Jason Priestley (16 page)

I hadn't personally seen Bernie for quite some time. The last I'd heard, his agent and a couple of friends had pretty much grabbed him, forced him onto a plane to Vancouver, and called his mother, saying, “We're sending this guy home to you for a break. We can't deal with him anymore.” But that was years ago; I was sure he had pulled it together by now.

Peter tracked Bernie down, made a deal, and soon enough we were reunited on set. I was so happy to see him again. As filming wore on, we had a great time, just like old times. Of course, we were still young guys and we liked to have fun and party after work, but nothing that got too out of control.

While I was shooting
The Highwayman
with Bernie, I got a phone call notifying me that my uncle, my mother's younger brother, had suddenly died. David was only ten years older than me. He'd had a massive heart attack and was dead before he hit the floor. Because we were so close in age, we were unusually close for an uncle and nephew while I was growing up. In fact, just before
The Highwayman,
he'd spent a week with me in Los Angeles just hanging out.

He was a very fit guy, an avid runner, and only forty years old. This was a horrible shock. Fortunately, being in Canada, I was able to attend his funeral. Back on the set, I was not quite in the same partying mood. But work was going fine, and I certainly didn't see anything in Bernie's behavior to alarm me at all until one morning when I got a call from our driver.

The usual routine was that the driver picked Bernie up at his hotel, then came to pick me up, then dropped both of us off at the set. One day, in the middle of the week, I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee at six
A.M.
, waiting for the driver. He didn't show up. The phone eventually rang, and it was Pete. “I'm at the hotel and Bernie's not here. What do you want me to do?”

“What do you mean, he's not there?”

“I've been looking everywhere. I finally had someone from housekeeping check his room. He is not on the premises.”

“All right,” I said. “Come and get me, then we'll go find him together.”

The weather was bitterly cold, and the winds were brutal that winter. There was no reason to be outside unless you had to be. Still, we figured we might find Bernie on Lower Yonge Street, the drug-buying area of town. Sure enough, we drove around for just a few minutes and then saw him, buying crack from a dealer on the sidewalk, standing there in plain sight, not hiding.

Pete pulled up next to the two guys. I jumped out of the car and grabbed my friend. I snatched the bag out of his hand and threw it to the ground and then shoved Bernie into the backseat. It was like a kidnapping.

“What the hell are you doing?” Bernie said in an injured tone as we drove away.

“Bernie, what are
you
doing? It's six thirty in the morning, man, and we are supposed to be at work right now! What. The. Hell?”

I was not pleased, but I was mainly more surprised than anything else. We'd been having such a great time. There was no one like Bernie when it came to having fun. By the time we got to the set that morning he had me laughing about the whole thing. I was convinced it was just one more crazy, over-the-top Bernie escapade. This guy and I had been through so much together. “Blood Brothers,” right?

But then it happened a couple more times during the six-week shoot. This was where Bernie was in his life. He apparently could not even get through a month or so drug-free. My feelings changed from surprise to annoyance to real anger as the problems on the film mounted. Finally, I just wanted the shoot to end. Bernie did finish the job, barely, and then returned to his regular life in Vancouver.

A few weeks later my phone rang. Bernie was at a Western Union office in the seediest part of downtown Vancouver. He needed cash, or some guys were going to break his legs because he owed them some money. Or something like that; I barely listened. I broke into his story.

“How much money, Bernie?”

“Five hundred dollars. I have to have it today, Jason, right away!”

“Here's the deal, Bernie. I'm going to wire you five hundred dollars right now. And in return I want you to lose my phone number.”

As promised, I sent the money, and Bernie lost my number. That was fifteen years ago, and I haven't spoken to him since.

I
met a businessman through some Canadian friends who was developing a piece of property on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I headed out there one day with a bunch of other people to check out what he was building. He was constructing ten cabins right on the waterfront in a tiny fishing village called Ucluelet, just south of Long Beach, a popular tourist destination. The location was amazing, offering access to a private beach. My old friend Terry David Mulligan and I bought one of the cabins on the spot. We owned our cabin, but when we weren't using it, the cabin went back into the rental pool in a standard kind of operation.

The plans were for a resort, with ten cabins and twenty other lofts overlooking a boardwalk next to the water. Each cabin was completely self-contained with several bedrooms and bathrooms on two levels, full kitchens, washers, dryers, and so on, where families could come stay for a week or two in the summer. It was a charming, quaint little development. When I was a kid, my parents used to take us to vacation on the west coast of the island, back when you could camp out on Long Beach. It was much more remote then; there are rules and regulations prohibiting camping there now, but I'd always loved that area and remembered those days. This group of guys appeared to be a solid group to do business with. All the cabins got snapped up, as did the lofts.

There was a man in charge of the entire development. He was also in charge of the finances, making sure all investors got their money at the end of each month, that the taxes were paid, and so on. All the details of running the resort fell to him. A year into our project, it became painfully clear that he was not operating the resort the way it should have been. Too many customers were leaving, not having had a good experience, and certainly were not coming back. There were numerous complaints. The group of homeowners, myself included, had to remove him from the operation. We brought in another man to hopefully turn things around.

However, many of the original investors had gotten cold feet. They just wanted to walk away from a bad investment and move on. They simply stopped paying for their cabins and let the bank foreclose on their mortgages. I saw a good opportunity here. I approached my father and told him that I had a chance to pick up a bunch of the cabins at a greatly reduced rate and eventually start operating the place myself. By myself, I really meant my father, as I couldn't possibly manage this project remotely. Fortunately, he agreed, and as more and more properties at the development came up for sale through foreclosure and tax liens, we snapped them up. Eventually, I owned twenty units.

