In 2003 I wrote an article for b-independent.com about visiting the set of AMONG US, the first of my screenplays I'd seen turned into a movie and my first work with director Mark Polonia. Happily, AMONG US has had some (hairy) legs and is still tromping around b-movie bins and streaming sites here and there. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for Pennsylvania again, to make another Bigfoot movie with Mark, our seventh collaboration.
AMONG US WAR JOURNAL
by John Oak Dalton
SUMMER 2001: A JOURNEY OF A MILLION MILES
A co-worker brought me a movie he said I “had to watch.” It was the
Polonia Brothers’ space epic BLOOD RED PLANET. I was mesmerized. Past
the motorcycle helmet space masks and the water bottle oxygen tanks and
the gravel pit moonscape and the hand-puppet monsters I saw a great
sense of energy and fun and love for the genre. I looked up Polonia
Brothers Entertainment on the Internet, quickly found Mark Polonia, and
thought I would drop him a line. At that point it never occurred to me
that I might end up sleeping on his couch.
DECEMBER 2002: FROM THE POLONIA MIND TO MY HAND
Mark Polonia and I had been writing back and forth and talking on the
phone for some time, discussing projects and trying to get a few off the
ground. Mark asked me if I would be interested in writing a Bigfoot
movie based on an outline he and his brother John had worked up. I told
him I wasn’t sure what I could do with a Bigfoot movie but that I would
think about it. After I hung up with Mark the phone rang again a short
time later. It was PBE actor, director, and general co-conspirator Jon
McBride. He said, “You’re not going to write that Bigfoot movie, are
you?”
JANUARY 2003: PEN AND SWORD IN ACCORD
My first draft of AMONG US was finished and sent to the Polonia Brothers
with some trepidation. Deciding that there was no way to do a Bigfoot
movie with a straight face, I channeled those weird stone-faced
quasi-documentaries of the 1970s, Sunn Classics like IN SEARCH OF NOAH’S
ARK and CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, that used to scare the skin off me as a
pre-teen at broken-down Midwestern drive-ins. In my script, B-movie
director Billy D’Amato (a Polonia Bros writing pseudonym), who has made a
modest career churning out fare like BRIDE OF BIGFOOT and BIGFOOT HOUSE
PARTY, ends up squaring off against the real thing at a remote cabin
deep in the Pennsylvania woods, with an ex-lover and a weak-stomached
cryptozoologist in tow. Fortunately the Polonia Brothers enjoyed the
offbeat approach of my script and were eager to move forward. Now if it
would only stop snowing.
SPRING 2003: “AND SO IT BEGINS”
Casting, FX by Brett Piper (PSYCLOPS, DRAINIAC), and some second unit
and b-roll shots are done throughout the spring, in LA and Pennsylvania,
with the changing seasons and locations hopefully giving the project an
expansive feel. The bulk of the shooting was locked down for the end
of May in Pennsylvania, and I agreed to come out and be on the set and
try to pitch in. Little did I know then that “pitching in” would
include everything from gathering wood to cooking food to putting on an
ape suit to feeding my own script into a campfire. I was blissfully
unaware of what was to come.
WEDNESDAY MAY 28: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
I touched down in beautiful Elmira, New York at 11 p.m., and was quickly
whisked off to Wellsboro, Pennsylvania by the Polonia Brothers and Jon
McBride. They had been shooting all day all over Wellsboro with Bob
Dennis and Hunter Austin, playing the leads Billy D’Amato and Jennifer
Dempsey. Early in the morning we were going to leave for the cabin that
is the centerpiece for the latter third of the movie and spend several
days and nights living and shooting there, so everyone was ready to call
it a night. But I did get a quick tour through Wellsboro, recognizing
tons of locations from PBE films like FEEDERS, NIGHT THIRST, and others.
At midnight we pulled up to the house that I last saw in THE HOUSE
THAT SCREAMED 2. I had the surreal feeling that the whole town was a
giant Polonia Brothers backlot, and I briefly wondered why the humble
people of Wellsboro had not risen up with pitchforks and torches and
driven these diabolical twins into the river. A short time later I was
lying on Mark’s couch and asleep.
THURSDAY MAY 29: “SURVIVOR: WELLSBORO”
For the first time I heard words that I wrote coming out of an actor’s
mouth, and it’s a weird feeling...from my laptop in the cornfields of
rural Indiana to an L.A. actresses’ mouth in a van bumping down a road
in Pennsylvania. It is basically a funny little scene where Billy
D’Amato is driving to the cabin and talking about the differences
between shooting documentaries and shooting porno movies. At the end
Mark Polonia turns to me as I’m crouching out of the camera line in the
back seat and says, “Well, you’ve seen your first scene comes to life!”
and John Polonia cheerfully chimes in with, “We haven’t even started
raping the script yet!”
