Halloween 3 - “Where the Hell is Michael Myers?”: A definitive history of horror’s most misunderstood film by Tommy Wallace

Author:Tommy Wallace [Wallace, Tommy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2023-02-14T08:00:00+00:00

One last thing about Preproduction:

Always, as it is with shooting, you’ll wish you had more days of it. The common wisdom:

Extra days of prep are more valuable than extra days of shooting, because if you have time in prep to think things through, you’ll almost always come up with more clever and more efficient solutions, which often will require less actual shooting time.

ECOMIA AND MEA CULPA

Halloween 3 owes part of its ultimate success to personnel inherited from earlier John Carpenter movies, especially Halloween and The Fog. A lot of “the family” joined up, but it was my decision not to bring along two very important veterans of those early movies.

The Art Department on Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween and The Fog consisted of me, Randy Moore and Craig Stearns, with occasional help from some USC buddies, as well as the woman who eventually became my first ex-wife Nancy Kyes, formerly Nancy Loomis (Annie from H1 & H2).

That’s a country music joke; Nancy is my only ex-wife, still a friend and still the mother of our two great kids. In addition to her day job, Nancy not only did Costumes, but often helped us wrangle props, collect leaves (Halloween) or any of the 450 other odd jobs cropping up on a movie every day. That kind of team play defines a successful indy show. Hell, Jamie Lee often lugged camera cases. It’s how you make a film on the cheap; wear six hats, share the load.

Anyway, the Art Department on those films was, at its core, a three-man operation. Not quite knowing the official boundaries of a bona fide Production Designer, I assumed a lot of other roles, especially on Halloween: I scouted locations, wrangled the bad-guy car, figured out the mask and the jump suit, and on and on, including the usual Designer tasks of making sure sets and locations were prepped, primed and ready to shoot.

Randy came from Ohio University, like me, but we didn’t meet until California. His background was in Architecture, but he took to the Graphic Design program as enthusiastically as I did, with a special love of, and talent for, lettering and typography. By Halloween he had become our construction master, chief draftsman, graphics wizard, handiest handyman, mechanic, tombstone carver and dozens of other tasks. He even hand-drew the H1 head titles.

Craig came in through a different door, having apprenticed with Charles and Ray Eames, two of the foremost industrial and furniture designers of the 20th Century. Craig was our titular Property Master, but in practice was Set Decorator, Man Thinking Ahead, chief fixer and procurement specialist, leaf-wrangler, pumpkin-finder and the list goes on.

Long story short, the three of us provided the manpower of a dozen, cut corners like crazy and got away with it, turning pennies into dollars on screen. I’ll never forget how good they were, on Assault and Halloween but again, even better, on The Fog.

Yet when H3 came along, I did not hand over the Art Department to them. I had my reasons, of course.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.