April 18: In Like a Lion — A weather gone wild movie.

They’re making Twisters this year and you know, I don’t care.

I never saw this movie when it came out but my wife did.

I only knew it from the pinball machine.

Last year, she made me watch this movie and you know, I came away wondering how anyone could leave all that food behind at Aunt Meg’s house and then she put it all in bags for everyone because she’s used to all these storm chasers in her life.

Yes, storm chasers. My aunt used to follow tornados with my grandmother but they just had a little Cutlass Ciera. They didn’t have Dorothy and a cool truck, much less a woman who would make gravy for them.

Twister is a strange film because it has great talent — Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman — in the service of a Jan de Bont summer blockbuster. That means that there are moments that are total popcorn as trucks raise twisters and then moments of longing and romance that feel honest, thanks to Paxton and Helen Hunt.

Maybe it makes sense, I figure, that there was no script pitch for this movie, but instead a proof of concept clip of the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic. When you need a movie to go with all those computer animation, you used to get Michael Crichton (who co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin).

So here’s how it happens: Bill Harding (Paxton) is now a weatherman but once, he was a storm chased along with his soon-to-be ex-wife Jo (Hunt) and he has to track her down to get the divorce papers signed so that he can marry Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) who gets a raw deal in this movie to be honest but you know, when you chase tornadoes your whole life with a girl who lost her family to one, you have to imagine the sex is like getting tossed around the bed by an F5.

But yeah, while everyone is getting Dorothy IV to send out probes and watching Cary Elwes get pulped by a twister, poor Dr. Melissa is stuck in a truck with Dusty (Hoffman) hearing about how cool weather is. And she’s a therapist!

At least it’s based on some facts, as The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma trained the crew on weather safety and brought the actors along on a tornado chase. There was a moment in the script where one tornado lasted for 36 hours and they shot that down. Speaking of Oklahoma, the production shut down so the cast and crew could pitch in and help after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Also in case you want to talk about stormy weather, the crew wanted to kill Jan de Bont. The camera crew l– ed by Don Burgess — said De Bont “didn’t know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he’d want to shoot in the other direction right away and we’d have to move everything and he’d get angry that we took too long … and it was always everybody else’s fault, never his.” Five weeks into filming, the director knocked over a camera assistant who missed a cue and Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They agreed to stay Jack N. Green and his crew took over. Sadly, Green was injured when a house rigged to collapse did so with him inside it before filming started. He injured his head and back, which led to de Bont being director of photography for the last two days of the movie.

This movie was filled with injuries, as Hunt had a door hit her in the head and she and Paxton both had their retinas burned because of how intense the lights were during the inside the truck scenes.

Both the soundtrack and the orchestral score featured Respect the Wind,” an instrumental composed and performed for the film by Alex and Eddie Van Halen. Again, speaking of storms, another song — “Humans Being” — was a big mess for the band Van Halen. Lead singer Sammy Hagar didn’t want to be working as his wife Kari was pregnant and they wanted to naturally deliver the child in Hawaii. He also believed that the band should rest up after touring as Eddie had avascular necrosis, which had him on a cane and painkillers, and Alex was in a neck brace.  Their manager Ray Danniels told them they’d get rich off the song, as if they needed more money.

As they wrote the song, Alex called de Bont and asked him how closely he wanted the lyrics to be to the movie. de Bont said, “Oh, please don’t write about tornadoes. I don’t want this to be a narrative for the movie.” Hagar asked for some footage and the lyrics he wrote were “Sky turning black/knuckles turning white/headed for the suck zone.” Yes, he started the song not supposed to be about tornadoes by writing about tornadoes.

As Eddie told Guitar World, “And so what does Sammy come back with? “Sky is turning black, knuckles turning white, headed for the hot zone.” It was total tornado stuff! Not only did Alex tell him not to do that, but the director of the fucking movie told him, “Do not write about tornadoes.’””

Hagar claimed de Bont loved a demo he recorded in Hawaii and provided “300 pages of technical weather terms that tornado chasers use” that had the word “suck zone” in it. He also explained to Livewire, “The new manager that came in wanted us to do a greatest-hits record with both Dave’s era and my era with two new songs from me and, not to my knowledge at the time, two more songs from Dave. We ended up using one of them for Twister, and that was the end of the band. I wanted to do a whole record. I didn’t want to do a greatest hit record. I didn’t think Van Halen was there yet.”

Six weeks after the premiere of the movie, Hagar was out of Van Halen, replaced by David Lee Roth, who was soon replaced by Gary Cherone.

I love that this movie was so loud and had a bass-heavy sound that destroyed the speakers in theaters everywhere. A tornado hit a drive-in theater in Thorold, Ontario, on May 20, 1996, damaging a screen that was due to play this movie.

We don’t get many tornadoes in Pittsburgh but one of the few took out my childhood drive-in, the Spotlight 88, and I have hated tornadoes forever because of that.