The Thing

David Foster coproduced The Thing with Lawrence Turman; their previous collaborations include Peckinpah's The Getaway, the early post-Vietnam melodrama Heroes, and their sole genre effort, Caveman. Foster recalled the long search that led to the choice of Stewart as a stand-in for Campbell's South Polar setting. "When we came intot heis project," he told me, "we immediately got hold of several documentaries made in the Antarctic by the National Geographic Society and the National Geophysics Society. Once we had it in our minds what the Antarctic really looked like, John Lloyd, our production designer, set out on a huge quest to find that look somewhere in North America. We couldn't go to Anarctica--there are no Holiday Inns there. Nothing there, really, except sea life and the penguins that live off the sea life." Lloyd's attention was finally directed to the great Northwest, and it was only a matter of time before he found Stewart, a hundred miles east of Ketchikan in Alaska's norther panhandle.

While Stewart's mountains and glaciers were ideal from a cinematic point of view, they offered numerous logistic problems. Delivery of daily film footage to Universal's labs could take as long as four days, due to storms and fog. Day and night shootings, scheduled with Carpentian economy, resulted in gruelilng thirteen- and fourteen-hour weekdays seven days a week, frequently in subzero temperatures. And when the local hotel had been filled with top-level crew and cast members, the balance of the crew was lodged in a cramped barge used to house seasonal mineworkers during the summer. As another measure of economy, the interior of the location set was outfitted as a tiny studio; when inclement weather hit, the crew would march inside to shoot additional cover for the scenes previously shot on the L.A. sound stage.

"We built the locat set during the summer," Foster explained, "so it wasn't all that tought getting it set up. The plan was to build it and let it sit there, so the sun could burn it and brown it, and, when the fall came, let it get knocked around by a few storms, so in the winter it would already look hassled over."

I had arrived late in the day's shooting, and th eset was not the only thing that looked hassled over; after three weeks on location, many of the crew had acquired the haggard look of Antarctic explorers. Actor Kurt Russell in particular, being one of the last survivors this late in the film and therefore in virtually every scene, was surviving on coffee and cough syrup. Conditions on the set were even more Spartan than those depicted in The Thing's Antactic outpost; despite the budget and the Universal logo, this was no "Winnebago film." Meals were served in a tent whose heater had just broken down, and the few heated trailers there had been parked so far from the set--to keep them out of the long shots--that they were seldom used.

Circling aroudn the main shack that is the central component of The Thing's set, I came upon what was undoubtedly the cause of Russell's incipien bronchitis: four heavy-duty eight-foot-high wind machines under the command of effects man Roy Arbogast, of Jaws and Star Wars. A shot was being set up of Russell trudging across the rear of the complex while leaning full-tilt into a blizzard. For the duration of the shot, i was made an honarary crew member: one of Arbogast's assistants handed me a plastic trash can filled with snow, and seven official crew members and I stood by the wind machines. On cue, we hurled the white powder into the maelstrom.

The next shot at last brought a bit of warmth to the set. It was a "fire gag" performed by veterean fire-stunt man Tony Cecere. I'd seen him work once befor on the set of Swamp Thing, where he had done a "three-quarter burn," a stunt that leaves the face rela tively flame-free so as not to interfere with breathing. That had been impressive, but this was even more so, for it was to be a "full burn," with Cecere wrapped from heat to toe in a shroud of fire while standing in for a character, who under suspicion of "Thing"-ness is attacked by Russell's flame thrower. As Cecere had explained on the earlier occasion, the difference is crucial. In a partial burn, the flames flow back; you can both breathe and see. But when your stading still or enduring a full burn, the eyes must be closed and you dare not breathe; otherwise, you may end up blind--or dead from singed lungs. Watching a man like Cecere work is like watching a race driver total his care and emerge unscathed, except that here the "accident" is meticulously planned. When Cecere works a stunt, no one else breathes either; when it's completed, after the flames are extinguished with blankets and CO2 and Cecere returns to his feet, he is invariably greeted by loud applause.

The balance of the evening belonged to Roy Arbogast, as shack after shack was swiftly "unbilt" via his expert use of explosives. Each of these "gags" took better than an hour to prepare and wire, with a good deal of time spent making sure that no one was too close to the set--or standing under a potential avalanche--at the time of the blow. Little plywood shacks were quickly thrown together to house the radiocontrolled cameras, which were set to shoot at fifty-percent higher speed than normal in order to extend the length of the explosions. "He blowed 'em up real good" became the watchword, as everything came off without a hitch.

