DESCENDING INTO THE 'HELLHOLE'

By Marneen L. Fields & John Harrison

 

 

In early 1985, I received a call from Sandra Gimpel, stunt coordinator and ex-president of the Stuntwoman’s Association of Motion Pictures asking me if I’d like to audition for the role of an insanity victim in a new film which she was stunt coordinator on. What I found most surprising about Sandra calling me out of the blue like that was it had been about five years since I had last seen her at a Stuntman’s Association 5K race. At that event I had mentioned to Sandra how serious I was about my acting and how I’d been studying acting with celebrity acting coaches like Victor French (known to many as Agent 44 on Get Smart) and Jeff Corey (who played one of the mutant humans in 1970's Beneath the Planet of the Apes), along with performing in small theater productions in the Los Angeles area. The timing of her call was perfect as I had just finished a run of the famous Paddy Chayefsky play, The Tenth Man at the Melrose Theater in Hollywood playing the lead role of schizophrenic Evelyn. I was thrilled to get her call to audition for this character because I was fascinated with portraying characters dealing with complex issues like mental illness.

 

The film which Sandra had contacted me about was a low budget horror film titled Hellhole, and I’d heard through the grapevine that Linda Blair was maybe going to star it. It was being produced by Louis Arkoff, the son of the legendary Samuel Z. Arkoff, the prolific producer of a long string of low-budget drive-in features which he produced between the 1950s through the 1970s, many of them with his partner James H. Nicholson and his American International Pictures (AIP) company. So Louis Arkoff came from a good pedigree and had huge footsteps to follow in. To co-produce the film with him he brought in Billy Fine, and to helm the film, he brought in French director Pierre De Moro, whom apart from Hellhole has two other films to his name, Christmas Mountain (1981) and the award winning Savannah Smiles (1982).

 

Hellhole was something of a throwback to the women-in-prison films (or WIP, as they were affectionately known as), that were so popular in the early 1970s. Except here, the location was changed from a prison to a female mental institution, where a young woman (played by Judy Landers, taking the role Linda Blair was originally marked for) is sent after suffering from amnesia that has been brought on by the trauma of seeing her mother brutally murdered in front of her. Unfortunately, amnesia turns out to be the least of her worries, as she soon discovers that the institution is run by a mad doctor and his female assistant who are performing illegal experiments involving chemical lobotomies on the inmates. Landers was a familiar face in television shows like Vega$ and BJ and the Bear, usually playing the blonde bombshell, and she often appeared in projects alongside her older sister Audrey.

Louis Arkoff certainly assembled an interesting cast to populate his film. Playing the role of the mad Dr. Dane was Marjoe Gortner (who had found fame in the 1940s as a child evangelist before turning to acting as an adult), and Mary Woronov (a statuesque actress known for her work in Andy Warhol and Roger Corman films), was cast as Dane’s feared assistant, Dr. Fletcher. Also in the cast was the late Ray Sharkey, Terry Moore (who had been acting in films since the forties, and starred in the classic 1949 monster movie Mighty Joe Young), and the late Robert Z'Dar, an actor with a huge face and immense, prominent jaw who developed a cult following thanks to his appearance in the Maniac Cop series of films.

 

I almost didn't get the role in Hellhole. Louis Arkoff and Pierre De Moro cast me with a verbal offer based on a four page composite of photos and credits which I had shown them during my interview. Louis cast me on the spot and tole me the part was mine, then within minutes when I re-entered the casting waiting room I was informed by a casting assistant that another actress had been given the role. Casting mix ups like that have happened to me throughout my career, sometimes over a courtesy phone call late at night after you think you’ve booked the job, and once while at the airport ready to board an airplane for San Francisco. It’s best to assume no job in Hollywood is yours until you’ve signed a contract. But on this day, I stood up for myself refusing to take no for answer because the producer himself had cast me. I flat out told the casting assistant that she must be mistaken because the producer and director had already verbally offered me the role. I remember this very aggressive lady then explained to me,

 

"We have two roles available, do you have any objection to playing a lesbian and doing nudity?"

 

“Well, yes. I do. Can you explain the roles in more detail?”

