John Carpenter living a boyhood dream
By Sharon Wright
Bowling Green in late October is the place horror stories are born.
The town takes on that crisp, ripened quality it gets just before turning winter. Its red and orange leaves burn through a chilled smoke screen, and it's like the color of blood in a nightmare - it's the only color you remember.
It's that kind of Bowling Green October that makes a town turn reflective, makes people look at things dying and wonder if maybe they're entering a cocoon from which there's no emerging.
It's the mood from which the notion of Halloween - the notion that sinister things can happen that time of year - is perpetuated.
It's the kind of mood that is John Carpenter.
Carpenter - whose career as a movie director has escalated in the last half decade in the wake of his success with HALLOWEEN, a low budget horror film credited as the highest-grossing independently produced picture in movie history - grew up with that kind of October.
Carpenter was born 34 years ago in upper New York state but grew up in Bowling Green and attended Western for two years before enrolling in 1968 in film school at the University of Southern California.
As a student at USC, Carpenter directed THE RESURRECTION OF BRONCHO BILLY, the first student film to win an Academy Award.
He also made DARK STAR, a science fiction satire that cost about $6,000 and was later expanded into a feature film that received limited commercial distribution.
Carpenter's third film, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, was ignored in the United States but was well received at a London film festival. A producer who saw the movie in London asked Carpenter to expand on an idea for a movie about murdered babysitters. In collaboration with Debra Hill, he emerged with HALLOWEEN, a story about a youngster who kills his sister and her lover on Halloween night and returns 15 years later to begin another bloody rampage.
That's what Carpenter movies are made of - raw emotion.
They're based on the same reflex that causes people to run their fingers over a wound to make sure it still hurts. They're the kind of movies with scenes that gel fluid at the spine and send currents through the muscles so that nerve endings singe the skin like the frayed ends of electrical wires.
But it's nort so much the immediate physiological reaction; that part passes. It's the recollection later of those frozen pictures of horror that bothers you.
They were the stories that grew from Bowling Green in October - the place where horror stories, and, for John Carpenter, success stories, are made.
In 1953, Howard Carpenter was finishing his doctorate at the Easterman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
When he graduated that summer, the only job he could find was one in Western's music department, teaching music history and theory. Reluctant to leave New York, Carpenter accepted the job with intentions of looking for something better within a year.
A native of Carthage, N.Y., Carpenter moved to Bowling Green with his wife, Jean, and their son John, then 6. The family was assigned living quarters - a log cabin on the grounds of the Kentucky Museum - which they rented for what Carpenter now calls "some ridiculous sum. Like $30 a month."
In early photographs, John is slender and pale, his clean face revealing a humor, a relaxed demeanor inconsistent with an untouchable source of depth behind the eyes. His hair was darker and shorter than it was later - when the Beatles came along and inspired him to grow his hair long.
He still appears this in recent pictures, almost gaunt, the skin stretched slightly tighter across his face. His hair is relatively long, and he sports a well-groomed moustache. The camera still captures the humor, and that depth in the eyes is still there.
The Carpenters reveled in music and the arts. Classical records were always around, and Howard Carpenter made frequent trips to Nashville to work as a studio musician.
"John was always one to spend a lot of time at home," Mrs. Carpenter said recently. "He liked music and creative writing. And he loved movies. I started taking him to the movies very young. The first movie I took him to was THE AFRICAN QUEEN, in New York when he was 3 years old."
Carpenter's parents sat in their home on Chestnut Street, it's living room walls a collage of the glass covered movie posters they keep the way other parents save report cards.
"He always had a way with words," his fatehr said, "a feel for writing. He liked science fiction films - he would think up a story and type it on the typewriter by the hunt-and-peck method."
When the Carpenters arrived, Bowling Green was placid and small.
Activity at Western centered at the top of the Hill, and the campus extended no farther than McLean Hall. The cabin was something of a rustic tribute to the time when such buildings thrived, in what was then a part of the campus used for agriculture.
John, his parents said, recruited a cast of playmates to act in primitive movies he recorded with an 8mm camera borrowed from his father.
When the Carpenters visited New York, John's father said, "He would garner his cousins. They'd be playing cowboys and Indians, and John would be filming it."
As Carpenter told The New Yorker magazine in a 1980 interview, "When I was a kid, I'd go to the Southern Kentucky Fair and pay 25 cents to go into the Haunted House... I went again and again to learn how it worked. HALLOWEEN was maybe a way of being young again and scared, and innocent in that way.
"I got my friends from school together, and we made a movie called GORGAN THE SPACE MONSTER, " he said. "It had a lot of special effects - toy tanks running in animation, things like that... I'm just beginning to realize how much of what I do goes right back to Kentucky. I'm still doing what that kid was doing... All I want to do is go back to the log cabin, but do it for a living, and be successful."
It's the Thursday before Halloween and the University Center Board sponsors an 11:30 pm. showing of HALLOWEEN II in the university center as a part of its "Hilloween" festivities.
In outlandish, sometimes macabre disguises, their faces falsely disfigured for the occasion, students file into the crowded Center Theater. Minutes into the movie, Carpenter's soundtrack throbs as his supernatural maniac begins a spree of creatively gruesome killings.
A couple of students wander in and stand at the back of the theater, mesmerized by the mounting tension on the screen. One looks as though he is drawn to the screen, his mouth dropping open slightly as a young woman's throat is slit and her dark blood shoots up to dapple her cheeks.
"God, I hate these kinds of movies," he said.
"I know," his companion answers. "Come on. Lets find a seat."
The suspense that breeds a kind of blood-pumping fright is the thread that runs through Carpenter's movies.
