Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film Page 7

  Comedy!

  IV. Was there some sort of secret rivalry between Broken Arrow and Con Air? Broken Arrow came out in the winter of 1996 and climaxes with one of the craziest over-the-top, Wile E. Coyote villain deaths I’d seen up to that point (John Travolta speared and launched through a train by his own stolen, deactivated nuclear missile). Next summer here comes Con Air, which ends with John Malkovich leg-speared, dropped from a ladder and then head-smooshed by an industrial press—while lying on a conveyor belt. In 1998 there was Armageddon, and Bruce Willis nuking himself on a killer asteroid after experiencing a video montage of Liv Tyler, but it wasn’t the topper I was expecting. If only Shakespeare in Love had ended with Joseph Fiennes falling off a cliff wearing rocket skates . . .

  V. Josh di Donato is another story, and it’d be cruel and insensitive of me to say anything too harsh about the poor bastard in these pages. That’s why we’re crouching down in this footnote while I whisper to you. Look, yeah, he was kind of fucked up. I’ve run into him recently and he’s a much calmer, more self-effacing guy. Without going into too much detail, he knew how to book a room. He was a one-man Internet mailing list before the Internet became the all-reaching clarion it is today. Tireless promoter. But also, tragically, a frustrated comedian who thought of himself as equal to a lot of the performers he booked. It’s forgivable—as you’ll see, when you read the rest of this chapter, we were all fucked up and full of ourselves then. There was a madness to the Largo, and Josh, just as much as anyone else, got caught up in it. That’s another book—and not mine to write. Also, Pedro’s Grille became even shadier and scarier than the Four Star, so it followed that Josh would want to take his admittedly superlative show to a more stable room. He’d have been a conquering hero if he’d just stuck to booking the room. But he let his hubris lead him up onto the stage, and so now he’s an older, wiser motherfucker with a rueful calm. I like him. I do.

  VI. “God mode”: endless ammo, endless lives. A lot of my MADtv sketches never got written because I was too busy mowing down Beholders and Cacodemons with a pulse rifle.

  VII. No, I’m not going to name any names here, either. Especially ’cause I suspect, in another ten years, I’m going to be dropping by whatever 2024’s version of the Largo is to tell myself that my aching feet and spasming back are in no way signs of my unavoidable disintegration.

  VIII. That was during a bit where I suggested that Forrest Gump might not be that good a film. An audience member politely pointed out, “It made a lotta money, you asshole!”

  IX. Yes, it’s a gorgeous film about a brief, elegiac time in Italy before the rise of the Nazis destroyed the fabulous, yet unrealistic, gated paradise of the Finzi-Continis. Sure there’s a weak-ass parallel with me and my friends’ immersing ourselves in the unreality of the Largo, but, I mean . . . Nazis. Nazis, right? There’s no real comparison. That’s why I’m hiding it down in this footnote.

  X. Davey Marlin-Jones. He was a film critic for the local CBS affiliate in Washington, DC, when I was growing up. And he’d do these roundups of currently playing movies, and he’d review them by taking out a stack of index cards, and depending on how he’d treat each card, that was how he felt about a movie. So for a movie like They Call Me Bruce? or The Burning, the card would get crumpled up and tossed over the news desk. The card for a film like The Verdict or The Empire Strikes Back would be lovingly slid into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. But sometimes, he’d rip off a tiny corner of a card—a corner that would represent, say, Michael Moriarty’s performance in Q: The Winged Serpent or Morgan Freeman’s in Street Smart—and this little bit would be saved in his vest pocket before the rest of the card was flung away. Calvino’s “inferno” principle, illustrated for me on the local news. Thanks, Davey. RIP.

  XI. The Comedy Store was Ciro’s back in the forties. People murdered and disposed of in its back rooms, it was rumored. Lead-lined, bulletproof walls. Mickey Cohen himself survived a drive-by machine gun hit out front because he stooped down to pick up a dropped dollar. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in vibes. And the Comedy Store has cosmically bad ones, to this day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  No Small Actors

  Down Periscope, 1995

  I was sitting in a multiplex in Sherman Oaks, nearly rising out of my seat, electrified with inspiration. Clint Howard had just spoken on-screen. It was a “Eureka!” moment for me.

