Kathleen Turner and Steve Martin in “The Man with Two Brains”

Assistant Directors Training Program is a 400-day apprenticeship. After nearly two years, I was in the home stretch with well over 300 days (and most of those were 16-hour days). Finally, I was assigned to my last trainee job, “The Man with Two Brains”, a wacky comedy starring Steve Martin as a mad scientist.

The director was the legendary Carl Reiner, the lauded comic actor/writer/director/producer whose career was launched in the 1950s with “Your Show of Shows” and epitomized by “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. He’d also directed Steve Martin in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Jerk”. It was the collaboration of two comedy geniuses.

Read more

Click link below:

https://www.storybeat.net/marsha-scarbrough-author-assistant-director-episode-413/

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

A brilliant light has gone out in this world. Dolly Parton has left the planet.

I had the great privilege of working with her on “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” when I was an Assistant Director Trainee in 1981. She was such an intelligent woman, a talented artist, a consummate professional, and a caring woman who was wickedly funny.

When I was assigned to “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, I was overjoyed. It was a major feature film of a musical based on a Broadway show. The director was one of my Hollywood heroes, screenwriter Colin Higgins. He had written one of my favorite films, the sweet and startlingly original “Harold and Maude.” “Whorehouse” wasn’t his first directorial effort. He’d also directed the ebullient “9 to 5” and “Foul Play”, both of which he also wrote. I was relieved to be back with gentlemanly Burt Reynolds, and I was about to find out how lucky I was to get a chance to work with country music star Dolly Parton.

Principal photography would begin in Austin, Texas. After the exterior shots were completed, we’d return to the Universal lot in Los Angeles to shoot the interiors. I was excited to embark on my first “distant location” where I would stay in a hotel with the cast and crew, including 22 male dancers, 18 female dancers, a choreographer, and dance captains.

Our headquarters was the Austin Airport Hilton. The whorehouse set was a Victorian mansion in the small town of Pflugerville, a little more than 10 miles outside of Austin. The plan was that all the cast and crew would travel by van from the hotel to the set every day. We set up offices in the hotel. When the dancers and choreographer arrived, dance rehearsals began in a school gym near the hotel. Texas was a long way from creative, open-minded Hollywood, both culturally and geographically. Male dancers prancing off to rehearsal in hot pink legwarmers did not sit well with local rednecks.

On a distant location, all vehicles are driven by members of the Teamsters union. The transportation captain, also a Teamster, had come from Los Angeles. He would oversee the whole movie to keep consistency between the work in LA and the work in Austin. However, he was hiring local Teamsters from Texas for the work in Austin to save money on hotels and airfare.

A couple of days before principal photography was to begin, the transportation captain informed the production manager and the First AD that we had a problem. The local Texas Teamsters had told him, “We ain’t drivin’ no faggots in our vans.” In 1981, in Austin, the most liberal city in Texas, the drivers refused to transport the male dancers because they assumed the dancers were gay. Just for the record, 18 of them were gay, and four were not. Also, for the record, the director was gay, but the drivers never figured that out.

Indeed, it was a big problem. The company had no way to get 22 key employees to the job site. We had a potential publicity disaster if news of this homophobic bigotry leaked out. We needed to head off potential legal action, strike, or rebellion by the dancers who were, in fact, being discriminated against. The situation was complicated and serious. The solution devised by the production team was to hand the problem to their least experienced, least qualified member, a person with absolutely no authority…me!

The Key Second AD said, “Marsha, solve this problem.”

In the script, the dancers were supposed to be a college football team that patronized the whorehouse. This team traveled to games and to the whorehouse in a funky, old school bus. We had a bus to be photographed. Normally, picture vehicles (those vehicles that will be photographed as part of the story) are not used for anything else, for good reason. The script is shot out of order, and the vehicle has to look the same in every scene. If the vehicle was damaged, it would not match the previously photographed scenes. I asked the production manager and the transportation captain, “Can I use the picture bus?” They put their heads together and decided that in this emergency situation, I could, since the bus was beat up anyway.

So far, so good. I had a vehicle that could transport all the dancers. I just needed a driver.

I asked the transportation captain if I could interview drivers. He steered me toward some likely candidates. I found one who agreed to drive the bus. This brave soul was a teacher who was just driving as a summer job, so breaking ranks would not affect his primary source of income. He was a lovely, open-minded Texan.

