Yahoo Lifestyle John Carpenter on Loving Los Angeles, Making Music and If He’ll Direct Again
Anyone who’s seen John Carpenter’s 1996 sequel “Escape From L.A.” knows that, in the past, the filmmaker’s feelings about the City of Angels have been mixed, to put it mildly. They’re epitomized by a scene in which Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is enjoying a brief moment of relative peace in the earthquake-ravaged ruins of the city, after almost having his body parted out by the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills (Bruce Campbell), when his running mate of the moment (Valeria Golino) looks at him and observes, “Once you figure out this place, it’s really not so bad.” She is immediately shot in the back. (“By a kid!” notes Carpenter, who also co-wrote the script with Russell and the late producer Debra Hill).
While Carpenter has occasionally been metaphorically wounded by the slings, arrows and bullets of the city’s entertainment-industrial complex, he’s managed to survive. And in the lead-up to receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 3, he’s positively effusive about is love for his adopted hometown of 57 years — which he’d much rather talk about than his movies — and seemingly at peace with his legacy.
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Although Carpenter is best known as a master of horror, sci-fi and action, his filmography isn’t all gore, jump scares and explosions. Within those genres, he’s explored romance (1984’s “Starman,” which earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar nomination for best actor), comedy (1986’s “Big Trouble in Little China”) and social commentary (1988’s “They Live”).
For most, Carpenter’s legacy is defined by his third big screen directorial effort, 1978’s “Halloween,” which spawned a franchise that’s proved harder to kill than Michael Myers, the white-masked slasher who is its focal point. But serious fans tend to prefer Snake’s first go-round in 1980’s “Escape From New York” or another Russell-starrer, “The Thing” (adapted from the same novella as 1951’s “The Thing From Another World”), which flopped with both critics and audiences upon its release in 1982 but is now widely regarded as a classic.
In recent years, Carpenter has focused on his passion for music, passed down to him by his late father, Dr. Howard Ralph Carpenter, who served as the head of the music department at Western Kentucky University and recorded and performed with artists such as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Brenda Lee as a founding member of The Nashville Strings. Starting with his micro-budget first feature “Dark Star” (1974), Carpenter has penned and performed pulsating, synth-heavy scores for most of his films (emulated by the theme to Netflix’s “Stranger Things”) and, since the mid-2010s, he’s been pursuing a third-act second career as a recording artist (four “Lost Themes” albums) and live performer, working in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies (son of Dave Davies, guitarist for The Kinks). This fall, they’ll be doing a four-night residency at Los Angeles’ Belasco Theatre that will include a concert on — you guessed it — Halloween.
As this conversation with Variety demonstrates, Carpenter appears to have figured it out.
You’re literally going to be part of the Hollywood landscape with your star on the Walk of Fame. Does that have any symbolic significance for you?
Well, it does have a significance because I will be on the sacred boulevard. My name will be on it. I never expected that when I was a kid coming into Los Angeles from Bowling Green, Kentucky. I didn’t know any of this was going to happen, so it’s unbelievable.
As a movie-obsessed kid growing up in the South, what did you imagine Hollywood to be?
I had no clue. I came out here in 1968 to go to USC film school, and I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles or USC or where anything was. I just had my suitcase and a guitar and my long hair, and that was it. I remember flying in over Los Angeles and just being stunned at the size, like, “My God. Are you kidding me? This goes on forever.”
In the ‘60s, there was no internet and film school was just starting to become a thing. How did you learn about USC and make the decision to go there?
I looked up the available film schools and they had a bunch of them. They had UCLA and USC in L.A., and then they had one, I think, at Bob Jones University [in Greenville, South Carolina]. But that was a religious training I didn’t want, so I applied to both SC and UCLA and heard back from SC right away, so I thought, “That’s my school.” I didn’t know any more about it than that.
There’s the city and there’s the business, and the business can be pretty brutal. Have your feelings about Los Angeles evolved over the years?
My love for the city has deepened and it’s now mature, but it’s the same joy that I had when I arrived. I’ve traveled all over the world. Please… there are no comparisons. In terms of the business, I accept that it’s filled with pirates. It’s also filled with very good people, people who love movies, people who love working on movies. That’s the people I’m hanging out with. I can’t say enough. And no one’s paying me. This is how I feel.
The studios aren’t what they were. They’re kind of these old bones of dinosaurs sitting there. It’s sad now. This is not the business I got into. But the pull of it, the attraction, the legend of it stays the same. Tourists come and stare up at the Hollywood sign, they walk by the Chinese Theatre, they look at the [hand and shoe] prints on the ground and the stars on the Walk of Fame, and they say, “This is it.”
How did the fires in January affect you? I imagine you know people who lost their homes.
Yes, I did. Part of the price we pay for living here is the fires. My wife [producer Sandy King] and I have an office down in the center of Hollywood, in the flats. We were threatened, but we didn’t have to evacuate from where we live, so we made out OK. But we know people who didn’t or had close calls. There was a lot of devastation out there.
On a happier note, how does it feel to have a standalone career in music at this point in your life? It’s like you have all the rewards and not a lot of the pressure.
No pressure. It’s just joy. You don’t really have people telling you what to play and how to play. We’re having a blast. I’ve got a great band. I’m playing with my kid. I mean, what more can you ask?
Do you have plans to direct anytime soon?
Plans? I don’t know. I would love to direct again, given the right circumstances. But I’m not the same kid anymore who will do it for any amount of money. I can’t back into a budget anymore. I’m too old. It’s too hard. But directing is the love of my life. I’ll never stop loving that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tipsheet
WHAT John Carpenter receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
WHEN April 3, 11:30 AM
WHERE 7000 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood
WEB http://www.walkoffame.com
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