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Michael Gross Reveals Wacky Idea He Pitched for ‘Tremors 4’
Tremors 6 is set to arrive on January 30, 2018.
The Tremors franchise is pretty fun across the board, but the low point was probably 2004’s Tremors 4: The Legend Begins. A prequel set in the 1800s, the film starred franchise mainstay Michael Gross as Hiram Gummer, great-grandfather to series hero Burt Gummer. But if Gross himself had his way, the role he played in Tremors 4 would’ve been quite different.
In an extensive, career-spanning interview with Absolute Music Chat, Gross just revealed that he pitched Universal on playing Burt’s great-grandmother in the fourth installment, rather than his great-grandfather!
“I will tell you one of the things that is funny, because they did not let me do it,” Gross explains. “I have to laugh because it was my idea and it was rejected. See, I have always loved the British music hall tradition of men dressing as woman, and it is something also done in Kabuki theatre. Men play women’s roles and I myself on a couple of occasions have played either transvestites, or in some cases I have played an actual female. In Tremors 4, I played my own great-grandfather, Hirum Gummer. But I had pitched – unsuccessfully I might add – that I play my great-grandmother, meaning that Burt had acquired his tough no-nonsense quality from the female side of the family, not the male side.”
He delved deeper into the pitch, “I had this idea, based on the history of the western frontier, when men would find mail order brides – women who would answer an advertisement in the paper requesting a mate. There were women desperate to leave their own surroundings, desperate for adventure, and a bachelor would pay a certain amount of money to a matchmaker who would arrange to ship a woman West. So I imagined Burt’s great-grandfather as a diminutive, unassertive man who had sent away for a bride, but the creature who emerged from the stagecoach was this ungainly six-foot plus female who was as tough and assertive as he was reticent, the joke being that Burt had actually acquired his testosterone from a female ancestor.”
“I begged the producers to let me play my own great-grandmother.”
The best part about engaging with collaborative genre fiction on the internet is that anyone can get in on the action, with worldwide accessibility often resulting in absurd story beats that wouldn’t be possible if any single person was responsible for the entire narrative. And while Kane Parsons’ Backrooms film is definitely the young filmmaker’s own unique take on the infamous creepypasta, it’s fun to see other creators join the Backrooms sandbox now that the big screen adaptation is getting ready for a record-shattering opening weekend.
As if cleverly timed releases like Puppet Combo’s The Backrooms game weren’t enough (not to mention that Scary Movie poster poking fun at Parsons’ flick), McDonald’s official social media accounts have now released an analog horror video of their own celebrating the liminal terrors of the McRooms – complete with a familiar purple surprise at the end of the footage.
While it’s funny enough to see the world’s most recognizable Fast Food giant engage with internet-borne Found Footage thrills seemingly out of the blue, the video is actually referencing a long-running gag among the Backrooms fandom where creators jokingly talk about there being a fully functional McDonald’s restaurant hidden somewhere in level 0 of the infamous liminal labyrinth.
Now, would it be too much to hope for a moist-carpet-flavored McShake to tie in with the film?
Backrooms is now playing only in theaters from A24.
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