aka "Deadly Trauma" aka "Trauma"

A man witnesses the murder of his girlfriend by a masked man carrying a hunting knife. To add to his grief and shock, he becomes the police's number one suspect.

Bruce says:

I remember when I was directing (under a pseudonym, thank you very much) a film where the director had been fired and I'd taken over on a moment's notice - not exactly my cup of tea, this film was, but I did my best to get the thing done (it was a thriller). Anyway (and, yes, Virginia, there is a POINT to this story) I remember that at one point we see the inside of Frank Stallone's cabin - he played a wacked out crazy person with guns and knives, and I thought it would be funny if he had nothing in his kitchen except Spam, so I sent a runner and they came back with fifty cans of Spam, which we put into the kitchen set. Afterwards, there were no takers for the Spam, they just sat there like so much fish and got dumped eventually.

Producer Alain Silver talks about how Bruce got involved with the film

"We went and got it rewritten by Bruce Kimmel. The story's about a high school guy who goes on a weekend camping trip with his girlfriend. She's brutally murdered. He's so traumatized that he loses his voice and is put into an institution where his psychologist is Susan Strassberg. He escapes to clear his name and find the real murderers. Susan re-encounters him and helps him. It was a hopelessly convoluted plot.

"Thomas Cost had written it so that after his first sexual experience with this girl, this kid's showering in this waterfall and her severed head comes over the waterfall. I read that and said that is impossible. I can't even get you a decent severed head with our budget.

"So on the spur of the moment, I said, instead of a waterfall, it's a small lake. And he's gone swimming and she's by the shore. And while he's 100 yards off shore, this dark figure comes out of the bushes with a knife. He sees her being killed. He swims as fast as he can but he can not get there. He gets there just in time to have her die in his arms. That's what we shot. Of course Thomas didn't like it.

"It's an ok scene. We were limited by the capabilities of the actors in the cast. But we had to do those kinds of things to the script. And as pre-production continued, we had far more problems. Our DP (Director of Photography) and Production Designer couldn't understand what Thomas wanted. It's the first movie he's ever directed.

"I remember a scene at the production meeting a week before shooting. There are two killers in the woods and there are cutaways to their hands holding knives. But one actor is white and one actor is black. But these cutaways are supposed to look the same.

"Both executive producers wanted to fire Thomas but I fought to keep him on. We'd made a deal with the guy who'd written the script and brought in the package [of actors].

"We started shooting and we saw the dailies and they were impossibly confused...We saw by day two or three that this was not working. I talked to the bond company and they agreed. But we didn't have a pretext. Thomas's deal was that he couldn't be arbitrarily fired. While the production attorney wrestled with those issues, we kept shooting. On day five, I was in the office. My partner was on the set. I just got off the phone with the attorney, still trying to find a pretext to find Thomas. My partner called to say, 'Thomas just attacked me. He tried to choke me. The first AD and the DP had to pull him off of me.' And my first reaction is great, we can fire him.' And we did the next day.

"We brought in Bruce Kimmel, who did the rewrites under a pseudonym (Alex Josephs). He came in for a small fee and made the movie work on the remaining days, including re-shooting. We were rewriting the script before each scene. Bruce would be shooting a scene and I'd be rewriting the next scene.

"Susan Strassberg had to work the first day after Thomas, the man she lived with, was fired. And that was not easy. She burst into tears the first four times she came out of make-up. And she had to go back in. It was a long day. My producing partner was banned from the set because Susan held him responsible for Thomas's problems. I was the only producer allowed to speak to her.

"We finished on schedule and under budget. The problem was, we had a lot of Thomas Cost's material. And as we cut the picture together, we got rid of many of Thomas's scenes. It came out 84 minutes long. Tom Broadbridge had a deal with an early incarnation of Sony Pictures. They were based in New York and called Sony SBS. And they were picking up pictures for distribution. He owed them a picture. One of the Australian pictures he gave them, they didn't want. So he gave them this one. They said, great, but it has to be at least 96 minutes long.

"That was impossible. We shot a really long title sequence in the cemetery and got it up to 88 minutes. My producing partner Patrick Regan quit. We thought about this character you never see, this aggressive district attorney. How about we make him like the Peter Coyote character in Jagged Edge? So we wrote and shot two full scenes and four transitional pieces, shot them in two days, for $8000. We got to 96 minutes. At the screening, Tom Broadbridge turned to me and said, 'You shot all these minutes for $8000. Why couldn't you have shot the whole picture at that ratio?" One of those impossible questions.

"We delivered the picture to Sony. A couple of weeks later, there was an article in the LA Times with the president of Sony SBS. The president talked about our film, though he didn't mention it by name. He said we have to be more careful with these pickups. He didn't have a problem with the quality of the picture but in the shooting of the post-production inserts, we'd used a Panasonic TV. And when the people back in Japan at Sony first saw this movie, they focused on this instant of a Panasonic TV.

"Prime Suspects was made for $520,000. Tom sold it to Sony for $420,000 and then he made a deal for foreign distribution for $750,000. He was happy with his instantaneous profit. The company that bought the foreign, when they took delivery of the picture. They had bought it off the original script. They realized when they took delivery of the picture that the budget was not as high as Tom had said. He told people the budget was $2 million bucks. They might've bought it if you said it cost one million but not two million. So when they got the picture, they realized they'd overpaid and they reneged on the deal.

"And it went to a lawsuit because the New Zealand bank believed the contract was good. The case went to arbitration and the arbitrator nullified the contract because the picture was too different from the original script. I testified that all the changes we'd made were to improve the picture. Tom resold Prime Suspects for half the original amount, long after I did a second picture (Night Visitor) with Tom that was distributed by MGM-UA. It was the same formula with very gratuitously violent and extreme and tasteless script. Again I had Bruce Kimmel do a rewrite to try to inject a little humor and tone it down. It starred Allen Garfield, Elliott Gould, Richard Roundtree.