Once I had secured a vehicle and a driver, the problem was solved as long as the dancers agreed to do everything together. At this point, the Key Second AD put me in charge of the male dancers. I was to go everywhere with them and take responsibility for getting them all where they needed to go when they needed to be there. I was honest about the situation with the dancers. They understood that this was what we needed to do to get the job done. They didn’t love it, but they were willing to cooperate and make the best of it.

As we boarded our funky bus after wrap on the first day of principal photography, Colin Higgins, the director, climbed aboard.

“Gentlemen, I want to thank you for a great day’s work. I know this is not an ideal situation for you, and I really appreciate your professionalism and cooperation under these circumstances. Thank you for making my job easier and putting the production first. You’re all fabulous!”

The dancers gave him a round of applause. He waved goodbye and exited the bus. Everyone was in a buoyant mood on the drive back to the hotel.

The next day after work, Burt Reynolds got on the bus.

“Hey guys! You’re doing a fantastic job. It’s a pleasure to have such a professional group on the team. Thanks for having such a great attitude. It’s gonna be a great show!”

The dancers answered with whoops and hollers. Burt departed and headed to his luxury dressing room bus. The guys were in good spirits on the ride back to the hotel.

The next day, Dolly Parton, wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, came on board. She put her hands on her hips as she scanned the wildly cheering dancers.

“Well, I have never seen so many handsome men in one place in my life! Can I ride this bus?”

The dancers shouted their approval. Dolly rode the bus all the way to the hotel. She sat on each dancer’s lap, asked him his name and where he was from. She felt biceps, caressed cheeks, tousled hair, and inquired, “How’s your mama?” The guys loved it.

From that day on, our funky bus was the coolest place to be on the whole set. Everyone wanted to ride the bus. All the actors took a turn. Dom DeLuise was a frequent, rowdy passenger who chased dancers down the hotel hallways. My guys made me laugh. Our rides became rolling parties.

Dolly magically changed the energy and brilliantly turned a difficult situation on its head with caring and connection. Empathy was her superpower.

About five years later, one of those dancers turned up as an actor on a show I was working on. We talked about that experience. He said, “I know it was a terrible situation. I know we were discriminated against, but when I think back on it, I only have happy memories.” I said, “I feel the same.”

When we went back to the studio to shoot the interiors, I was given the job of getting breakfast for Dolly and her makeup and hair crew. Her elaborate look took time, so they were usually the first on set. I would greet them and make sure everyone on the team had arrived. I’d take their breakfast orders, call them into the commissary, pick them up when they were ready, and deliver them to her huge motorhome dressing room.

Dolly and her crew were always pleasant in the early morning hours, which I deeply appreciated since it is not always the case with diva actresses. They never complained and were always on time. What was really unusual was that I never saw Dolly without makeup. She would arrive with the basics already applied. By that time in my career, I was used to seeing beautiful women arrive bare-faced and looking quite ordinary. After three hours of hard labor by a team of two or three, they looked like movie stars. Dolly, however, arrived gorgeous and became even more so.

One day, I was switched to another assignment in the early morning hours. That afternoon, I was working on paperwork at a makeshift desk I had set up on stage behind the scenery. Dolly came looking for me.

“There you are! Are you OK?”

I was surprised to see her in my dark corner.

“Yeah. I’m fine. What can I do for you?”

“Nothin’. I was just checking to be sure you’re OK.”

“That’s so nice, but why?”

“Well, you bring me my breakfast every morning, and this morning you didn’t. I thought something might be wrong.”

“Nope. They just gave me another job, but how sweet of you to miss me.”

“Glad you’re fine. See you tomorrow?”

Remember, I was the lowest person in the production hierarchy.

Dolly never mentioned her Christian faith at work, but she lived it. She embodied the teachings of Jesus Christ every day. She was love. As the years passed and I followed Dolly’s life, I saw that love expressed in her philanthropy. She shared her wealth with her community and her family. Her Imagination Library sent books to 300 million at-risk children. She financially supported medical research. She invested the royalties from Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” in the Black community in Nashville. She wielded the power of her fame and fortune to improve the world for its most vulnerable people.

On top of that, she made people laugh. Here’s my favorite Dolly joke, imagine her sweet Southern drawl saying:

“Do you know what you get when you rub two little green balls together?”

“No. What?”

“Kermit’s complete attention.”

I know her sparking energy will hover over us above the clouds forever.

