Campbell's first autobiography, following his interest in acting from making Super 8 movies with his buddies in Michigan, up to appearing in the first Spider-Man movie. He spends a little time on his personal life, mostly in his childhood and school years. After that, it's mostly to the extent his career intersects with his personal life (like how all the traveling helped bring about the end of his first marriage.)
I didn't realize how much other stuff related to movies he'd done, in terms of being a producer, helping with editing or filming second shots for movies, even directing several episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The nice thing is, these aren't treated as simply parts of his resume. Campbell spends time describing the process and the work behind the different roles.
There are multiple chapters about he, Sam Raimi, and others' efforts to raise money to film Evil Dead. He details the process, breaking up paragraphs about who you ask with brief examples of phone calls he might have with old acquaintances, or how he asked his dad if he could put the family farm up as collateral to get a bank loan. Once the film is made, all the work that goes into preparing it for release, all the things you have to put together to convince a distributor they should want to sell your movie, the trailers and translated titles for release in other countries. In the chapters about Adventures of Brisco County Jr., he talks about the process of being selected for a role, the number of times you may have to audition, and how many different people you have to sell yourself to.
Kind of amazing to me that anyone gets anywhere in show business at all.
The book has a lot of visuals. Photographs of him as a kid (still easily recognizable, although it was the brow line more than the chin), stills from the various films he and his friends put together - with names like Bogus Monkey Pignut Swindle - or a "Kiwi Primer", translating various American words to their New Zealand equivalent. "Body Shop" becomes "Panelbeater", apparently.
My favorites were the diagrams of the different rigs they came up with to capture some of the shots Sam Raimi wanted on the Evil Dead films. The "Vas-O-Cam" in particular, where the camera sat on a U-shaped bracket that could slide over over tape coated with Vaseline and stretched across two sawhorses. It's a poor man's dolly, as Campbell notes, but has the benefit of being portable, light, and cheap.
It's a quick read. Most of the chapters are short; some read more like a collection of brief anecdotes that a true narrative. This paragraph details something funny that happened, the next paragraph details something else funny, without any particular connective tissue or overarching theme other than this is stuff you may deal with in acting. But the anecdotes are funny, or failing that, informative. I went in expecting a standard autobiography, and learned a lot of things about acting I didn't expect, so I'd consider that a win.
'Raising money for the Man with the Screaming Brain was a little like being trapped in a slow-moving elevator after someone farted - the ride took too long and the atmosphere was foul.'
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