FAIR DINKUM TERROR: GRABOIDS DOWN UNDER

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When ‘Tremors’ co-creators Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson were approached to develop a fifth entry in the popular franchise, they envisioned sending gun nut Burt Gummer to the land down under the throw another graboid on the barbie. But a combination of unfortunate events and mysterious studio forces saw them unceremoniously dumped from the franchise.

Read the Tremors 5: Gummer Down Under synopsis here:

Much like the lead characters in the series of films they helped bring to life, S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock have often had to adapt to circumstances largely beyond their control. For starters, there was the case of the ever-decreasing returning cast.

“Michael Gross (who played survivalist Burt Gummer in seven ‘Tremors’ films as well as the 13-episode TV series from the early naughties) would be the first one to say that the running joke was that he was the only one willing to show up,” Wilson said.

“Kevin (Bacon, in case it wasn’t obvious, who played Val McKee in the first film) bowed out before ‘Tremors 2’, although he did consider it briefly. We flew out to New York and saw him. But at the time, he hated the movie. He hated it for about 20 years. At the time, he’d had some flops, and ‘Tremors’ wasn’t a breakout hit. He was incredible to work with, and when we went to see him, he was very polite. But he said, ‘Guys, you know what? People don’t come up to me (and say) ‘You’re so great in that movie.’, they just say ‘The monsters are so cool’. He was very, very pleasant to us, all the while saying ‘no’. Then Fred Ward (Bacon’s co-star) came back for the second film but didn’t want to do any more after that. So in ‘Tremors 3’, we knew it was only going to be Michael - and we knew that Burt needed sounding boards; he needed ‘real’ people who he can react to and who can react to him. So we decided to get someone who could fill that Val role (Shawn Christian), and we brought in Susan Chuang to be the new Walter Chang (Walter, played by Victor Wong in the first film, owned the Perfection General Store) and use those characters to ground the story and let Burt be his outlandish self.”

Then there was the fact that there was never supposed to be a fourth film. ‘Back to Perfection’ was intended to wrap up the series with the townsfolk forming an uneasy truce with El Blanco. This giant subterranean monster had been terrorising the town of Perfection.  “The studio was just beginning to come to grips with what the direct-to-video universe was all about and how successful it could be,” he said

“The video department begged the studio proper to make ‘Tremors 2’ and then it was a while before we made ‘Tremors 3’. That was designed to be the last one - the thinking being that surely we couldn’t milk this for more than those two sequels. But by that time, it was rolling forward on its own momentum, and they ordered ‘Tremors 4’ almost immediately. We explained that we’d structured three to be the end of the sequels, that we’d ended the life cycle of the monster and brought it full circle. The studio wasn’t bothered and basically said, ‘Well, what can you do?’ We asked if they’d mind if we made it a Western and start over. Their response was, ‘We don’t care, as long as it’s called ‘Tremors’ - so that’s why ‘Tremors 4’ is a Western.”

A further test lay in wait, though, with the studio decreeing shooting on ‘Tremors 4’ needed to start while Maddock, Wilson and star Michael Gross were still filming the ‘Tremors’ TV series (we did mention that Universal’s Sy-Fy network had also ordered a series that would follow the first three films, didn’t we?). “I forget where we were with ‘Tremors 4’ when they came to us with the series,” Wilson said.

“Sy-Fy, which Universal owned at the time, came to us and said ‘What about a series?’. “We’d actually pitched a series years earlier, so we had materials half ready to go. We were making the series, and Universal called and said ‘We need ‘Tremors 4’. We said we’d do it, but they said ‘You don’t understand. We need it now. You have to pull Michael out of the series for the last few episodes and start shooting immediately.’ Brent and I had been writing and re-writing scripts, and I had to leave - leaving Brent handling the final few episodes. This was an interesting experience because when you sit down with writers, they see ‘Tremors’ as farce. Now, don’t get me wrong, they were seasoned writers - more experienced than us with the daily grind of television - but it’s a difficult tone. It’s horror, yet it’s comedy. And you can’t make fun of the monsters; you can’t make fun of the characters. Added to that, we were barely prepared for the incredible grind of television - to get scripts out, get them to Mexico, field calls from directors, review dailies and then call the directors to talk through what worked and what didn’t. And I had to leave all that on Brent so that Michael and I could go and start pre-production on ‘Tremors 4’.”

