True Stories #420 - The Leaf Blower

Robert got a primo job as "leaf spreader" on the 1978 horror movie "Halloween." His story is fascinating.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-stories-with-seth-andrews--5621867/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Roberts found himself working in the movie business. Now,
when you and I think movie business, we're thinking glamour,
fame and markeee names. But anybody who has ever sat

(00:24):
through the closing credits of a film knows that there
are hundreds, sometimes thousands of people who are unheralded in
the movie business. And Robert was one of those people
way back in the late nineteen seventies when he got
a job as a temporary set builder on the classic
John Carpenter horror movie Halloween. And by set builder, I

(00:48):
mean that one of his main jobs was to make
it look like October in the town of Haddenfield, Illinois.
The problem was, Haddenfield wasn't a real town and it
was in October. Halloween was actually shooting in the month
of May in Pasadena, California. So Robert's job as a
set dresser was to walk around with these big garbage

(01:11):
bags full of dead leaves and spread them out all
under the trees and over everybody's lawn. Now, this would
be an interesting story any time of year, but as
we are airing this in the month of Halloween. I
wanted to talk about Robert and the iconic film for
just a few minutes. Imagine being able to say that
you were there, You were part of the crew that

(01:33):
produced this three hundred thousand dollars miracle movie so low
budget that the actors on screen were wearing their own clothes.
The movie written in ten days, shot in about twenty days,
much of it using a fancy new contraption called the
pana Glide. John Carpenter's first title for the film was

(01:55):
not Halloween. It was The Babysitter Murders, until they decided
to focus the action on October thirty first. Michael Myers
is a household named today, but in the first film
he was actually referred to in the credits as the
shape representing evil. That famous mask, of course, the spray
painted and slightly modified William Shatner mask that became a

(02:19):
kind of blank canvas that audiences could project their own
fears onto. I mean, what could be more terrifying than
the realization that your fears are coming to get you
and that evil cannot be killed. Interestingly, many of the
character names came from people the director knew. Michael Myers

(02:40):
was the name of a film distributor on John Carpenter's
previous movie, Assault on Precinct thirteen. Laurie Strode was named
after one of his old girlfriends. The kid Tommy Doyle
was named after a character in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.
The Sheriff Lee Brackett was named for a science fiction novelist.

(03:00):
Halloween shot for less than a half a million bucks
given almost no marketing budget. That movie went on to
gross a massive seventy million dollars and made history. It
became history, it launched how many sequels and inspired countless ripoffs.
Michael Meyer's masks are everywhere in costume shops. That piano

(03:24):
theme from the movie score written and recorded in just
three days by John Carpenter himself. Those creepy notes have
been played by both amateurs and professionals all around the world.
And there is a big budget video game planned for
release in September of twenty twenty six, with a Halloween
game trailer already circulating online. The game trailer feels a

(03:49):
lot like the movie, and of course, the movie terrified
and thrilled a generation, and right there at the beginning,
way off camera in a job that was pretty much
on noticed and certainly uncelebrated was Roberts. His job so
menial that he pretty much had no interaction with John
Carpenter or producer Deborah Hill. He didn't get a driver

(04:12):
or his own trailer. He worked for almost nothing, walking
those neighborhood streets in Pasadena, gauging what the camera's lens
would see or not see, and then opening up those
big trash bags full of leaves, and doing his level
best to make California in the summer look like Illinois
in the fall, as the film totally fooled millions. On

(04:35):
that note, I think you would agree Robert did a
really good job set decorator leaf spreader. This was his
humble yet critical start in the movie business, and it
was also a strangely coincidental one, because Robert, the leaf
spreader on the nineteen seventy eight horror classic Halloween, would

(04:59):
be Calm in nineteen eighty four a horror icon himself.
After all, the leaf guy was also the finger Knives
guy Freddie Krueger, played to perfection by Robert England. And

(05:25):
that's a true story. True Stories podcast dot Com