This month (October) is the anniversary of both my first and my last films. So here is the trailer for NINJA BUSTERS (below) written when I was 21 or 22 years old.
The original screenplay THE FALCONS CLAW written by the star Sid Campbell was about two guys who are constantly working out at a dojo and get a job at a warehouse... Where the other workers are "zombies" - hypnotized to obey orders and not notice that they were shipping drugs for a gangster.
Director Paul's first film DEATH MACHINES was about 3 hypnotized martial arts assassins who obeyed orders and could feel no pain, and I suspect that is where Sid (star and original writer) got that idea... or maybe someone told him that Zombie movies were popular and he wasn't thinking about horror zombies. It was an action script that had one big fight at the end, but the rest was lots of working out and sparing in the dojo... Sid owned a dojo in Oakland so he "wrote what he knew" - training. Not fighting.
I was hired to rewrite it and add more action. SILVER STREAK was one of my favorite movies and I love ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, so I rewrote it into a fun chase action film where the ninjas were always coming out of the shadows and attacking. Kind of THE WARRIORS with Ninjas - a series of chases and fights that used every location that Paul and Sid said were available. Instead of lots of working out at the dojo, flighting Ninjas that grew out of the shadows wherever they were.
I had a lot of cool scenes, like the one at the automobile graveyard - stacked with junk cars, where shadows crept out from under the wrecks and became Ninjas. My theory was that if we saw this happen a couple of times, every scene where there was a shadow somewhere would create suspense. Low budget production value. Why not turn *naturally occurring* shadows into a threat? Once you establish that Ninjas can kind of be "born" from the shadows, every shadow is a threat! None of that is in the movie.
Paul had an unusual way of raising money for his films. He put on these Martial Arts Exhibitions with the stars and sold tickets, had Luaus with exhibitions, did things that were closer to tent religious revivals than anything resembling an investor prospectus. Because the SEC said you could only have 35 investors, Paul created all of these events and all of the money raised when into one of 35 "investor's groups" that funded the film on paper.
This film was the first in a 3 film contract I had with Paul, and I wrote the other two scripts (and a fourt script) while they were raising the money... and during production shut downs. I wasn't paid for those scripts! But when I wrote them, NINJA BUSTERS was the first film for this slate of films and we would just keep making films in Oakland forever. The other two were a Romeo & Juliet kung fu flick about Columbus Avenue in San Francisco - on one side was Little Italy and on the other side was Chinatown - so I had a love story amidst a gang war. The other one was called A FIGHTING MAN and was about no rules barn fights that was kind of the kung fu version of HARD TIMES where people often fought to the death, and this mysterious stranger shows up to fight the champ... That was an idea from a news article I read. My unofficial 4th script was something that I planned to direct if the first three films made money - a science fiction kung fu movie about a post apocalyptic world and a WAGES OF FEAR type journey through the wilds of the nuked portion of the USA to deliver supplies from San Francisco to Boston. I had mutants who could travel through mirrors! (I'd seen ORPHEE). I don't even have copies of any of those scripts, because I delivered the originals thinking that NINJA BUSTERS would be a big hit and we'd need those scripts right away....
And NINJA BUSTERS crashed and burned.
One of the problems on low budget movies with non actors is that sometimes the audience is laughing *at* the movie (DEATH MACHINES had all kinds of clunky lines like "There go the guys that cut off my arm!" and a weird light filter problem where Detective Green was actually green in a whole scene - plus an actress with an accent that seemed almost cartoonish... Lots of unintentional laughter) so my plan was to add *intentional* laughter with some funny lines and situations. My theory was that if the audience was laughing on purpose and having a good time, they would forgive any of the low budget issues and maybe even laugh *with* problems that they would normally laugh *at*. Comedy is cheap, and covers a variety of problems.
MY story had these two losers joining a *women's* martial arts self defense class to pick up girls, but instead they pick up trouble when they see a mob assassination on a date. I had a great scene where one of them reads from their "How To Kung Fu" book while the other fights - and it doesn't go well. "Using your shoulder as a fulcrum..." And the guy fighting tries to follow those directions. Eventually the two guys actually learn how to fight, so we can have the big action scene at the end where they save the day.
You never want to be too serious if you don't have a lot of money. One of the things that all of the good reviews of the film point out is how *fun* it is - like we were having a good time making it. Well, making a movie is making a movie - what happens behind the scenes has little to do with the tone of the film. There are movies where the male and female lead have amazing chemistry onscreen... But hated each other in real life.
This thing had 3 directors! Lots of problems! The first director had never even made a short film! I still don't know why he was directing it. You always want the BEST person you can get for the job if you don't have much money. The BIGGEST name star you can get for the money, etc. Make the most expensive looking film possible for the least amount of money. So we weren't always having a good time. But the film was funny, and that helped.
One of the good things was that once that tone was set, it remained for the next two directors (the late great Paul Kyriazi in the clean up position, taking all of the existing footage and coming up with a way to shoot new material with new cast members that would cut together into a movie). So the humor remained.
You can see the Abbott & Costello influence in the trailer. Because Sid's script named the characters after the actors who would play them, I retained that (mostly to appease Sid), but the first director leaned into the Abbott & Costello thing and I changed them to Chick & Bernie. That director burned through our budget and 2 week schedule shooting the Dojo scenes and a half page scene in a nightclub... and the film died for the first time.
But we had the World Champion Oakland Raiders signed to play the guys in the Automobile Graveyard scene, so a new director shot that scene.
Then the film was shelved again for a few years as Paul tried to find the money to finish it. Thai money came from a guy who also had a dojo, and a son who was a wannabe rapper and break dancer, and a woman that the investor thought should be the lead, and...
Well, when the two female leads (actual actresses) refused to return because they were owed money, suddenly the script needed to explain why the cast changed and Paul reworked the script. Basically pasting together 3 versions of the story - but my humor element remains and big chunks of the story are my script. It was a troubled movie...
And then the negative and only print vanished. That new investor had set it up with a distributor who sold it to Mexican TV (before Robert Rodriguez would make EL MARIACHI for that purpose) and that distributor had gone bankrupt and nobody had a copy of the film. The problem with low budget films is that there isn't any money for back up prints and if the one copy was gone? The whole film was lost (except for a dubbed Spanish version) and the one screening of the rough cut to raise post production money was the only thing I had ever seen... or would ever see.
Until a guy who ran a "so bad they're good" film festival bought a film storage locker full of low budget films and discovered NINJA BUSTERS around a decade ago. Showed it at his festival, where it was a favorite, which lead to Showings at Alamo Draft House cinemas and a Special Edition DVD release...
And a Screening in San Francisco, with cast & crew doing Q&A afterwards... On October 29th a few years ago... at a theater in Chinatown where I used to see undubbed Kung Fu movies around the time I was writing this script.
So here's the trailer for my first produced screenplay!
Here's one of a bunch of great reviews of the film:
The key to making low budget movies is humor. They are either going to laugh at your film or laugh with it. If you have intentional humor, they will laugh with it!
- Bill
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