been to one before," Campbell says. "She never went to another. It freaked her out so bad… She was saying, ‘They’re looking at me! They’re taking my picture, they’re asking about my personal life! Oh my God!’
"She hated fishbowl life. She was so disconnected from the reality of the business that she couldn’t understand that when you do something in a movie, people may like it, and they may like it so much that they’re willing to show up at a forum and try to meet you, and there’s a good chance some of them will not be exactly like your neighbors.
"It takes a heightened interest to be willing to get into a car with six other fans and drive 200 miles to a Frightvision convention in Cleveland and pile into the same tiny motel room and then muster up the guts to walk up to an actor you like and try to meet them. It takes a more dedicated personality than most people can understand."
Which isn’t to say that fans don’t freak Campbell out, too.
"I did a documentary about fans called Fanalysis. I decided to turn the video camera around and put it in their face. They found it very disturbing. You watch them squirm on their seat. It gave them a sense of what it’s like to be an actor in that kind of situation. Just like an actor, a fan that’s being interviewed has no idea what part of the interview will be used. For all they know, I could make them look like buffoons by taking their comments out of context.
"But it’s nothing to worry about. I’d rather have people going to a Xena convention than a gun show to buy semiautomatic weapons they don’t need. Some of the fans are really tough-looking, but deep down, they’re terrified. Some of them can’t even look me in the eye. I sometimes thought it was disinterest, but I sort of came to think it was probably just nervousness.
"I don’t want them to be nervous. They’re my bosses. When you get down to it, I don’t really give that much of a shit about directors or producers. Fans should realize that. They should realize that they’re the bosses of this industry, and not support any movie that doesn’t deserve to be supported. That includes any movie described in newspaper blurbs as ‘a triumph of the human spirit’ and almost any Hollywood film released between the months of May and August."
Bubba Ho-Tep is not a May-to-August movie.
"Ever major distributor turned this movie down," Campbell says. "Every single one. And I’m not surprised. This is not an easy movie to market. It’s not the kind of movie where you can just put Mel Gibson on the poster holding a gun, staring into the camera and trying to look pensive, and be done with it. It probably sent the marketing guys running in the other direction.
"But that bodes well for it… It needs to find the Evil Dead audience, the midnight audience. I’ve seen it at a dozen midnight movies by now, and I can point to the places where the reactions are gonna be. The movie’s working. People get it."