 

She told me in one role my character would eventually wind up dead and the mad female doctor’s character would passionately kiss my corpse on the lips. I said, “As an actor I'll take that part since I'm dead when she kisses me, I wouldn’t know that she had kissed me.” I let her know that I don't do nudity so I’d have to decline the other role. So I chose necrophilia instead. It seemed a lot easier to deal with.

 

My co-star performance in Hellhole revolved around two big scenes in the film. My character, a religious insanity victim named Curry, an inmate at the institution is sitting in the cafeteria at meal time watching Judy Landers and another woman eating their dinner. I suddenly go into a religious hallucination and leap up from the table and begin to toss everyone’s plates into the air and onto the ground, screaming about the devil poisoning their food. After I have made a big mess and thrown everyone’s food onto the floor, I wrestle fight a nurse, and then jump up onto one of the tables, walking across other people’s food on their plates, knocking over a lot of dishes and ranting in tongues while bad guy Ray Sharkey looks on in disbelief. I stop dead in my tracks against the wall and perform the sign of the cross as Dr. Dane and Dr. Fletcher, accompanied by their big security guards, drag me off and sentence me to the hellhole, the secret experimental area where I am tied to a gurney and subjected to several needle injections into my neck (chemical lobotomy) and the gross post-mortem kiss.

 

My sequence inside the cafeteria scene was shot in one take, which was standard for scenes that were to be shot in one take, especially on low-budget productions. While everyone went to lunch, I stayed in the room going over and over my dialogue and the blocking for the scene. I didn’t get to meet Mary Wornov prior to the filming of the scene and imagined she was going to be a short and older-looking nurse, but when she walked into the room for my scene and I saw how tall and beautiful she was I was shocked, and it almost threw me off. I staged everything myself in the cafeteria, setting up the trays, bottles and plates of food for me to kick and trip over as I walked across the tabletops. Another thing to mention about my cafeteria scene is that director Pierre DeMoro gave me an interesting task moments prior to rolling camera that I hadn’t rehearsed. He told me to cross myself every time my character says the word, “devil,” and showed me quickly how to cross myself. Up until this point in my life I’d never been in a church so I didn’t know how to cross myself. Pierre let me know several weeks after filming that I’d crossed myself wrong. We both justified that crossing myself wrong was a great choice for a religious insanity victim. Eventually my character’s name of Curry was dropped from the credits and my character was titled Girl in the Cafeteria.

 

After the cafeteria sequence was finished, Marjoe Gortner pulled me to the side and quietly said, “This is how you speak in tongues.” He gave me a quick lesson in how to speak in tongues, which differed somewhat from my own interpretation. I’m sure Marjoe’s background in evangelism helped him there, and he was wonderful to work with and complimented me several times after filming the scene of me on the gurney, telling me what a great job I’d done. It’s a pity Marjoe seems to have given up acting and has not spent any time in the public eye for some time. In 1993, nearly ten years after Hellhole, I ran into him at the 12th Annual Golden Boot Awards. I had a nice chat with him, he told me he was with William Morris and that he was producing. I managed to snag a photo with him, and I must say he looked very resplendent in his western gear and huge belt buckle.

 

 My scene on the gurney would not have turned so great had not producer Louis Arkoff given me such great direction on how he wanted me to play that scene. He told me minutes before the camera started rolling that he wanted me to take that gurney out of the floor and whip myself around very violently. To this day people who see the film talk about how much they love the scenes of my hair flipping back and forth, and that was Louis’ favorite part also. I felt honored and satisfied that finally, after being a serious acting student for eight years (and minoring in Theater Arts at USU), that I had become the first girl from the stunt arena to land a straight acting and speaking role this prominent. Louis told me that they ended up cutting most of the other actresses scenes that took place in Hellhole because mine were so outstanding. For my work in the film I studied performances like Jack Nicholson’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and loved the technique where the characters are seen being carried off while screaming back into the camera. I applied that staging technique when they carried me out of the cafeteria and it looked great on film and in all the still photos.

 

Originally in my close-up scene tied to the gurney prior to Mary Woronov performing the chemical lobotomy, my character spoke no lines. Woronov stepped in and said she wanted me to do some lines about being afraid of the devil, and saying the devil was her. I learned that day that sometimes in filmmaking lines are written and given to you on the spot. Pierre De Moro shot the scene where I was crying real tears from a long shot and I remember him saying he felt bad that he didn’t shoot any close-ups of it because it was so good. Unfortunately, as an actor, once you exhaust the emotion it’s awfully hard to summon it up again no matter how good you are. Pierre and I discussed how in highly charged emotional scenes a director should start with a tight shot on the actor to get the best performance, and save the establishing long shot for later in the sequence.