  It was Saturday, July 1, 1995. A pitiless hell-blast of an afternoon in the Valley. This wasn’t the pleasant May warmth of the Saturday I’d first entered the New Beverly, two months before. The Valley in July was a concentrated slice of the sun. Everyone on the sidewalk was a scuttling ant under a magnifying glass. I’d tucked myself into the cool-and-carpeting oasis of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, into their bland multiplex, to see Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.

  I was digging it. I’m a sucker for contemporary history, especially when it involves uncomfortable-looking clothing, galactic risk undertaken with slide-rule-level technology, and Ed Harris looking grim. Apollo 13 was a fun lunch.

  I was at the “Houston, we have a problem . . . ,” moment in the movie. Kevin Bacon stirs the oxygen tanks, and somewhere within the wiring of the fragile coffee can in which they’re soaring through space, an imp leaps loose. Sparks and fire, rattling and lurching, and now the drama is under way.

  Back at ground control, Ed Harris’s team of scientists and technicians gape at their eight-bit computer screens, seeing Atari 2600–style error messages and hearing ominous, urgent bleeps. These are men who, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix or a hedge fund risk manager, could see danger in tumbling clusters of numbers. The numbers here add up to defeat and death for the three astronauts.

  And there’s Clint Howard, wearing a pair of glasses that would soon adorn the bridge of every hipster’s nose in Williamsburg and Los Feliz. And a tight, conservative comb-over haircut and Church of the SubGenius pipe. He’s one voice in a chorus of calm, robotic engineer and monitor vigil keepers, spitting out only what the numbers could prove.

  And he does it, too. At first. Reading off of his frantic, scrambled screen, in defiance of its digital panic, he says, tersely but professionally, “O2 tank two not reading at all. Tank one is at seven hundred twenty-five PSI and falling. Fuel cells one and three are, uh . . .”

  And then a pause. He’s so determined, in that moment, to offer up his report, to be a part of the team, to function.

  But that pause. It’s as long as an intake of breath. And then, with a frightened flutter in his voice (and notice how there’s also a touch of anger, at himself, for allowing this moment of doubt in the face of science and the infinite):

  “Oh boy, what’s going on here?”

  That single moment in Apollo 13, that single line reading by a lifer actor who, like the character he’s playing, never fails to show up and deliver a solid piece of work, pierced me. I realized that up until that point in Apollo 13, all of its pyrotechnic special effects and thrilling cinematography had left me cold. Well, not cold. I liked the rocket taking off and the explosions and the editing and the Apollo 13 itself spinning through the void, spitting instantly frozen oxygen. Good moviemaking.

  But it was Clint Howard’s line. The pause, and the “oh boy,” which hit me with twice the impact of a thousand rocket engines and all of their vulcanized thrust.

  I’d seen single lines in movies land with that kind of weight before, at least for me. Jerry Ziesmer, as “Jerry the Civilian” in Apocalypse Now, intoning the icy line “Terminate . . . with extreme prejudice.” The single, terminal “Neutered,” from Gates of Heaven. Glenn Shadix’s “ES-kimo” from Heathers. “Rosebud,” fer Chrissakes.

  Up until this moment, in my sealed, air-conditioned cube in a Sherman Oaks multiplex, I’d always noted those moments and enjoyed them and then lost them to the larger flow (or failure) of whatever movie I
was watching. They were either a tiny, perfected detail in a larger masterpiece or a brief glimmer of goodness in something forgettable. Like a fast food meal where, out of nowhere, you pluck one of the most transcendentally perfect French fries out of a soggy mound of blandness.

  But things were different now. Because now, watching Apollo 13, I was halfway through filming my first movie role.

  I’d been cast in a movie called Down Periscope. Kelsey Grammar was playing an iconoclastic, brilliant submarine captain with a tattoo on his dick. He gets picked to helm an old diesel sub in a war game to see if a rattletrap relic from World War II, in the hands of radical terrorists, could be used successfully in a suicide attack.I The crew he’s tasked to work with are the usual misfits, malcontents, rogues and oddballs that are usually assembled around whatever comedic alpha dog drives movies like this. His rivals in the exercise, arrayed against him in a sleek nuclear submarine, are William H. Macy and Bruce Dern. Rip Torn is his only ally among the top brass. Somewhere within the bowels of Kelsey’s sub lurks Harry Dean Stanton, as a crusty old engineer. In terms of my sprocket-­fiend tastes, Down Periscope was a smorgasbord.

