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| Peter Boyle's adventures with Mel Brooks! |
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Hanging on the set of the movie F.I.S.T.
(This is a true story the tabs never got!)
Rocky wouldn’t wear the blue suit. Production of this big budget
film being shot in Dubuque, Iowa in 1978 had stopped...and so we sat
around for most of the day listening to and being entertained by Peter
Boyle who described in finite detail all the makeup procedures for him
as Mel Brook’s “Young Frankenstein.”
I had read in Kup’s column in the Chicago Sun-Times that Sly
Stallone was shooting this picture...loosely based on a Jimmy Hoffa type
leader of the Teamsters Union, so I got on the phone to my
union...Screen Actors Guild and ask them if they had a number in Iowa to
call about work. They did and I was hired over the phone but had to
make the two hour drive from our home near Rockford for the next three
days to be an extra on the film.
I left at 4AM to get on the set on time and after being fitted out
in heavy winter clothing...well worn...and given a Jimmy Cagney
cap...(it actually had a tag saying that) I sat down for a treatment
from Michael Westmore of the famous Westmore family of movie makeup
artists who chopped my hair and slapped some stuff on my face.
The movie was supposed to be in Cleveland in the middle of
winter...so...the heavy clothes...but this was summer in Iowa and 100
degrees in the shade. Sly’s dispute with director Norman Jewison about
changing from a brown suit which Sly apparently loved...to a dark blue
suit went on for hours with assistant directors and other bigwigs
running back and forth between Sly’s air conditioned trailer where he
had, of course, stewed in comfort and the set of the movie which was the
very hot basement of a large Dubuque church...where Jewison stewed over
the star’s apparel objection in less comfortable surroundings...along
with a highly paid bunch of actors...and other staffers while hundreds
of thousands of dollars was being wasted by the minute.
Finally after we broke for lunch...a compromise was reached.
Stallone would wear the brown suit he loved...but he’d put a tan topcoat
on to appease the director. Hooray...production could resume. This
incident never made the trade papers, by the way.
After the next scene was finished I was sitting on the steps
outside trying to cool down and smoking one of my big black Tampa
cigars. Sly walked by and said that smelled great and ask me if I had
another. I gave him a couple and when he was on my show in Philadelphia
by phone a few years later before Rocky 2 came out...I offered to send
him a box which he gladly accepted.
The heat in Iowa got to me the third day so I quit but before I
left I had a chance to chat with two future stars...who were just
getting a shot at the big time.
One was Melinda Dillon who no one had heard of at that time...but
who everyone would know shortly as the mother of the little boy
kidnapped by aliens in “Close Encounters of a Third Kind”.
The other was Kevin Conway who made a bunch of flicks after FIST and
is probably best known for his part as the Sergeant with the Union Army
in” Gettysburg”.
connect:
stanmajor@aol.com
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