THE MAKING OF...BONES

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*Bones began as a pitch to New Line Cinema by producers Peter Heller and Lloyd Segan. "Snoop Dogg had done a cameo in a film I produced called Caught Up," Heller explains. "I thought Snoop had real star potential, with his laid-back charisma and powerful presence. In speaking with him, it was clear that Snoop was very interested in doing a horror film." Heller approached writers Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe, both afficionados of the horror genre, whom he'd worked with previously. Simon had an idea for a horror film which he and Metcalfe then began to adapt to fit Snoop Dogg. "We learned that in addition to horror, Snoop loves Clint Eastwood’s work and was also interested in doing a Western," Heller explains. "The two genres coalesced into a form where in the first half of the movie Snoop is the ghost in a classic haunted house story and in the second half, he is more like the Clint Eastwood character seeking retribution."

"Peter Heller and the writers approached me with the idea for Bones, at the time describing it as High Plains Drifter meets The Crow meets Nightmare on Elm Street, with Snoop Dogg as the lead character," producer Lloyd Segan recalls. "I have a long-standing association with New Line Cinema and knew this film would appeal to them because of their great love of horror films." New Line bought the pitch and Simon and Metcalfe soon set to work on the script. "We're creating a whole new genre within the genre," Segan continues. "The idea of doing a gothic, dark thriller set within the horror genre makes it exciting. Jimmy Bones is a brandable franchise character, which is something every studio likes, and New Line has particular expertise in creating a number of branded franchises as diverse as Nightmare on Elm Street, Blade, Rush Hour and Austin Powers.

When the time came to bring a director on board, the producers sought some one with the bold visual style and original storytelling vision that the project demanded and found that pefect synergy in Ernest Dickerson. It just so happened that Dickerson, who began his career as an acclaimed Director of Photography on such films as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X before making the transition to director, is also a huge fan of horror films, possessing a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the genre (Dickerson also directed the 1995 "Tales from the Crypt" feature film, Demon Knight).

"I like good horror," says Dickerson. "But it's only as good as the script and the script only really works if you care about the people that these things are happening to. That's the element that really brought me to the project. I love the characters. They're very well drawn. I think the whole relationship between Jimmy Bones and Pearl is very rich. I also love the fact that the story is universal. You could set this story anywhere. It happens to be set in an urban neighborhood, but it could be set in Japan, modern day with the Yakuza or even a few hundred years ago with the Samurai, or it could be set in a small town in Italy, with the don of the town being betrayed and assassinated."

Dickerson describes his vision for the film as gothic horror, harkening back to some of the great horror classics like The Exorcist and The Omen. "I'm a big fan of the Italian gothic cinema," Dickerson enthuses, "directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Antonio Margheriti, and Bones was a chance to do something on this level. I've seen horror films since I was a kid, but I also read the literature, and this script grasped the larger vision of the genre, which is about people coming to grips with the fantastic."

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"The best horror films are really about something more than scaring somebody, " Dickerson continues. "They're about the fears that affect each of us. Jimmy Bones is our dark avenger. He's been robbed of his life, brutally murdered, and the neighborhood he loved has been destroyed by the same people who murdered him. It's about the sins of the past visiting themselves upon the children. It's about a man's spirit - his drive to come back to right the wrongs, or as well as he can, to get revenge. On another level, the story tells us that revenge is not without its cost. There's a price that you pay for revenge and the price that Jimmy Bones is paying is the loss of his soul. It's an escalating, dangerous and deadly cycle that he's gotten himself into."

With the script written specifically for Snoop Dogg, the filmmakers had a touchstone for the chemistry they were looking to build in the cast. "When I first read the script," says Dickerson, "I was very pleased because I could hear Snoop's speaking rhythms, his personality and his own personal cadences, which made me believe that he could create the character of Jimmy Bones with a great deal of style. In fact, he's exceeded all my expectations in bringing Bones to life - and to the afterlife."

In Jimmy Bones, Snoop Dogg discovered the type of film role he had long been looking for. "People are always saying to me, ‘Snoop, why haven’t you starred in a movie.’ Because it was never the right movie, the right situation…until now. This was the perfect role, and it was handcrafted for me." Snoop responded to the fundamental human dilemna that faces his character. "Jimmy Bones is a real person, the lord of his neighborhood. He goes through the community spreading love, keeping the peace, not allowing drugs and violence. But he’s some one who was wronged by evil people and gets the opportunity to take his revenge. I’m able to come back and take care of those who thought they took care of me." But Snoop also responded to some of the film’s more funhouse thrills. "The movie is pretty spooky. We just want it to slide up and scare the hell out of you."