Before long we arrive at the location, a cabin miles down a dirt road
deep inside “the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania,” with a raging river at
the front and cliffs at our backs. The whole cast and crew piles out,
soon to be joined by rats, snakes, centipedes, and whatever chewed on
the legs of the outdoor chairs. Mark Polonia intoned, “They’re more
afraid of you than you are of them,” a line that would be repeated often
throughout the day and deep into the night. However, I also learned
from his wife that he once chased a bear away from the trash with
nothing to defend himself but his “tighty whities,” so there you go.
John Polonia gleefully told me that what is politely called “production
assistant” in credits is more aptly named “prison b***h” on the set. But
it was fun to be involved during the shoot, doing a little of
everything from setting up lights to taping “behind the scenes” footage
with my Digital 8 camera to shooting promotional stills to grilling hot
dogs for lunch and washing up afterwards. At one point I was carrying
the heavy tripod and camera across a rickety footbridge that would be
considered too unbelievable to use in an “Indiana Jones” movie, with
John Polonia right behind goading me forward, and I thought two
things…one, at least if someone is rolling tape they’ll have something
to sell to FACES OF DEATH; and second, I wonder what the WGA would think
about all of this?
Later in the evening we set up for a major scene where the principals
are sitting around a campfire and start revealing little bits of their
backstories about what motivates them to find evidence of Bigfoot.
Unfortunately, wet wood and five inept males could not get the fire
started. Finally Bob Dennis took me aside and said apologetically, “If
this offends you we don’t have to do it, but I brought an extra copy of
the script…” I looked around at the fading “magic hour” and said,
“light it up.” A moment later I was watching Bob feed the script into
the fire and thinking, “Well, I know writers say actors send their
scripts down in flames, but I bet William Goldman has never seen this.”
When we got going on the campfire scene, my heart started racing. With
the night falling, the cabin lit in the background, the flickering light
from the fire illuminating the actors, I looked through the viewfinder
and realized for the first time that the movie was going to look
fantastic. Then the next scene shot was a little away from the fire,
the heart-to-heart between Billy and Jennifer, where some of their
unexpressed feelings bubble back to the surface. I got a chill when it
suddenly dawned on me that the acting was great too. At the end of the
scene, Hunter had tears in her eyes, and the crew spontaneously clapped.
John Polonia observed, “It was the first time someone cried making a
Polonia Brothers movie, instead of just watching one.”
(Flash forward to a few days later, when I told Mark Polonia that I
could remember the exact moment when I thought the movie would be great.
He looked on, sleepy but sage, and said, “Be prepared for bad reviews
anyway.”)
Fourteen hours after we loaded in gear at Mark Polonia’s house we were
ready to wrap for the day. Bob Dennis, the Polonias, and I retired to
an upstairs bedroom to look at dailies. When Hunter Austin joined us,
she let out a blood-curdling scream. Although we assumed she was
looking at the screen, she was actually watching a snake slither out of
the rafters and dangle ominously over Bob’s head. More girly screaming
ensued as two more snakes made an appearance, perhaps coaxed out by the
warm movie lights we had used earlier. The sad part is that the girly
screaming was evenly distributed among the participants, only one of
which was a girl. It was loud enough that it actually woke up Jon
McBride, who throughout the shoot showed the ability to drop onto any
flat surface at a moment’s notice and instantly fall asleep. The
fastest set breakdown in cinematic history had us bouncing back up the
road to Mark Polonia’s house just a few minutes later. Quoth Mark
Polonia, “I was there the day the courage of men failed.”
There is an ironically prophetic line in the script where Jennifer
queries “counselor’s cabin at Crystal Lake or Leatherface’s living
room?” Suffice to say, it did not take long for the Polonia Brothers to
abandon their idea of the location as the center of a series called
“Hell Camp.” John Polonia’s replacement idea: “Hell Yacht.”
FRIDAY MAY 30: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S SHEMP”
The whole cast and crew returned to the cabin in the light of morning,
shaken but determined to go on. The entire day would be spent shooting
the last few minutes of the movie where the Bigfoot creatures lay siege
to the cabin. It never occurred to me to ask that with Hunter, Bob,
Jon, and John Polonia in the film, and with Mark behind the camera, who
might be called upon to put on the Bigfoot suit.
