Darren
Eliker

By Debra Toma

One
of the great things about our readers is that they are just as devoted, if not
more so, to adventure games as we are! A perfect example would be Debra Toma.
Debra is a huge fan of Take 2’s Black Dahlia and in fact managed to obtain an
exclusive interview with Darren Eliker, who starred in the game as Jim Pearson.
(The most amazing part to me was that I was not even aware that Mr. Eliker only
lives a few miles from me in Pittsburgh!) We are printing this interview with
Debra’s permission. After you have enjoyed your visit with Darren Eliker, please
take some time to visit Debra’s excellent Black
Dahlia fan site.

Hi,
Darren! Great of you to take the time to do this interview for us. We really appreciate
it! Black Dahlia has got to be one of the best and best-made adventure
games ever made. Do you play adventure games yourself? If so, what are your favorites?

Black
Dahlia was actually my introduction into the world of PC computer gaming as
it is today. Technology has come along so fast and furious in the last decade
it’s almost impossible to keep up with. I remember when I was a sophomore in high
school playing one of the first versions of Zork on my father’s old Apple
Lisa, which moved like a dinosaur. No visuals, just interactive dialog, but my
friends and I all though it was the coolest thing. I do love adventure. Tolkien
was a big influence for me growing up, and my friends and I would often have all-night
D&D sessions, but the computer gaming industry really didn’t take off until
I was well-ensconced in college. When I emerged, it was kind of like coming out
of a time capsule. It’s amazing what they’re able to do now.

How
did you come into the role of Jim Pearson? You played the part well. Do you have
anything in common with the character?

Well, first off,
thank you for saying so! The company that produced Black Dahlia has two
branches, one in New York and one in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh.
It was the Latrobe branch that was the creative force behind the game. So, when
they went looking for talent, while they did do a national search they also did
a great deal of looking here. When my agent first talked to me about auditioning,
I have to admit to a little concern. I knew of the graphic nature of many of the
games on the market today, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be on a project that
could possibly turn pretty vile and I have very strong feelings about delving
into the world of the occult. When you do an audition, most of the time you will
never have read the script, only a part. Sometimes all you have to go on is a
description of the character. That’s when you simply make the best educated guesses
you can. So, my involvement with Black Dahlia might have ended right there.
But something told me it was okay to go forward. Maybe it was a sense that it
was just the right part for me. That began a process of several auditions beginning
in October and ending in a call from my agent the weekend before Christmas where
he said, “Well you got the part. And you’re not going to believe who your
costars are!”

The more I got into the script, the more I really liked
Jim. I liked his sense of honor and duty. I liked his skepticism and his tenacity.
I liked how he had simple desires to settle down and have a family. I liked how
he cared about people. Perhaps those are some of the areas where we coincide.
Besides, we all want to be the hero to believe that under pressure, we would rise
to the occasion and show courage we didn’t think we had.

What
kind of differences did you see in playing a role in an adventure game compared
to mainstream acting?

The biggest difference is the constraints
of the game world. In theater, everything has an arc and a flow. Each moment builds
upon itself, and you can use that momentum to carry you through the piece. With
film, the challenge is shooting everything out of context because of location
and budget constraints. That’s just practicality. With the filming of a game like
Black Dahlia, you have the same out of context shooting where you do as
much as you can with a particular setup. All the scenes in Merylo’s office, for
instance, are shot one angle at a time. So you cover all of the CDs with all the
costume changes for that angle. Now here’s the tricky part. Add to that the notion
of nonlinear time. All of the questions can be asked out of sequence, and that
has to be taken into consideration. What could have happened just before? We had
to deal with a physical limitation which director Eric Trow and I dubbed “Neutral-Man.”
Every time you begin and end a scene, you have to return to a neutral position
that would be physically consistent with whatever could have come before. This
can feel particularly awkward and hard to justify when you’re in the middle of
a heated confrontation like that with Louie the Fish or Von Hess.

What
were your favorite parts or least favorite, and why?