The momentum behind the series by this point, Wilson recalls, was so great that the studio had already begun looking to the future, commissioning a script for ‘Tremors 5’. “It was written while we were doing ‘Tremors 4’,” Wilson said.

“Everybody was excited by the idea and, for a while there was talk of an even bigger budget and the potential for it to be a theatrical feature. So we were looking to how we could be really different, and one of the ideas that came up was putting Burt in another country. We felt Australia has its own wild west element to it, and none of us had ever been. But it seemed like it would be a fun place to go and would make a natural fit for Burt’s character.”

After handing off the writing duties on the third and fourth films and a large part of the series, Maddock and Wilson decided to return to write the fifth film. “We had talented people on board for the series and for ‘Tremors 3’ and 4,” Wilson said.

“John (Whepley, writer of 3) and Scott (Buck, writer of 4) came back with their own ideas based on our stories. But it can also be a frustrating process, because we get stuck on what we would do. We rewrote the writers on the series, and we did on the films too. And at the time, we thought we had sufficient time available to do it ourselves, and so we decided to do it instead of giving the story to someone else, reviewing their draft, coming back with notes, then rewriting their work. We just thought we’d write it, and then it’d be done without that process. By now, Gross’ Burt Gummer was firmly ensconced as the face of the franchise.

“When we made the first film, it was astonishing to us that they even wanted us to read Michael for the part of Burt because he was hugely famous for ‘Family Ties’ (the 80s sitcom that also launched star Michael J Fox),” Wilson said.

I think Michael was as surprised as us to get the call when he learned what the role was. And then one day while we were on set - I can’t remember which of the films this was on - he came up to me and said ‘Steve, it happened!’ I said ‘What’s that?’ He said ‘As an actor, when you’re as famous as I was on ‘Family Ties’, you see people coming down the street… and they get this look. They glance at you, and they suddenly recognise you and get that look - that ‘Oh my god, it’s him!’ look.’ He said, ‘This happened to me in New York, but the guy said ‘Oh my god! You’re that crazy gun guy!’ Michael was thrilled. It was the first time someone said that, and not ‘You’re the dad from ‘Family Ties’. For him, it was a great milestone because most actors are lucky if they get one role like that - and he had two!”

With that in mind, Wilson and Maddock wanted to make sure Burt was seemingly fully equipped to do battle with the graboids in the outback when he’s summoned by the Australian government to help them capture a live ass-blaster (the third iteration of the graboids first seen in ‘Tremors 3’). “It’s the running theme in those movies. Burt is always planning for what just happened, but the graboids do a reversal on him,” Wilson said.

“We wanted to stay true to that - but we also didn’t want to break our own rules, one of which was that there would be no ‘Queen’ graboid. The thing we realised was that Burt had never seen a baby graboid (first introduced in the prequel ‘Tremors 4’), so we figured that would still work. Admittedly, we did bend that rule a little bit near the end with the Aussie graboid, which would’ve been much bigger and weirder. But when we were writing, we always started with the idea of being true to what we’ve said before, to the world we’ve set up and to the fans. It made sense for the graboids to be showing up in other parts of the world, people would know what they were, and people would know that Burt’s the guy to ask.”

This time around - and for the first time since the series began - Burt has a love interest, pastoralist Margaret Campbell, whose sheep station serves as Burt’s base. “Heather (Burt’s wife, as played by Reba McIntyre in the first film) ‘left’ because Reba wasn’t coming back,” Wilson said.

“And it’s hard to ask movie stars to come back and do more work on that thing that wasn’t really that successful. But to us it made sense, and it felt the time was right to bring in a romantic interest. He was down in the dumps in two, but the battles there re-energised him, re-focussed him and got him out of his shell.”

Wilson’s research also fed into one of the script’s more ambitious setpieces, where Burt and crew are high-tailing it through the desert in a land rover equipped with a scavenged six-barrelled minigun, with hordes of baby graboids in hot pursuit. “I’d once been to a Soldier of Fortune convention when I was researching firearms - it was the most amazing thing, and it was fairly crazy,” Wilson said.