  I didn’t get to meet any of those guys, by the way.

  I’d been cast as “Stingray Radioman,” the nameless sailor assigned to sit at and monitor the radio of the Stingray, the diesel sub. I’d lurk in the background, silently taking in numbers and facts. And, at one point in the script, I look up from my station and say to Kelsey, “Radio message for you, sir. It’s Admiral Graham.”

  Not an auspicious debut. It’s not Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon or Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs. or even Nick Nolte in Dirty Little Billy, whom I still can’t spot after watching that muddy masterpiece three times. But it was work, and a SAG card, and getting used to the drudgery of acting in movies. Without having to expend any effort of my own—I’m sitting in every single scene except one, which we’ll get to shortly—I was able to watch as Kelsey and the other actors did take after take, from angle after angle, to slowly assemble what would be scenes important, inconsequential and a combination of both. I sat at my fake radio inside a practical submarine set that had, according to one of the producers, also been used in Run Silent, Run Deep (was I sitting in a chair that once held the ass of Don Rickles?) and concluded that shooting a movie was like blasting a tunnel through a mountain. Or brushing every grain of sand off of a fossil. You attacked it relentlessly. The form was hidden in unyielding, indifferent rock. Or, in the case of a movie, nonjudgmental reels of virgin celluloid. It really came down to where you pointed the camera. And how you assembled the pieces afterward. I must have known that in the abstract, sitting in the New Beverly, marveling at the shower scene from Psycho or a Kurosawa katana fight, but this was the first time I’d seen the process from the “take one” point.

  Our director was David S. Ward. He wrote The Sting! Won an Oscar for it! Then started directing. Now it was twenty-one years after his fingertips first touched the gold plating on an Oscar statuette. He was sitting in front of a half-submarine set, telling Rob Schneider to yell louder. And David wore the bemused, happy expression of a man who was truly fascinated and startled by where his journey was taking him. I missed noticing it until recollecting all of this, just now.

  I sat in my chair in front of a fake radio, pretending the water I was sipping was bracing navy coffee. I sat there and thought about Big Hollywood Stars who’d started as background actors. Richard Dreyfuss’s concerned face, poking out of the crowd of rooming house boarders near the end of The Graduate. Tony Curtis, silent but magnetic, sharing maybe three steps of a close dance with Yvonne De Carlo before Burt Lancaster sweeps her away, back into the main narrative of Criss Cross. Alan Ladd, in silhouette, at the end of Citizen Kane.

  Were those guys, even then, working some inner engine, some focus-pulling voodoo that set them on the path to bigger roles? Not that I was even looking to become a lead actor like them. My thinking was to become a solid character actor, a working-all-the-time type like Buscemi or, deep in the fake engine room of the fake sub I was sitting in, Harry Dean Stanton. That’s how I would observe every kilowatt, sprocket and tape measure of the filmmaking process, until I grew into the Great Director I was destined to be. I mean, John Ford was an extra in The Birth of a Nation.II Right?

  I had a radio, a coffee cup and my profile to the camera for every single scene I was in. I had a single line of dialogue. For now, I had scene after scene in the background, blurred by the foreground antics of Harlan Williams and Toby Huss and Schneider.

  I sat there at my fake radio and thought of a story a stage actor friend of mine from New York had told me. Apocryphal, probably. But I was holding on to it like it was gospel, at least for the situation I was in now. Sanford Meisner, the legendary acting teacher, was doing a play early in his career. He was young and was just a background extra. A man sitting at a desk. While they were rehearsing the director suddenly singled Sanford out, yelled at him for pulling focus from the main actors. All Sanford was supposed to do was sit at a desk in the background and pretend to fill out forms while the drama happened in front of him. But the simple act of his writing on paper became more fascinating than anything the two leads could do with their pages and pages of dialogue.

