Trivia / Crimewave (1985)

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, estimated to be between $2-3 million. Box office, $5,101. The only reason the movie didn’t go Direct to Video was because of a television deal to air the movie on HBO. The production company decided to only release the film in major cities and buried it afterwards.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Sam Raimi calls the film "a horrible, horrible, horrible, depressing scene" and the production process "really wrong." Notably, he didn't participate in the film's 2013 Blu-Ray release, while Bruce Campbell (who is no less critical) did.
  • This isn't exactly The Coen Brothers' career highpoint, and it's usually left out of retrospectives on their career, even as it went on to influence later works like The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Raimi and the studio clashed many times during production. They rejected his original choice of leading man (Bruce Campbell) and insisted on a more "Hollywood" actor in Reed Birney. Raimi retaliated by giving Campbell the role of Renaldo, and then expanding the character.
  • The studio criticized the decision to use cast and crew members (including Campbell) as extras in several scenes, a Raimi staple known as "Shemping".
  • During post-production, the studio replaced Raimi's music composer with one of its own choosing, then did the same with the editor, removing Raimi's influence over the film's final cut.
  • An argument broke out near the end of the post-production between Campbell and the producers. Campbell argued that he and Raimi had always been closely involved with their own films' editing, describing the behavior of the producers as "nickel-and-dime-bullshit". One of the producers replied by calling Campbell an "asshole", commenting that the crew had gone severely over budget. The difficulty during production left a negative impression on Campbell, who insisted that he never wanted to work with big-budget movie producers again, describing the conduct as "soulless" and "just a business".
• Troubled Production:
  • Production took place during a bitterly-cold Michigan winter. When the script called for flowing river water when the actual river was frozen over, the crew resorted to illegally dynamiting an ice floe.
  • Actress Louise Lasser spent most of the shoot on an extended cocaine binge. After firing her make-up artist, she insisted that she apply all her own make-up, despite objections from the cast. She would often show up on set with poorly applied "clown make-up" and messed up hair, oblivious to how she appeared. There were occasions when she outright refused to leave her trailer, to the annoyance of the cast and crew.
  • Brion James apparently suffered a nervous breakdown during shooting, and trashed a hotel room while attempting to "exorcise a ghost from [the] light fixtures."
  • The crew spent a week filming on a street after dark, directly under a nursing home, with huge wind machines blowing for long hours. One evening a glass bottle with a note in it crashed to the ground from an upper floor. The note inside read, "The noise is keeping me awake all night long and I am getting sick. I am dying because of you."
• What Could Have Been: As mentioned above, Bruce Campbell was originally meant to play the lead. As one AV Club commenter put it, "I can understand one of the producers going 'We're sorry, Sam, but we can't cast your friend as the main character.' What I can't understand is that same person then turning and saying 'SOMEBODY GET ME REED BIRNEY!'"