“And I saw one of those miniguns fired, and it’s something they’ve never got right in movies. It’s not this rat-tat-tat sound like a machine gun, it’s unlike anything else you’ve ever heard. It’s six thousand rounds a minute, and it’s like this weird, steady roar. And we’d always wanted to get Burt some big weapons, so we thought it’d be great to give him this minigun, and then turn it round by having him burn through all the ammunition in a minute and a half.”

Unfortunately, while writing for Part Five (tentatively subtitled ‘Gummer Down Under’) was in full swing with the duo well into their fourth draft, Maddock and Wilson were told to down tools. “‘Tremors 4’ did not perform as well as the earlier sequels, and the bottom had also fallen out of the video/DVD market too,” Wilson said.

“Large outlets like Walmart weren’t going to carry films that weren’t studio pictures and didn’t have advertising behind them. And while the studio did a considerable amount of advertising for ‘Tremors 2’ - they even sent me and Michael on a little jaunt around the country to promote it - by three and four they’d discovered this magical thing they really loved - no advertising whatsoever. So they ultimately said ‘No, we’re going to shelve it (the fifth film).’”

Wilson concedes the script as it now reads (and you can read his synopsis of it above, still needs work. “We did seven drafts of the first one,” he said.

“And somewhere in drafts four through six, they got too funny. Our goal has been to always make it as real as possible, because if you’ve got something as strange as graboids in the film, the people had better be believable. And those drafts had jokes that were at the expense of the characters and at the expense of the monsters. We want the comedy to be funny because it involves something someone would really do or say, and the audience can feel that. So with ‘Tremors’, by the seventh draft it had become what you see - this delicate balance between comedy and horror. And when I re-read ‘Tremors 5’, I was a little surprised at how much wasn’t included. The thinking of the studio at the time was that we might need to look to hand the franchise off, and start over with new characters - like ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. The idea was that Chad (Margaret’s juvenile delinquent nephew whose knowledge of the finer points of hot-wiring saves Burt and crew) would grow as a character and potentially move into that leading, Burt-ish role for the next movie. But that isn’t indicated at all in what we’d written! The other character that’s not served well is Margaret. There were moments to be played with Burt, but the script really only has that one at the beginning when they take the tour of her ranch. But that’s it. We needed to fix that - get her in earlier, and figure out how to get her back into the story before she literally falls out of the ceiling near the end. Because, as it reads now, when Burt ‘gives her up’ at the end, that doesn’t really play.”

Another character that needed work, Wilson said, was Hako Garimara - an Aboriginal man who meets up with the group early on, after one of Burt’s “Government” escorts gets slaughtered by an ass-blaster.

”We’d done enough cursory research to hopefully get those keynote moments right, like the fact that Hako is the caretaker of the region,” he said.

“Had we gone ahead, we would have been all over people to make sure we got it as right as we can.”

Upon revisiting, however, the main issue for Wilson is the prevalence of action. “There’s way too much action - unless you had $100 million, you couldn’t shoot everything in that script,” he said.

“We usually get inventive with the action and put them all in drafts of two and three. And those drafts are too long, they’re 120, 130 pages long. We then sit down with our team - we ask people we trust to read it and if they say things like ‘I was kind of bored by the time Burt shot the 100th graboid’, we’d cut the number of graboids he shoots. If they say an action scene’s a little unbelievable, we throw it out. If we have two action sequences, and one of them has Chad using his talent with cars, and he’s not doing anything in the other one, that one gets thrown out and the one where he fixes the car at the last minute stays in. So that’s the process, it’s part budget, part opinion and then what works best for the character while still moving the story forward. I was also dismayed to see there’s a couple of complete logic lapses that we would never allow in the finished movie. The radio that Burt uses to call Nigel (a bumbling salesman unwittingly brought into the graboid hunt) is the same one Nigel has later on that’s used to call the airforce, which doesn’t make sense.”

While ‘Tremors 5’ had officially been put on ice, fan interest in the fate of the franchise remained strong.

