Lucky Man (2 page)

Interrupted by a knock on the door, we looked up to see Charlie Croughwell enter, unbidden and apologetic. An inch or so shorter than me, ten pounds less body and twenty pounds more muscle, Charlie is even tougher than he looks—and he looks like George Raft.

“Sorry, Mike . . . but it doesn't look like we're getting inside that building today, so they're setting up to toss you through the barroom window in about a half an hour.”

I had to laugh; it was typical of Charlie to phrase it that way. In truth, I wasn't being flung through any window—he was. Whatever hardships his diminutive stature may have presented in his life—and I could easily identify—it had been my good fortune that someone of his physical proportions, as well as skill, had chosen to become a stuntman. He had not only saved my ass on a number of jobs, but had accomplished the not-inconsiderable feat of actually making me look rugged.

“I've got the pads on now, but I'll give 'em to you for the roll-in.” The roll-in: I lie down in roughly the same place my double made his nasty, bone-threatening landing. On “Action,” I roll fully into the shot and, grimacing in shock and agony, expose my face to the camera's lens—as deliberately as Chuck had hidden his.

After I introduced Charlie to the visiting director, he left to prepare the stunt. Michael and I picked up the thread of our conversation, moving now to the Warner Brothers project, about which I felt lukewarm at best.

Based loosely on the book
What? Dead Again?
—the story of a surgeon who, waylaid in a small Southern town, grew to love it, and to establish a practice there—the
Doc Hollywood
script had been on my desk for months. It was funny, but more
Green Acres
than Frank Capra. Picaresque to a fault, it was a string of amusing anecdotal scenes with no cohesive arc or storyline to bind them. The secondary characters, stereotypical Southern rubes—Gomers and Aunt Beas—were as familiar as yesterday's reruns. The hero, the young doctor, was purely vain and avaricious; the script gave you no reason to root for him. But my reservations about the material paled in comparison to my reservations about taking on another film so soon after
The Hard Way
. There was a long list of excellent reasons to sit this one out, take a breather.

PERPETUAL MOTION

First of all,
The Hard Way
had been a trial. With a greater emphasis on pure action, and more spectacular stunts, than anything I'd ever done, I had taken a physical beating on this picture, the best efforts of Charlie notwithstanding. My co-star, James Woods, is a genius, an amazing actor, but to hold your half of the screen with someone of that intensity requires an energy, concentration, and vigilance that wore me out. Add in a tight schedule, a hyperkinetic character, and several reshoots of key scenes due to personnel hirings and firings, and I was left even more ragged than usual. I needed rest. A long rest.

Were I to sign on, assuming that their goal of an October start date was plausible,
Doc Hollywood
would be my fifth film in less than three years, during which I also taped the seventy-two episodes of
Family Ties
, including the series' emotionally draining last season and finale. A large part of this work had been on-location—film-speak for out-of-town (“town” in this case being either New York or Los Angeles). It was all but certain that a movie set in the South would be filmed, at least in part, on location.

Filming on location is not unusual, or even entirely unappealing. Many in the business consider the opportunity for travel a perk; a break from the structure of their established routines, the demands of their families, communities, schedules, and responsibilities. Many liken it to war—not in the sense of battle or danger, but in that they are thrown together with a group of people, many of them strangers, who have been charged with a single mission: get in, get it done on time, under budget, and get out. Oh yeah—and do your best work. The pressure, isolation, and narrow scope of our lives while at “movie camp” is known to promote prolonged and legendary drinking binges. Time not spent on the set is spent either in a bar or in a coma.

Life can get pretty crazy on a long shoot.
Casualties of War
, the 1988 Vietnam war epic I made with Sean Penn and Brian De Palma in Phuket, Thailand, was rife with some of the most outrageous examples of location fever I've ever witnessed. The stifling tropical heat, the culture shock, and the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm endemic to any film set was a potent combination. Waiting in this context meant waiting for Brian to finish cooking up one of his signature microchoreographed steadi-cam shots. Eager to do our scenes and be done for the day, we'd become restless and start pounding down the local beer. The stuff was rumored to be laced with formaldehyde, but we couldn't read the labels and the locals weren't talking. That's not quite true: they were talking incessantly, but we couldn't understand what they were saying. Formaldehyde, turpentine, Drāno, whatever . . . we'd swill it down and then—the big kick—drive out to the local snake farm and goad each other into drinking shots of a popular Thai cure-all: equal parts Thai whiskey and cobra blood.