Snoop found starring in his first movie alongside seasoned actors a constant challenge but was inspired to push himself to rise to the occasion. "I have to dig in and give it my all as if I’ve been doing it as long as the other actors I’m working with," says Snoop. "It drives me and makes me want to do my best." It’s a sentiment echoed by director Dickerson. "Snoop wanted to be surrounded by high-caliber actors because he wanted a bar that he had to raise up. He’s doing a really amazing job."

Snoop was inspired by the experience of working with director Ernest Dickerson and the collaborative process of shooting a film. "Ernest was leading me, telling me where I was right, where I was strong and where I should stand as far as my attitude and demeanor are concerned," says Snoop. "In film every actor needs a great director, unlike in the music industry where you're usually your own director." This trust came in handy when Snoop was called on to perform some of his own stunts, such as pursuing his victims through a room ablaze with fire. "It was scary," he says, "but I was concerned that it look real and believable and frighten people."

Snoop also found musical inspiration from his character, penning several songs for the film’s soundtrack, including "The Ballad of Jimmy Bones." An added benefit came when Snoop learned that he would be able to keep his character’s colorful and funky wardrobe, created by Costume Designer Dana Campbell. "These clothes were custom-fit for me and there’s nobody else that’s made like me," says Snoop, "so it would be useless for some sucker to get my clothes and be running down the street trying to be like me."

Pam Grier co-stars as Pearl, a woman whose passion for life and commitment to love never flag. "Pam was someone that Ernest Dickerson sought out," producer Lloyd Segan recalls. "He immediately envisioned her opposite Snoop as the wonderful, beautiful, insightful and clairvoyant Pearl. In fact, in so many ways Pam embodies this character because she is a very spiritual woman in her own right. She’s greatly intelligent and brings to Pearl something that I'm not even sure any of us previously believed possible," Segan enthuses. "Her Pearl really is co-equal in every way to the Bones character, which makes it easy to believe their attraction for one another."

Dickerson lights up when he talks about Pam Grier. "When I was casting the role of Pearl I was thinking which black actress can play from 30 years of age to 50 years of age and do it with grace and style and have the strength needed to portray the character, and the only person I thought of was Pam. For me it was a kind of ‘Pam or nobody else’ mind-set."

The connection between Snoop Dogg and Pam Grier was already in place before the pair even met. "You always wonder what the chemistry will be like when you bring two actors together," Dickerson muses. "When I told Snoop that I was trying to get Pam to play Pearl, he said, ‘Oh man, you have to get her!’ And when I told Pam that Snoop was playing Jimmy Bones, she said ‘I love Snoop!’ So they were a mutual admiration society from the very beginning."

"When Ernest told me that Snoop Dogg was playing Jimmy Bones, I asked ‘Is he tall?’," quips Pam Grier, who's quick wit and ready smile never fail her. "Ernest said, ‘Yeah, he's real tall’," Grier continues. "That’s good, because I don't want my leading man to lay his head on my shoulder. I always want to lay my head on someone else's shoulder," she slyly winks. "And Snoop really is tall…and he can kiss, too!"

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Although Snoop Dogg is a relative newcomer to acting, Grier feels he’s a natural. "Just look at his videos, his songs and his creativity," she says. "He can tell a story and visualize, and that’s the sign of a good actor. It’s like he’s been doing it all his life."

For Grier, who starred in such archetypal 1970’s films as Coffy and Foxy Brown, the early scenes in Bones set in 1979 time-warped her back to what she remembers as a more innocent time. "It definitely took me back. When I put on my costume and afro, I felt like going out and kicking butt! The 70’s was the only decade where we were actually celebrating our freedom, individualism and uniqueness. The colors, the clothes — we haven’t had that since we lost it in the 80’s."

Bones also provided Grier with the opportunity to induldge in a little excitement. "I’m always the one that goes on roller coasters and likes watching horror and science fiction movies," she says. "That’s my escape. I just want to run out and be a kid again and be frightened."

Casting for the four young people who are in many ways responsible for raising Jimmy Bones' spirit from the dead was once again a matter of finding the right chemistry. "We wanted the audience to really feel that these kids had a history together," Ernest Dickerson explains. "We narrowed it down and did mixes and matches to see where the best chemistry was."

Khalil Kain plays Patrick, the elder of Jeremiah's two sons who buys the decrepit building that was once Bones’ home with the intention of turning it in to a successful nightclub. He had previously worked with Ernest Dickerson on the film Juice, which marked both Dickerson's directorial debut and Kain's first on-screen role. "Patrick has an entrepreneurial spirit," Kain explains, "but he definitely has something to prove to his father, who's come up the hard way and made a lot of money. As well as being a great horror film, I like the fact that there are many other layers to the script. You have Cynthia and her mom as a single parent family, facing the issues of adolescence and independence. Then there's my brother Bill and my step-sister Tia and myself, in an interracial mixed-family situation, and amidst all this there's also a lot of humor," says Kain.