“There was never-ending interest from the fans, I became something of a de-facto frequently asked question answerer,” Wilson said.

“I lost track of the number of times I had to write ‘I’m sorry, but there’ll never be a ‘Tremors 5’.”

Over the next few years, the world of home entertainment changed dramatically (remember - ‘Tremors 4’ was made in 2004, a time when MySpace not only existed but was also popular). Home internet capabilities expanded and the streaming universe began to take off. Then, roughly ten years after work on ‘Tremors 5’ was ended, Wilson got a phone call he never expected. “My wife’s family was living in Chicago, and I was determined to live in the southwest, so we would periodically drive cross-country,” he said.

”We were on the way back from Chicago, and got a call on the road from Nancy (Roberts), who was still heading up Stampede (the production company established by Maddock, Wilson, Roberts and ‘Tremors’ director Ron Underwood). She said ‘You won’t believe it! ‘Tremors 5’ is happening! They want to make it!’ We got very excited, Nancy was going to get the information so we could hit the ground running. Nancy asked whether they wanted Brent or I to direct, and they told her neither of us were going to direct or even be remotely involved in the film. We were floored - it didn’t make creative sense, and it didn’t make financial sense. The story they gave us at the time was that they needed a team that did low-budget movies. The sequels we made we all low-budget films. That clearly wasn’t the real reason, and we never were able to find out what that real reason was. We did have a ‘right of first refusal’ clause built into our contacts that had just lapsed - a clause which meant they would have had to offer the sequel to us, and, if we said no, they could then take it to someone else. But we never got any real information about what really happened that led to that.”

To add insult to injury, Wilson was invited back to Universal for a private screening of the sequel he had nothing to do with. “I went back to Universal and watched ‘Tremors 5’ before it was released,” he said.

“I couldn’t have been more horrified. By halfway through, it was clear that it wasn’t anything we would want to do. I kept hoping it would get better, but it just got steadily worse. There was just a whole list of things that I felt were wrong with it - it’s got some of the worst monster movie clichès, the types of things we’d laugh at as kids, there were terrible homages to ‘Jurassic Park’. It’s quite a long list.”

With the Direct-To-Video universe in full swing without Maddock or Wilson (“When we were making the sequels, someone at the studio said ‘You guys don’t know what’s happening! VHS, man! VHS! I could sell an empty box so long as it was called ‘Tremors’!’ At the time, I thought that was a compliment. Now I see they weren’t kidding,” Wilson said), history chose to repeat itself in a way that neither writer would have liked.

“Nancy called us out of the blue again and said ‘You’re not going to believe this. Kevin’s finally thinking about returning to the character of Val! They want you to come in and talk about this new series idea that he has!’,” Wilson said.

“Then, when we called back to set up a time, they said ‘Oh, we’re sorry. There appears to have been some sort of mistake. No-one here wants to talk to you in any way, shape or form and never will.’ It was classic Hollywood - classic, bad Hollywood. There’s a lot of good Hollywood too, and Brent and I have experienced a lot of that. But this was not fun.”

Despite the way things ended, Wilson said he doesn’t have any regrets about his ‘Tremors’ experiences.

“Brent and I have had a really good run in the business, and sure… some people would argue we shouldn’t have kept doing ‘Tremors’, that we should have kept our hands in other, bigger movies,” he said.

“There’s the argument that we burnt bridges that we shouldn’t have because we were so busy with the ‘Tremors’ series. When we did ‘Tremors 2’, sequels were still looked down upon, our agent begged us not to do ‘Short Circuit 2’, saying ‘Only hacks do sequels!’ But that’s completely changed now - look how many ‘Star Wars’ films there are, for instance. And we love directing, and we love that world. None of the other things we’ve written have come close to the kind of satisfaction we had on those films.” *batteries not included’ is fun, ‘Heart and Souls’ is one of our favourite movies, our first big sale - ‘Short Circuit’ - ended up being sillier than we wanted it to be. But ‘Tremors’ 1, 2, 3 and 4 all came very close to what we were shooting for. They were so much fun to make, and were so gratifying in so many ways.”

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