Ryan White - My Own Story (24 page)

We had a great time, but I think Lukas also wanted to be around me a whole lot, so he could figure out how to act like me without being a carbon copy.

“I can’t be just like you anyway,” Lukas said. “You loved your school and I wasn’t crazy about mine.”

In the scene where Lukas is interviewed at home by a television reporter, he told me that he’d tried to make his voice and his eyes as relaxed and matter-of-fact as he could. “That’s how you are all the time,” he said.

Well, I try. When we first started shooting, I had had a bleed in my right elbow, and kept it all wrapped up in an ace bandage. It hurt to pick up anything. Everyone was very friendly and wanted to shake my hand. Normally when I have a bleed anywhere in my right arm, I shake hands very, very gently. I’m hoping other people will figure out that if you squeeze my hand tight, it hurts. But they don’t always get my message. With my elbow out of action, I finally had to stop shaking everybody’s hand—it was just too painful.

After a good actor has spent enough time with you, he can act more like you than you do! Like in the movie’s opening scene, you see Lukas fussing with his shirt collar, first pulling it up straight, then flattening it down, then pulling it up again. That was Lukas’s idea. He never did see me get dressed—but it
is
the kind of thing I might do.

Sometimes I would give Lukas some tips, though. In that opening scene, Nikki, who’s playing Andrea, is trying to get Lukas away from the mirror and out of the house so she can make skating practice. After the first take, John asked Andrea and me if the scene sounded right. Andrea and I both said no—Nikki had to be a lot tougher. She should boss Lukas more. Nothing gets in the way of Andrea’s skating!

It was fun to watch other people pretend to be us! I wasn’t embarrassed or upset, but sometimes I just had to laugh and say, “Oh gosh, I can’t believe I ever behaved like that! I was younger then!”

Andrea thought it was weird that she was being played by a redhead who didn’t skate. Andrea did teach Nikki a few moves. Nikki had taken some lessons, but she was no skater. Andrea got to play one of the girls in the roller skating competition. She wore her own costume, a black and gold one. You can spot her in the rink, circling around in back of Nikki. She lent Nikki some medals she’d won, and her skating sweater.

Andrea and Nikki Cox who plays Andrea in
The Ryan White Story
on the set, 1988.

A few people we knew got to be in the movie. Some of Andrea’s skating friends came down to be the other contestants in the roller-rink scenes. Mr. Vaughan’s son, who’s his partner, played a lawyer, and Mr. Vaughan himself was a reporter. He lent the film people a picture of his father and a statue of a horse from his real desk for his movie office.

Mr. Vaughan must have been pleased that he was played by the biggest star, George C. Scott. Scott was in only a few scenes, so he wasn’t in Statesville for very long. He’s such a big name and acts like such a man of authority that Mom felt shy about asking him if she could take a picture of him with me. But he said, “Why
sure!”
and put his arm around me right away.

I know that when John cast me in the movie, he and Linda were trying to make a point. They were telling the audience, look, there’s Ryan hanging around all these well-known actors. See, you can’t catch AIDS from being close to someone who has it.

Every day I ate with everyone else working on the movie. I used the same toilets. No one in Statesville ever got upset. And none of the cast or crew ever objected. A lot of them had friends who’d died of AIDS.

I liked being a member of the cast, but the best part for me was the way the cast and crew hung out together all the time, like one big family. You get to know everyone—or at least I did. I was amazed at how many people you need to make a movie. Because everyone was working long hours together, they made a big effort to be as nice as possible to each other. I appreciated that. I even got to be part of the crew.

The first time I met some of the crew, Mom and Andrea and I had just arrived in Statesville. I was standing in the hotel lobby, when Doug Whitley, the location manager, and a bunch of other crew members walked by.

“Hey, Ryan,” Doug said, “we’re gonna party. Wanna come?”

I found out that a party meant a trip to the hotel basement. The hotel didn’t have a bar, but they’d tried to set one up in their storeroom. You had to walk through the kitchen, and then you found an old jukebox and some packing crates set on end with a few bottles on top.

Another movie company had just passed through and some of the crew had worked on their film too. I asked what it was about.

“Oh, an Amish family whose baby was killed,” Doug said. “And now here we are on
The Ryan White Story
.”

Everyone laughed, including me.

“Film crews have a sense of humor about everything,” Doug told me.

“So do I,” I said.

Then a crew member I didn’t know came over. “Hi, I’m Kurek Ashley,” he said to me.

Ryan fakes a punch at Kurek Ashley on the movie set.

Kurek seemed like a tough street guy—“twenty-seven with a twelve-year-old attitude,” he told me. He had worked with John on all his movies, but I found out he had other talents. Because of the heat, he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. My eyes kept wandering to his amazing biceps.

“Where’d you get those muscles?” I asked.

“I need them,” Kurek said. “I’m usually a stuntman. Right now I’m a grip. I have to move the cameras around. Want to work out together sometime?”

“Sure,” I said, even though I knew I’d have to spend most of my time watching. “Too bad there aren’t any stunts in this movie.”

