I Was Bigfoot’s Shemp (Part 3)
By John Oak Dalton • Jul 2nd, 2007 • Category: Articles, Filmmaking
Don’t miss Part One or Part Two of John Oak Dalton’s adventures in b-moviedom.
SATURDAY MAY 31, 2003: THE AFTERGLOW
With two of the main actors, Bob and Hunter, making their way home, the Polonia Brothers, Jon McBride, and I began to watch all of the footage, seeing the scenes we had shot over the last few days unfold before our eyes. Everything was there (a blessing, as John Polonia had an alarming tendency to leave the lens cap on), and not only that, it looked great. Over several hours I began to see in my mind how the film would piece together, and I thought, even if it gets panned from coast to coast and in every dusty corner of the Internet, I am still proud of what we did.
That evening I was treated to a great dinner at a nice restaurant with the extended Polonia family. There I saw a poster for the local “Rattlesnake Festival,” where denizens swarm the hills to capture and bring back rattlers to the baseball diamond in the center of town. Prizes are awarded for the biggest capture, and anti-venom and pork fritters are easily on hand. For myself, I would then apply a well-swung axe; but the fun-loving Pennsylvanians turn the snakes loose again. For the first time I thought I understood what in their formative years made the Polonia Brothers what they are today.
SUNDAY JUNE 1, 2003: PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW
My last day in Wellsboro was full of odds and ends. I got to see John Polonia’s massive VHS and DVD collection, chockablock full of everything from rare Italian giallo to undistributed backyard slasher flicks to films I’ve never heard of from Russia and England to Mexico and Japan, a wall of horror titles that would make a fanboy weep and a Blockbuster rep quake in fear. I got to peruse the basement lair of Mark Polonia, where boxes of grisly props, alien hands and buggle-eyed masks and scorched spaceship models and gore-spattered swords, are packed in next to an AV nerd’s dream-stash of edit controllers and cameras and film equipment. I saw the row of PBE master tapes, NIGHTCRAWLER and FEEDERS 2 and SAURIANS and others, nestled in orderly rows in a basement, but already having a life of their own, in video stores and department stores and homes all around the world. I looked at them and wondered, would one day AMONG US be picked off a shelf in a store in a town in a country on this great spinning earth?
Later both Polonias and Jon McBride accompanied me to the airport. As I was checking my bags in the quiet terminal, the attendant inclined his head and said, “Your family can come up here and talk to you while we’re doing this if you want.” I began to muse on the idea…was this group of people more Partridge Family or Manson Family? Or was it something else, a family of artists and dreamers and technicians and of course filmmakers but above all movie lovers, who rose up from rich Middle American earth and followed their vision despite what those who cluttered the coasts might tell them was possible, embracing fans and ignoring foes while striding ever forward?
I was still thinking about it when the plane rose up into the sky.
2004: DAYS OF WINE AND PIRAHNAS
The Polonias had caught me in an unguarded moment when I carried that heavy tripod across the rickety bridge near “The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania,” and I agreed to help them with rewrites over their next two features, a couple of relative quickies about a piranha attack and one about a killer rabbit. The killer rabbit script came to me a mixture of handwritten pages and typed inserts from an old script called PSYCHO CLOWN, bolted together with brass screws. The piranha script turned out to be a bit of a mishmash after production problems and long delays, but a little Polonia Brothers magic smoothed them out into enjoyable little packages, and both were on the shelf and ready for consumption.
But everyone involved were ready to gird their loins and launch another epic project. Some unwise historical collectors, unaware of how much mud and (fake) blood splashed around at a b-movie shoot, had offered access to period uniforms and weapons from World War II. This sparked the Polonia Brothers on to a burst of ideas, and somehow, once more, I was sucked into their vortex, on a supernatural war movie tentatively titled HELLSHOCK.
MONDAY MAY 23, 2005: BACK TO THE FRONT
Today we hauled equipment under two barbed-wire fences to state land behind the Polonia Brothers ancestral home in Ansonia, Pennsylvania. Mark Polonia insisted it was okay but seemed to be keeping his eyes peeled for rangers anyway. This was my first glimpse of D.P. Matt Smith and his low-riding purple van laden with dolly tracks, a jib, and every kind of light setup imaginable, including the low-budget filmmaker’s friend the Chinese lantern. People who might scornfully say that the Polonia’s movies were all shot with handheld camcorders would come to a reckoning on this day. The authentic costumes and weapons add much, though everyone’s shoulders are hunched against the eventual FBI raid, or the appearance of nervous hunters. John Polonia voices his fears that he might have gotten on some unwanted lists by buying Nazi armbands and costumes from casually-perused websites.
Lots of tramping in the woods, with a fog machine providing some spookiness. Mark gave the actors a faceful of leafblower to simulate a “cloud of souls” passing over the troops, and it was amusing to watch people’s skin flapping back against their skulls. I came to realize that World War II filmmaking is a lot like the various descriptions of actual battle–long periods of boredom and inactivity spiked with sudden bursts of madness and desperation.
