neither/nor 48
not too much in the way of heroes. And also, death was not… What we saw as death didn’t have much meaning. When somebody’s hit in a movie they die in a very graceful way, usually. But when they’re hit in real life, it’s just… the life goes out of them, and they fall any which way. A complete lack of grace, complete lack of meaning, complete lack of anything. It’s immediate ashes to ashes. So the experience was very sobering. Te other really scary thing was when we shot with Kemper in Vacaville. He knew all the Schrader films. He was 6’4” and weighed about 300 pounds. He was enormously strong. He was famous because he had his own recording booth to read books for the blind there at Vacaville. He was there when Charlie Manson was there. I remember we asked him what Manson was like; he said, “Manson doesn’t talk to anybody, he only talks to the lizards.” [laughs] I was interviewing him, but Leonard was there with us. And the Co-Ed Killer was a fan of Taxi Driver, which Leonard had co-written, uncredited. We stopped at one moment to take a break, and Leonard was left alone with him—we were interviewing him in his cell. And Leonard later told me that when we all stepped out to get some coffee or whatever, and it was just Leonard left alone there with him, and he said to Leonard, “I’ve killed you.” And Leonard immediately tensed up. And he continued, “I’ve killed everybody I’ve ever met. In my mind.”
So, making those arrangements to do that kind of shooting took a lot of work, a lot of coordination. We would load our crew into a six-place single-engine plane and fly to wherever we were going, and that gave us a lot of mobility; we could shoot at the Grand Canyon, we could shoot at Lake Powell, which turned out to be better than the Grand Canyon… Te Grand Canyon you can only shoot in the morning and evening; the Canyon doesn’t look very photogenic in the middle of the day,
mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
but Lake Powell for some reason looks good all day long. And every time we shot was preceded by a scouting trip, or we went in a plane that could fly low and slow to simulate helicopter flight, so we could line up our shots. So it wasn’t as unplanned as it might appear.
So with that mobility were you able to follow stories as they came up?
SR: Let me give you an example: We were looking for an ending to the film. I was in Paris on business. John Lennon was shot. And Mata wanted me back in America right away, to New York, to shoot at the John Lennon memorial. So I flew back. We rounded up a savvy New York camera guy who could get us through the police lines. And we were the only people shooting on film at the Lennon memorial in Central Park.
Te only thing in the film that I’m really unhappy about is the only thing in the film that we faked. We had footage of policemen who had surrounded a man with a gun on a freeway in San Diego. We had only MOS footage, without sound. Te police claimed that they were yelling at him, “Drop the gun.” But we didn’t have that. So I went into the studio, hired a voice actor, and dubbed it. And to this day when I see the film and hear the policeman say “Drop the gun,” I believe that I’m actually seeing it that way, as it happened, even though I know that I directed that sound and added it at a studio in Burbank. But everything else in the film was absolutely true, no exaggerations, no faking, no nothing.
Which makes it quite unique among these compilation films that were lumped together under the category of Shockumentary.
SR: It wasn’t hokey in any way, really. It’s not a sleazy movie. It was all real. Te sound guy that we had, Courtney Goodin—who also was an inventor, he
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