Chin Up

His was a horrible experience from the get-go: In 1985, he and Raimi and their Detroit posse of filmmaking pals (along with Joel and Ethan Coen, credited as screenwriters) made their first studio film, the alleged comic-thriller Crimewave, their follow-up to the low-budget, homemade horror film Evil Dead. But what began for Campbell and Raimi as a hobby when they were kids in Michigan was immediately perverted by outside interference from union crews and executives at Norman Lear's Embassy Pictures, which footed the $2.5-million budget. What they wound up with was a movie that was unwatchable and, finally, unreleaseable.

"On Crimewave, everyone made a mistake," he says now. "That movie never should have been made in its present form because it was too confused. We just didn't want to do another horror movie. That's all we knew. Anything else would be perfect. The idea behind it was it was meant to be lighthearted, hardly any blood, no one dies--well, very few people die--the guy gets the girl, there was a music number, there was comedy, action, the whole bit. We were giving people everything, and it turned out to be kinda nothing." After that, Campbell, Raimi and their cinema gang rushed off to make Evil Dead 2, hoping to wash out the bad taste of Hollywood with the familiar flavor of Karo Syrup and red food coloring.

Ah, but Campbell was going to be A Star once upon a time: In the fall of 1993, Sandy Grushow, then the head of development for the Fox network, vowed to eat his desk if the wild, wild western Brisco County didn't make Campbell a household name. Grushow was convinced the show would be a hit, just as he was sure the other debuting series that followed it, The X-Files, wouldn't last a season. He treated Chris Carter's new sci-fi series as "an afterthought," wrote Brian Lowry in his book The Truth is Out There, but 26 episodes later, Brisco County wasn't thought of at all. It was axed before the start of the 1994-1995 season, and Campbell ended up taking small roles in the likes of Congo and a Twister TV rip-off titled Tornado! (Still, Brisco County lives on: TNT reruns the show every Saturday morning--"God bless 'em," the actor says--and Columbia House is releasing the entire series on home video within the next two months. Campbell is writing liner notes to accompany each episode.)

One could easily gaze at his filmography and assume his has been a career of bad breaks and missed opportunities; you could easily mistake him for the leading man who follows only the money, which lands him in small piles of cash and large piles of shit. But, he insists, you would be mistaken. He will tell you you're mistaken, simply because he would rather take small roles in big films or big roles in small films. He will tell you he has no interest in assuming the mantle of Big-Budget Leading Man, because he has little interest in making movies for Hollywood. Indeed, one of the films of which he's most proud is a barely seen 1999 French production called La Patinoire, a film about the making of a hockey movie; he likens it to a "Woody Allen-Robert Altman mix," though it was never released in the United States.

"Look, I live where I want to live. I live in Oregon, so I don't have to play the L.A. game anymore, and that's cool enough for me. The older I get, the less I want people telling me what to do. It's amazing." Campbell laughs. "Between casting people and producers and directors and studios, there's an approach of, 'We're doing you a favor in giving you this role, because you can be in a Hollywood movie.' After a while, I look back and think, 'You know what? You're not doing me any favors. I'm doing you a favor, because I'm going to be the only actor who shows up who's not gonna freak out on you or not know his lines or whatever. I'm gonna be there, so you need to pay me even more, because you're not gonna have a single hassle with me. I know what I'm doing. I'll get in, get out. This can be really painless for everybody, and we can have fun.'

"I don't mean to make this sound so clinical. It's just as the years go by I take a little more of a businesslike approach to the whole thing. I evaluate projects based really on whether I'm going to have a good time, creatively and otherwise. And then the money, you work it out. You figure out a way to make your year."