Away from the cameras, cast and crewmembers huddle around propane heaters, hoping to warm various parts of their anatomy before being called away into the chilly night on a hill in northern Los Angeles County.
"I wish I'd worn my gloves tonight," mutters one production assistant, jamming his hands into the pockets of his down jacket as his friend just nods. His teeth are chattering too hard for him to reply; so loud, in fact, that the chattering nearly drowns out the noisy drone of trucks and cars on nearby Interstate 5.
But if Burt is affected by the TREMORS 3 © 2001 Universal Home Videocold, he doesn't show it. He just keeps on smiling.
However, the congenial actor Michael Gross, who portrays the famous worm-stalking hunter, doesn't care much for the icy wind that whips over the hilltop. Between takes, he approaches our group of frozen journalists. Up close, we can see his nose is red, just like ours, and he joins us in the huddle around the heater.
Even though Gross is as cold as everyone else on the TREMORS 3 set, he's still happy just to be playing one of his favorite characters again the title BACK TO PERFECTION holds true for this actor.
"Burt Gummer and TREMORS is the best thing that ever happened to me," Gross says. "My wife used to laugh at me with my 55 gallon drums of earthquake water. Burt Gummer proves you can't be too prepared!"
Actually, the longest running continuous character that he has ever played is, as Gross says, the part of "good old Steven Keaton" on TV's FAMILY TIES. But over a period of time, the gun-totin' character of Burt has had more staying power, coming back again and again since the first TREMORS was released in 1990.
"And here we are, 11 years later," he smiles. "He's been so much fun. He's probably every wife's nightmare. Very technical and very into his fear. I think he's ultimately a very funny man because he doesn't have much of a sense of humor. Because he takes life so very seriously it makes him very funny. And so I enjoy the heck out of him."
Suddenly Gross gets the call to return to filming and leaves us standing around the heater. We crowd in, quickly closing the void he leaves behind. And then, just as suddenly, Gross is back, picking up his thoughts exactly where he had left them.
"I've always thought [IMG3L]in some ways that Burt is a peripheral character," he says, reclaiming his heater spot. "In the same way that Fonzi's character in HAPPY DAYS would never work unless he was surrounded by the normalcy of the Cunningham family. And the same way that Michael Fox in FAMILY TIES worked so well by contrast because he was so obsessive in his own way in a relatively normal family. So I've always felt that Burt should have relatively normal people around him to function best and be set off by contrast as the strange man that he is."
When told that Burt would be the only returning character for TREMORS 3, Gross says that he knew that his character had to be surrounded with normal people.
"What worked so well, particularly in TREMORS 1, it was a whole community being threatened," he explains. "Women, children - you cared about what happened. There was a certain amount of vulnerability there. I can't tell you about this story, but there will be a return to that town of Perfection and you will see some of our old denizens of Perfection."
Having said that, Gross stresses that bomb shelter fanatic Burt will never see his TREMORS 1 wife again, and he feels that her absence is completely logical.
"She refused to live with the man after the fall of the Soviet Union because he fell into a deep depression without that common enemy out there," Gross laughs delightedly. "He didn't know what to do with his life."
Nor does he expect that Burt will ever find another lady like his wife Heather. Reba McEntire portrayed the woman who could match Burt, grenade for grenade, in the first film.
"I can't imagine anyone living with this man," he says. "How Heather lived with Burt as long as she did, I just don't know. But he seems to work better as a loner."
The loner theme carries on throughout Burt's life. Some people thought that Burt, because of his fondness for firearms, should have had National Rifle Association stickers on his truck, but Gross disagrees.
"This man would join no organization," he emphatically says. "He hasn't voted in years. He wants nothing to do with any organization. He wants to do it alone, whether it's governmental, or extra-governmental. He's not a joiner. That's why he's out living in the middle of nowhere, basically saying 'I don't need any of you.' He's a queer duck in that way."
Gross is called away again, this time to practice blasting one of the many guns that Burt totes in TREMORS.
With all that firepower [IMG4R]around, the film requires that a knowledgeable person be on the set to keep tabs on what Burt decides to fire next. Vietnam vet and former cop Bill Davis fills that bill.
"The character Burt Gummer has a basement full of guns," says Davis. "He can just pick and choose anything he wants. He's a one-man gun store."
Davis says the character of Burt is also very knowledgeable about firearms, choosing to carry on his right hip an Israeli-made .357 Desert Eagle, which he adds should be more than sufficient to stop normal monsters. However, Burt rarely deals with normal monsters.
"It wouldn't stop a graboid," Davis explains. "But it might stop one of the two-legged jobbies [referring to the other, land-based creatures seen in the second film]."
He says that Burt also keeps an assortment of provisions on hand.
"He has all kinds of doodads in his desk," he says. "When he needs something like cannon fuse, he'll pull out cannon fuse. Or he'll pull out binoculars. Or his Palm Pilot, where he's downloading satellite images. He can do anything."
And Davis reminds us that Burt is the world's only remaining graboid hunter who actually focuses on worm fighting as a living.
"After TREMORS 1, he's gone on to be the monster hunter, the graboid hunter," he laughs.
Be sure to check back this weekend for part two of CINESCAPE's TREMORS 3 set visit.
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