Bruce Campbell
By
Monday. Aug 01, 1:06 AM
"What? You want a little of this? Huh?" – a pure genius answers our questions.

Self-proclaimed B-movie actor Bruce Campbell is quietly having himself one hell of a new millennium. Best known for playing Ash in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and various roles for the Coen brothers (ranging from “soap opera actor” in Fargo to “that humane fucker” in last year’s The Ladykillers), Campbell burst upon the literary scene in 2001 with his surprise best selling memoir If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor. He followed up a whirlwind book tour with parts in both record breaking Spiderman movies and a fantastic turn as an elderly Elvis in the genre defying ultra-indie hit Bubba Ho-Tep.

Campbell’s legions of fans are an extremely loyal and hardcore bunch (a guy in line for his book signing asked me if there was a director’s cut of McHale’s Navy: true story), and rumors of Bruce producing an Evil Dead remake have left them frothing at the mouth. But first, the chin from Michigan visits the land of Hemmingway and Faulkner by following up If Chins Could Kill… with his first fictional novel, Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way.

Hitting bookshelves June 13th, Make Love!… finds Campbell dropping himself Charlie Kaufman-style into a hilarious narrative about the movie-making process that lies somewhere between Day of the Locusts and the Bugs Bunny one where Elmer Fudd hits Humphrey Bogart in the face with a coconut crème pie. With the same sly wit and everyman appeal that made If Chins… a hit, Campbell carves out a tale in which his years of grinding in Hollywood finally give fruition to his big break, a major role in an A-list studio picture. Closer director Mike Nichols has personally hand picked Bruce for the pivotal role of Foyl the doorman, a Morgan Freeman-type moral anchor who dispenses sage advice to beautiful people, in his latest movie Let’s Make Love. With the likes of Richard Gere and Renee Zelwegger signing on, Bruce knows he has to up his game for the big times. So he does what any actor worth his salt would do and sets out across America to research the media obsessed, technology driven culture of love in order to get to the bottom of his character. However, when familiar faces rear their heads, Bruce finds it harder to put his B-movie past behind him than he thought. It’s a tale of lust, ambition, and big-time phonies with an axe to grind told by one hell of a funny storyteller.

Bruce is currently spending the summer on a torrid speaking engagement/book tour in support of Make Love!… that has more stops than a telegram of the Gettysburg Address. To check out appearance locations and dates, or to learn more about the book or any of his up coming projects, check out his website.

How exactly do you make love the Bruce Campbell way?

You don’t do it like it is in the book. Thank God for all of us it’s fiction.

Well congratulations on the book making the best-seller list.

Yeah, thank you.

Two books, two best-sellers. Piece of cake, right?

Yeah easy-peasy. You just have to tour 78,000 cities to do it.

Now the approach you took in writing the novel you called “autobiographical fiction,” meaning that you’re the protagonist and it’s full of real people in fictional situations right?

Yeah.

Did you have to call up any of the people like Richard Gere and say like, “hey is it alright…”

No.

No, huh?

It’s satire. But, you know, no one’s getting a secret drug habit revealed. And they’re all portrayed in the book as, you know… Richard’s a peace loving Buddhist. The fact that I get into a fistfight with him is another thing. People are generally more concerned with the graphics. I’ll spend three hours on tour talking about the graphics and five minutes talking about the people. Because it’s satire. It’s not non-fiction. You get a little bit of leeway there.

You can’t take it too seriously.

Well, I’m waiting for a person to finish the book and then go to Internet Movie Database to try and find a movie called Let’s Make Love. Then I’ll know that I’ve succeeded.

So you haven’t heard any feedback from anyone in the book?

I doubt I will. I’d be shocked if I did. If Mike Nichols called me up and went “hey kid good job!” or “you bastard I’m suing you!”, I’d be very surprised.

Might be a good way to start a conversation.

Or good PR. Might sell some copies of the book.

Now usually guys hear the words “relationship book” and run for the hills, but this isn’t Bruce is from Detroit, Women are from Venus. You took an interesting angle on it.

If they run for the hills they’re missing out, because there isn’t a shred of relationship advice in the book.

So it won’t help me get girls?

Most of the guys who read my books or see my movies can’t get girls anyway.

Cuz I need help.

Uh…

I caught your film Man With the Screaming Brain the other day.

Where?

At Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. It was a lot of fun.

Cool theater!

Are you bringing that along the whole book tour?

Yeah, it’s my traveling companion. I’m trying to give people two reasons to show up.

