The inmates emerge from their cells and begin to walk listlessly in neat lines toward the cafeteria. Suddenly, on the fourth tier of the cell block, a wiry blond man in a gray prison uniform lunges toward the railing. He climbs up, clings to it for a few seconds and then plunges 50 feet.
”Jumper! Jump!” shout about 120 Stateville Correctional Center inmates as they watch the man fall. Two movie cameras recording the fall from the concrete floor below pull away from him just before he flips in mid-air and lands on his back on a canvas-covered stack of empty cartons and mattresses. The jumper gives the thumbs-up sign to signal that he`s all right, and applause fills the prison block.
”Cut!” yells film director John Hancock.
”Let`s do it again without the boxes,” yells an inmate.
Needless to say, this is no routine jailhouse suicide. The jumper, a stunt man, is one of some 70 members of a film crew who all but moved into the maximum-security state prison in Joliet Feb. 12 for a week and a half to film scenes for ”Weeds,” an offbeat prison drama starring Nick Nolte.
Nolte plays Lee Umstetter, a hard-core criminal whose life changes after he discovers acting and writing in a prison theater workshop. Umstetter, a character whose story is based on the real life of former San Quentin Prison inmate Rick Cluchey, publishes a play about prison conditions and forms a troupe of ex-con actors upon his release from jail. He manages to rehabiliate himself through his love of his art.
The suicide scene, filmed Feb. 16, depicted one of Umstetter`s three attempts to kill himself when he is first imprisoned. To movie viewers, the stunt man who performed the jump will appear to be Nolte.
Although ”Weeds” isn`t the first movie to be made in the 57-year-old prison, it posed the biggest challenge to Stateville`s security, said assistant warden Salvador A. Godinez. The film required an unprecedentedly large number of inmates–250 in all–to play themselves and perform seemingly violent acts that included a staged murder in the jail`s basement tunnels and a full-scale prison yard riot with real Stateville guards.
Those scenes were especially tricky to pull off in the notoriously tough prison, where many of the inmate extras actually had committed the kinds of acts they were being asked to perform for the cameras. Thirty-six percent of the population at Stateville are convicted murderers and, in all, 78 percent of jail`s 1,830 inmates have been convicted of hard-core crimes, Godinez said. But ”Weeds” producer Bill Badalato was convinced that the risk of working in the prison was worth it because, he said, Stateville and its inmates provided a realistic edge that was crucial to the film. Like five other producers before him who filmed projects at Stateville, such as ”Bad Boys” and the documentary, ”Hard Time,” Badalato chose to film in the prison because of its gothic look, he said, as well as the cooperation he received from the state`s corrections and film offices.
So what happened when Hollywood glitz met Stateville grit?
Surprisingly good things, partly because the film crew, including the actors, kept the glitziness to a minimum, carefully observing instructions to carry no more than $30, never move through the institution without a guard escort and to dress down.
As for the inmate extras, who earned $20 a day, they seemed slightly starstruck by their West Coast visitors, some of whose faces they`d seen on their television screens. Flexing their muscles and resplendent in their tattoos, bandanas and berets, the inmate actors chatted with crew members and followed directions better than extras hired on the outside, Badalato said. In the last two weeks, prisoners said the pervasive tension–between guards and inmates, between inmates belonging to opposing street gangs, between blacks and whites–magically seemed to lift.
”Being a part of this film takes you out of this place,” said Mike Fritz, 34, a soft-spoken man with glittering icy eyes who is serving 60 years for convictions that include rape, armed robbery, kidnaping and home invasion. ”For the first time since I got here,” Fritz continued, ”I don`t feel like I`m in prison. I feel like I`m on a movie set.”
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”Okay, all the bikers over here!” yelled an assistant director. ”We need the bikers. . . . All you guys with different head gear, there. Muslims! I just want to tell you what`s gonna happen.”
The inmates, mostly in their mid-20s to early 30s, swaggered across the floor in their gray prisoners` costumes and sweats. Dark blue, home-made tattoos swirled across their weight lifters` biceps. Moustaches, full beards, and devilish little goatees obscured their faces. But despite their intimidating appearance, the prisoners were, as Lt. William ”Kerf” Kerfin put it, ”as quiet as lambs.”
”I`ve locked half these guys up (in their cells) and let me tell you, they`re doing better than I thought they would,” said the big mustachioed correctional officer. ”Yeah, they can be very dangerous. But for most guys, this is the biggest thing that ever happened to them.”
As he talked, one of the assistant directors told the inmates where to stand for the next scene. His instructions echoed in the huge, 300-plus cell round house, a circular prison block with a huge guard`s tower in the middle. Scheduled for demolition this spring, the round house provided a perfect movie set because no one had to worry about undoing the decorating changes the crew had made.
The problem was that the cell block looked too good. So the cream walls and brown railings were covered with hideous gray paint that was painstakingly peeled and dirtied. Painters also blacked out each of the cell`s tiny window panes to reduce the incoming light–until director Hancock changed his mind and ordered that the glass be scraped. Then a smoke machine wafted acrid smoke through the round house to diffuse the sunlight.
After putting the inmates through their paces, Hancock called out,
”Okay, we`re ready to go. Quiet on the set . . .”
