Monday, March 17, 2008

The Midnight Man

Word spread around Anderson SC in the Spring of 1973. They were going to shoot a movie called "The Midnight Man". It starred Burt Lancaster, Susan Clark and Cameron Mitchell. I went to the auditions and met Burt's son Bill. He later wrote "The Bad News Bears". A couple of weeks later, they called me, and my friends Jimmy and Ed, to come to Clemson to be in the film. We got there early, and didn't know that they were already shooting a scene. It was at a club, and we walked right in. We thought they were going to tell us to go home, but thankfully they didn't. When our scene came up, we saw Burt. He was also directing the film. He picked Ed and me to be on the dance floor with a few others. Jimmy was placed at the bar. They served beer during the scene, and some folks got a little loud after a while. Burt wanted me to dance with Susan Clark. I told him I didn't know how to dance, and he taught me on the dance floor by leading me around. It was a slow dance. We danced to "Rocky Mountain High" by John Denver on the jukebox. Susan wanted to dance fast, and I wanted to dance slow, so we kept tripping up each other. After several takes, she went over to Burt and called me a bunch of names and then told him that if she had to dance with me, that she was going to walk off the picture, and she was the female lead. Burt was very nice and told her that I was trying my best. I had been cast as Susan's teenaged love interest, but now the script was rewritten, and I was now paired with a high school girl to dance with. If you look carefully at the finished product, Susan is sort of dancing with herself. Also, they couldn't use John Denver's song in the movie, so they changed it to an uptempo jazz tune. Everyone is dancing slow, except Susan. She was the only one dancing correctly then. I was paid $16 for four hours work that day. It was my first paid acting job. I learned a lot about how movies were made. As of today, the movie has never been released on DVD or video, but maybe one day. You can see it on cable some times. But, now I had been in a movie. My popularity went up more.

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