Revenge of the Nerd by Curtis Armstrong

Author:Curtis Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1984

It was 1984 and we were in our third grueling month of production of Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear, a film so complex and challenging it took five months to shoot, and so bad it destroyed Auel’s epic Neanderthal franchise at a single stroke. The book was an immense, exhaustively researched novel, following the adventures of a Cro-Magnon orphan, Ayla (played as an adult by Daryl Hannah), who is taken in by a clan of the fading Neanderthals and raised as one of their own.

Aside from Hannah, the film starred Pamela Reed, James Remar, John Doolittle, Thomas G. Waites and a supporting cast of fifteen others chosen because of a general similarity in body type and coloring.

My audition for Clan happened immediately after returning to Los Angeles following Revenge of the Nerds. As in the case of Nerds, the nature of this picture pretty much precluded a traditional reading: screenwriter John Sayles had written the script in colloquial English (his script was dropped before we started filming), but there weren’t enough lines for most of the characters to attempt that kind of audition.

So I went to the Producer Sales Organization building on Little Santa Monica Boulevard one day to have a meeting with director Michael Chapman. Chapman had never directed before but he was already a legendary cinematographer for his work on films with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

I was shown into a completely empty office and found Chapman sitting on the floor in the corner. He asked me to sit down so I sat down in the corner with him. He picked up my picture and resume from a pile in front of him.

“Hmm,” he said, after studying it for a while. “You’ve done a lot of theater.”

I assured him that I had, indeed, done a lot of theater. I pointed out, though, that I had done a couple of movies as well.

“Yeah, Risky Business!” he said. “Who directed that?”

“Paul Brickman,” I said. “He also did the screenplay…”

“Must’ve missed that one.”

There was a brief pause. Looking again at the resume, he suddenly brightened.

“Revenge of the Nerds! Is that out?”

“No, not yet…”

“I love that title!!” Chapman enthused. “So what is it, like kind of a Mark David Chapman thing?”

I thought I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.

“Mark David…?”

“Yeah!” he said, excitedly. “The guy who shot Lennon. That kind of thing?”

“Ahhh, no,” I said. “No, nothing like that. It’s more like … a comedy, really. About nerds.”

Chapman’s face fell.

“Oh, I was hoping it was about that. You know, nerdy guy killing someone famous for revenge.”

“No, no. Just about regular nerds.”

“Chapman was kind of a nerd,” Chapman said, sulkily. “Well, that’s too bad. It should’ve been about that.”

A silence fell on the room as the two of us sat there on the floor, reflecting: Chapman, I assume, about the tragedy of squandered opportunities, I about how weird it was that I was having this conversation about Mark David Chapman with a guy named Michael Chapman.

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