A heavy-set prisoner stood in front of his cell, alternately playing a soulful refrain on a harmonica and singing, ”When I woke up this morning, you know you hurt me so bad. Ooooooo . . . ” Three prisoners crowded around him, clapping and dancing, while other convicts cocked their heads and listened.
After two tries, the scene was perfect. Hancock yelled cut. But the prisoner kept singing.
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A cat cradled in his arms, Essex Smith leaned against a post, well out of camera range in the round house in what had become the film crew`s makeshift supply area. ”I tell you, when I watch these guys, I just feel lucky that somewhere along the line I didn`t make a mistake like they did,” he said.
A tall, gentle man with a granite jaw that rivals Nolte`s, Smith has appeared in television movies such as ”An Early Frost” and films including
”Stir Crazy” and ”Uptown Saturday Night.” In ”Weeds,” he plays Thurman, an ex-convict who organizes the music for Umstetter`s acting troupe. He told a visitor that on this morning, the little silver tabby he was petting also had become something of a movie star. The cat, dubbed ”Venus”
by the film crew because she was so lovable, made her film debut when she dashed down the tier as guards brought Nolte, shackled in chains, to his cell. Venus was one of two tabbies recruited from a local animal shelter to appear in the film as jailhouse cats. In exchange for the cats` services, a sympathetic crew member had promised to try to find them homes. If she failed, the cats would be returned to their wire cages at the shelter.
While Smith tried to decide if there was room for two movie stars in his family, he found himself facing four or five inmates who wanted to hold the cat.
”Hey, man, they don`t let us have no pets in prison,” explained Mike Nolan, a red-haired 32-year-old serving time for murder.
Awkwardly, the convict tried to make conversation with the actor. Although the inmates had been warned not to mob the actors or besiege them with requests for autographs, they remained fans who longed to establish some sort of contact.
”We heard about the movie coming in November,” continued Nolan, who belongs to Con Artistes, Stateville`s theater troupe. ”Then people were saying we ain`t gonna get involved. We don`t want our faces on the screen. Someone might remember us sticking them up or something. But when the sign-up list for the movie came around, 600 guys signed up.”
Supervisor of extras Ken Kitch was responsible for screening prisoners through what he described as very professional auditions that tested their ability to emote. Then began three solid weeks of acting exercises. ”Teaching 200-some inmates to stage a riot without hurting each other isn`t easy,” said Kitch.
”I appointed 32 of the best guys as squad leaders and had them teach the others what they needed to know. The rehearsals got bigger and bigger until we had 250 rioting inmates.”
For Kitch as well as Hancock, who co-authored the script with his wife Dorothy Tristan, bringing ”Weeds” to the screen has been an eight-year labor of love. Hancock and Kitch first met Rick Cluchey, on whom the script was based, in 1965 when Cluchey was an inmate in San Quentin and attended an acting workshop they were conducting there.
They maintained contact after Cluchey was released and followed his acting and writing career, all the time trying to hammer his story into a saleable project. Last week at Kitch`s invitation, Cluchey flew to Joliet to play small role in the film.
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Beneath the whirring police helicopters, artificial blood was flowing in the prison yard. According to the script, Umstetter (as played by Nolte), an ex-con, had visited the jail with his acting troupe and performed his play, which described the horrors of imprisonment. After the curtain went down, a riot had broken out.
As more than 200 inmates ”attacked” guards, Umstetter, who was still dressed in his prisoner`s costume from the play, escaped through the jail`s underground tunnels. When he finally reached a prison gate, the guard posted there refused to open it. Try as he might, Unstetter couldn`t convince him that he was an actor, not an inmate. When a young, black-haired prisoner appeared with a sledge hammer, Umstetter yelled, ”Break it!” and pointed at the gate`s lock.
The prisoner swung the hammer high over his head, but when he touched the gate the hammer bent in two. Amid director`s cries of ”Cut, cut!” the men at the gate dissolved in laughter.
”You see,” said 24-year-old Maximo Cerda, the hammer wielder, remembering the riot scene staged Feb. 14, ”the guards` clubs were real. They let us know that by banging them on the floor before the filming started. But the sledge they gave me, the weapons they gave all the inmates, were made of foam rubber.” Cerda, who is serving 35 years for murder, chuckled, ”When I hit the gate, the thing crumpled like a big sponge. . . . That was the most fun I had since I got locked up.”
Nolte, who refused to be interviewed, apparently did not look upon the riot scene with Cerda`s enthusiasm. Fearing that real trouble could erupt, he requested that a Stateville correctional officer dressed as an inmate act as his bodyguard during the riot scenes.
In all, inmates, film people and prison officials agreed that Hollywood and Stateville gelled nicely during the 10 days when the prison became a movie set.
”Sure, they (the film crew) disrupted our routine,” said assistant Warden Godinez. ”And I`d be lying if I said I wasn`t sitting on eggs everytime we took a (head) count. But the inmates got to be part of something positive.”
Inmate Nolan summed the experience up this way: ”For the first time I saw guys who I never talked to, who I thought might come out of a bag someday and try to kill me, and they were smiling and laughing. The macho stuff, the false faces disappeared for a while. I just wish the powers that be could figure out a way to make it stay that way.”