If
you mean that in terms of the end-product, I’d have to say, believe it or not,
my scenes with Teri. Again, the constraints of the gaming world frustrated us
here. Madame Cassandra’s character is belabored with information. It’s not dialog
that is very actor-friendly, and I don’t know that I agreed with the decision
to take a wonderful and spontaneous performer like Teri Garr and force her talent
into a box. And because the dialog was so unnatural and given on short notice,
she was having to use a prompter. Unfortunately, Teri was unable to look directly
at me and this can be a real consternation for a performer’s natural desire to
give and receive. Writer Patrick Freeman had actually written a whole other scene
between Cassie and Jim which took place just before the train ride to L.A.. It
was very sweet and actable, but because it didn’t really further the necessities
of the game, it wound up on the cutting room floor. There were a lot of other
elements that never got into the game because of the sheer size of it. I was disappointed
they couldn’t include several first-person battle sequences. The one in Louie’s
loft was much more involved, plus there was a second in the sewers involving a
kind of cat-and-mouse hunt with the Torso Killer. The third was an out-and-out
one-manned brawl with the Nazis after Jim escapes the vestry. We shot tons of
running, shooting, grenade throwing, diving combat encounters for that, and the
whole thing was scrapped because it was making the game too big.

How
were the special effects done, for example, the torso killer sequences, the dream
sequences at Madam Cassandra’s, with the door and planets, the falling in the
wine cellar sequence, and labyrinth with the hidden rooms, the train, the fire
in Winslow’s abandoned loft, and, of course, the end sequence at Al King’s?

Most
of the actual effects are handled in postproduction by the programming guys. On
our end, the tedious part was matching the camera angles up so the final shot
would be in line with their environment. The door was fairly simple. You have
a master shot of Jim from behind approaching the door. Then you switch point of
view to a side angle as he gets sucked through the door, during which I had to
arch backward as though I was being pulled into the vortex. The loft shots were
more involved. The original fall began with a shot of Jim trying to open the window.
We shot that on-level, and I just did a pratfall to the ground. The second piece
of the puzzle was the actual fall. To accomplish this, I dropped from a bar suspended
at about 12 feet with the camera lens cutting just below my feet. Then, I drop
through the frame of the camera. The final piece is a shot of the landing, which
consisted of me throwing myself onto the floor into a pool of sticky red goop
and the crew dumping debris on my head. Cut it together, and then the programming
crew works their magic.

The environment for BD was
so interesting! And so realistic. Who did it, and how was it done? It was a masterpiece
of art! Did you see any of that while filming? What was props and what was real?

I
felt like I was swimming in a sea of chroma-key blue. For eight weeks, we shot
at Jay Verno Studios on the south side of Pittsburgh from 7:30 am till 5:30 pm,
five days a week, at a frantic pace that sometimes reached 80 shots a day. To
put that into perspective, a normal film might do 12 to 15 a day depending on
location. Blue screen shooting allows you to accomplish a lot more a lot faster.
The tedious part is making sure the angles of the shot match those of the 3D environment
created by the programmers. Everything was blue. Blue, blue, blue. A desk was
a big blue box. A doorway was a blue frame. A comfy chair was a blue stool. A
coffin lid was a piece of cardboard clamped to a light-stand. Props were minimal.
Even the newspaper Sullivan is holding in the beginning of the game is a blue-coated
piece of cardboard. Everything you’re reacting to everything is in your imagination.
The first day of filming, we did nothing but walk paths for the crypts. They dressed
me up like Indiana Jones, lit a live torch, put it in my hand, stuck me on a big
blue stage 40 feet tall and 50 feet wide, and said walk from here to there. I
do. The director says, “Cut. I’ll buy that. Moving on!” After a couple
of these I had to stop and say, “Guys, I need some context, where am I? What
am I seeing? How big is the room? What’s in it? Where have I come from and where
am I going to?” Before each shot, the camera angle is matched to a superimposed
image on the monitor, which the director can see. The image is a rough of the
room environment built on a three-dimensional blueprint. Each room is painted
by individual artists in the postproduction process. Then the edited video footage
is digitized and married to the finished environment with a computer called a
“Flame,” where the final lighting and special effects are added to make
it as seamless as possible.

Did you know any of the cast
or crew before making BD? What were they like to work with? Do you keep
in touch with any of them now?

