Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (34 page)

When filming finally began, they had not moved the hearse back in front of the grave. After about thirty minutes of filming, the director suddenly asked, “Was the hearse in the establishing shot? Where is the driver?” The establishing shot is the opening sequence, where they use a wide-angle lens to capture the entire graveside scene. In response, a couple of crew members pointed at me. After I explained the incident of getting yelled at, he seemed to realize it was a lost cause to reshoot the entire opening shot.

He then asked an assistant how many mourners there were for the graveside shot. When he was told that they had ordered only twelve, he became very upset. At this point he looked back at me and asked, “Has the studio paid for your body for the whole day?” and of course they had. Because I showed up in my usual black suit, he said, “Good, you’re going to be a mourner,” and paired me up with a young lady I had spoken with earlier. She was a pretty convincing actress because as we stood at the
graveside, she was actually crying. As they filmed the service’s conclusion, we walked away from the grave and I put my arm around her to console her, which seemed like the natural thing to do. At least this time they weren’t yelling at me.

The most unnerving production I was ever involved in was an order for a hearse to report to Rosedale to be used in a music video. About 200 gang members were present, and the assistant director explained to me that this was an attempt to “bury the hatchet” between Los Angeles’ two infamous rival gangs—the Crips and the Bloods. The rationale was that if both gangs participated in the same video, they might somehow lessen the bad blood between them.

You could feel the tension as the gang members walked alongside the hearse while we passed all the standing headstones. Repeatedly, a gang member would flash his gang sign, and each time that happened we had to stop and start all over again. This went on for over three hours. By that afternoon, tension had risen to the point where my instincts told me it was time for me to get my ass out of there.

Without a doubt, the most realistic cemetery scene I saw filmed was at the Westwood VA Cemetery for a movie called
Hard to Kill
, with Steven Seagal and his then wife Kelly LeBrock. They had limos, police cars, motorcycle officers, a military color guard, bugler, gun squad salutes, and bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace.” The entire day of shooting probably cost about $50,000, and unfortunately it wasn’t even used in the film. The only reference to the funeral in the film was a color photograph of the officer on a
USA Today
front page.

The extent to which studios sometimes go to create an authentic-looking cemetery is amazing, but it’s costly to rent a working cemetery for a day, so when they don’t have a big enough budget or the scene is short, they fake it. On one episode of
Doogie Howser, M.D
., they set up a cemetery shot on a grassy San Fernando Valley parkway. Because all the scenes were close-ups, you couldn’t even tell the difference.

Probably the strangest funeral scene I participated in was for a Virginia Madsen horror movie called
Candyman
. The villain was played by a tall, sinister-looking black man who had a large hook instead of one hand that he used to kill his victims. They instructed me to approach Madsen’s casket at the conclusion of the graveside service and activate the lowering device, so that the casket would gradually descend into the grave that they
paid the cemetery to open. The camera panned up to a knoll where about 100 nicely dressed African Americans were all in a line, two abreast. They slowly came down the hill and each dropped something into the grave as they passed by. They didn’t talk to each other and appeared almost zombie-like.

For another movie, they shot two funeral scenes with the same hearse on the same day. It was a film with Laura Dern called
Afterburn
. They also used rain in one of the shots to make it appear like a different time of year. All the actors had to change their clothes, but they let me appear as the stereotypical black-suited funeral director. The most interesting thing about this film was that it was based on the true story of a fighter pilot who was killed when his jet crashed. After an extensive investigation, the Air Force claimed that it was caused by pilot error, but the pilot’s wife doggedly sought proof from the military and defense contractor General Dynamics that mechanical failure in the F-16 caused the crash. As it turns out, the jet had an intermittent flaw that only showed up after a certain number of flight hours.

The longest I ever appeared on screen was in a Tim Robbins film called
The Player
. He and Greta Scacchi were leaving a graveside service and stopped to chat before they parted company, while I stood in the background next to my hearse. The director knew that this was my profession so after the shot he complimented me for looking convincingly bored while waiting.

When one of the studios began filming for a feature called
Chaplin
, starring Robert Downey Jr., the script called for an early ’70s Cadillac limo. Charlie Chaplin had built a large Tudor-style studio on La Brea and Sunset. Many people only remember the property as being the home of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Over the decades there were only slight changes, so the architecture remained the same. The limo was used to depict Chaplin’s final visit to his studio just before his death.

While preparations were being made for the scene, I spoke with a uniformed motorcycle officer whose job was to direct traffic on La Brea during the filming. He was riding a fairly old black-and-white Kawasaki 750cc bike previously owned by a funeral escort. After I talked with him about my love for motorcycles and mentioned that my favorite model had been a 1956 British Triumph, he said, “What got you interested in antique bikes?” That kind of question really makes you think about your age, because the bike was only two years old when I was riding it.

Another interesting project was the filming of a Clint Eastwood movie,
In the Line of Fire
. Clint played an aging secret service agent trying to figure out who was plotting to kill the President. Our first shot was a motorcade of limos, motorcycles, and trucks with Secret Service agents watching closely to see if there were going to be any attempts on the president’s life. The lead limo was an authentic Cadillac presidential limousine, with bulletproof doors and windows that they had located at a General Motors storage facility. The limo was scheduled for destruction, but the studio got GM to let them use it first.

They filmed our arrival at the Westin Bonaventure hotel multiple times. The motorcade would start a few blocks away, and many people on the street were watching to see what all the hoopla was about without realizing that it was just for a movie. My limo carried secret service agents and was immediately behind the president’s limo. My next two limos carried military and dignitaries. It was hard to refrain from laughing as we approached the hotel because many people who were walking on the streets seemed to believe they were observing some official protocol. To make it even funnier, the man playing the president was waving at all the people, who thought he was someone really important.