I will always love her.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Share Adventures of a Roaming Crone

David Hasselhoff and the talking car

I landed on another pilot with my old friend and mentor, Second Assistant Director Herb Adelman. “Knight Rider” starred a talking car. When I arrived, the human co-star had not yet been cast. Herb and I ran screen tests for at least a dozen actors of varying types. Some were hunky action heroes. Some were sensitive and soft-spoken. A couple of them were crisp Brits. None were well-known. The final choice was to be made by top-level studio management.

Read more

Pamela Hensley, Lee Horsley, and Lincon Kilpatrick in “Matt Houston”

Cast and crew worked hard on “Hill Street Blues”. We put in the usual exhausting hours under difficult conditions. I remember sitting in a honeywagon dressing room doing paperwork with the Second AD after wrap. Through the open door, we watched rats and cockroaches scuttle across a Skid Row sidewalk as we laughed about our “glamorous” Hollywood careers. Nonetheless, intelligence and professionalism held sway, and the final product made us proud.

After a few months on “Hill Street Blues”, I was reassigned to a TV pilot called “Matt Houston” about a rich Texan who moves to California to manage oil wells and play at his private detective hobby. It was an Aaron Spelling show with all the glitter and lack of substance implicit in the brand.

Read more

After “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, I was assigned to another TV cop show. “Hill Street Blues” was the opposite of “CHiPs”. It was brilliant in every way. The incredible writing by Steven Bochco and his team wrung human emotion from every encounter. The performances by a true ensemble of trained actors with admirable skills brought gritty drama to the episodic format. Stunts were minimal. For the most part, the actors were polite, professional, and more interested in practicing their craft than being celebrities.

Read more

Dolly Parton with “Whorehouse” director Colin Higgins

On every movie, all the actors do not stay on the payroll for the whole shooting schedule. When their scenes are completed, they are dismissed. On their last day, the First AD announces to the crew, “Today, we say goodbye to so-and-so. Thanks for your performance. It’s been a pleasure working with you.” The crew applauds. The actor makes a little speech thanking the crew. On “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” all the male dancers were finished on the same day. The First AD thanked them. The director made a speech. The guys whooped and hollered and hugged everyone. I got kisses and hugs galore.

The next day, they were gone.

Read more

Summer Solstice brings maximum sunshine, the longest day, the shortest night, unless you live in the southern hemisphere. In that case, happy winter! Here in the northern half of earth, el sol is blasting its most glorious solar power.

In indigenous cultures, this heat, the sun, the sky is considered the masculine element. The moon, the darkness, the night is considered the feminine element. These are energies, not personified men and women. As humans, both men and women have masculine and feminine energies within us. Our work is to bring them into balance. This is part of the process of individuation described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung.

I love men who embrace this process of integration. When I was an Assistant Director, I saw this clearly in Clint Eastwood, who was the most feminine man I ever worked for…and the most masculine. He seamlessly combined the feminine traits of intuition, supportiveness, and listening with masculine decisiveness, boundaries, and responsibility. For me, working for him was a pleasure. I saw similar integration in Pierce Brosnan, John Travolta, and Gene Wilder. I see it to different degrees in my former lovers and current friends.

So, I love men…but not all men.

I do not love men who beat, rape, and kill women. I do not love men who drug and rape their wives for online entertainment. I do not love men who make sex slaves of children. I do not love men who traffic in women’s bodies. I do not love men who need to dominate, a sure indicator of pathetically low self-esteem. I do not love men who deprive women of their reproductive rights. I do not love men who don’t care for the children they father. I do not love men who start wars.

These transgressive behaviors are not true masculinity. They express an aberrant masculine. These men have forgotten who they are. They have lost their humanity. They have lost respect for life. Thus, they have lost respect for themselves. They are sad shells of men, and they are dangerous.

We see this aberrant masculine in the online Manosphere, in “the male loneliness epidemic”, in porn addictions, in incels. Although they define their disconnection as “loneliness”, what they really want is sex, which they use as an antidepressant. However, their concept of sex is that it is a thing floating around in the atmosphere that they can grab and possess. Or it is something that should come out of a vending machine if you put in enough coins. Or it is a product that you can order from a catalog.

To me, saying “I want sex” is as silly as saying, “I want tennis.” We all know that if we want to play tennis, we have to find a partner who wants to play, who matches our skill level. We need to book a tennis court and buy rackets. We must meet at a certain time and play by the rules. If we have an enjoyable match, we may want to play again. Sex is the same but with more profound consequences.

