Rounding out the cast, Marty Porter was a comedian and actor who originally made his name in Second City in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, where his career never rose to the heights of fame but where he nevertheless kept busy. He had a talent for impressions and voice work and it became his bread and butter. Coming cheap and at 4’ 11”, he was hired rather than several of the larger (no pun intended) names like Danny DeVito that were floated, each vetoed by Goldman based on cost. Marty was sold as someone who could build the Ebbie character and inhabit him rather than just playing him as a version of himself with some prostheses as a DeVito might have. Porter would end up being paid well, anyway, as he took on several roles and saved Chariot Ln lots: in addition to Ebbie, he would voice Fifi the Robot Phoenix (who would turn out to be a form of Dame Amber Daly’s White Witch), and a Magic Sunflower that no one really knows the role of, and so by definition must have been a creature from Act 3. Perhaps the vines laid on the Peruvian ziggurat in some photos had something to do with it; we may never know.
The aforementioned Amber Daly only received her damehood over a decade later in 1996 with the recommendation of her friend, Lady Diana. At the time she had been in five films, including Cesar, Edgar Hopkins’ Latino inner city re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Four more prestigious roles following The Realm (making her by far the most successful, unscathed actor to have worked on the film), philanthropic work, and the founding of her school the Battersea Academy, earned her the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) at age 54.
Her fellow, Sir Christopher Price, had already been knighted prior to his casting as Ambassador Cyrus. A Shakespearean actor with a notoriously abrasive personality, in American film, Price had been relegated to horror movie villains like Dracula or his equivalent in science fiction. Somewhat ironically (as it was commonplace at the time), Price openly despised genre work and referred to he and his fellow actors that worked thusly as “glorified Punch & Judy puppets.” He was also notorious for an outspoken hatred of Method acting as "the stubborn refusal of an actor to do the job he's hired for."1 In a behind-the-scenes interview, he said the elaborate trappings they’d built "looked like a bloody Renaissance Fair my nephew might enjoy, but certainly not a professional set." Yet only days after this on-set interview, Price was refusing to remove his costume or to retire to a trailer, insisting on living and sleeping on the set as Cyrus.
Newcomer Luna Cavillace took the place of pure animatronics to play Mother Yssyss, a black-skinned night elf that leads Starquilt the Elf into a secret temple at the center of which some sort of plot twist was meant to occur. To my knowledge this scene was never written down in anything more than hand-scrawled notes handed to Vinny Lee just prior to his entry into the Chuqi Ziggurat.
A ghost named Strella would be played by Luna’s young daughter, Maria. No footage of these scenes remains; they are part of a final confrontation that took place in the ziggurat. Luna and her daughter were discovered on the streets of Lima shopping at a market when director E.E. Smith and location scout Marta Daniels were taking in the place. Smith had a “vision” of Yssyss as a Peruvian woman, and of a spirit that would change the context of the entire film. He did not know what he meant by it at the time, but we have some clues as to what these characters became from his “moment of clarity” towards the end of shooting.
At first, this quote may take some time to parse. On an episode of the Johnny Carson Tonight Show, Price stated it differently: “The job is to act. To act, to pretend, you see? You show up, become someone else. When they say “cut”, you stop. Use your bloody imagination, and say the lines. These… people, show up and refuse to pretend to be someone else, and instead insist on making it real.”
"Sounds like pretending to me," Johnny said.
"You may call it that, Johnny. But I do not."
“Well, what would you call it then?”
"I call it bloody schizophrenia!"