Hail to the Chin Read online

  In the episode, a massive ocean storm capsizes a ship carrying Xena, Gabrielle, Autolycus and various guest characters. To simulate the underwater aspect of the story, a submerged set was constructed inside a giant water tank. Life imitates art and the tank cracked open without warning, spilling more than five thousand gallons of water in a virtual ocean storm of our own.

  Water flows in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. Perhaps that’s why Angela ran toward the rupturing tank. I shoved her in the opposite direction and my “gallant heroism” was hailed. The truth is, Angela probably would have gotten more dampened than drowned, but I milked her praise for all it was worth.

  The Jack production benefited from a combined twelve seasons of Herc and Xena – notably in executing fight scenes. Countless brawls and scuffles had been staged over the course of both shows, but I was never satisfied with the way they had been filmed. The procedure of the day, one that I bristled against, was to shoot the fights all in one uninterrupted piece, just like the stunt guys did. That’s fine if you have months to rehearse a complicated fight, but on a TV schedule you’re learning the fight the morning of the scene, so there isn’t time for all the moves to sink in. I felt that the longer fight takes lasted, the sloppier and more dangerous they became.

  When Jack rolled around, we worked out a very straightforward formula for shooting fight sequences that I still use today. We broke each fight into a series of smaller, easier to execute, beats. Each chunk, now shorter, could be shot with more safety and confidence and didn’t take any more time to complete.

  To their credit, Herc and Xena established a rule that “actors don’t fight other actors.” That may seem both obvious and absurd at the same time, but it was actually a very safe and successful guideline. Stunt guys are not known for their acting prowess and actors are not known for their flawless stunt work.

  The master and wide shots for the fight scenes of Jack of All Trades were all staged with stunt people. In closer shots, if the Daring Dragoon was the focus the French soldier fighting him was a stuntman and vice versa. We ultimately got everything down to a nice, efficient science. No actors or stuntmen were injured during the season.

  RIDING INTO THE SUNSET … AGAIN

  Six years had passed since I headlined The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., my first “one-season wonder.” Jack of All Trades was to be my second. At the end of the day, Jack was a woulda, coulda, shoulda scenario. There were a lot of good elements in place, but the show was hamstrung by its own self-imposed limitations. Crappy time slots didn’t help, either.

  When you’re a young actor, your reaction to a failure is egocentric: It’s me. It’s my fault. They didn’t like me. I guess I didn’t try hard enough …

  Getting canceled after such a short burst can make an actor think that people only want you as a little spice and sizzle – not as the whole meal. But, after you’ve been around a while, you realize that it’s not all about you – you’re just a little cog in a larger set of wheels.

  Whatever the reason, I was faced with my second failure in a row as a leading man of a TV series. The saving grace for me was feeling confident that on both Jack and Brisco really good work was done by all participants. Both shows have “aged” well in the eyes of the public and have since become “Cult TV” – a somehow fitting end.

  3

  GNOME, SWEET GNOME

  Ida and I bought a very funky house, knowing that we could always “fix it up.” True vision must come from complete blindness, because we had no idea what we were getting into.

  For starters, the house, if you could call it that, was essentially the shape of a Quonset hut, but not all aboveground – it was about half-submerged, with eighteen inches of dirt on the roof.

  I personally had never lived in a Hobbit house, but there were many pluses. The arch was a very sound structure and allowed for open spaces within the home. Because of the dirt above, the hottest summer day had virtually no effect on the interior temperature, and the same applied to winter. A single wood-burning stove was sufficient to heat the entire house and there was no need for air-conditioning of any kind.

  If you’re a noise freak and like peace and quiet, a dirt roof is for you. Ida and I have slept through numerous wind, rain and thunderstorm events because the natural insulation was such an effective barrier.

  Having said that, the place was very cave-like. The lower level, mostly underground, swallowed light. It was not unusual to have two or three lights on at 1:00 in the afternoon. The curved shape is a square-footage cheater as well. Furniture can never be placed too near the wall, because you’d bang your head on the arched ceiling above you.

  The eleven-hundred-square-foot house had been built ten years previously by an eccentric Englishwoman and she lived alone. In retrospect, the house was perfect for one person – one bathroom (if you exclude the “country” toilet in the pantry), one main bedroom that was attached to a small greenhouse, a very tiny second room and a mostly open upper floor, with the exception of cheesy cabinetry that blocked a million-dollar view out the windows.

  There were no building codes in Oregon until the seventies, and it allowed for some odd results. Because there were so many hippies in my neck of the woods (and still are), there are many single pieces of property with six or seven habitable dwellings. Oregon locals are a hearty, self-sufficient bunch and they like to build their own garages, pour their own concrete and rewire their own electricity. Permits? Deal with that when you sell.

  Our house was not a model of building code compliance. A lot of new age “Pioneering” had been done since the initial construction phase. By definition, I mean: work performed by unskilled laborers, whereby a proprietor hopes to save money but ultimately wastes even more in the end because the crappy work never lasts and has to be redone.

