Drama (21 page)

[22]

Induced Insecurity

A
movie?!

Until that moment, I never dreamed I would ever be in a movie. Acting in movies was simply outside the context of my life. From before I could even remember, acting on the stage was the only acting I had ever known. Beyond the odd commercial or soap opera, none of the actors I had ever worked with had appeared on a screen. I loved movies, of course. Like anyone else, I had my favorite movie stars, and going to the movies was part of the rhythm of my life. But movie actors struck me as a breed apart. To me, it seemed they worked in a different profession. I never pictured myself in their company. I never envied them, coveted their roles, or thought I could do any better.

So imagine my astonishment when I got a phone call out of the blue asking me to come to a swanky townhouse in the East Sixties and interview for a major role in a Hollywood film. For months I had been pounding the New York pavements, looking for an open door into the acting game outside of the protective custody of my father. I had struggled with the ego-bruising reality that, apart from him, no one wanted to hire me for a paid acting job. And now a movie director was coming after
me.
How did this happen?

The seeds had been planted years before. By a sublime irony, it turns out that my good fortune had had its beginnings at the lowest point in my fledgling professional life. In the disastrous summer of The Great Road Players, a young filmmaker named Brian De Palma came down to Princeton to see his old Columbia buddies in that long-ago production of Molière one-act farces. I had directed the show and performed the part of a loony philosopher, maniacally spouting a stream of philosophical gobbledygook. I remember being onstage that evening and hearing a wild cackle rising above the titters of the sparse audience. That cackle was Brian De Palma. When I met him briefly after the play he was effusive in his praise; but with the weight of the world on my shoulders, his compliments barely registered. I never heard of him again until a few years later when his anarchic low-budget film comedies
Greetings
and
Hi, Mom!
came out.

I had forgotten Brian, but he had not forgotten me. And when another young filmmaker named Paul Williams was looking for someone to play a patrician Harvard undergraduate dope dealer, Brian De Palma told him to track me down. It didn’t hurt that Williams was a Harvard alumnus himself and remembered my glory days on the stage of the Loeb Drama Center. These two fleeting connections from my past steered me to that townhouse and got me that role. It was not the last of Brian De Palma’s favors. In the years to come he was to hire me more often than any other film director. By then he had become known as “the Master of the Macabre.” Each time he hired me, I was his villain. In three of his classic psychological suspense thrillers, I was the psychological suspense.

A
nd what about the movie itself?

Does
Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues
ring a bell? Probably not. You will find almost nobody who has seen or even remembers the title of my first film. But for me it was huge. It introduced me to the magical, mysterious, nutty world of filmmaking. On location in Toronto within two weeks of that townhouse meeting, all the rigorous rules and protocols of theater were tossed out the window. For me, making a movie was like entering an altered state of consciousness. This was particularly true of
Dealing
, since the subject of the film and the process of making it were both suffused with the smell of pot smoke.
Easy Rider
had exploded on the scene only a year before, and the Hollywood studios were scrambling to duplicate its runaway success. Every one of them was throwing money at stoner filmmakers with reckless abandon.
Dealing
was Warner Brothers’ entry in this drug-addled cinema horse race. I’d never made a movie and I’d never been much of a pot smoker, so the entire
Dealing
enterprise was almost surreally new.

Any stage actor recruited into films has shared my experience of the first time on a movie set. Nobody tells you
anything.
Who knew that a two-minute scene could take ten hours to shoot? Who knew that you would perform it sixty times (half of them off-camera) before it was in the can? Who knew the difference between masters, panning shots, two-shots, over-the-shoulders, and close-ups? Who knew the precise roles of operators, focus-pullers, key grips, dolly grips, gaffers, and best boys? Who knew the particular challenge of husbanding your physical and emotional resources, and keeping yourself fresh and spontaneous until your very last shot of the day? Typically the novice actor arrives on the set and is promptly flung into the deep end, left to discover all these mysteries for himself. On
Dealing
, this precipitous learning curve made me feel like I was learning the craft of acting all over again, and in the slow learners’ group at that. Never the most confident of actors, I found myself in the grips of an insecurity as acute as a chronic low-level fever.

My big breakthrough came when I realized that insecurity is the prime currency of film acting. In a sense, induced insecurity is exactly what you strive for. This was a major shift from what I was used to. In theater acting, you work to overcome your insecurities. In weeks of exhaustive rehearsals you carefully craft a performance, polishing it like a gemstone. You work at it until you’re finally “secure” in your role. You rely on technique to sustain you and keep you consistent over the length of a run. That run can be weeks, months, or even years long. Your challenge is to sustain the illusion of the first time, for yourself and for the audience, from the first performance to the last.

In the movies, you only need to achieve that illusion
once
and you’re given lots of chances to get it right. When shooting a single scene, the camera captures the trial-and-error process that a stage actor goes through during weeks of rehearsals. Only a tiny fraction of what’s shot eventually appears on film. In the course of several takes, all sorts of happy accidents can happen in front of the camera, completely uncalculated. The best of these accidents are like lightning in a bottle. They are flashes of artless reality born of your induced insecurity—your fear, your pain, your longing, your nervous laughter. They have a close-up truth that can’t be faked. Hence, when you’re shooting a film you must recklessly put your emotions into play. You must induce your own insecurity, ignoring all constraint (a plausible explanation for the on-set misbehavior of so many film and TV actors, luridly recounted by the tabloid media). Emotional accidents are a film actor’s most potent tools. You don’t actually need a stage actor’s skills to achieve them. You just need the willingness to let accidents happen and enough technique to put them to work. Indeed, the more polished your performance the more you risk losing its truthfulness. Happy accidents are at the heart of the best film acting. You offer them up to a filmmaker and hope that he or she will make good use of them. And as a general rule, those accidents make up your best work on film.