 

I never actually got to see or read a completed screenplay for Hellhole, only my scenes. I had no idea the film was going to have as much violence and sex that it wound up containing until I saw it in the theater. The script (written by actor Aaron Butler under the pen name Vincent Mongol) had some interesting ideas and moments and I felt the film could have been much better if they toned down lot of the stuff that I felt was in poor taste and concentrated on some of the more psychological aspects of the story, but I guess they were trying to appeal to the thrill-hungry drive-in crowd. One of my best days on the set was when the scriptwriter pulled me aside and told me I brought more to my role than he could ever have imagined it having. That was the ultimate compliment an actor can receive. Butler had also written the popular 1983 women in prison film Chained Heat, which starred 
Linda Blair and was also produced by Billy Fine.  



Released in March of 1985, Hellhole seemed to slip through the cracks of independent film distribution at the time. The drive-in and grindhouse cinemas, where films like this found their biggest audiences were slowly disappearing in the wake of home video. When Hellhole did get released on VHS in America, on the RCA/Columbia label, it was exciting to see myself in the film featured in two of the three photos on the back cover of the video box. It’s interesting to note that after my name had been included in the Variety magazine credit listing, it was then mysteriously removed the following week, seeing my face so prominent on the video helped soften the blow of seeing my name removed from the credit listing in Variety, and reinforce how important my character and performance was to that film.

 

Over the subsequent years, Hellhole became something of a cult classic, but one that became increasingly hard to find with old VHS copies selling for high prices on sites like eBay and within collectors circles. The fact that a clip of my chemical lobotomy scene on the gurney from the film has racked-up over 600,000 views on You Tube provides testament to how popular the movie could have been had it been given a better chance.

 

Lots of people commented that I was destined to become the next Sissy Spacek after seeing my performance in Hellhole, but the film’s lack of distribution made it hard to capitalize on. Fortunately, Scream Factory announced that the film would finally be coming to DVD and Blu-ray in July of 2016, so maybe it might still prove to be a handy - if rather belated - stepping stone for me. I am glad the film will finally be available more widely and enable people to see and enjoy my performance in the wonderful high-definition which Blu-ray provides.

 

One thing I will never forget from my Hellhole experience was attending the cast party at Louis Arkoff’s magnificent house up in Mulholland south of Coldwater Canyon Blvd after production had wrapped. I was excited to be there but also rather nervous. I wasn’t used to walking around in high-heels when I descended a staircase holding my glass of wine and trying to look cool, calm and collected. You can probably guess what happens next. I lost my footing, but instead of tumbling down the stairs, I grabbed the railing with my free hand and vaulted head of heals straight over the railing and onto the floor below! The amazing thing was that I did it without spilling a single drop of my wine, and landed completely upright on my high heels. I glanced around at a sea of stunned faces and open mouths. I’m sure some people thought I had taken the spill deliberately to show off my stunt skills. There’s no doubt my old gymnastics and balancing ability came in handy when I had to make that landing with barely a split-second to think, but believe me there was nothing pre-planned about it. I managed to avoid breaking my neck and received a round of applause in the process. I also met Samuel Arkoff at the cast party, and it was true, he was usually seen smoking a cigar. It meant so much to me when he told me, along with co-producer Billy Fine how good they thought my performance was in the movie.

 

Hellhole though has certainly haunted me throughout the years. Mary Woronov slipped her big forceful tongue into my mouth when she kissed me. I wasn’t expecting it, and since my character was dead I could do nothing to resist against it. I just had to close my eyes and take it. It was real creepy, but it certainly looked effective and after many years of big-budget studio films and television work, it was certainly a memorable introduction to the world of exploitation filmmaking. I am proud of my performance in Hellhole and grateful for the experience and challenge, and I am happy that the movie has established a devoted fanbase in the years since its release, but it is not the sort of film I would have wanted to continue making.

 

 

(Excerpt from the forthcoming book Cartwheels & Halos: The True Marneen Lynne Fields Story, by Marneen Lynne Fields & John Harrison. Copyright 2016 by the authors of the work).