The Crack of Dawn #802

11/13/2025

Newsletter #802

The Crack of Dawn

When I was in the shower last night, I thought, “I hope Sheldon doesn’t take this wrong.” Let me be clear—I love Sheldon. Very few people in my life have been as nice and helpful to me as him. In my early formative years in Hollywood, he was like a big brother to me. I can never thank him enough.

Nevertheless, collaborating with him was impossible. He’s an extremely strong-willed guy, and once he has an idea he believes in, he cannot be swayed. As soon as he took over Bloodbath, he wasn’t interested in any of my ideas. I envisioned a gritty, low-budget, exploitation movie; he saw a big Hollywood, A-picture, which I thought was insane. I mean, really? The Marines versus the Manson Family? That’s not an A-picture. All of our script meetings became arguments, and there’s no winning an argument with Sheldon. He’s a Marine who never says die. He wasn’t writing a script; he storming the beach at Iwo Jima. He was writing the script without me and that was that. There was nothing I could do about it. After about a month of this angry madness, and not being a Marine, I gave up. Sheldon and I remained friends, but we couldn’t not collaborate.

Meanwhile, I was being evicted from my apartment. When I received the first Seven Day Notice to Quit, I panicked. I’ve only got seven days to find somewhere else to live? I didn’t have any money. Sheldon wouldn’t let me crash on his couch anymore because I had abused the privilege. This last time, after a month, he rightly kicked me out. That gave me the incentive to find this little shithole, from which I was now being evicted. I foolishly called my dad with the vague hope he might help me out. As a landlord himself, he quickly assured me that I still had about three months before they could actually evict me, since it took about three months to get a real Eviction Notice from the city. My father added, “You buy Seven Day Notices to Quit by the pad. They’re not real legal documents.” I said, “You wouldn’t want to loan me some money, would you?” My dad said flatly, “I don’t loan money. Besides, you don’t have any collateral.” I thanked him for his advice. Meanwhile, I got a new Notice to Quit every day in my mailbox. As I read them I thought, “Okay, I quit. Now I’m going back to my apartment.”

Perhaps I could’ve pushed it to three months, but it seemed like the wrong thing to do. I rationalized that one extra month was covered by my security deposit. The next two months would be stealing. Once again, my father’s advice had proven to be both worthless and unethical. After a month of constant Notices to Quit, plus getting the stink eye from the manager, I quit.

Luckily I didn’t own anything—except a backpack—so it was very easy to leave. This was the second time I was bailing out on of Hollywood. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. I’d go back to Detroit and make Super-8 movies with Bruce, Sam and Scott. While I was in Hollywood jerking off, they had been making movies. Yes, I did have an article published in the LA Weekly, for which I was paid actual money—$80 to be exact. The contract for the sale of the article was printed in small letters on the back of the check. By endorsing the check, I was signing the contract. I had also written a truly shitty script called, get this, Disco Dolls—it was, keep in mind, 1979 when disco was huge—which was based on a story by me and Sheldon. I guess that was really our first collaboration, although we never wrote anything down. We just kicked the idea around a number of times. We both knew it was a stupid idea, and probably not worth pursuing. I decided to write the script anyway. Sheldon didn’t care. So I wrote it myself, and it turned out really terrible. I knew it was crap while I was writing it. The script’s only virtue was that I finished it. Oddly, I typed it on onion skin paper.

A published article, and a shitty script; that was it.

No, that wasn’t it.

I’d come up with one good story idea—the Marines versus the Manson Family. In Hollywood parlance, it was a “High Concept” idea, meaning it could be told in one short sentence. In any case, it was good enough for Sheldon to take it. He didn’t really take it; he ran with it. In his own way I could see that he felt bad about the situation, but not that bad. He was writing the script and he didn’t need my help. He was inspired. Far be it from me to get in the way of that.

I packed my backpack, quit my apartment, then slept on Sheldon’s couch (where I had slept so many times before). In the morning, after breakfast, Sheldon drove me out to where I would begin my hitchhiking trip back to Detroit.

We drove east on I-10, through the vast, horrid outskirts of L.A., heading toward the desert. Sheldon had to arbitrarily stop somewhere and let me off. I said that he didn’t have to go too far, just outside the city limits. As Sheldon and I yacked and yacked about movies, I’d occasionally say, “This is a good spot, you can let me out here,” but he just kept driving. I did it again, saying, “Right here’s good,” but he didn’t stop. We went through the hot horrible towns of Pomona, then Ontario, then into Rancho Cucamunga, which is in the San Bernadino Desert. We were at least fifty or sixty miles from Hollywood when I finally said, “Okay, Sheldon, enough. Stop here. You’re not driving me to Detroit.”

Reticently, Sheldon pulled his little pickup truck over to the side of the road and stopped. We both got out. The vast barren desert, and a few crappy buildings. It was over 100-degrees. I put on my backpack. Sheldon looked honestly concerned, saying, “Are you gonna be all right? I feel bad about leaving you in the desert.” Since I’d already hitchhiked back and forth across the country a couple of times, I said, “I’ll be fine. Send me the script when it’s done.” We hugged, and he finally drove away. Pretty soon I got a ride.

I magically found myself back in my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house in Franklin, Michigan. In my absence, my parents had my bedroom painted. In the process, my movie posters had been taken down. Among the posters, I had an original (on heavy paper), 1962 poster of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, with an extreme close-up of Sue Lyon wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, licking a lollipop; plus, an original, 1957, The Harder They Fall poster. I asked my mom, “Where are my posters?” My mother said offhandedly, “I don’t know, the painters took them down.” I never saw them again.

Soon thereafter, I received a box in the mail. Within the box lurked an enormous tome—Sheldon’s 185-page, first draft of Bloodbath. Oh my God! It was the size of a phone book. I immediately sat down and read it. How Sheldon could have seen this serious, dramatic, painfully stilted, insanely verbose, film out of that initial silly idea, was beyond me. I hated everything about. I didn’t even like the names of the characters. He renamed Manson to Thanatos. Thanatos? I called him and told him in no uncertain terms exactly what I thought—it was bad in every possible way, including the character’s names, and it was both insanely and ridiculously too long. Scripts are 90-120-pages. This was the script for Lawrence of Arabia.

Sheldon got righteously mad. He’d put in a lot of work. I had no doubt that he did. Finally, I told him, “It’s my idea. I’m rewriting it.

He got really mad, but gave up pretty quickly. “Fine, you rewrite it.”

I thought, “Good. I’ll rewrite it.” The universe had given me back the one good story idea I’d ever had.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Sheldon turned into a scriptwriting machine. He began churning out several scripts a year. He was the only writer I met in twenty-five years in Hollywood who wrote as much, or more, than me. He was bloody determined to be a screenwriter and director, and he achieved both. However, it still took seven more years until his career took off with Bloodsport (1987). As far as Bloodbath was concerned, I don’t think he ever looked back. He had way too many stories of his own to write.

I, on the other hand, only had Bloodbath, and I hated the script. I had a completely different idea, and I was going to rewrite the shit out of it. What I was going to rewrite it into, I hadn’t yet figured out.

Luckily for me, that was when we all went down to Tennessee and made Evil Dead. For the next eleven weeks, I didn’t have a minute to think about Bloodbath, which was just as well.

However, the day we stopped shooting Evil Dead, in January of 1980, Bloodbath was my first order of business. This naturally leads me to my next collaboration.

End Part II.