During the time I’ve worked
in this city, you come to know people. A number of the crew, like lighting genius
Ed Letteri and makeup guru Patti Bell, are people I’ve worked with on other projects.
The director, Eric Trow, and I had worked the summer prior to this project on
a series of commercials for Pittsburgh Brewing and knew each other well. He and
I, along with Black Dahlia’s author, Patrick Freeman, still keep in touch
or get together when we can. Working with these people was fantastic. They are
pros at what they do, and there is a certain comfort that comes with familiarity
where you simply get down to the business of making it happen.

I
loved some of the costumes as much as the scenery. Especially the coat and hat
and some of Winslow’s–very stylish! Did you have any input in your characters
dress or any other parts of your character’s makeup?

Outside
of shirts and ties, all of my costumes and many of David Whalen’s, who played
Winslow, were handmade. There was no need really for input from the actors because
the era was well-researched by the gentleman who designed the costumes. I really
wanted to keep the coat! And I thought Winslow’s ensemble for the California sequences
was pretty cool–I told David it kind of reminded me of Shaft.

Would
you ever be interested in doing another adventure game? Of course, we’d like to
see BD come back. Kinda disappointing ending, but it could be done. How
would you feel about that?

I’d love to do another one as
long as it had the same kind of class this production had. There was some chat
toward the end of this filming about a sequel, but I’m sure that’s fallen by the
wayside. This scale of project is extremely expensive, and Take 2, like so many
other gaming companies, has more of an interest in what is expedient and profitable.
Believe me, I don’t condemn that. A company has to do what it can to survive when
competition is fierce. Actors cost a lot of money, and when you can do it all
with computers, why pay for the hassle of using us temperamental and slightly
neurotic human beings?

As adventure gamers, we’ve been very
disappointed to see the decrease of new games as opposed to the increase in action
games. Do you have any insight as to how Interplay/Take2 Interactive feel about
that or if they have any plans to do any new adventure games? Is there any way
to contact them to express our feelings about it? I never felt BD got the
attention it deserved. It beat most other adventure games hands down! How come
it didn’t get more marketing? How come there’s no access to it by Interplay or
Take2 over the net?

I’ll just continue with my answer to
the last question. I don’t believe there are any plans in Take 2’s future to develop
more adventure games on the scale of Black Dahlia, and I agree with you
that it’s a shame. And I agree with you that Dahlia didn’t get the attention
it deserved. You’ll recall I said there are two offices to the company. The one
in New York who foots the bill, and the one in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, that developed
the game. I always had the impression that the president of the New York office
looked at Black Dahlia as something to be tolerated rather than encouraged.
Why, I have no idea. Perhaps he didn’t really believe it would be successful and
just saw it as a project to throw some money at and not expect much of. After
the project was completed, there was a big shakedown at the local office, and
many who worked on Dahlia were laid off or left because they knew something
was coming. It’s a shame, really, because I feel that if they tried even just
a little bit, this could have become something truly wonderful. It simply comes
down to shortsightedness and a lack of creative managing ability. In spite of
all of this, I still hear from gamers around the globe who have enjoyed the game,
and to me, that makes it successful.

I loved the Easter
eggs in BD (Angelo’s mother while visiting the Santini home, the spinning/dizzy
sequence, the hotel phone, and the file cabinet at ABC). Are there any other Easter
eggs to find? Whose idea were they?

There is one that involved
drinking out of one of the bottles in the wine cellar. Off the top of my head,
I can’t think of any other ones we shot. The producers were trying to place at
least one in each of Dahlia’s eight CDs, but a number of them didn’t make
it in for the same reason many of the extraneous scenes were cut. The sheer size
of the game meant that anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to furthering
the action had to be left out.

Most of us adventure fans
are fans of Access’s Tex Murphy series as well. At the end of one of his games,
they added the bloopers. What kind of bloopers were there in BD? Any interesting
behind-the-scenes stories?