The next scene was of the limos leaving after unloading their passengers. We were told to slowly pull away from the hotel, but what we weren’t told was that a taxicab would come screeching up along the departing limos and that Clint was going to jump from the cab and run between my limo and the second limo. As a result, the second limo driver almost struck Clint. Although they reshot the scene, the assistant director told me later that he liked the first shot because of the shocked look on Clint’s face when my second limo almost ran him down.

Because of my participation in so many productions, reading movie credits was always interesting and allowed me to see the names of the many people I worked with over the years. I have often thought that it would be nice to thank all the studios that supported our motion picture rental division. Aside from the major studios like Universal, Fox, Paramount, MGM, and CBS, the productions that had the most impact on our business were Steven Cannell and Spelling-Goldberg Productions because of their many weekly TV shows that often depicted funeral scenes.

After renting vehicles and going on movie drives for several years, I added mortuary and cemetery prop rentals to our service. When independent out-of-town film producers would arrive in Los Angeles, they would often contact local studios for leads. Because I had become part of this small fraternity of brothers in the industry, they always recommended calling us for all funeral-related cars and props.

One prop rental we had was from a production company that didn’t even call us. A film crew was set up under the Harbor Freeway, a few blocks from our mortuary. After approaching the scene, I noticed three men having difficulty with a cot that wouldn’t collapse enough to fit into their coroner’s wagon.

I approached them and said, “You know what your problem is?” Without getting up, the director turned around with a contemptuous look on his face and said, “No, what’s my problem?” I informed him that they had an ambulance stretcher and what they needed was a mortuary cot. He stood up and asked, “So what makes you the expert?” I told him that we owned a mortuary just down the street and that we had the proper cot that they could rent. One of his people followed me to the mortuary to pick it up and had me demonstrate how to operate it.

Sometimes a studio would ask if they could send someone over to conduct research about a movie they were making. I would happily help them with information about anything to do with funerals, body preparation, burials, etc. On one such occasion, a studio asked if I could spend some time with three actors who had many questions about the funeral business. When they arrived, one face was very familiar to me. It was Christopher Atkins, who had been in
The Blue Lagoon
with Brooke Shields. He was preparing to star in a movie called
Mortuary Academy
, along with two other actors, one white and the other black. Their first questions were about embalming procedures, so we went to our
embalming room. Under a sheet was a male body, which didn’t seem to bother them.

Some of the actors’ questions were quite technical, so I asked our embalmer, Jerry Hendricks, to provide additional details. The inevitable question was asked: “Does a body ever sit up on its own?” Jerry explained that it was physically impossible for a deceased person to do anything more than just twitch or gurgle. Jerry was standing next to the body as he explained things in great detail. He topped it all off by saying, “Believe me, if this corpse sat up right now, I would be the first one out the door.” The young black actor hadn’t spoken a single word up to this point. His eyes widened and he said in a hushed voice, “No, you wouldn’t!”

Providing equipment and vehicles for film productions eventually led to the renting of our mortuary for many movies and TV shows, some of which included
Tucker’s Witch, The A-Team, Riptide, Hunter, MacGyver, Hooperman
, and
L.A. Law
. On the
L.A. Law
shoot, one of the crew gave me his cap with the show’s logo on it, a California license plate reading “LA LAW.”

For an episode of
MacGyver
, they sent some workmen to create a fictitious funeral home sign. I told them that they didn’t have to change the name because we preferred the exposure, so in the opening shot of the show, the entire screen was filled with our sign. As they pulled back from it, MacGyver walks in the front door to pay his respects to his deceased friend, who had actually faked his death to avoid a mob hit.

On John Ritter’s detective show
Hooperman
, they were investigating some thefts from the reposing room of a local mortuary. They had a plainclothes officer in the casket shortly after the mortuary had closed for visitations, and on his wrist was an expensive Rolex watch. When the thief snuck into the chapel and started to remove the watch, the detective grabbed him. A short struggle ensued as other detectives came running out from the draped-off family room. As soon as the perpetrator was on the floor and being held down, Hooperman started reciting the Miranda rights. Another officer stopped Ritter and told him that it wasn’t necessary to continue, because the perpetrator had had a heart attack and died.

In addition to big productions, we rented our equipment and facilities for student film projects. One recently graduated film director wanted to film scenes for a project called
Beverly Hills Body Snatchers
. He came to the mansion to discuss the possibility of renting the mortuary to film just
enough to show some executives his work. Our going rate was $700 per day, which he said he couldn’t afford. I agreed to let them film for three days at one-fourth our usual rental rate on his promise that if he was able to sell the idea, he would return and pay the full rate. About four months later, he called and said it was a go, so they filmed at the mortuary for a full week.

The film starred Vic Tayback and Frank Gorshin. It was never released in theaters, but it did come out on video and the director sent me a copy. It made me feel good to have helped this young man establish himself as a director. His name is Jonathan Mostow, and he has since directed
Terminator 3, Flight of Black Angel, Breakdown
, and
U-571
, and assisted in the writing of them as well.

In 1990, actor Jeff Daniels came in to do some research for a movie called
Arachnophobia
, about a very poisonous spider from South America that is accidentally transported to the United States in a makeshift coffin. Daniel’s character is a doctor in a small town where people are mysteriously dying. His discovery is personally unnerving because of his arachnophobia, an extreme fear of spiders.

Shortly after his visit, I furnished them with some props, including a casket, lowering device, folding chairs, a cemetery canopy, and an Abbott & Hast conversion for the shoot. The studio transported everything to the small coastal town of Cambria, although it was called Canaima in the film, a veiled reference to the national park in Venezuela where some of the filming took place.