The first of these explosions was the smallest, but it proved to be a real eye-opener to a crew that had just finished off the last coffee on the set--and even more so to Russell himself. The scene called for Russell to deliver, with a stick of dynamite, what he hopes is the coup de grace to the Thing. As Russell threw the prop dynamite at the dummy that had replaced Cecere's prone form, Arbogast touched off the charge that lay beneath the dummy. The resulting "small" explosion proved to be far larger than most of the crew anticipated, particularly Russell, who was the closest. I myself jumped three feet into the air as a flaming hand--the last remnant of the dummy--landed at my feet. "You asshole!" Russell shouted at Arbogast, reverting for a moment tohis Snake Plissken persona. A still-photographer beside me suggested that the charge must have been miscalculated, but one of Arbogast's assistants, passing on the way to wire the next explosion, declared that it had been exactly right.

And so it was, as Carpenter confirmed when we talked some more weeks later at his Universal office. Russell had been advised as to the scale of the explosion, but constant references to it as "small" had put people off their guard.

With The Thing, Carpenter has crossed the Rubicon and associated himself with a studio--a step some of his fans view with trepidation, especially those who felt that Halloween II, distributed by Universal, followed to closely n the path of formula splatter films. "These are two very different films with very different situations," Carpenter says. "Halloween II was an independent film, make with Dino de Laurentis; I really had no problems on it. The Thing is an in-house project of Universal, where, in theory, they'd be much more involved than in a pick-up deal.

"I did have tremendous doubts coming into it--doubts about bureaucracy and about he amount of freedom I'd be granted on the film. But I've had an amazingly--and surprisingly--pleasant experience here. The bureaucracy is a little hard, but there are ways to deal with it, and the people are very cooperative, very straightforward. So far, I haven't had any problems at all. The unions weren't a problme, except in the stills department. I'd wanted Kim Gottlieb to be photographer on this film. She is in the union, but she not 'group one," or whatever it is...The camera crew had already been unionized for Escape from New York. Our most special case was Rob Bottin, who's doing our creature effects. He started out nonunion, and now belongs to every union there is."

Bottin, just twenty-two years old, supervised the effects on JOne Dante's The Howling just a year ago. Since then, a spate of "shape-shifter" films have followed. The extraterrestrial creature in The Thing takes this ability to its ultimate level: it's a monster capable of shape-shifting at will to any form that it consumes, yet it has a unique--and indisputably repulsive--shape of its own.

Bottin's work is certainly cut out for him--especially since Carpenter has promised to be faithful to the creature of the Campbell story:

"It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table. The broken half of the bronze ice-ax was still buried in the queer skull. Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood, from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow..." And later: "Like a blue rubber ball, a Thing bounced up One of its fourt tentaclelike arms looped out like a striking snake. In a seven-tentacled hand a six-ince pencil of winking, shining metal glinted and swung upward to face them. Its line-thin lips twitched back from snake-fangs in a grin of hate, red eyes blazing." How did he portray that? "Rob came up with several good solutions," says Carpenter. "They go pretty far in the direction of the story."

But what of Roy Arbogast? His mechanical-effects skills were put to excellent use in the creatures of Jaws and Alligator; won't he have something to do with The Thing? "It's difficult to say without actually giving away some secrets," Carpenter says hesitantly, "but they are working very closely together in some areas where they overlap."

Shortly before speaking with Carpenter, we ahd heard that a stop-motion animated sequence--described as quite a shocker---had been written intot he scehedule and animated under Bottin's supervision by Randy Cook, a young newcomer who had previously worked on Caveman with veteran animator David Allen. Whay was this decision made so late in production? "I knew from the start that there was the potential for the stop-motion in this film, but it had to go hand in hand with the concept of the monster, rather than an an insert," Carpenter says. "For a long time, we were working on sequences that didn't call for stop-motion. Now we have one in which a little bit of animation can be used."

As the rough cut of The Thing heads for its final edit, the score--by veteran composer Ennio Morricon--has been arriving in brief segments from Italy. Carpenter, who scored his prvious films himself, really admires Morricone's work, but "metting him was very strange, mainly because he doesn't speak English and I don't speak Italian. So we dealt entirely through an iterpreter--but we did sit down at the piano and play to each other. At this point, we're in the experimental stage--straight orchestrations in some places, and in other places strictly electronic. We're looking for a 'cold' score, but, at the same time, something not entirely without hope."

With The Thing nearing completion, Carpenter can look ahead to his next picture. One possibility is his long-promised fantasy-western for EMI Studios, El Diablo, with Kurt Russell once again in a starring role. The other possibility is Carpenter's return to Embassy Pictures, which produced The Fog and Escape From New York. Bill Lancaster, The Thing's screenwriter, has already finished a first-draft script for the Embassy project, an adaptation of Stephen King's suspense novel of pyrokinesis, Firestarter--in which case Carpenter's crew should have no problem keeping warm.

--TZ