Aside from my typical giggling
fits, which normally happen when I start getting tired, and my usual goofing off,
one particular episode comes to mind. We were filming the end sequence where Jim
leaves Alice to follow Winslow through the portal to Odin’s Pool. To do the actual
jump into the portal, the camera had to be back far enough to allow for distance.
A blue apple box was placed on the floor pretty close to the back wall. The box
is used to get some height and give the appearance of jumping. I was covered in
dirt, soot, and blood from head to toe. Now, the shot was toward the later part
of the day. I was pretty exhausted already. I think I was starting to lose depth
perception facing the back wall and staring into the blue field. To make matters
worse, the joint between the stage floor and back wall is curved so it appears
seamless to the camera. It also would appear seamless to me as you’re about to
see. We did a number of dry takes to make sure the physical action looked right.
Here comes the funny part. I guess I didn’t realize how close the box actually
was to the wall. You can probably already see where I’m going with this. Action
is called. I stagger toward where the portal should be gaining some momentum.
I get to the box nearing run speed. Step up, arch back, swing my arms outward
as though the vortex is pulling me through. I must have gone too far. Because
the next thing I know I’m lying on the floor looking up at the wall amidst much
laughter from the crew, where I can make out a rough impression of my head, hands,
and upper body left on the wall where I had careened into it. I think I was seeing
a few stars. But at least I provided everyone with a moment of levity after a
long day! They had to wash down the wall before we could reshoot.

On
a more personal level, you really are a wonderful actor. I was surprised to find
you reside and do most of your work from Philadelphia. Why? Aren’t you from Chicago?
What brought you there, and what keeps you there? Do you have family or friends
in Philadelphia? Are you married, or do you have any children?

Actually,
I reside in Pittsburgh. Originally, I am from the Philadelphia area of New Jersey,
born in Camden. My family still lives there, all within three miles of each other.
I first came to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie-Mellon University’s drama program.
I spent the majority of the summers here, and I grew to like the town and how
easy it is to live here. One of the areas of the training I seemed to excel at
aside from acting was voice and speech. Fortunately, that’s something I’ve been
able to capitalize upon in the real world. About seven years ago, I fell into
a job at a local radio station, where I now write, produce, and voice the majority
of commercials for local advertisers. It’s garnered me a number of awards and
also allowed me to develop a substantial freelance business doing voice-over work
for television and radio outside the station. In turn I have a lot of flexibility
and freedom to choose the theatrical projects I get involved in, which I do about
three or four times a year. It’s also kept me out of having to do so many of the
other odd jobs like temp work and waiting tables that many other performers have
to do, even those that have conservatory training, just to make ends meet while
you wait for the big job. I met my wife Jennifer here about four and a half years
ago, and we’ve been married for three of those years. No kids yet! We look forward
to it; sometimes I think I do even more than her. But the thing about children
is once you have them, you have them. We want to enjoy being married for a little
while yet!

You get very good reviews and it seems you stay
busy there, too. I’m not sure I have this right, but I read you went to New York
before and they found you too young to get the kind of roles you wanted, so you
returned to Philly. How old are you? Will you try again later or maybe go to Hollywood?

Pittsburgh has been very kind to me. You’re right, I did
sign on with two New York agencies (one commercial, one legit) after I graduated
and commuted for auditions from my parents’ home in New Jersey. At the time it
seemed like things were going to really open up. But after a year, I had to reevaluate
things. As I looked back over that year, what I kept hearing was, “Hey, I’ll
definitely remember the acting, but you’re just too young for the role.”
This wasn’t exactly a surprise, because I tend to identify with the mindset of
more mature characters, and that is what I tended to play in college. But it would
probably be about ten years before I grew into physically being able to play the
parts I could emotionally relate to. So, instead of sitting and waiting in an
expensive city, I decided to come back to a place I’d become familiar with where
at least I could live and work. Now, Jen and I often talk about the possibility
of taking another shot at it, but you still have to live life in the meantime.
The work for me in this town continues to grow, and one thing that you have to
realize is that the world has changed. Computers, ISDN lines, and the Internet
have made it much easier to actually do things like voice work long distance.
I also happen to be a very patient person. I’ve watched as friends of mine who
are very talented either go and sit or go and come back. That’s not the way I
want to go about it.

I see you do a lot of plays. Is that
your favorite expression of acting? Do you ever direct? What was your favorite
role or medium, and why?