Some members of the
C.O.W.
crew, many of whom were Aussies, had hired local prostitutes as companions for their entire stay in-country. One guy set up housekeeping with two women; an oddly civilized arrangement, they would accompany him into Phuket village to do his marketing. When finally asked, “Why two?” he answered, straight-faced, as if it was obvious: “So they can keep each other company while I read the paper in the morning.” He obviously wanted to approximate the routines of his ordinary home life but kick it up a notch by including the fulfillment of his sexual fantasy. Location can be nuts.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

My fantasy—at least it was beginning to seem like a fantasy—was not so much to escape a domestic routine as to establish one. I spent most of our brief engagement on location in Thailand.

Tracy made the marathon transpacific journey for an extended set visit. T never mentioned anything about having second thoughts, but she's a smart, observant woman and I can't imagine she wasn't horrified by the emaciated wreck of a fiancé she found in the jungle—her own personal
Heart of Darkness
featuring her future husband as Col. Kurtz. I'd contracted some nasty strain of exotic stomach rot; she nursed me through it, and as a reward had to battle it herself for the rest of her time in Southeast Asia.

Far more unnerving—hell, it was terrifying—was the weirdness she encountered upon her return to “civilization”: waiting for her at home was a series of graphic and vitriolic letters, individually stamped and posted by a single troubled individual, threatening death to Tracy unless she called off the wedding. I remember the phone call. It must have been three or four
A.M.
Phuket time when I picked up the phone and heard Tracy weeping, spilling out the surreal details. I felt helpless and angry to be thousands of miles away from this woman who, simply by falling in love with me, had apparently placed herself in jeopardy. We decided to hire Gavin De Becker, a widely recognized expert in matters of threat assessment and personal security, to investigate the source of the letters and assign agents to ensure Tracy's safety in my absence. Some months later it was discovered by Gavin and the LAPD that the person responsible for what eventually amounted to more than 5,000 death threats was a lonely, disturbed young woman. After months in jail awaiting trial (at which Tracy and I both had to testify), she was convicted of making “terroristic threats” and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.

July 16, 1988: I'd been back from Southeast Asia a little over a week when we were married in a quiet ceremony at a small country inn in Vermont—or at least that had been the idea. In many ways it was the experience we had hoped for, an intimate celebration. Before our friends and family we affirmed our commitment to spend our lives together. But it was something else too, a kind of ground-breaking. My own bubble, the one that had sheltered me through the last seven years of public life, now had to be expanded, renovated into a duplex.

We had invited just seventy-odd guests, close friends and family only. As a precaution we hired Gavin's firm to provide security. This proved to be a wise move: dozens of tabloid reporters and paparazzi attempted to crash the party, deploying helicopters and even undercover spies disguised as llamas in order to blend in with the innkeeper's pet livestock. Locals and waitstaff were bribed and pumped for information, and a surreal siege began. It became a drama of spy vs. spy—and thanks to Gavin, our spies won. The paparazzi were unable to capture even a single photograph of the bride and groom, and the wedding went on exactly as we'd hoped, except maybe for the whir of helicopters overhead.

The honeymoon also had its share of gatecrashers. We island-hopped through the Caribbean, but at each step, we would find ourselves being tailed. Wherever we went, we'd look out our window to find boats anchored just offshore, bearing photographers with 500mm lenses aimed at our honeymoon suite. Finally we made our way to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Tracy's family had vacationed during her childhood summers. Resigned to the fact that we were going to have to deal with these interlopers, we figured we might as well face them on our own home turf.

