"The Lone Ranger had a mask, a white horse, and silver bullets," he adds, "but he didn't use them as a crutch. Those things stood for his code and his values. They identified who he was and what he believed in. What I hope is that my knives can do the same for action heroes today--give them that little something extra to define their characters."
And when those touches have an impact beyond the screen--when they reach into the audience and fire up a moviegoer's imagination--it's sweeter still.
Take Rick Johnson, a native of Ocean City, New Jersey, who was spellbound by Commando and Predator and now has an entire room devoted to merchandise from the films. The centerpieces of his shrine are sets of original Jack Crain knives used in the pictures.
"I've got one of the big machetes," says Johnson, who developed an affection for well-made knives through his career running a chartered fishing boat company. "And I've got the one they used to build the jungle traps at the end. I've got the one Bill Duke used to remove a scorpion from the shoulder of one of the other soldiers, and I've got the one Jesse 'The Body' Ventura wore upside-down on his chest."
Fortunately, Johnson's wife appreciates his compulsion to collect such inexplicably meaningful objects. She owns a sizable assortment of merchandise related to the British royal family, including books, statues, commemorative plates, and two-foot-high replicas of Prince Charles and Lady Diana as they were dressed for their wedding.
"I bet if you could interview everybody living anyplace in the country," Johnson says, "you'd find out that just about everybody is a collector of something."
Life has recently been very, very good to Jack Crain. He's been favored with good seats at world premieres many Hollywood power players couldn't get invited to. He's eaten dinner with Joel Silver when the producer set up a row of small portable grills along the front sidewalk of his bungalow and treated his staff to an impromptu Hibachi-style barbecue. He's played touch football on the 20th Century Fox lot with the cast of Predator. He's flown out to Los Angeles on a whim to join a dinner of action film prod-ucers and stars celebrating the impending production of The Hunt for Red October. Arnold Schwarzenegger greeted Crain's late arrival by abandoning his dessert to pour the Weatherford knifemaker a fresh cup of coffee.
Yet Crain conducts himself with such a relaxed, folksy de-meanor that it's hard to reconcile his flamboyant work with the jes' folks persona. Of course he's only humble on the surface; he has tremendous confidence in his work and isn't shy about expressing it to people whose company he enjoys. Once you've gained his trust, Crain will trot out comparisons between himself and various immortal visual artists, including Picasso and Rembrandt, noting that the works of those men were also produced by one hand alone and have increased exponentially in value with the passage of time. (Crain prefaces such comments with, "Now, don't get the idea I'm comparing myself with these people"--then compares himself anyway.)
But among strangers, Crain values his privacy; the only precondition for an interview was that the article not describe in detail where he lives, because he shudders at the thought of being accosted by strangers and pestered for knife lore and movie trivia outside the confines of conventions. Crain refuses to work anywhere else, because he loves the beatific calm of the central Texas fields and the knowledge that he's alone with his tools and materials and needn't fear human interruption.
"If you're a friend, and you get me talking, I can ramble on forever," he says. "But with strangers, I'm not too good." He fears that when he recently attended a show-and-tell with his 13-year-old daughter, Jennifer, he was less than electrifying. "I bored those kids silly, I'm afraid.
"But I do like seeing my work on the big screen," he says. "I really do. I get excited, I admit--I always sit there during premieres wishing Stallone or Schwarzenegger would move the heck out of the way so the audience can get a better look at my work. If I made movies, they'd be the most boring movies you've ever seen--no dialogue, no plot, no characters, just two hours of tight closeups of knives. Knives, knives, knives, and knives.