I get tired of hearing performers
criticize the different mediums as though one was necessarily better than the
other. You tend to hear things like, “I did film for the money, but theater
is my true love.” Or, “Television is for lightweights you’ll never see
me in daytime.” Or as Dennis Miller has said with his tongue in his cheek,
“Do commercials!? That’ll ruin your career!” Look, there is a distinct
magic and challenge to each medium that the others don’t have. Theater has the
magic of live performance. But while you have the pressure of having one shot
to get it right without retakes, a theater performer has the luxury of building
moment by moment. You can’t do that in film. You have the challenge of making
a moment happen totally out of context and have to make it believable under the
pressure of a daily shooting schedule. In television, sometimes you have the combination
of both, depending on whether you have a live audience or not, and you often will
have a tremendous schedule of rehearsal and rewrites and shooting every week.
A lens can make you as a viewer see things with a precision that stage can’t.
Then there’s advertising and voice-over acting. I look at commercials as little
plays in 60 or 30 seconds. Like a song, the essence is boiled down to its most
essential elements, and it requires good acting to make it believable. How many
of us, when watching a show, are more often entertained by the commercials we
see (I mean the good ones, now) than the show itself? And most actors would kill
to have Don LaFontane’s workload and pay scale for voicing a good percentage of
all of the movie trailers and TV promos you hear. I think there is a delight to
be found in them all.

How long have you been an actor,
and what inspired you to get into it?

When I was little,
I hated being in front of people. Well, let me correct that. I was outgoing and
was a ham among the family, but I didn’t enjoy the close scrutiny of people watching
me under the pressure of solo performance. Piano recitals left me feeling nauseated.
And when I was in ninth grade, I actually fainted giving an oral report in my
high-school English class. Although, now that I think back, there was this weird
phase in elementary school around the third or fourth grade where I vaguely remember
singing, of all things, John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”
over the lunchroom PA system. Don’t ask, I don’t have a good answer. It was my
friends in the high-school marching band that dragged me into it. They were the
ones who were always in the spring musicals and insisted that I audition at least
to just be in the ensemble. Well, I wound up getting the role of Miles Gloriosus
in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and much to my surprise,
people actually like it. Then the following three years, I played the male lead
in My Fair Lady, Hello Dolly, and Music Man. I didn’t think to seriously
pursue it until somewhere around my junior year. I guess it came down to being
the thing I liked to do the most and the fact that it was a gift I never knew
I had that made me want to make it my career. I auditioned for Carnegie-Mellon
early during my senior year, figuring that’s where I really wanted to go and I
wouldn’t think about anywhere else unless I didn’t get in. That concern never
came to be. At the end of the auditioning day, they sent me over to the dean’s
office and offered me a place at the college. So, with the “vast experience”
of four high school musicals under my belt, I entered the very competitive world
of conservatory theater training. What was I thinking?

What
other kind of interests or hobbies do you have?

I still
love noodling around on the piano. I am much less of a perfectionist now. There
was a time when I was much younger when I would actually get up and storm away
from the piano if I couldn’t get the notes exactly right. I’ve softened a bit
since then. Now I play more for my own enjoyment in a much more freestyle fashion.
I love news. I have to admit, I’m a Fox News junkie. It’s the only network where
you actually get a balanced view of the news and actually learn something. I also
have a passion for reading. Particularly nonfiction and theological stuff, believe
it or not. I need things that help me use the left side of my brain and that give
me a break from the creative thinking mode; besides, I believe we have a real
lack of rational thinking in the world today. We get a whole lot of our views
from entertainment and entertainers, and I personally think it’s to our detriment.

What are you working on now, and is there any way we can
check it out on the ‘net?

I won’t be starting anything until
the summertime. I will be working on a one-act play by Noel Coward called Shadowplay
and after that an Irish adaptation of Chekov’s The Seagull, both produced
by the Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theater. After that, there is a possibility
I will be playing Henry in a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, which
I’ve been dying for years to do, but because it’s dependent on a number of logistical
things, that’s all I’m willing to say about it for now. I’ll keep you posted!

Thank
you so much for your time, Darren. And may everything you do turn out as great
as BD! If you have anything you’d like to add, please do! It’s hard to
do an interview like this online and not be able to ask follow up questions as
you answer.

If you would like to read more about Black
Dahlia, please visit Debra
Toma’s Black Dahlia site.