Things looked very grim our first couple of years, and I couldn't blame most of the original investors for cutting and running. But today, fifteen years later, Terrace Beach Resort is a thriving business. We've had families come to vacation there year after year after year. It's been an excellent education in the hotel business, but it's also been a great opportunity to work closely with my father. He oversees everything there, and, trust me, with the weather on the west coast of Vancouver Island, there's plenty of upkeep to keep him busy.

W
hile I was still in Vancouver, I had been contacted by Marcy Poole, who ran the Movie of the Week department over at FOX, about directing the first in what they hoped would be a series of movies for them. They wanted to take old film noir titles from the 20th Century FOX archives, update the stories, and remake them as Movies of the Week.

This was the perfect job for me. I was a huge fan of film noir and to have an opportunity like this just handed to me was such a gift.

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
was a remake of the classic 1942 film
Moontide,
starring Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, and Claude Rains. Nick Lea, from FOX's hit show
The X Files,
starred as the main protagonist. FOX was looking to promote him at the time. He played the main character of Dustin, a Hollywood producer who wakes up on the beach one morning, near the body of a dead girl, but remembers nothing and is soon being blackmailed. I was able to cast my good friend Holt McCallany as Minnow, the antagonist. I took a small role as his best friend.

Directing that movie was a challenge but it was also a lot of fun. I had twenty-four days to shoot this Movie of the Week, and a real budget—something like four and half million dollars. Those days with plenty of time and money are gone. The locations were gorgeous, including the Sunset Strip and posh beach houses, and the sound track was amazing. The film itself turned out very well, and then, just like that, FOX decided to get out of the Movie of the Week business. There was never another in the series, or another Movie of the Week. It was the end of an era.

I
finally finished editing
Barenaked in America
and returned to L.A., but I felt restless and antsy and uncomfortable there. I wasn't sure what I wanted next, but somehow I no longer loved L.A. as I had from the day I arrived as a teenager. Something was off. Looking back, I see it was me. I hadn't been quite myself for a while. I was especially restless now that I had finished my huge labor of love—the documentary. I dyed my hair a bright chicken-fat yellow. Not for a role, just for a change. Not my best look.

When May rolled around, it was time for the American Music Awards again. I was asked to present an award and headed out to Monaco with my racing buddy Scott Maxwell. Pamela Anderson hosted the show that year, and after it ended, it was time for the official postshow banquet, which was hosted every year for the participants by Prince Albert.

Then Scott and I moved on to the main reason for our trip. We headed to London for the inaugural Gumball 3000, a three-thousand-mile illegal road race crisscrossing Europe, founded by a filthy rich British entrepreneur/race car driver, Maximillion Cooper. There were about fifty of us drivers participating. I was in a (borrowed) Lotus Esprit V8. Billy Zane, with whom I'd shared a memorable scene in
Tombstone,
drove an Aston Martin. We took off from London and drove to Dover to get ourselves and our cars on the ferry to Calais. We rode across the English Channel, then got in our cars and raced to Le Mans. We swung through Paris and stayed in castles at every stop, having an absolute blast.

It was then on to Monaco, then Rimini, Italy. In Rimini, the Gumball 3000 crowd took over an entire hotel. Imagine fifty guys and gals, rowdy as hell, having been racing nonstop for days and days, arriving at the lobby of the most beautiful and ornate hotel in the country. A bunch of us grabbed the scooters we all carried with us for pit stops and drove them into the lobby. Then we started racing up and down the Grand Staircase, drinking heavily of course. It was extremely bad behavior and we were politely asked to stop a few times, but no one paid any attention, until the security guy pulled a gun on us and started screaming in Italian that it was time to go to bed. The party stopped abruptly.

The accidents on that trip were epic. Scott and I were professional drivers, adept at driving 150-plus miles an hour. But these other guys? They were just a bunch of millionaires driving $300,000 Ferraris and wadding them up right and left. They simply had no business driving 180 mph and it was fortunate that no one got badly hurt. The participants in this particular race didn't care if they wrecked—they could just buy another car. It was a very memorable event . . . Scott and I drove the wheels right off that car to the end. As the years passed, the annual race became more and more elaborate, the celebrating more and more out of control. I'm just glad I survived.

D
uring production on
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,
I got the news that
Barenaked in America
had been accepted into the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. We would be in the Reel to Reel section and have our world premiere at the famous Winter Garden Theatre. This was a huge honor (or should I say
honour
) for a first-time documentary filmmaker. I was quite humbled. But there was also much to do and much to prepare for. So it was easy for me to keep on working and ignoring the things in my life that I knew needed to be dealt with at some point. Work and racing were the ultimate distractions. I could feel the pressure really starting to build, which made it even easier to keep losing myself in my work and professional commitments.

Being back in Toronto with Barenaked Ladies was, as always, a fantastic time. The boys were in rare form as we introduced our film to a packed house at the Winter Garden Theatre. The Ladies were riding a huge wave of success and it was an exciting time.

We sold the film to the Shooting Gallery and got a theatrical release, an amazing feat for a small documentary. It was extremely successful for a documentary at that time and place, and it did very well for me, the band, and for all parties concerned.

A
fter the film festival, I headed to L.A. for a few weeks, and later to New York for a directing job. I was directing an episode of Tom Fontana's new drama
The Beat,
about NYPD cops. I'd always felt happy and at ease in big cities. Of course I enjoyed L.A., which had been my home since 1987, but I had always loved New York City. Ever since my first visit when I went there as an eighteen-year-old visiting to screen test for the feature film
Heartbreak Hotel,
there was just something about that place that got under my skin. The noise . . . the energy . . . I've always felt at home in New York.