His soundtracks move like roller coasters - high-pitched notes in a stimulated tempo over a mechanically thudding bass. It's with the sound, which Carpenter composes and conducts, that he manipulates his audience in a way many filmmakers haven't discovered.
Some say it's that blend of sound and a sense of humor that sets Carpenter's movies apart.
Except for HALLOWEEN, Carpenter's movies - he has also made THE FOG, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE THING, as well as the made-for-television version of ELVIS - have only been moderately successful. He tries to avoid the stereotype assigned to a director of suspense movies, though none of the subsequent films has matched HALLOWEEN's record at the box office.
HALLOWEEN made money. And that, Carpenter has told interviewers, is how one is judged in the industry.
"He was always so serious about writing," Mrs. Carpenter said. "He would beat at the typewriter, pounding things out with his fingers. People would come over and they would say, 'Well, John's so serious.' But there's a sense of humor that comes out in John."
Carpenter's sense of humor is apparent in his work. His movies are set in cities with streets named for those in Bowling Green, and the names of Carpenter's friends have turned up in his screenplays. The references creep up subtly, like an inside joke, a nudge in the ribs to those who live here.
When Carpenter started school at Western in fall 1966, following his graduation from high school, he enrolled in Joe Boggs' creative writing class.
Because Boggs taught the class on a one-to-one basis, and because he saw potential in Carpenter's writing, he became something of a mentor for Carpenter.
"We both had 8mm cameras," said Boggs, an assitant professor of English. "We'd go out and shoot some. It was just kind of playing around all the time."
Boggs said Carpenter's social life was "pretty well balanced. He wasn't a loner, but there was that side of his personality that allowed him to lock himself away and write."
"I think John got where he is by being more conscious of what things cost than a lot of film directors," Boggs said. "When you can write, direct, edit and do the music - and also get by with unknown actors - you're cutting costs all over the place."
Boggs said a factor in Carpenter's success is what Carpenter has called "unnatural motivation."
"I would say we've had better writers go through here... but they didn't have the kind of motivation John had," Boggs said. "I think John's a case of "if you want it badly enough, you put everything you've got into it."
"It's a big-risk business. The pressure increases on someone like John. He made it big on HALLOWEEN. Now they expect everything he does to be HALLOWEEN."
In Carpenter's second year at Western, his instincts were leading him closer to the pursuit of a career in directing.
"I realized John was not getting anywhere here," Boggs said. "He said he wanted to make movies, and I said, 'You need to get away from here, then. Get to where it's being done.'"
But, Boggs recalled, "I told him a long time ago he shouldn't forget who he is and where he comes from."
Thirty years ago, Western's training school and College High School housed grades one through 12 in what is now the Science and Technology Hall. The classes were small, and many of the students were children of Western faculty members.
When John Carpenter enrolled in elementary school in 1953, he was in Gertrude Bale's music class.
Mrs. Bale said Carpenter "didn't like the songs we sang. He wasn't interested in the little rhyming songs most children like. It wasn't until about fourth grade, when we started playing the serious stuff, that he liked it. He liked it when I played symphonies."
"He was used to hearing string quartets at home," Mrs. Bale said. "When you're brought up hearing good music - not making trashy music - it makes a difference in a child."
A classmate of Carpenter's, Steve Todd, remembers visiting Carpenter at the cabin. "There used to be a creek bed there," he said. "He used his father's movie camera and would make movies. I remember the plastic dinosaurs, and he would blow them up. He was interested in that stuff for years."
"I'd go over there after school or on Saturdays," said Todd, now a Bowling Green lawyer. "We would find rocks and tie them to tree branches or sticks to make spears and make dinosaur movies."
He said the theater in town "would have double or triple features on Saturday. He was interested in it from a very early age. Especially science fiction and space movies. We were just having fun then."
When the two enrolled at Western, Todd said, they "kind of lost contact. You know, you change as you get older. You grow up, you make other friends."
He didn't see Carpenter from 1968 until their class reunion in 1978. A year later, when Carpenter and actress Adrienne Barbeau were married here in a private ceremony, Carpenter telephoned Todd.
"I remember a judge was marrying them," Todd said. "He was wondering what would be an appropriate gift for a judge."
From inside the Kentucky Museum, tall rectangular doors frame the flat gray squares of the afternooon, as the clouds outside cast a darkness into the open corridor.
A receptionist is sitting in front of the door, nearly concealed by a counter marked "Information." A red-faced man with blue-gray hair sits nearby, leaning back in a padded swivel chair, his fingers locked behind his head.
"Looks just like Halloween out there, doesn't it," the young woman says. "Yeah," the old man sighs. "Sure does."
An almost imperceptible remorse underwrites the pride with which Jean and Howard Carpenter speak of their son.
They say they have considered moving to the Hollywood area to be near him. And when asked whether they envision a closer relationship, Carpenter will smile and say, "Jean does."
"Well," Mrs. Carpenter said, "for that reason, but not for John. He's happy. He's doing what he wants to do."
The cabin in which Carpenter grew up is still visible from a spot on Ketucky Street, its horizontal stripes of light and dark wood and white lattices on the windows running like a watercolor into the rest of the picture.
Flanked by stone chimneys and surrounded by a shallow fortress of stones and a primitive fence, it's a childish structure being swallowed by blankets of ivy and cords that resemble red seaweed.
It's as if Bowling Green's native son grew up and nobody noticed. As if the boy who made movies on the cabin's back lot could still have been there if he hadn't started making money.
But it's like the cycle of seasons that isn't complete until it's gone full circle - the same way Bowling Green Octobers eventually mature into winter.
It was the thing that carried John Carpenter away from borrowed cameras, from raw innocence, away from Bowling Green.