Kain's character Patrick, however business-like he might try to be, is blind-sided by his attraction for Pearl’s daughter Cynthia. Played by Bianca Lawson, Cynthia is a radiant beauty who possesses the same psychic sensibility as her mother. "I play my first love scene ever in this movie with Khalil," Lawson admits. "It's all very innocent, but still the level of intimacy was scary. Like a lot of the elements in this movie, it doesn't go for the obvious surface appeal, but instead delves into the deep stuff, in this case the deep connection between two people. In so many ways Patrick and Cynthia are what Jimmy Bones and Pearl could have been," Lawson concludes.

Rounding out the young talent from the cast is Katharine Isabelle as Patrick and Bill’s stepsister Tia and Sean Amsing as their ill-fated friend Maurice.

The rogues gallery of villians, those who betray and murder Jimmy Bones, is comprised of an eclectic cast of character actors that includes Michael T. Weiss as the corrupt neighborhood cop Lupovitch, Clifton Powell as Jeremiah Peet, who finds even though he’s moved up in the world his past isn’t easily left behind, Ricky Harris as local neighborhood hustler Eddie Mack and Ronald Selmour as Bones’ one-time friend, Shotgun, who still lives across the street from the haunted brownstone and shouts out warnings to any one attempting to enter it.

The group was faced with the challenge of playing their characters both in 1979 and in the present day. For Michael T. Weiss’ Lupovitch, this meant aging twenty years and donning a padded suit and prosthetic makeup to give him the realistic appearance of having added a few hundred extra pounds. After being put through the grueling four-hour makeup process each day, the normally trim Weiss, best known for his starring role on the television series, "The Pretender," says with a laugh, "I know now that I’m staying away from eating anything that’s possibly bad for me for the rest of my life!"  

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From the start, director Ernest Dickerson knew he wanted to make Bones in the style of the classic horror movie, using the techniques of those earlier films, not to the exclusion of computer-generated effects, but certainly with an emphasis on practical, mechanical, make-up and prosthetic effects. "Ernest has used a lot of practical and physical effects in his work to date," says producer Rupert Harvey. "He's also a great cinematographer and this is a picture that demands a certain look. Some of the processes we're applying to the film technically, only a director of Ernest's experience could pull off as spectacularly as he's been able to do."

Dickerson's interpretation of the otherworldly Necropolis, the land of the dead that serves as the visual centerpiece of the film, was particularly bold and exciting. "Ernest brought a wonderful sensibility to the Necropolis that the writers conceived of in the script," producer Peter Heller explains. "It's another dimension that exists concurrent with our dimension but one that is not accessible to the living. Because of Jimmy Bones' violent demise and subsequent refusal to go on to heaven or hell, he stays in this land of the dead and tears open a doorway that allows our human characters to enter this other world."

Production Designer Douglas Higgins and Make-Up and Prosthetic Effects Designer/Supervisor Tony Gardner rose masterfully to the challenge of interpreting Dickerson's vision on the Bones house, the exterior 3-story façade of which was built from the ground up on a street in Vancouver, the interiors comprising four separate sound stages.

"In the process of transformation that the 'Bones Brownstone' set goes though, we begin with an attractive architectural integrity in 1979, which 22 years later becomes shabby and degraded," says Higgins. "From there we devolve into the nightmare landscape of the Necropolis by using an overlay of polyurethane foam and plastics, to make it look like the architecture has been overgrown by a kind of cancerous organism. Orifices lead into tunnels which feel like the inside of arteries or intestinal tract, the walls of which have writhing bodies, both human and animatronic, embedded in them."

"Ernest first described the Necropolis to me as an environment that uses the souls of the damned as building blocks," Gardner explains. "He showed me some pictures as references. Ernest also had a specific color scheme in mind. From that initial meeting my team and I did some illustrations and with feedback from Ernest on those drawings, we sculpted a miniature version of the Necropolis walls with people imbedded in them. Once we had the miniature locked down, we made a scale size blueprint which we mounted on the wall of the shop."

We started building big wooden frames and doing live casts of actors and friends - literally anyone who we thought might be willing - in all sorts of weird poses," Gardner laughs. "We created an arsenal of bodies and body parts to be embedded in the walls. We also had to take into account how to make these walls articulate, deciding where we would put animatronics and where we could insert live performers to arrive at something that looked like a huge panel of body upon body, smashed together into a compressed space - a wall that could pulsate, writhe and have facial expressions."

Gardner was thrilled by the professional challenge that Bones presented. "I love the fact that we are pushing the envelope, experimenting with traditional techniques and doing everything practically as much as possible," he says. "We're using CGI where it works best, like compositing, and also in combination with the physical effects, but I've always preferred effects you can see, that the actors can interact with on set, that you can light, and everyone can collaborate on more collectively."