When the healthy masculine meets the true feminine, a sacred communion can occur. This communion is sex. This powerful connection between humans is not a commodity or an athletic event. From it, new life can be born. Thus, it can, and should be, a spiritual experience.

Recreational sex can be fun and nourishing too, if safety, consent, caring, responsible birth control, and health protocols are all considered. Of course, partners can be of the same sex or opposite sexes.

The transcendent moment of communion, when separate souls become one for a moment, happens during simultaneous orgasm. From what I’ve seen of the Manosphere, the lonely men don’t understand that this is the name of the game, don’t have the sexual skills to pull it off, and don’t get that giving your partner pleasure enhances your pleasure. Sex is a non-verbal conversation between caring people, and lonely guys aren’t willing or able to communicate. Their ignorance is sad, but it is up to them to get educated.

Because women carry the new life in their bodies and steward it after birth, they get to choose their partners and control conception. No exceptions. If men want to be chosen, they need to be respectful, caring, responsible, healthy, intelligent people that women want to partner with.

Today, many women are choosing to live alone. Earth is overpopulated, so reproducing is no longer an imperative. Women support themselves financially, so male breadwinners can be a nice bonus but are not a necessity. Women can afford the luxury of solitude and self-care. I am one of those women.

What can men do to get back into women’s beds? The answer is embedded in their insistence that women need to lower their standards to relieve men’s loneliness. Men have come to rely on women to solve all their problems. They make women responsible for their happiness. Men feel powerless because they have given their power away.

The most useful lesson I learned from a shaman was when I was complaining about what an ex-lover had done to me. My Native American teacher, Beautiful Painted Arrow said, “Never blame anyone else for your unhappiness. Live your life as if you chose everything that happens to you.”

“Even if someone breaks into my house and robs me?”

“Yes, on some level, you allowed it because you wanted to learn something from it.”

“I don’t know if I believe that.”

“You don’t have to believe it. Just live as though you do. We can’t control what other people do. We only control how we respond to it. If other people make you unhappy, change your life if you can. Otherwise, accept it. But never complain about it.”

I have lived by those words since, and they have served me well. If lonely men need women to behave a certain way to be happy, they have given away their power. If they want authentic power, they need to stop blaming women for their loneliness and figure out how to be the partners women want or be happy without them (as women are doing without men). Lonely men need to stop acting like whiny victims and take personal responsibility for their lives.

In the US, a socio-political element plays into this, too. Many of these lonely men voted for politicians who vowed to (and did) take away women’s reproductive rights. It’s not rocket science to foresee that if women can’t get abortions or birth control, they are going to be less willing to have sex. Outlawing abortions for women makes it harder for men to get laid. Men who didn’t see that coming self-selected their own removal from the gene pool.

That’s the ever-evolving intelligent energy of nature in action.

Share

“So, I love men…but not all men” is another expression of the parallel universe theme I wrote about in the last newsletter. Now, I live in a universe where handsome young men automatically offer me their seat on the bus, where my well-dressed neighbor insists on carrying my groceries up a few stairs, where my 35-year-old friend has volunteered to come from Madrid to take care of me while I am in the hospital for my second knee replacement surgery. Caring men are everywhere.

A vivid recent example of parallel universes is the juxtaposition of the dignity, respect, intelligence, and love expressed during the opening ceremony of The Barack Obama Presidential Center with the tawdry, bloody, gladiatorial cage-fight on the White House lawn. It’s up to us to choose the universe we want to live in, personally and politically.

Have a hot, sexy summer. Enjoy more tales of my life in Hollywood with a paid subscription to this Substack.

Share Adventures of a Roaming Crone

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Here are some beach reads:

Medicine Dance

Honey in the River

Subscribe now

After “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” returned to Universal Studios, my dancers still had lots of work to do. I continued to be in charge of them even though we no longer had to ride the bus. The female dancers were added to my responsibilities. Together we plunged into a heavy schedule of dance rehearsals for a big number on the set of the interior of the whorehouse. The guys also had to prepare for another big dance scene in their football locker room, which was a set built inside a soundstage.

Read more

On “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, the last day of shooting on location in Texas looked reasonable on paper. We had moved out of the Austin hotel and into downscale motels in Victoria, Texas, to shoot scenes in the countryside. We had a few daylight exteriors and then an interior scene in a small-town café with Burt, Dolly, and three other actors. When we finished the day’s work, the plan was to return to our motels, pack, sleep, and ride the crew bus to Austin airport the next morning.