The rush that was my life then meant Tracy and I had no real opportunity to digest the strange twists and turns on the way to the altar, or the extended road comedy that had been our honeymoon.
Family Ties
started up again in August,
Back to the Future II
in the fall of that year (forcing me to moonlight again), segueing right into
Part III,
which wouldn't wrap until January 1990.

My bride, the one and only love of my life, was wondering what in the hell she'd gotten herself into. Pregnant one month after the wedding, Tracy found herself with a husband who, when he wasn't away on the job, was little more than a narcoleptic Lamaze partner. I did, however, negotiate time off to coincide with Sam's birth. A clause inserted into my deal—
labor plus three weeks
—had to be a first for a movie contract. But as soon as the three weeks were over, it was back to work again, leaving T nursing a baby and, no doubt, a few resentments.

Another issue for Tracy—one she rarely broached but that I wish I'd been sensitive enough to acknowledge more often—was this: inside of a year, a beautiful, exquisitely talented twenty-something actress, career ascendant, had become a virtual single mother. Schlepping to and from the set, Sam in arms, was not only unfair and exhausting, but it underscored the notion that I was still free to work—that my creative identity was intact, while Tracy's was in limbo. Offers and opportunities were coming in for her; most, but not all, she had to turn down. In fact, as I was in New York shooting
The Hard Way
, Tracy was in San Francisco starring in a film-for-television. Sam, now fourteen months old, was with her, and I missed them both terribly.We had a home in Manhattan, so I was not the one on location this time, she was. I was happy that she was working again. Still, here we were, thousands of miles apart once again.

Our marriage, and more important, our love and friendship, were surviving under the pressures, but the situation was not exactly the stuff of dreams. We were living a scattered, bi-coastal life—with sojourns to Vermont, where we'd bought a farm, in the naïve hope of living a more tranquil life there someday. We desperately longed to settle somewhere, sometime soon. But we'd both begun to wonder: was a normal life even possible?

So, only three months off between
The Hard Way
and
Doc Hollywood
? No way. Well, at least New York was a fun city for a young director on a studio expense account, I said to myself, because otherwise Caton-Jones was wasting his time. I wasn't doing
Doc Hollywood
. I was absolutely sure of that. . . .

Or was I?

Immensely charming, the sort of artist-as-human-train-wreck I seem drawn toward, Michael Caton-Jones was on his third Molson when I realized the son of a bitch was actually selling me on this project. His pitch put a completely fresh spin on the story. My
Green Acres
concerns vanished; half an hour in a motor home on Avenue B and Michael had convinced me that this movie could represent something important to me—that it had personal significance. Young doctor, trained as a plastic surgeon, sets out across country in his Porsche Roadster, leaving the Washington, D.C., combat zone E.R. of his residency. He's Los Angeles–bound, boob jobs, butt tucks, and big money in his future. He cracks up the car in Grady, South Carolina, and the natives, in dire need of a local doctor, conspire to trap him there. A gentle life, the girl of his dreams, and the realization that the brass ring may not be worth reaching for convince him to stay.

My own knuckles white from hanging on to that goddamned brass ring, it sounded good to me.

SOUTHBOUND

Cut to an explosion of sugar-glass—followed by a glittery spray of shards from the nucleus of which emerged Charlie, completing at ferocious speed the exterior half-arc of his brief but turbulent flight through the window. From out on the street, it looked as though he was being propelled by the force of the shattering window, rather than propelled through it. Charlie hit the pavement hard, executing a perfect shoulder roll, with his head tucked, more to avoid the lens than injury. Coming suddenly to a stop, he lay facedown, motionless. As soon as the director yelled cut, Charlie lifted his head and with a modest grin, indicated that he'd lived to be pummeled another day.

After a quick repositioning of the camera angle, I got into place, was sprinkled with pieces of broken sugar glass, and, on hearing “Action,” did my roll-in. “Cut-print . . . one more please.” As I reset for take two, I glanced up to see Michael Caton-Jones and Charlie Croughwell excitedly plotting the best way to crash Doc Hollywood's Porsche. They both knew I was in, and so did I.