CBS uncloaks 'Vampire Bats'
Gannett News Service
14 October 2005
MIKE HUGHES
"Vampire
Bats" seems cozily distant from the harshness of realism and
real life."It's good fun," says Lucy Lawless, who stars in the CBS movie on Halloween eve. "Not everything has to be deep and meaningful."
Except that sometimes, real life finds you. A week before filming ended, the cast and crew had to flee from Hurricane Katrina.
"I had bought, at considerable expense, hurricane insurance," says producer Frank von Zerneck.
He needed it. The filming
concluded in Nova Scotia, 1,600 miles from where it started.
Chances are, viewers won't notice that. They'll just see the
latest attempt at loose, popcorn fun.
"CBS had been doing fairly traditional, mainstream films," von
Zerneck says. "They decided to mix them up a bit."
So he made "Locusts" and "Spring Break Shark Attack" for last
season. "They both did very well with younger audiences," he
says.
It was time for a "Locusts" sequel with the same stars and
writer.
A few years after the locust attacks, Maddy Rierdon (Lawless), a
specialist in voracious insects, wanted a simpler life. She got
a college job and moved to Louisiana with her husband (Dylan
Neal) and their two daughters.
Life was peaceful -- until vampire bats attack. Brett Butler
plays Lawless' sister-in-law, with Timothy Bottoms as the mayor.
This is classic turf, von Zerneck says. "When you say 'bats,' an
image comes to mind. They're odd and they fly and only go out at
night."
If you can claim humans have altered them by messing up the
ecology, you have a story. And New Orleans may be the logical
site.
"It's a very attractive place for backgrounds and the
architecture is incredible," von Zerneck says. "There's nothing
else like it ... and there's a huge (film) industry there with
all the professions."
Besides, actors find it a fascinating place to temporarily live.
"You have to get used to it," Lawless said, midway through the
shoot. "You'll have people running down the street in the middle
of the night, saying, 'I'm going to cut your (bleeping) heart
out.' But it's such a magnificent place and I love it."
At the time, she was on her own. "I'm going around this huge
house by myself," she said then. "My family has all gone back to
California."
Lawless, 37, and her husband (Rob Tapert, the producer of her
"Xena" series) have two children, ages 3 and 6; she also has a
teen daughter from her first marriage. The whole clan settled
into a rented New Orleans home -- for a while.
"It's hard to be mothering if I'm working nights," Lawless said
later. "I was sort of a hag in the day; I couldn't do either job
well."
The others left and Lawless stayed, savoring New Orleans. She
and producer Jill Tanner talked of jointly buying a New Orleans
home for family vacations.
Then the winds came.
"I was going to plod it out," Lawless says. "It seemed very
adventurous ... besides, a lot of people depend on you for their
living. You can't just leave."
Von Zerneck started to have doubts on Aug. 27.
"Saturday morning, it looked very serious," he says. "My people
had been up all night, so they needed to sleep. But we had to do
something."
He got a bus for most of the people; some took cars. Lawless was
one of the final four "Vampire Bats" people to leave and that
included an accountant and a producer who wisely took the stocks
of film that had already been shot.
The weather became fierce, Von Zerneck says. "As Jill (Tanner)
put it, 'It's raining sideways.'"
Still, it was pleasant to reach Baton Rouge, La. "Forty of us
stayed at the bed-and-breakfast ,where everyone was absolutely
friendly and warm," Lawless says.
Von Zerneck hoped to return to New Orleans. "Then, on Tuesday,
the levee broke and that was it."
The entire group retreated to Nova Scotia where his company was
just finishing "The Hunt For the BTK Killer."
There, the final week of the film was shot. Far from the real
horrors of Katrina, they returned to the fictional ones of
"Vampire Bats."
----
Program details
-- "Vampire Bats."
-- 9-11 p.m. Sunday (Oct. 30), CBS
-- Did you know: Lucy Lawless' musical career peaked when she
was a New Zealand teen. "When I was 16, I was doing 'South
Pacific' on stage and had the best time. But I sort of lost
interest."
----
Click here for
more information about the movie