Later we retired to a gravel pit, where I stood down at the bottom and allowed Brian Berry and Bob Dennis to lob mock grenades down on me, and I retrieved them take after take. Angling for that “Grenade Wrangler” credit.
Even later we went to John Polonia’s basement for some underground stuff, a location seen in more features than any Hollywood backlot. Mark and John decided to scrub a scene where the soldiers accidentally shoot a cat who jumps out in one of those patented scares oft seen in such films. John voiced his concern for showing cruelty to animals. Meanwhile, behind him, Jon McBride is pointing out to curious castmembers where he was standing where he was whipped with hooked chains in HOUSE THAT SCREAMED 2, and where Ken VanSant took the machete to the skull in PETER ROTTENTAIL.
Our ragged band returned home late, after about a 14 hour day.
TUESDAY MAY 24, 2005: OUR FIRST DEADLY SIN
Today was the first day of shooting at the historic church in little Germania, Pennsylvania. What man of the cloth allowed the demonic twins to have unlimited access to this sacred spot remains a mystery. Though I remembered the ban on cussing at the church from earlier in the pre-production phase, when I had to rewrite the script to take out the bad words. If the Polonia Brothers and I were going to hell, it wasn’t going to be for cussing in a church.
I continued to be amazed that the good people of the small towns of Pennsylvania–Wellsboro, Ansonia, Germania, and so on–don’t rise up with pitchforks and torches and drive the Polonia Brothers across state lines into the wilds of upstate New York. As a for instance, we couldn’t get cell service, so Ken VanSant (Lt. Bonham) walked down to a pay phone in front of a mom and pop store. This was unfortunately after the scene where he gets wounded and thus had some bloody bandages on. Apparently this caused a bit of a stir in downtown Germania, a stalwart hunting and fishing community where such injuries are perhaps not uncommon but certainly not welcome. Though later Dave Fife (as a German prisoner) walked into the local honkytonk with a leaking neck wound and a Nazi uniform and apparently didn’t cause a stir. But this is what happens when Hollywood comes to town.
WEDNESDAY MAY 25, 2005: REALITY SEEPS BACK IN
A journalist, with a photog in tow, show up at the set from Harrisburg, the state capitol. They had been nosing around the night before, but stayed through until morning to see the cherry picker shots for the open and close of the feature. But the cherry picker never arrived, and everyone seemed disappointed except the unflappable Mark Polonia, (who has seen more b-movie disasters than Irwin Allen) who simply said, “We’ll move on.” I had been keeping my eye on the photog, hoping he would get a picture of me in full William Goldman mode, nodding in approval at the Polonias from a discreet location, instead of a shot of me going to pick up the pizzas or picking up all the trash in the church. I really didn’t expect to be interviewed, so I was surprised when the journalist climbed into my van as I headed down the road to our lodgings to boil some hot dogs for the cast and crew’s lunch.
I was chatting along, trying not to talk out of my butt too much, when the reporter asked me if I was interested in going to Hollywood. It seemed like a dizzying anomaly for a moment. I was in our rented rooms above the local general store, boiling hot dogs. That morning, while I was drinking coffee with the locals downstairs, I learned a group of them had chased a mother bear and her three cubs down the main street of town the day before. It was not the William Goldman moment I had hoped for.
But I was reminded of a shelf of free paperbacks in the store below, alongside the video rentals and the Polaroids of hunting adventures and the fresh coffee. I had found a Philip K. Dick book I wanted, a welcome find, and left a paperback I had brought. This brought me more happiness than almost anything else all week. I remembered an interview I had given a while back where I recalled that as a child I had never thought about writing the New York Times bestseller but instead thought about my Great American Novel being on a dusty shelf in some out-of-the-way place, and a kid finding it and reading it and thinking: I could do better. I think about my movie experiences the same way. I have always been drawn to the underground, the unheard voices, the photocopied ‘zines, the local bands with their homemade cassettes, and so on. Let my movies exist, not under the searchlights of Hollywood, but on a shelf in Germania, Pennsylvania, and let some disenfranchised youth from our great Flyover Country between the two coasts find it for rent, and be inspired to go on the same long, crazy trip I have taken.
That great, beautiful country sang by my windows as I took my leave of this latest cinematic adventure and pointed my car towards home.
Portions of this article first appeared, in slightly different form, at b-independent. For John Oak Dalton’s latest b-movie adventures, visit his blog!
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John Oak Dalton is a Community Television Station Manager by day, and a DIY acolyte by night. In the 80s he made Super-8 movies and his own basement mix tapes. In the 90s he hosted a cable-access show and made his own zines and minicomics. In the 21st Century he began working with grassroots video and microcinema and writing b-movies, and has more than a dozen projects on the shelf, on screen, in development, or in production.
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