It’s a wonderful technique, so effective. Let’s travel forward a bit and talk about Blade II, truly my favorite of the series. When you are working, is it through del Toro’s now infamous notes?
Steve Johnson: Well, what Guillermo likes to do is work with people he trusts and respects, and he has a brainstorming session with everyone. So everyone goes off and does their own thing, and when it all comes back it’s just a hodgepodge of ideas. But for the most part, Guillermo’s notes and ideas are the deciding factor. You’ll have to read about it in my book, but it’s not in the first few volumes.
Let’s talk about the latest edition of Rubberhead that you are crowdfunding now. In the first part of the collection you were extremely candid and honest about only your life, but the hardships and successes of your work in the industry as well. Would you say you’re even more honest in this part of your story?
Steve Johnson: Well, I already laid myself on the chopping block for Volume One. I told about the time I had had enough of the business and fled to Costa Rica, and part of the reason I wanted to break this down into five volumes was for each to tell its own story. I felt I had to answer those huge, burning craters of questions with the first book.
Volume Two focuses more on the glory days of the industry, and the early eighties. It goes back to mullets, fast cars, Big Trouble In Little China, Fright Night, the work on Predator before it all changed. There’s a huge nostalgia for that kind of thing right now. It’s really funny like in Volume One. In fact, quite a few people felt it was humorous. (Laughs) There’s a ghost that weaves itself in and out in Volume Two. Volume One had sort of these hallucinatory experiences, but they were all true.
With the ghost story, I was working on Fright Night and worked with a guy named Rob Cantrell. We were best buddies, really good friends, and then he really f***ed up one day on Fright Night. He went out and bought a bunch of coke the night before and didn’t show up the next day, which put me in a really precarious position. So, after a twenty-four shooting day, at three in the morning he’s rapping like the raven at the chamber door. And I told him he wasn’t fired, but he had to prove himself on the production. I mean, we were all doing drugs at the time, but the job always came first. I told him that we had work on Poltergeist 2 in a couple of weeks.
He went home and blew his head off. It was so mind blowing for me at the time because I was twenty-two. Everyone told me that it wasn’t my fault, but put that on the shoulders of a twenty-two year old kid. I was haunted by that, and there were nights I couldn’t even spend the night in my apartment, and I either drove around or got a hotel room. But to talk about him in a brutally honest way sort of became a writer’s device to weave stories together.
It’s his ghost haunting me, which it did, sort of like Jack in American Werewolf. I did see him under a tarp leaving the 20th Century lot, or holding a sign on the side of the road that said something like You Killed Me. There’s a lot of intensity in the book, but there’s a ton of humor as well.
The Big Trouble In Little China section is hysterical. And there’s even a story that has nothing to do with the industry where I got cosmetic surgery. I had work on my eyelids that went terribly awry. In fact, Mikey Hill, who should have won an Oscar for his work on The Shape of Water just read that chapter and you could hear his laughter all the way from the San Fernando Valley.