First there would be many intense scenes of screaming, running, smashing
things, swinging meat cleavers and hot dog forks and rolling pins,
running up and down the stairs, and so on. Basically, everyone drew on
their real-life experiences of the night before. And the real, palpable
fear on everyone’s faces when shooting the scenes where the cast
barricades themselves in the bedroom (aka “the snake room”) only gave
the sequence some extra spice.
Late in the afternoon we returned to Mark Polonia’s house, and were
treated to a great home-cooked meal put together by the Polonia
Brothers’ wives, giving a much-needed second wind. Then it was off to
the home of the Polonia parents, a friendly couple whose easygoing
manner made it hard to believe that they spawned the twins who made
SPLATTER FARM, to shoot vehicle interiors for a climactic attack on
Billy’s van. Although Jon McBride had “shemped” Bigfoot in the
publicity stills shot earlier in the day and John Polonia shemped
Bigfoot in the b-roll, it fell upon my shoulders to put on the heavy,
hairy suit and throw myself repeatedly against the windows and doors of
the van while screams and shouts issued forth. It didn’t take long to
realize that there were no airholes around the nose and mouth, but I
tried to bravely soldier forth, ripping off the mask in between takes to
gasp blissful gulps of air and wipe the sweat from my brow. My head
spun only once.
I peeled off the suit, leaving it uninhabitable for other mortals, and
stepped away from it smelling like the inside of a flat tire. Then I
looked around and realized that principal photography was over. Like
the film’s antagonist, the shoot was hairy, noisy, smelly, and left a
swath of destruction in its wake. But as the cast and crew
congratulated each other and said their good-byes, it was a good
feeling.
SATURDAY MAY 31: THE AFTERGLOW
With two of the main actors, Bob and Hunter, making their way home, the
Polonia Brothers, Jon McBride, and I began to watch all of the footage,
seeing the scenes we had shot over the last few days unfold before our
eyes. Everything was there (a blessing, as John Polonia had an alarming
tendency to leave the lens cap on), and not only that, it looked great.
Over several hours I began to see in my mind how the film would piece
together, and I thought, even if it gets panned from coast to coast and
in every dusty corner of the Internet, I am still proud of what we did.
That evening I was treated to a great dinner at a nice restaurant with
the extended Polonia family. There I saw a poster for the local
“Rattlesnake Festival,” where denizens swarm the hills to capture and
bring back rattlers to the baseball diamond in the center of town.
Prizes are awarded for the biggest capture, and anti-venom and pork
fritters are easily on hand. For myself, I would then apply a
well-swung axe; but the fun-loving Pennsylvanians turn the snakes loose
again. For the first time I thought I understood what in their
formative years made the Polonia Brothers what they are today.
SUNDAY JUNE 1: PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW
My last day in Wellsboro was full of odds and ends. I got to see John
Polonia’s massive VHS and DVD collection, chockablock full of everything
from rare Italian giallo to undistributed backyard slasher flicks to
films I’ve never heard of from Russia and England to Mexico and Japan, a
wall of horror titles that would make a fanboy weep and a Blockbuster
rep quake in fear. I got to peruse the basement lair of Mark Polonia,
where boxes of grisly props, alien hands and buggle-eyed masks and
scorched spaceship models and gore-spattered swords, are packed in next
to an AV nerd’s dream-stash of edit controllers and cameras and film
equipment. I saw the row of PBE master tapes, NIGHTCRAWLER and FEEDERS 2
and SAURIANS and others, nestled in orderly rows in a basement, but
already having a life of their own, in video stores and department
stores and homes all around the world. I looked at them and wondered,
would one day AMONG US be picked off a shelf in a store in a town in a
country on this great spinning earth?
Later both Polonias and Jon McBride accompanied me to the airport. As I
was checking my bags in the quiet terminal, the attendant inclined his
head and said, “Your family can come up here and talk to you while we’re
doing this if you want.” I began to muse on the idea…was this group of
people more Partridge Family or Manson Family? Or was it something
else, a family of artists and dreamers and technicians and of course
filmmakers but above all movie lovers, who rose up from rich Middle
American earth and followed their vision despite what those who
cluttered the coasts might tell them was possible, embracing fans and
ignoring foes while striding ever forward?
I was still thinking about it when the plane rose up into the sky.
John Oak Dalton
June 2003
I have some news coming soon, and I promise my loyal e-newsletter people will get to read it first. Until then, thanks for being there.
