Written By
Ted Nicolaou
During the Making of Subspecies
September – December 1990
NOV 26 — Mon — I come downstairs for coffee and see Anders alone at a table. I sit, he extends his hand and says, “Peace?” We shake and a bit of the tension swirling in my brain evaporates. Everybody’s going crazy here, everyone’s drinking too much wine, the situation’s volatile to begin with, so the explosions happen and pass quickly, and I’m learning to let them roll off my back.
We meet Laura, Michelle, and Keith in the lobby and trek over to the Brutalist Intercontinental Hotel Pan Am office for our showdown with Ion. Ion arrives and goes in to talk with his friend, the Chief of the office. Meanwhile Laura and Michelle confirm their reservations for the 8th. Keith’s ticket is economy class, not business as he’s been promised. Ion swears he can’t deliver the business class ticket today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, but Keith has been promised the ticket today (and for weeks now). He’s furious, and says he’s not working till it’s resolved. Anders’ ticket is non-negotiable, even though he was promised in LA that he could change it to route himself home through Copenhagen to take care of some personal business before returning to LA. He threatens not to work until that problem is resolved. My ticket, which is supposed to be business class is economy. Ion swears he can’t change it immediately, but will do it within a few days. I still have my business class ticket which I received in LA, but Ion insists we hand the originals over to him so he can exchange them for the Buftea-bought tickets on Romanian airline Tarom, which Ion will then change into Pan Am tickets, since no one wants to ride on the Communist-era buckets-of-bolts Tarom planes. I flew Tarom once on my initial scouting mission to Bucharest, and I swore never again.
Ion and Anders stay at the Pan AM office to work on his ticket. I walk back to the hotel with Keith, who’s so fed up with the whole situation he wants to leave this week. I offer to buy his ticket with my card if Ion doesn’t get it worked out. But Keith goes to his room and calls his father, who’s on the verge of calling the State Department and having Keith airlifted out of here. But if Keith refuses to work, he could be sued, so his father advises him to work today, and if the ticket isn’t resolved by Thursday, he’ll buy a ticket and get Keith out of here.
We have two days left for Michael Watson. If we don’t work today, there’s no way to finish what’s left with him before he flies home on Wednesday.
I head to the studio at noon to see what’s up. The Sleeping Chamber set, which was promised to be ready by noon is not even remotely ready to shoot. The crew has been there since 11, waiting.
Keith and Anders show up about 2, and begin the 3 hour makeup routine. The plan is to shoot the final scenes between Michael and Laura first while Anders is in makeup, then when Anders is ready, we’ll finish the sword fight.
But even under the best of circumstances, I fear there’s no way to shoot the originally scripted 3 pages of dialogue between Michael and Laura in the Sleeping Chamber, the sword fight that carries on from the throne room to the Sleeping Chamber, and the sword fight that we still haven’t finished in the Throne Room, all in this one day. This is the moment of truth I’ve hoped wouldn’t come. I’ve wracked my brain for weeks trying to come up with a way to simplify the ending in case we ran out of time.
As originally scripted the fight begins in the Throne Room, then Stefan and Michele run up the stairs to the Sleeping Chamber, lock themselves in, there’s some dialogue, Michele offers her blood to Stefan to energize him. He drinks her blood, she becomes a vampire, Radu and Lillian break down the door, and they all fight — then the fight returns to the Throne Room for the final action. Throne Room/Sleeping Chamber/Throne Room — with the Popeye the Sailor Man moment where Michele offers her blood like spinach to Stefan; I have a sudden inspiration that’s so simple I should’ve thought of it much sooner. Let the entire fight play out in the Throne Room. Instead of breaking the sword fight into three short scenes, we could use the same choreography to make one long fight. It would eliminate the Popeye/spinach thing, which I’ve always thought was a goofy interruption in the middle of the climax.
This change would make the day possible. It would eliminate 2 1/2 pages of dialogue and some fight action in the Sleeping Chamber. For the resolution of Michele becoming a vampire by Stefan’s bite, we’ll have to change two beats of action already shot. In the pre-fight scene in which Radu has Michele in bed and is about to suck her blood before Stefan’s eyes, which we shot so that just as his teeth descend on her neck, Karl enters and interrupts the action, we now have to see Radu’s teeth pierce her throat and Radu sucking her blood. One big closeup will solve that problem. And one other shot near the resolution will have to be re-shot with puncture marks on Michele’s neck.
And in the sword fight scene, which we’ve barely scratched the surface of anyway, we have to get Michele (Laura) off the stairway behind Stefan to her fight with Lillian under the chandelier, early on in the sequence. With these few changes, I think we can fix the ending without doing any damage to the story or the material already shot, and perhaps, additionally, create a more sombre ending for the film.
Anyway, there’s not much choice. Otherwise we won’t finish the film. It’s 3:30, and Michael still hasn’t arrived. The crew is grumbling about waiting for the Americans —as if we haven’t waited for them a few times.
Another problem for the day -- actor Angus Scrimm, the star of PHANTASM, who’s been cast to play the Vampire King Vladislas, father to Radu and Stefan, didn’t arrive in Bucharest on Saturday as scheduled. He arrived on Sunday instead -- but due to the fog in Bucharest, his flight was diverted to Timisoara, a city in the north, an 8 hour drive away. It’s still foggy today, so he’s stuck in Timisoara, under guard in a hotel, since there’s no customs facility there. If he can’t get to Bucharest tomorrow, production asks me, how will we shoot the scene between the King and Stefan on Michael’s last day? I tell them we have enough problems to solve just to get through today, and after that we’ll figure out tomorrow.
I explain the new ending to Vlad, Pusa the script supervisor, Relu the occasional AD, Laura, and when he finally shows up, to Michael. I ask Michael to help improvise some dialogue in the final scene where Michele, bitten by Radu, fears she will become a malignant vampire like him, and begs Stefan to finish the job and make her more like him, a vampire with a human heart. Michael gets excited about the challenge and we rough out the dialogue. He and Laura rehearse, she improvises additional dialogue, and we refine it until the scene works pretty well.
Leaving Michael to hurry through makeup I head down to the stage to prepare to shoot. Thirty minutes later, Michael’s still not down, so I send Carmen up to fetch him. She returns with a look of horror on her face and tells me there’s a problem upstairs. Broken chairs. Shattered glass. Anders and Michael in a drunken rampage. Aw for fuck’s sake. I hurry up to see what the hell’s going on now.
STILL MORE TO COME. . .
Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying the journal, please take a moment to hit the “like” button, tell your friends, and come back for more. I promise - the worst is yet to come.
Ted Nicolaou
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