DepressedBergman@DannyDrinksWine
Patrick Swayze on how Marshall R. Teague & he nearly ki!!ed each other while filming this fight scene in "Road House" (1989):
"'Road House' (1989) gave me the opportunity to hone an old skill [Martial Arts] that I never realized I’d missed. I soon found out that I’d need all the fighting skills I could muster for this movie. Because the actor who played my primary opponent, Marshall Teague, was ready to kick my ass for real if he could get away with it.
From the very beginning, Marshall R. Teague, who played the bad-guy enforcer Jimmy, treated me like some snot-nose know-nothing actor. He had served in Vietnam and was a Navy SEAL—which meant he was a serious, real-life badass. He had no patience for bullsh!t and would say so to anyone’s face. Marshall apparently thought I was a dilettante pretty boy he could knock over with one of his meaty fingers. But when we started training, he learned otherwise.
He and I started rehearsing our fight scenes, and soon enough he saw that I knew what I was doing, and that I could take a punch. “Let’s put some contact into it,” I told him, well aware that he could lay me flat out if he chose to. But I knew if we choreographed it well, we could have some contact without killing each other, and it would look amazingly real onscreen.
When you earn the respect of a man like Marshall, you earn it for life. He and I became friends on the set of Road House, and we’ve been friends ever since. Not that many people understood his mentality, but when I looked him in the eye, we really connected. It was a good thing, too, because the fight scene we shot was absolutely epic, and we very nearly killed each other.
We fought in a river, and I was wearing nothing but little hip-hugger sweatpants—no shirt, no pads, no nothing. So when I hit the ground, I was hitting the ground hard. Since both Marshall and I loved the adrenaline high of a fight, it was easy to get carried away, and we really started pounding on each other in this scene.
After a few minutes of us punching and kicking the shit out of each other, Marshall picked up a log and swung it over his head. My eyes got wide as I realized he was about to break it right over my back. Marshall apparently thought it was a prop log, which would have been perfect for the scene—but unfortunately, it wasn’t. He realized his mistake midswing, but it was too late: He cracked me right across the spine with a real log, breaking a couple of my ribs and knocking the wind out of me.
I dropped to my hands and knees, gasping for breath, but the scene called for us to keep fighting. I didn’t break character and didn’t give up —we kept fighting, and eventually got to the part where Dalton is forced to ki!! Jimmy. When you watch this scene in the movie, the exhaustion you see on my face is absolutely real. I barely had the strength to drag myself out of the river after that fight."
("The Time of My Life", Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi, 2009)
P.S: On this day, 37 years ago, "Road House" (1989) was released in the USA & Canada.