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The Necropolis is only one element of the fantastic that Gardner and his team were called upon to create for Bones. Their work also involved the mangy, ravenous black dog that intially appears as Jimmy Bones' other, his physical presence in the world before he becomes physically manifest. In addition to sequences filmed with a real dog, Gardner's team created a demonic, animatronic version. "The puppet version of the dog has eyes that glow as well as a glow that emanates from the back of its throat," Gardner explains. "It just looks messed up and more frightening than the real dog. With shock cuts between the real and the animatronic dog, it gives Ernest one more tool to play with in telling the story. We also created several puppet versions of the dog for specific purposes. A couple of the dogs pulsate, there are digging paws…in fact, the dog is sort of a 'Mr. Potato Head' dog with a removable back end, front end and paws so that Ernest can pick and choose what he needs for a particular shot."

For one memorable and terrifying sequence in the film where maggots rain down on a crowded dance floor, no effects were necessary, as only the real thing would do — a "maggot wrangler," accompanied by over one hundred thousand of his charges, was brought in for the job.

Owing to Ernest Dickerson’s background as a cinematographer, a number of cutting-edge visual techniques, both practical and computer-generated, were used throughout filming and overseen by Visual Effects Producer/Supervior Ariel Velasco Shaw. In the opening sequences of the film that tell the story of Jimmy Bones’ cold-blooded murder, says Shaw, "we used a PAL mini DV camera mounted on a descender rig and did a big pull back to depict Bones seeing himself being murdered and going up toward the spectral light, up towards what we as humans believe to be the better place. Midway through, he halts and realizes that he has unfinished business to attend to and rushes back down. Not only do we rush back down into the real world, but we actually pass into Tony Gardner's world of the Necropolis. It's my job to take this mix of in-camera effects and prosthetic effects and digitally put them together to create an omniscient, ghost-like point-of-view."

"When you shoot a practical effect," Shaw continues, "you get a very specific physical signature and all the beautiful detail. If I need to punctuate that or need to augment it, make it larger or smaller, that's where the visual effects aspect of it really starts to shine, particularly in this show. We're trying to touch the base of the brain for that primal fear reaction," Shaw grins, "by taking something that looks and feels real and tweaking it slightly so that it becomes weird. That's when it gets creepy, and that's when I start having fun."

More than anything else, with Bones the filmmakers have set out to terrify audiences by tapping in to their collective fear of the supernatural and unknown. "Science has demystified so many things," says producer Segan, "but there is no science that can absolutely tell us about the afterlife, and because of this it’s something we fear the most."

"The public's love for the supernatural is the same as every child's fear of goblins at night. People like to be reminded that what we consider to be reality is not necessarily the only reality. That everything we believe in and trust and assume is solid under our feet in fact isn't," suggests producer Rupert Harvey. "It brings those primeval fears out into the light in a way and makes us feel more secure when we realize that it's only a movie. Plus it’s fun to have a good scare every so often."

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Internationally acclaimed, Grammy-nominated rap artist Snoop Dogg makes his starring film debut in Bones. Snoop Dogg secured his place in hip-hop history with his solo album "Doggystyle", which became the first rap album by a debut artist to enter the Billboard pop chart at #1. "Doggystyle" also secured the #1 spot on the R&B charts and spawned the gold single "Who Am I (What's My Name)?." "Gin and Juice," another hit single from "Doggystyle," garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance. His other albums, all of which went platinum, include "Da Game Is To Be Sold Not To Be Told" and "Top Dogg" as well as his albums with Da Eastsidaz, "Da Eastsidaz" (which entered the charts at #1) and "Deuces and Trays." His latest album, "The Last Meal," has spawned three hit singles. Snoop began his recording career in 1993 teaming with Dr. Dre on both the soundtrack for the film "Deep Cover" and Dre’s classic rap album "The Chronic." Snoop also heads up his own record label, Doggystyle Records, whose roster of artists includes Soopafly, Butch Cassidy, Kokane and Tha Angels

On the big screen, Snoop can currently be seen co-starring opposite Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in the drama, Training Day. Later this year he will be seen opposite Dr. Dre and Eminem in the comedy, The Wash. Other film credits include cameo performances in Half Baked and The Game of Life.

On television, Snoop recently appeared as himself on the hit NBC comedy series, "Just Shoot Me" and was also the subject of the award-winning VH1 series "Behind the Music."

Snoop also hosts the nationally-syndicated radio show, "Big Snoop Dogg Radio." His latest venture takes him into the world of fashion with the development of his own clothing line of denim wear and athletic gear, Snoop Dogg Clothing (SDC), as well an upcoming deal to develop his own line of shoes. In partnership with the William Morris Agency, Snoop has launched Doggfather Entertainment, which will develop film and entertainment projects.

[Don Seer]

Dope! .. I can't wait