Read more

Film production work is brutal. You must function at a high level under all kinds of difficult conditions… like torrential rain, blazing desert sun, darkness, dust storms, or, as in Texas, sticky, humid, mosquito-infested heat. Perfectionism is a given. One mistake can get you fired, and another equally qualified person is always waiting to take your job.

Read more

Bob Boyle, Alfred Hitchcock’s art director who had been our instructor in the Assistant Director Training Program classes, was the production designer on “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”. He directed a Second Unit that was an important story point. It was one shot that revealed how the whorehouse came to be called “the Chicken Ranch.” Later, on the set at Universal in Los Angeles, we would shoot the preceding scene where a customer arrives with a live chicken as payment. In this scene, Miss Mona (the madame played by Dolly Parton) takes the chicken and hands it to one of her “girls.” The young woman takes the chicken and walks off camera. In the Second Unit shot, the girl holding the chicken steps off the back porch of the house and releases the chicken into the yard. The camera moves up and back to reveal that the yard is filled with a sea of chickens.

I was thrilled when I was assigned to be the only Assistant Director on the Second Unit. It meant that I was promoted from AD Trainee to First Assistant Director for one day.

Read more

The entire time we were on location for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, all 22 male dancers had to travel together on the same bus…with me as their wrangler. Since I was with “my guys” all the time, I became an honorary member of their team. I was with them on the bus, as they were getting into wardrobe, during dance rehearsals, and on our one day off. On distant location, the company can work six days a week. That left one day for badly needed rest and recreation.

Read more

When the Assistant Directors Training Program assigned me to “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, I was overjoyed. It was a major feature film of a musical based on a Broadway show. The director was one of my Hollywood heroes, screenwriter Colin Higgins. He had written one of my favorite films, the sweet and startlingly original “Harold and Maude.” “Whorehouse” wasn’t his first directorial effort. He’d also directed the ebullient “9 to 5” and “Foul Play”, both of which he also wrote. I was relieved to be back with gentlemanly Burt Reynolds, and I was about to find out how lucky I was to get a chance to work with country music star Dolly Parton.

Subscribe now

Read more

I live in a parallel universe.

When I studied with a Native American medicine man named Beautiful Painted Arrow, he explained the origin of his name: “In every quiver, there is one arrow painted with …

Read more

Instead of firing me from “CHiPs” because Larry Wilcox hated me, the production manager gave me a secret assignment. He told me that the studio was fed up with Larry and Erik’s lack of professionalism and was considering suing them for breach of contract. The studio wanted more documentation than the notes we put on the production report. The “suits” wanted details about their lack of cooperation, their tardiness, their early departures, their unreasonable demands, and anything that slowed production. He gave me a little black book where I was to record dates, times, and details, which would be submitted as evidence if the lawsuit went to court. I was to keep the book hidden. No one was to know that I was a spy for the studio.

Subscribe now

Read more

The intense world of stunts was new to me. My first experience was a stunt where a car crashed through a fence while driving toward the camera. As the camera team was setting up, I noticed that they were building a barrier around the camera with plywood and whatever materials they could scrounge. I realized that what was about to happen might not be safe. I asked Leslie Jackson, the Second AD, “Where should I be for this?” The camera operator answered, “I suggest you get behind this with us. We know they’ll keep the camera safe because it’s expensive.” I did. The car demolished the fence. Huge splinters and debris flew everywhere. The camera was unscathed. Me too.

Subscribe now

Read more

After the relative bliss of “Paternity”, I got my own rude awakening. I was assigned to a long-running TV series about officers of the California Highway Patrol. “CHiPs” was about motorcycles, stunts, explosions, and stilted dialogue. It was a prime example of the schlocky, popular, escapist, episodic fare that ruled the airwaves in the pre-streaming days of the early 80s. Many of the trainees got a turn in the “CHiPs” barrel. I’d heard the story about how an explosion gone wrong burned a hole in an unfinished freeway so deep that the company had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to repair it.

Read more

Read more

Bob Jeffords 1939-2002

Besides our on-the-job training, DGA Trainees took weekly classes taught by working professionals where we learned about all the departments on a film, all the union contracts we were expected to be familiar with, all the paperwork we had to do, the state laws governing working with minors, as well as safety rules and regulations. Responsibility for safety on the set primarily falls to Assistant Directors. The First AD is the monitor of safety on the set. Crew members are supposed to bring their safety concerns to him (or her). A First AD who knowingly allows something unsafe to go on during filming can be legally liable.

Subscribe now

Read more