Robert Englund's new autobiography - "Hollywood Monster"

[august]

This just came out back in October, and I skimmed through it. Nothing shocking or scandalous, just neat memories and reminiscences that are similar to those of every other "working" actor - they get the bug as a kid, do stage work, try to get any paying gig possible, and occasionally luck into something that's a popular success. And work with plenty of other familiar names and faces along the way.

As a 13-year old, he got involved in a local San Fernando Valley children's theatre called the Teenage Drama Workshop mainly as a way to meet girls, but ended up getting cast in every production. The daughter of a friend of talk-show host Steve Allen was in a production of Pinocchio in which Englund played the title role:

After our...opening night performance, Mr. Allen came backstage to pay his respects....then eventually called out "Okay, where's Pinocchio?

I shyly raised my hand. "Over here."

He said "Come with me," then took me by the elbow, pulled me back behind the scenery, and said "Listen, fella, you're funny as hell. You're special. Keep it up."
...

That sort of thing doesn't happen any more. I'm not seeing David Letterman wander backstage at a junior high school production....seek out (a) kid... and tell him he's doing great work.

Fast forward to his 20's, and he's doing stage work at the Rochester, MI Meadow Brook Theatre and the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, and decides to go back to California and try to get into movies, after seeing Corman and Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha on tv and realizing that half of the cast and crew were his classmaste from Cal State.

His first "real" audition?

Buster and Billie, starring Jan-Michael Vincent, who was one of Hollywood's true rising stars at the time, having come off of the hit Charles Bronson movie The Mechanic. He was being groomed as the next James Dean/Steve McQueen..... I got (the role) beating out Gary Busey. (Gary was young and calm then; if I'd taken a part from him at any point after, say, 1983, who knows what would have happened?) My salary: about $5000. Not exactly Freddy Krueger money, but at the time that paycheck was d*** welcome. {that would be probably about $20 k today}
....

Our female lead, Pamela Sue Martin, was one of the most gorgeous creatures in creatio: porcelain skin, a willowy body, and large expressive eyes. That she was talented made her that much more desirable.
.....

One night, Jan-Michael Vincent had a craving for Cuervo Gold, so he stole one of the film's 1940's-era prop cars and hauled $&# across the county line to the nearest package-liquor store, justifying his behavior by saying "This is what my character would do." That sounded good to me, so I went along for the wild ride, which took us right across the local college football field. ....Talk about Method acting.
.....

Time Magazine said "Buster and Billie contains some good acting, especially by a boy named Robert Englund, who plays Buster's best friend" - and its success helped me get a number of presigious auditions, most notably one for the role of Telly Savalas's sidekick in the series Kojak.
....

I auditioned for...The Last Detail.... I was in the running for the part of the young sailor that Jack (Nicholson) and his navy buddy were escorting to the brig..... The role went to Randy Quaid - an actor I admire and who did a brilliant job in the film - but losng it still haunts me. A few years later, a gentleman wandered over to me in a movie theatre lobby and told me how much he liked my work in Buster and Billie and Stay Hungry. This was Darryl Ponicsan, the guy who wrote both the novel and the screenplay for The Last Detail. All I could think of was Why weren't you at one of my auditions?!

Then he does an A film w/ Burt Reynolds, Catherine Deneuve and Ernest Borgnine called Hustle, and when he shoots his pistol in a fight scene, "Burt's toupee flapped in the breeze from the discharge - thank God it didn't blow off completely." Burt ends up telling him not to worry, and adds "when we do it again, I want you to get vicious and psychotic. This is my big death scene. The nastier you are, the more the audience will care about me." Englund adds that he's killed plenty of people on screen, but Burt was his first movie star.

Then he did Stay Hungry w/ Jeff Bridges, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sally Field.

Working w/ Sally Field was a joy. Not only was she a fine actress but she was cute; and who would have guessed that the Flying Nun had such a hot sexy little body. Sally and I used to ride from the hotel to the set.....every morning, without fail...Sally would ask me to hold her coffee while she tuned the radio to her favorite local station, and then she'd sing along with d*** near everything. When some actors want to get into the zone, they meditate or do breathing exercises. When Sally wanted to get into the zone, she belted out "Sugar, Sugar."

He becomes buddies with Mark Hamill:

He introduced me to Monty Python, as well as a bunch of little known sci-fi and horror movies. Mark was a serious horror fanatic, complete with a subscription to Famous Monsters magazine. He was a die-hard fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and he loved his Heineken. Mark clued me in to quality tv, and introduced me to the delights of watching old Marx Bothers movies in the middle of the afternoon.
...........

My agent sent me to read for the part of the surfer in Apocalypse Now ...They took one look at me and decided I was too old.... "But," one of the casting people suggested, "you might want to poke your head into the door across the hall. They're working on something you might be right for." And that something was Star Wars. But again my age was a factor; I was too young to play Han Solo.
.....

After Mark came home from filming Star Wars, he entertained Jan and me with stories about how privileged he felt to work with Alec Guiness, how funny Carrie Fisher was, what an adventure it was to shoot in the Tunisian desert..... As a science fiction fanboy himself, Mark was one of the few people in the world who, early on, predicted that Star Wars was going to be an international smash.

A few years later he auditioned for the role of Bobby on Taxi, and they asked him to read for Latka too, whom they describe as being from a country of unknown origin. He looks over the script and asks:

"So what do you guys want here, an Andy Kaufman imitation?" They collectively shrugged and asked "Who?" I don't think they knew who Andy Kaufman was. I gave it my best shot. Next thing I knew, Andy had the part. Me and my big mouth.

He also writes about meeting the young James Cameron who was production designer for a low-budget Roger Corman movie he was in called Galaxy of Terror.

During the shoot, a rumor started going around that Roger had rented out the set to a German watch company for a commercial shoot, and they paid him enough to make back the entire budget of Galaxy of Terror and then some. We never found out if that was true, but if it wasn't, it should've been, because that is Roger Corman in a nutshell.

Cameron dressed the set for a corridor "using only milk crates and styrofoam take-out containers that began their lives as the home of a McDonald's Big Mac. "

The next year he shot a low-budget film in the Philippines, and while the stars and director had rooms on a nearby army base,

...we co-starring types were bivouacked at a brothel off-base. The rooms at our cathouse were spartan...each room was furnished with a simple bed, a chair, a lizard on the wall, a portable black-and-white tv, and a prostitute. And you couldn't refuse. She was part of the deal. You get a room, you get a whore.

In '83 he did a play with George Wendt, who "had replaced John Belushi at Second City back in Chicago....during (the play's) run, George auditioned for ...Cheers. When he was told the part of Norm was his for the taking, he was on the fence between accepting that role or another pilot... When, over a couple of beers, he asked me my opinion, I said 'You know what? I loved Ted Danson in that movie The Onion Field. I think you oughta do that Cheers show.' The rest is television history."

When he ends up getitng cast in V, he talks about what a big budget it had for a tv project:

...if Roger (Corman) ever got V money, he'd have used it to make 28 films and build a new studio, and he'd still have enough money left over to spend a month at a chateau in the south of France.