Musicians are prone to do one of three things on transcontinental flights -- get belligerent and threaten to kill a member of the flight deck, coax a member of the opposite sex into joining the Mile High Club, or just get some shuteye. Les Claypool decided to do none of the three during a fourteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Australia last year. Instead, the Primus frontman wrote an entire screenplay for a film he says fits the "Hitchcock does Deliverance meets the Coen Brothers doing Jaws and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" genre.

The film, called South of the Pumphouse, will be co-directed by Claypool and longtime Primus and Green Day music video director Mark Kohr. Film aficionado and Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett may pony up a small portion of the estimated $1 million budget and receive a producing credit. Kohr, who will also be the film's cinematographer, hopes Pumphouse will begin shooting in February, though, he says, "that's pretty ambitious." Claypool has next fall penciled in for principal photography.

The possibility exists that Claypool will appear in the film as well. "I might pop in and deliver a few phat lines," he says. Claypool's hoping to the call the Pumphouse film company World Sodomy Films, though Kohr appears a tad squeamish about that name. Don't know why.

BLAIR R. FISCHER
(November 17, 1998)