  Evidence of Pioneering was everywhere in our house, from the keep-the-spirits-away quartz-laden wall in the greenhouse to the stove, which was attached via a bare copper tube to a barbecue-sized propane tank outside.

  Every sink, faucet and showerhead had to be replaced – not so much to suit our tastes, but because they had become so calcified from the well water that they no longer functioned properly. Item by item, we began to rip out, replace and upgrade the house to the twentieth century.

  GREEN ACRES, OREGON-STYLE

  One of the more challenging projects was upgrading the telephone system. Two lines came into the house, with one jack upstairs and one down. In my world of home/ office, I needed a six-pair line installed to meet my immediate needs.

  Easier said than done.

  For the sake of technological reference, my valley was using telephone party lines up until the eighties. Getting extra lines in the Oregon backcountry wasn’t as easy as calling up the phone company and deciding whether it would be a morning installation or an evening one. Here is a letter I later sent, outlining the odyssey:

  Dear US West,

  Let’s turn back the calendar to May, 1998. I placed an order to add additional phone lines and voice mail. The installation was to be fulfilled approximately July 15th. Several days after that date, realizing that no US West phone company representative had shown up, I placed a call to a Customer Service Representative – let’s call him Leo – and asked why. The answer that came back was simple, yet astounding: “The area of concern utilized an ‘older’ system, and doesn’t provide the switching to connect a missed call to Voice Mail, or provide the additional lines that you need.”

  “Leo” from the Home Office Consulting Center in Phoenix (very far from where I live) didn’t even know what systems were available in my quiet little valley before he placed the order.

  Recommendation #1: Introduce the left hand to the right hand. Maybe throw a mixer.

  Together with Leo, I formulated Plan B, which was simple but challenging: “Your company would dig a trench up the length of my property – seven-tenths of a mile – lay a shiny new six-pair line, and I would pay for it.”

  Qu
ick update:

  The work was completed in January of this year. In case you don’t have a calendar handy, that’s nine months after the order was placed. I heard that there was a nasty little strike within your company during that time. Everything work out okay?

  In June of this year, the sub-contractors returned to bury the remainder of the exposed cable. That was the good news. The bad news was that in the process they “stretched” it in one area and snapped the line.

  Then there was the water thing.

  After a temporary splice reconnected the phone line, the diligent trench-digging men scraped an old steel pipe several times. Undaunted by this, they continued their course until they hit the pipe again, this time severing it. To our mutual horror, this turned out to be the main water supply for approximately three families across the road.

  Imagine the angry phone calls I got. You probably have a record of them somewhere.

  Recommendation #2: Update The Trench Digger’s Guide to Trench Digging by encouraging diggers to “change course” when encountering “obstacles.”

  Eventually, the severed line was repaired and all was well again in my happy valley – until I wanted to get call waiting. I lost count of how many times I was told “next day by six” or “tomorrow by noon for sure.”

  A Customer Service Representative in Salt Lake City – let’s call her Doris – informed me that I would have to call Repairs if I wanted something done. I became perplexed: How can something be repaired if the service hasn’t even taken place?

  Recommendation #3: Take Team Phoenix and Team Salt Lake to a US West corporate retreat for trust exercises and charades.

  Eventually, Doris said that the call waiting problem was caused by a Centraflex system that had been on my line all along. In order to use call waiting, she instructed, I had to hit the flash button, then dial *9. The only odd thing about this conversation was that the programming solution came from Doris – in Repairs.

  Recommendation #4: Close down Customer Service and let the repair department do everything. Corporations are always looking for ways to cut operational expenses, right? I’ll give you that one for free.

  Over the last year or so, I tried to calculate exactly how much time I have spent on the phone, talking to various representatives from both Sales and Repairs. After much tabulation, I realized that it was enough time to read How to Trench Responsibly, Companies That Are Too Big for Their Own Britches and Waiting for Call Waiting cover to cover.

  If US West were my child, I would send it to the finest attention deficit disorder clinic in the nation. If you were my employee, I would fire you. If you were my employer, I would quit.

  Yours in eternally crabby regret,

  Bruce “I can’t hear you” Campbell

  Granted, verbal battles with corporate giants aren’t anything new, but rural areas are even more neglected because equipment upgrades and service calls are always last on the corporate list.

  After much documented heartache, my damned six-pair line was trenched. Installation to the actual house was next, but an insurmountable obstacle halted the progress: hunting season.

  Norm, the phone guy, warned me after he came over the first time for a look, “This is gonna be easy, Mr. Campbell, but I gotta warn ya – I’m not gonna be around from the third through the seventeenth.”

  “Oh, going on a vacation?” I asked.

  “Nope. Elk season – high desert.”

  “Ah, yeah.” I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. “Right. Of course.”

  So, a couple weeks after elk season the phone lines were installed and I could get on the Internet. As I type this now, I laugh at how easy it has all become since. After all the aggravation, money and corporate incompetence, about a year later Satellite Internet was introduced to my area, and being situated on a hill, facing south, I was a prime candidate. The installation took one day and there wasn’t a trench in sight. Internet: done. Today, though I still have no cellular service, I make calls via satellite as well. Phone service: done.