It’s always fun to see you and Ted Raimi on screen together. You’ve also got the Disney picture Sky High coming out July 29th. Can you compare and contrast those two shoots?

One was really fun and easy and the other was a pain in the ass.

Also saw you in that “Bravo TV’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments” last Halloween. That was a great treat for horror fans. But The Evil Dead finished #76 behind Deliverance and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

Heck yeah! You stick around long enough and you become part of pop culture. You become part of the lexicon.

Yeah but behind freakin’ Willy Wonka…?!? There were no chainsaws in that!

Which obviously gets no respect from Hollywood because they’re remaking it this summer. This summer’s pathetic.

You think so?

I know so!

You didn’t like the Batman movie?

Oh, they’re on their fifth or sixth fuckin’ Batman! How excited can I get about that? It’s a rip-off. Batman’s not gonna get my… I’m not going to see The Longest Yard. I’m not going to see The Honeymooners. I’m not going to see Herbie the Lovebug. Even I have been in Herbie the Lovebug! You know? I’m not going to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’m not going to see Bewitched. I’m not going to see Bad News Bears. I’ve been around long enough that I know when I’m getting ripped-off. You may not. You’re probably younger than me. When were you born?

1976.

Oh, well. You don’t even have a clue.

No.

They’re rehashing 30 years of material. The year you were born is the year that these original shows came out. You don’t even know you’re being ripped off. So I’ll say it for you.

You make a good point cuz they’re doing a lot of remakes…

It’s pathetic! “A lot?!?” That’s all there are.

I heard they’re doing a remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Is that weird seeing your youth get regurgitated on screen like that?

It’s horrible! It’s pathetic. Every bad Aaron Spelling show is coming back to haunt me. They (the movie industry) are down for the 18th consecutive week over last year and they don’t know why. They act like they don’t know. I’ll tell ‘em: it’s cuz their movies suck. They’re creatively bankrupt. They used to make fun of B-movies, you know, because they’re crude and they’ve got bad actors, bad dialogue, and the directors don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have a budget and the effects are cheesy. But it’s the only place where original ideas come from. So much so, that the A-movies are all B-movies. If you’ve been bitten by a radioactive spider, I got news for you, that’s a B-movie. If you dress up like a bat like your favorite little Batman movie: that’s a B-movie! Tonight? The opening of War of the Worlds? Aliens are attacking the earth. Helloooo? That’s a B-movie.

I never heard that done before.

Yeah: an original idea from 1898.

I guess this is as good a point as any to mention the possibility of an Evil Dead remake. I know nothing’s written in stone yet…

The good news is that even if we did it, which we may in the next year or two, it’s our idea. You know? We’re not pulling out the old file drawer looking to find out if we can do Barnaby Jones the Movie or Perry Mason the Movie.

I think a lot of the fans, that I’ve talked to anyway, breathed a big sigh of relief when we heard you guys were gonna be calling the shots. Rather than it being…

It would be. There won’t be somebody else. The whole idea is just to scare the crap out of a new generation. It’s not about ripping ourselves off. We don’t even know if there’s going to be an Ash character.

Really?

Yeah.

Are you at least a little bit happy that the Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash thing didn’t come together?

Yeah, because… analyze that for two seconds and you’ll realize what a bad idea it is. First of all you’re splitting the pie three-ways, so financially it’s a zero. We only had control over the Ash character. And how do you reconcile their three different universes that they live in? Like where is Ash coming from? Where does he show up from? So it’s just absurd. It’s just that all the executives were your age.

Can we assume, hypothetically speaking, that since it’s a remake rather than a sequel, that you will not be playing Ash?

No way.

Can I blow your mind right now? Ashley is kind of a girly name right?

Whatever.

Lindsay Lohan replaced you in the Herbie the Lovebug remake…

Perfect! Let her do it! I’d love to see her covered in blood.

Has your life changed being an officially best-selling author?

No, but it opens up the door to a whole new side of things. Now I can write. That works for me. In my golden years it’ll give me something to do.

Well, I appreciate you taking a couple of minutes out of your time and I wish you a lot of success with the book. I really enjoyed reading it.

Thank you. I appreciate it. There are a lot of fine people out there looking to kill a couple of hours. And mainly I did it because I think it’s time for people to laugh and not take themselves too seriously.
www.bruce-campbell.com

Got something constructive to say? By all means, rant away. Gonna blab about something unrelated and/or talk shit? Don't expect your comment to stick around.