B is for book, a lively little number by Bruce Campbell

By Eric Bartels

The Portland Tribune, Jun 24, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Bruce Campbell, the lantern-jawed actor who has become the living embodiment of the B-movie, says he never aspired to become a suavely comic leading man in the mold of Cary Grant.

“A) I don’t care,” he says, “and B) there’s only one Cary Grant, so don’t even try.”

The man is too modest. For many moviegoers, there is only one Bruce Campbell. Made famous by a trilogy of gory, low-budget adventures that began with the cult classic “Evil Dead” in 1981, the Southern Oregon resident is now much more than a cartoonishly handsome actor.

Campbell is also a producer, director and writer.

“If you stick around long enough, stuff comes up that works,” says Campbell, a Michigan native who befriended director Sam Raimi in high school and knew Joel and Ethan Coen long before moving to Hollywood.

Campbell, 47, has gotten plenty of mileage out of his outsider status. But in his new novel, “Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way,” he puts a quarter century of filmmaking Ñ inside Hollywood and otherwise Ñ to excellent use, offering real insights.

“People tend to make fun of low-budget movies, often because they lack the sophistication of slick Hollywood fare,” he writes. “But what the average viewer fails to recognize is that low-budget movies, with almost nothing to lose, are far more likely to push the creative envelope.”

“Make Love” is gloriously goofy, but the fun starts with Campbell’s ability to conjure believable settings thick with knowledge of the business. Of course, scenarios quickly veer into implausibility, starting with the notion of Campbell in a well-bred romantic comedy. “I couldn’t walk into a Mike Nichols film,” he says. “They’d kick me out.”

Campbell’s plan for the book was to write a nonfiction follow-up to his surprisingly successful 2001 memoir “If Chins Could Kill.” He changed gears when he realized his body of work since the release of the last book was a bit thin.

“I haven’t done enough,” he says.

Instead, what the reader gets is a hilarious romp that details Campbell’s misadventures as a cast member in a imaginary blockbuster that stars Richard Gere and RenŽe Zellweger.

It is meant to be Campbell’s leap into the big time, but after seducing the filmmakers into bringing B-movie theatrics to the project, he runs afoul of studio executives mortified by a skyrocketing budget.

The book is the literary equivalent of “Army of Darkness,” the last movie in the “Evil Dead” trilogy. Its story just barely stays afloat in a fast-rising sea of absurdity.

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