Dealing
was not my best work on film. It was a listless caper movie, lacking both comedy and suspense. A caustic viewer might have remarked that everyone involved had smoked a little too much weed. This did not dissuade me from thinking that we had made a masterpiece, destined for blinding success. That it opened to resounding silence and disappeared without a trace was a lesson that I would learn over and over again in the years to come: when you’re shooting a movie, you really don’t know what you’re doing. The process of making a film has a way of persuading you that it’s going to be great, often against all evidence to the contrary. Work that hard on something and it just
has
to be good, right? Not necessarily.

With movies, you’re curiously unmoored from reality. While you’re shooting, you have no audience on hand to hold you to their demanding standards and validate your work. You’re flying blind. How else do you explain so many bad films by so many good filmmakers and so many bad performances by good actors? Of the many films I’ve done, a painfully small number have been as successful as I had expected them to be, or even as good. And the rule applies in reverse. In the mid-eighties I did five days of shooting on location in Nebraska on a film that was clearly out of control and destined for obscurity. How was I to know that it would be hands down the best film I have ever appeared in? It was called
Terms of Endearment
.

B
ut if
Dealing
was not the second coming of
Easy Rider
, it delivered in other areas. I gained my sea legs on a movie set (once the paranoia wore off). I befriended a great character actor named Charlie Durning (with whom I would twice compete for an Oscar). I got myself an agent (the William Morris Agency assigned me a rookie named Rick Nicita, who would represent me for the next thirty-five years). And I got my first look at the West Coast. Because I needed to loop a couple of scenes during postproduction, I was flown out to Los Angeles by Warner Brothers. I parlayed my round-trip plane ticket into a month-long visit and ventured into yet another undreamt-of world. For the first time I beheld the sun-baked, pastel-tinted, tacky, wacky, glorious lotusland called Hollywood.

I
f the learning curve on the set of
Dealing
was steep, in Hollywood it was downright vertiginous. Not since those traumatic days as the new kid in school had I felt so disoriented and out of place. I had barely adjusted to tough, abrasive New York City, and here was a scene that was entirely different in every conceivable way—languorous, narcissistic, and cynical, with feigned sincerity raised to the level of a fine art. But if the world of Hollywood confused and unbalanced me, I didn’t dislike it. Indeed, I plunged into it with the zeal of a convert. I eagerly shook hands with my cabal of broadly smiling new William Morris agents. I sat stoned on Trancas Beach with the West Coast
Dealing
contingent. I drank vodka at poolside at the Sunset Marquis with all the other deracinated and paranoid visiting New York actors. I even had lunch with Brian De Palma and Raquel Welch at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel as part of Brian’s (failed) plot to get me approved for a movie he ended up not directing
. Me?
Playing comedy sex scenes with
Raquel Welch
? Had the world gone crazy? It was as if I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

I thanked my lucky stars for my sister Robin. Within a few years of her graduation from Barnard, she had married an artist named Tim Rudnick. They had settled down in Tim’s home town of Los Angeles. Robin would soon begin a teaching career there which, years later, would place her at the head of arts education throughout the vast L.A. school system. But for now she and Tim were living with their baby daughter Anya in a bungalow-style house near Venice Beach, savoring the last heady days of the hippie era. During my dreamlike sojourn in Hollywood, they opened their home to me and showed me the essential Los Angeles as only natives can. If they hadn’t been there to lend a dose of reality to those dizzying days, I would have been a goner.

My Hollywood month passed in a flash, like the sweep of a klieg light outside a movie premiere. Despite the unending stream of shallow praise and the glib promises of fame and fortune from a whole army of agents, casting directors, and studio flacks, I never got a whisper of work. This didn’t really bother me. I hadn’t expected much, and no role had appeared that I really wanted. Indeed, I would have been much more surprised if somebody
had
hired me. In that brief month I never got beyond the feeling that I didn’t really belong out there. Except for some wonderful times hanging out with Robin and her family, it had been an arid, desolate time, my self-respect ebbing away by the hour. I missed New York, I missed my wife, and I was ready to go home.

Then finally something happened. Two days before my plane was scheduled to depart, William Morris called. They wanted me to meet a director for a film. They told me his name. My heart leaped. He was Terrence Malick, the brooding genius whose daring first film,
Badlands
, was already causing a tremendous stir, even before being released. Clearly this was a dazzling new talent for Hollywood to reckon with. But I had an even bigger reason to be excited. Terry had been a friend at Harvard and a fellow resident of Adams House, my undergraduate dorm. A taciturn Texan with a Buddha-like air and a razor-sharp mind, he studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and taught it at MIT. Even among Harvard brainiacs, Terry had been regarded with awe verging on reverence. But despite his aura of complex brilliance, he had always been a gushing fan of my acting. I hadn’t seen him since our Harvard days, but I had heard the surprising news that he had changed gears and become a filmmaker. He was already moving on to his next film, called
Days of Heaven
. It would be a period piece set in the vast grain fields of the American plains. It would feature a romantic triangle of which one character was a severe, silent homesteader. Terry was looking for the right actor for this part, and he wanted to meet with
me.