AGAINST ALL ODDS MY STORY by CHUCK NORRIS & KEN ABRAHAM

Author:CHUCK NORRIS & KEN ABRAHAM
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Broadman & Holman Publishers
Published: 2010-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

Ted Post, who had directed Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force, was signed to direct Good Guys Wear Black. He decided that since I wasn't an experienced actor, I should be surrounded by professionals, including James Franciscus, Dana Andrews, Jim Backus, Lloyd Haynes, and Anne Archer. I was excited to have such a great cast, but at the same time I was more than a little intimidated.

Thankfully the producers also hired Jonathan Harris, a voice and drama coach, to help me with my lines. Jonathan had starred in the television series Lost in Space. A very proper man, who enunciated every word as though he were reciting Shakespeare, Jonathan worked with me eight hours a day for three weeks. He spent more time teaching me how to speak than he did helping me learn the script dialogue.

One day Jonathan came over to me, put his fingers in my mouth, and stretched it wide open. “Open your mouth, open your mouth!” he screamed.

“Jonathan, you're the only man in the world who could do that to me and get away with it,” I said when he finally let go.

“I know,” he said with a smile.

Even though I didn't always enunciate the way Jonathan desired, at least I learned all the dialogue in the screenplay, including an eight-page scene that called for me to debate the merits of the Vietnam War with James Franciscus. The shooting schedule called for this scene to take two days of filming. It was a very difficult scene for me because I had to sit through all of it without moving.

I asked Jonathan to talk to the director and make certain that the scene was filmed toward the end of the schedule, so I would have a chance to get comfortable in the role. Jonathan agreed.

When we started shooting, however, the schedule got turned upside down. James Franciscus had signed to do another film and would be with us for only two days. Consequently, the director decided to film my scene with James on the first day of shooting; worse yet, he demanded that the scene be shot in one day instead of two.

I had my lines memorized, but on the night before shooting, I was so nervous that I had trouble getting to sleep. The following morning, when we started filming the scene, I discovered, to my horror, that James had rewritten his lines in the script. I had memorized my speech and the cues that led into it. When he started saying things that weren't in the script, I had a terrible time trying to ad-lib and splice in my replies. Worse, I realized that his character's argument was making sense, and that I was not winning the debate as I was supposed to.

To add to my difficulties, the producers invited a reporter to interview me during the lunch hour. The reporter wrote that I was apprehensive and nervous on the first day of shooting. He was dead right!

We started filming at 7:00 AM and finished at 4:00 AM the following morning.

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