  By the time Ida and I declared construction “sort of over,” we had added an entry with level, connecting walkways, poured concrete steps from one building to another, built a carport, carved out a park and a café and rerouted the driveway in order to create a more pleasing oak savannah backyard.

  What we should have done, Ida and I reasoned later, was drop a bomb on the house and start from scratch.

  Footnote: It only took us eighteen years, but Ida and I finally did just that – we destroyed the hippie haven and built us a proper house.

  “I’VE GOT WHAT ON MY PROPERTY?”

  Lavender. Specifically, Lavendin grosso. It’s a combination of cold-hearty English and heat-tolerant Portuguese varieties. As it turns out, lavender has many medicinal uses aside from its beautiful violet-blue flowers. During WW I, it was used in hospitals as an anti-bacterial agent. Today, it is promoted for its soothing properties and pleasing, not overpowering, smell.

  Ida: Lavender Lady.

  Go figure. This was all news to me as Ida and I surveyed the acre or so of lavender at the lower end of our property. Southern Oregon is a lavender-friendly part of the world, as it has hot, dry summers, and this mature crop was still doing very well. We decided to figure out this whole lavender thing and see what could be done with it.

  It turned out that the prep, harvest and processing of lavender wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s a once-a-year harvest, usually late July. Other than that, you keep the plants drip-irrigated, as they are not particularly thirsty and everything lies fallow in the winter. The harvest is done with hedge trimmers and you cut where the stalk meets the “ball” of the plant. The stalks are gathered and tossed into the back of a U-Haul truck, destined for the distillery.

  Distillation is the fun part. Harvesting is just hot and backache inducing, but distilling is where the sweet science of essential oils comes into play. Our lavender is loaded into a large, locking metal trailer with ventilated tubes fixed along the bottom. Once the cooking process begins, it’s kind of like steaming broccoli – you keep a lid on it and crank up the heat. A couple hours later, the oil is skimmed off the top of a separate container and voila – you’ve got lavender essential oil.

  “Okay, Ida, that all sounds great,” I said. “Where should we distill?”

  “How about Steven Seagal’s ranch?”

  “Steven Seagal has a distillery?”

  “I guess so,” she explained. “In researching lavender, I came across his ranch manager. They grow all kinds of botanicals.”

  I never would have used “botanicals” and “Steven Seagal” in the same sentence otherwise, but perhaps “Bruce Campbell” and “lavender” are a bit incongruous as well. Either way, off Ida and I went to distill our first batch of lavender.

  Over the years, as Ida did more research and development on what you can do with lavender, we began to make gifts for the cast and crew of various shows I worked on. Lavender products were particularly popular with the Miami-based Burn Notice crew. Quite literally, because of the unusually high heat index, combined with long hours of manual labor, they tended to smell worse than any other crew. As a joke one year, Ida and I gave away lavender soap, made from our oil. The response was swift and favorable, so yearly we expanded our offerings to include lotions, balms, ointments and dried lavender sachets.

  I knew we were on to something when our low-end products became addicting. One day during the Burn Notice shoot, a burly teamster lumbered up to me, invading my personal space. He was sweaty, of course, and he smelled “just okay.”

  “Hey, Bruce, where’s my fuckin’ lavender this year? I’m startin’ to smell like shit over here. C’mon!”

  If you’re expecting this chapter to go all “Newman’s Own,” where Ida and I build a lavender empire from our humble beginnings, you can stop there. This was a losing venture from the start and it always will be. We just do it for fun.

  RECONNECTING: BLADE RUNNER

  When you’
re an actor, you have a lot of things done for you. You get driven to the filming location. You get your meals prepared for you on set. Chances are you even have someone to run your errands, answer your phone and feed your cats. Over time, you begin to feel like you’ve forgotten how to do anything.

  It’s not necessarily the consequence of ego or wealth – there is definite professional value in having others handle the distracting aspects of life so you can concentrate on your work. Rehearsing dialogue or writing screenplays takes focus and it helps to know that certain things are off your plate entirely.

  Still, occasionally an actor finds himself stranded in the boonies of his own acreage without a personal assistant or teamster anywhere to be found. After I recovered from the initial shock of self-reliance, I embraced the new responsibilities of being a woodland landowner.

  One of the most pressing concerns was our driveway, which was seven-tenths of a mile long, steep and unpaved. If it became impassable, we’d be marooned.

  If you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of hippie marriages falling apart.

  There were plenty of married retirees living in the valley and one thing rural, isolated couples discover over time is that they can’t stand the sight of their spouses anymore. Shockingly, long marriages imploded all around us, and I was opportunistic enough to buy a John Deere tractor from a neighbor who was liquidating his life during just such a divorce.

  With the tractor, I’d be able to “blade” the driveway, smoothing out all the ruts and packing down the loose dirt. The reason an unpaved driveway needs to be bladed is because of the “washboards.” Scrambling for traction, every two-wheel-drive vehicle that trudges up the hill tears the road apart.