Campbell’s Scoop

Throughout a career that spans from Congo to Fargo, actor Bruce Campbell has always held fast to his belief that there’s no shame in toiling on Hollywood’s margins.

“Though you might not have a clue who I am, there are countless working stiffs like me out there, grinding away every day at the wheel of fortune,” he writes in his book If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor.

But Campbell, who reads from If Chins Could Kill and mingles with fans at Unity Temple this Thursday, may sell himself short. Since his starring role in the 1983 cult classic Evil Dead, he has worked consistently enough to create a lifestyle many actors would kill for. His high-school buddy, director Sam Raimi, employs him regularly, most recently in this summer’s Spider-Man. In addition, Campbell heads up his own Campbell Productions, which allows him and his wife to make documentaries. The resulting luxury is that he doesn’t live in Los Angeles — because he doesn’t have to.

“Movies used to pretend they were making art,” he says, gnawing a bit on the hand that feeds him. “Now the packaging is so naked: Hold up the Coca-Cola can and look at your Omega watch. There ought to be new Oscar categories, like ‘worst use of money’ and ‘biggest waste of time.’ Hollywood has become a vacuum for all the morons who want to be famous but don’t know why.”

This may be an odd indictment from a man whose last Hollywood movie cost upwards of $100 million. But in a phone interview from a book-tour stop in Vancouver, British Columbia, Campbell doesn’t mention spiders or Tobey Maguire at all. He’d rather talk about Bubba Ho-Tep, a little million-dollar movie that recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.

“I play a 68-year-old Elvis Presley dying of cancer in a retirement home,” he says. “And [black actor] Ossie Davis plays a man who thinks he’s Jack Kennedy; he thinks they’ve dyed him black. A mummy is sucking the soul out of the old people. But it’s a redemptive mummy picture — a cult moviegoer’s wet dream.”

It doesn’t sound that far from the Super-8 movies he and Raimi started making for fun as Michigan teens. And Evil Dead, the gorefest that brought them national attention, is now turning the stomachs of a new generation. “It made more money for its investors in the last two years than up to that point,” he says.

Campbell’s enthusiasm for his cult-movie roles suggests that there might have been more joy being young and making movies on the sly than being in a megabudget production like Spider-Man. Campbell says each has its benefits. “On Evil Dead, we were making $35 a week and had no heat, no running water, no creature comforts at all. But it was the only movie where we had 100 percent complete creative control. The trick is to get back to that.”