Supercut of John Cassavetes in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in 1965
Channel: Michael Dare
Date: 2021-11-29

It's 1965, I'm 14, and just beginning a four year stint at Beverly Hills High School which, at the time, bordered on the 20th Century Fox lot, which had yet to become Century City. My sister had a friend who was a secretary at Fox who had shown me around enough times that I knew my way. Even then, I understood that the best way to get past the guard was just pretend you belonged, and so, after school, I would bop over to the Fox lot to see what was up.

Oh sure, there was Peyton Place, but I was more interested in the triumvirate of TV sci-fi, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, all shooting on various sound stages at the same time. I knew not to enter when the red light was blinking, but once it was off I found I could enter anywhere and watch the shooting as long as I kept quiet in the shadows.

So I'm watching them shoot Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and thinking to myself You know, I'd really like to get David Hedison's autograph. He was the captain. My hero. So I waited for a perfect moment between takes, whipped out my autograph book, and sauntered right up and asked. He said sure and signed.

Standing right next to him was that week's co-star whom I had just watched shoot a scene. It was sort of awkward, I didn't have any idea who he was, but I asked for his autograph too, just to be polite. This brightened up his day. It was as though nobody had ever asked for his autograph before. He grabbed it out of my hands and signed away. I looked at the name. Still nothing. I thanked him anyway and started walking away when he said...

"Hey kid."

"Yeah?"

"You got something to do?"

"Not really."

"Cause I got some lines here I'm having a hell of a time with." He held out his script. "You think you can run lines with me?"

Boy was he lucky I knew what the fuck "run lines" meant. I was a freshman in the drama department at Beverly Hills High School and already memorizing scenes under the tutelage of my first acting coach, John Ingle.

"Sure," I said, "why not?"

He didn't have a dressing room. We went to some ill lit corner of the massive sound stage and we ran lines. It was full of technical jargon about how a bomb works and, of course, he wanted to get it right, and kept messing up, so we read it over and over till he had to go for the master shot, where they did one take, then took  another break while they prepared for his close-up and once again, we ran a couple scenes over and over. 

I was so bored I actually tried to let him get away with a slight mistake, he said "did I get that right?" and I said "Yeah" and he said "Really?" and grabbed the script from my hand to look at the line, then said "No I didn't, it says self-activated, I said self-activating, you gotta tell me these things." 

I apologized and got on with my life. No more visiting Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It was too much work. On to Lost in Space.

So 30 years later I'm going through a storage locker and come across my old autograph book. I flip through it. Yep, there's David Hedison. And on the next page, from beyond the grave, "To Michael, How's it going, buddy? John Cassavetes."

It's called "The Peacemaker." John plays a scientist threatening to blow up the world if they don't disarm. This is the special Michael Dare edit of all the scenes for which I was John Cassavetes' dialogue coach and for which I have as yet to receive adequate remuneration. In the second scene, he still has trouble with "self-actuated" and says "self-actuating" and I can't help but blame myself.

This was two years before he became a movie star as one of the Dirty Dozen, then as Mia Farrow's husband in Rosemary's Baby, who strangely enough was shooting Peyton Place on the same lot at the same time as Voyage. It was also five years before he gave up scripts altogether and made his first real film, Faces. I like to think my incompetence as a dialogue couch had something to do with that decision.

Though it's never gone on any of my resumes, this was most certainly my first Hollywood gig. Unpaid and uncredited and underage. Typical.