  “What are you doing back there?” asked the director.

  Sanford said, “I’m trying to draw a perfect seven.” Over and over, that’s what Sanford tried to do. And his concentration on the task was so intent, so laser-hot, that it became the center of attention.

  Could I do that with a hollow radio and a coffee cup? And if I did, wouldn’t I not be doing the job I was hired for? On the other hand, wasn’t I supposed to think about, even at this near-faceless start of my movie career, learning how to hold an audience’s attention on a movie screen? If this sounds grandiose, please remember that these are the thoughts that go through every extra’s mind, in every TV show or movie or play you see. It’s okay to have them.

  But it wasn’t smart, I soon learned, to act on them.

  “What’re you doing back there?” asked David on my second day of shooting. This was at the end of June, before we all took a break for the July 4 weekend.

  I’d done something brilliant, I thought. I’d taken a sip of my coffee and reacted like it tasted god-awful, and did an exaggerated, almost silent-movie move of putting the cup back down, like it contained nitroglycerin that might explode if I set the cup down anything less than delicately.

  “I just figured, you know, maybe the coffee tastes bad, and . . .”

  David said, with zero malice, “You don’t need to do that, Patton.” He’d probably said this to a dozen different day players in a dozen different films by that point in his career. He’d seen the impulse before and understood where it came from, and he wasn’t about to shame me for it. But seriously, Patton, sit in the fucking background. Don’t act out the thirty-page character bio you’ve written in your head for “Stingray Radioman.” You’re not Jules in Pulp Fiction.

  So that’s how it went my first few days on Down Periscope. Fiddle with dials that did nothing, scrunch my eyes at the silence coming in on my radioman’s headphones. Be a gray blur. This was my equivalent, acting-wise, of doing open mikes where I did seven minutes in front of three people at two o’clock in the morning. I was putting the time in. Good. I was happy to do it.

  I was even happier to hang in between shots. Because the camera had to roam all around the inside of the submarines, there were stretches—hours and, sometimes, days—when I’d come in and the actors in my shot angles ended up sitting around outside their trailers. Card games, board games. Someone set up a weight bench. I’d sit and listen to Toby talk about nightmare construction jobs he’d done, or Harlan would tell us about a series of children’s books he was writing. This is how it must be on movie sets, I was thinking. You find creative ways to pass the time, and if it was with a group of people you liked, even better. There w
ere mild, sunshiny days on the Fox lot while we waited. Ken Hudson Campbell, who played Buckman, the ship’s cook whom Rob Schneider’s character would yell at constantly, noticed there were a lot of studio golf carts sitting around, unused. The next day, without anyone saying anything to anyone, we all came in with newly purchased Super Soaker guns. Each of us would grab a golf cart—or pair up, with one driver and one shooter—and do an eight-mile-an-hour Road Warrior reenactment all over the studio lot. Until one day when we realized we’d slurped up every volt of charge in every single golf cart battery the studio had. Then we got shut down. Oh well. Back to Texas Hold’em with sunflower seeds for chips.

  We made up sea chanteys. Invented card games with illogical rules. Challenged each other to see how much weight we could bench-press. Talked about frustrating auditions and crazy girlfriends and anything. Everyone was relaxed and enjoying each other’s company and had their eyes on the long, colorful lifer’s arc of working in show business. Everyone except for me, of course. Make no mistake—outwardly, I was jovial. Inwardly? I was a box of snakes. Being on a movie set dawn to dusk was making me miss movies at the New Beverly. Movies I could have been ritualistically checking off in one of my Five Books. This was the first of many ignored warnings (removing myself from parties and social interaction, losing a girlfriend, losing sleep, subsisting on a diet of theater snacks and soft drinks) that maybe my movie addiction needed to be handled and quelled rather than stoked.

  Because despite all the fun I was having, I still finished that first week frustrated and impatient. This was my usual state of mind all through my twenties. Wasn’t it everyone’s? I wanted to headline comedy clubs. Wanted to get bigger roles as an actor. Wanted to write epic scripts and then direct them as world-changing movies. How in the fuck was that going to happen if I didn’t make my first screen appearance somehow memorable?