“We can still do some,” Kurek said. He showed me how to fake a punch and a couple of kicks.

A few days later, an NBC news team showed up to do a story about the movie. Kurek and I worked out a great stunt scene for them. Kurek came up to me shouting, “Hey, Ryan! Tom Brokaw’s here! I told him he could interview you.”

“You idiot!” I screamed. “What gives you the right to speak for me? No interview! I’ll never do it.”

Then I punched Kurek the way he’d shown me. We had someone off camera clap, so my punch
sounded
real. Kurek reeled backward and fell over a chair. We were a big hit with NBC and anyone else who happened to be around.

All the kids in the cast spent a lot of time with Kurek. He looked out for us. He even took Lukas and Casey to the hospital one day when they were working in heavy jackets in 107-degree heat and felt faint. You can see Kurek in the movie. He plays a plant worker who tells Judith she shouldn’t be drinking coffee with everyone else at work because her son has AIDS. Then he gets into a fight with another guy who supports her.

The day we filmed that scene, Mom went up to Kurek afterward and said, “Kurek, you know I really love you. But when you did that scene, you were scary. I
hated
you!”

“That’s a compliment, ma’am,” Kurek said cheerfully. “I wanted to be the epitome of Kokomo.”

Another day Mom was sitting watching the crew as they set up a shot. Suddenly a tall woman with long black hair came up to her out of nowhere and said, “Hi!”

Mom stared. She knew she’d seen the woman before, but she couldn’t think where or when.

“Mom, it’s me!” Andrea yelled. “Don’t you know me?”

Andrea made over by the makeup crew of The Ryan White Story. From left to right: Cheryl Voss, Andrea, Michelle Johnson, Jennifer Kelly.

The makeup team had given Andrea a giant black wig and had used every kind of makeup they had on her.

“You should be in a magazine,” I said. “ ‘Before or after—which is worse?’ ”

Andrea tried to punch me, so I moved fast. I knew she hadn’t been studying fake punches with Kurek.

I was hanging out with the crew so much they gave me a job—second assistant director. You’re called second AD for short. There are usually a few second ADs, so I guess I was the third or fourth second. The first AD stays on the set with the director, the producer, the actors, and the camera crew. When everybody’s ready for a take, the first AD says, “Roll camera!” As the second AD, I was outside, but I could hear the order over a walkie-talkie.

Then my job was to act like a traffic cop. I shouted, “Rolling! Very quiet, please”—so the rest of the crew and the people from Statesville who’d come to watch would shut up during the take. When I heard “Cut!” over my walkie-talkie, I knew they’d finished the take. Then I’d yell, “Cut!” again, so everyone could start talking or gunning their cars or whatever.

I had packed my skateboard and I used it to whiz around so everyone close by would hear me. Sometimes I fetched missing props, or found somebody to bring Judith a chair if we were shooting at night and she looked tired. I liked wearing two watches on the same wrist. My job made them look real official, not just trendy. I loved my job. I wanted to do it forever.

“You’re military, man!” Kurek grinned at me. The crew gave me a T-shirt with everything the second AD yells listed down the front. “Rolling—Quiet! Cut. Going Again . . . Rolling—Quiet! . . .”

Second ADs have to do a lot of paperwork and behind-the-scenes stuff that I didn’t know much about. One of the other second ADs, Annette Sutera, was only twenty-five. To work on movies, directors and ADs have to join a union called the Directors Guild of America, or the DGA. They have a training program for ADs. Annette was in it. I really liked her, so I volunteered to be the apprentice’s apprentice.

One thing Annette had to do was make up call sheets. Everyone in the cast and crew gets one at the end of each day so they know what time to be on the set, ready to start work the next morning. I’d hang around Annette’s room, reading comics on her bed or looking at TV, and watching with one eye how she did her job.

A couple of times I had a big coughing fit. When that happened, I could see I was making Annette nervous.

“It probably means I forgot to take my cough medicine,” I told her. Most days I felt unbelievably well—so well I wondered whether my AIDS had gone away. All day long I’d go and go and go.

Annette liked shopping as much as I did, so in our spare time we explored the malls around Statesville. She loved my orange Oakleys, the sunglasses I had bought at Maui Surf and Sport, so I found her a pair. She told me exactly how to become a real AD.

“Come out to Hollywood,” Annette said. “I’ll help you join the DGA. Then you have to work a certain number of hours as a trainee. When you’ve finished that, you have to go before some members of the DGA board and pass an oral exam. They do everything except shine lights in your face.”

“That bad? What happens?” I asked.

“They work hard to make you mad,” Annette explained. “They want to see how well you can think on your feet. They give you problems to solve—situations that might come up on a set. Whatever you suggest, they don’t like it. They say, ‘Think of something else.’ ”

“How many times did you take the test?” I asked.

“I passed it the first time,” Annette said. She sounded like she still couldn’t quite believe it.

“Then I will too,” I said.

Ryan is made up to play Chad, an AIDS patient, for
The Ryan White Story.