There and Back Again (3 page)

But I calmed him down by appealing to his genuinely decent nature.

“Please,” I said, “I can't afford to pay for office space. Let me use it. You won't even know I'm here. Eventually it'll pay off, and if you need the space, just say the word and we're gone.”

The funny, silly, sad lesson for me probably won't ever become the stuff of Hollywood lore that I wish it would. You see, during preparations for
On My Honor,
my first short film, I called virtually everyone I had ever worked with to ask for help. To a person, no one would contribute a cent, but just about everyone offered help in some way, shape, or form. Notably, Steven Spielberg offered to let me use his editing suites at Amblin on the Universal lot. I'll never forget driving into Universal Studios with ten or so reels of film in cans in my hatchback. Those cans represented a thirty-thousand-dollar investment, and I had them cooking in the L.A. sun in my car! Regardless, here I was, a bona fide filmmaker heading for the sacred work space that Spielberg had so generously offered for my use. I found myself alone in the editing room with no idea how to load the 35-millimeter film into the Moviola in order to look at it. I was terrified that Steven would pop his head in, and I would be exposed for the neophyte/fraud/idiot that I had pretended not to be. I opened the first canister of film and picked it up incorrectly. The core of the film fell out, and there I was, sitting in a tangled ball of film. I hightailed it out of there and have only been back once, in a failed audition attempt for
High Incident,
Spielberg's television show about the LAPD. Ironically, Steven told everyone in the room that he'd seen my second short film,
Kangaroo Court,
and that I was an excellent filmmaker.

The point of this story is that I was too embarrassed to ask for help and too impatient to figure out a problem on my own. I believe that mistake cost me the possibility of having Steven check up on me and the untold benefit that might have come from the folks at Amblin seeing me as a familiar face around the shop. While I deeply regret my fallibility in this regard, I am grateful to Milton Justice for stepping into the breach and working with me despite my idiosyncrasies. I think today he still considers me someone he'd be willing to work with, and that thought makes me happy.

*   *   *

As it turned out, Mark Rocco, a young director, was paying for a big suite of offices adjacent to our “storeroom” office, and he was in the process of putting together a movie about homeless drug addicts. Mark, the son of actor Alex Rocco, went on to forge a reasonably successful career, highlighted by a critically acclaimed movie titled
Murder in the First,
which features Kevin Bacon giving perhaps the performance of his life as a prisoner on death row at Alcatraz. At the time, however, Mark was just a hungry young director, eagerly trying to make contacts and assemble projects. Judging from the traffic in and out of his office, it seemed that a key component of his strategy was to form friendships with young Hollywood actors. At first, I thought he seemed like a scurrilous individual, and I didn't have a lot of respect for what he was doing. I knew he was planning to make a movie about street kids, and he just seemed kind of creepy.

Oddly enough, we wound up playing basketball together on a semiregular basis. I would come out of the little cubicle that I had co-opted and play hoops with the people who were Mark's assistants, friends, partners, and so on, and he ended up offering me a part in this movie about drug addicts and homeless kids called
Where the Day Takes You.
My first response was to turn down the offer, but then I agreed to do a cameo. I was trying to figure out what he was doing, and whether he had a real script, a real budget, and the ability and resources to put together a legitimate project. I had my doubts.

“It's union scale,” Mark said. “That's the best I can do.”

At this time I knew almost nothing about the fine art of negotiation. I'd had a very complicated relationship with my representatives at CAA, trying to figure out how money was made and eventually coming to the realization (obvious to anyone with a bit less naïveté) that they were more interested in making money for themselves than for me. So I was really grappling with the dynamics of what negotiations were. I was learning on my own the way things work in Hollywood—that multiple sets of books may be kept, and that on virtually every movie a quiet sort of compensation can occur. The studio has contractual obligations with the network or the producers or the distributors, and cash goes under the table, behind doors, and so on. It seems to happen on virtually every project. You just have to decide how much you want, what you think you can get, and what you're willing to not know.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly innocuous little story about a very small, independent film, a director seeming to do whatever was necessary to get his movie made, and a young actor trying to figure out how to make deals and keep his integrity while profiting at the same time.

“I can't give you any more money,” Mark said, “but is there anything else you'd like that would make you consider doing this? Can I give you a birthday present?”

My thoughts turned to my younger brother, Mack, also an actor. He'd made quite a good living working on the television show
The Facts of Life.
Unfortunately, he'd spent most of what he'd earned by spending crazily on such things as renting an indoor hockey rink in Los Angeles just so he and his buddies would have a place to play. Mack was always begging me to join them, but there never seemed to be enough time, and anyway, I didn't have any of the proper gear. I'd grown up playing baseball, football, and basketball. Hockey? In Southern California? It didn't make much sense. Now, though, as Mark Rocco asked me if there was something I might need, the thought of Mack and his ice-rink buddies flashed through my mind.

“You know, I could use some hockey equipment.”

The next thing I knew, I was in Mark's office, hoisting a huge black hockey bag over my shoulder, filled with top-of-the-line gear: skates, helmet, mask, pads, stick, everything. I remember the weight of that bag felt like the exact weight of compromise; it felt like the weight of having sold out. I wanted the bag and everything in it, and yet I wanted somehow to keep a firm grasp on my own integrity, and it occurred to me then that perhaps it was possible to do both. The very idea of that possibility, that moral ambiguity, confused and bothered me.

Looking at Mark Rocco, I realized that he was a young businessman, maybe even an artist (I wasn't sure yet), who would do whatever was necessary to get his movie made, including extending favors to his actors. Instead of despising him for it, I admired him. I even admired the fact that he'd gotten off cheap with me. That was a conscious decision: I
chose
to admire him, or at least that aspect of him. His determination. His will. His creativity.

“Okay, Mark,” I said, “I'll play the lead in your movie.”

He smiled.

“What changed your mind?”

My answer was complicated, but it came down to this: Mark had tapped into my own integrity. I had perceived him as something other than what he really was. Originally, I saw him as a guy who was not only trying to figure out how to cash in on actors' success in order to get movies made, but worse, was also trading on the misfortune of homeless kids. I couldn't understand why he was doing that. I questioned his integrity. It seemed like he was profiting from other people's experiences, and he was just a slimy, backroom sort of guy. Mark always seemed to be shrouded in a veil of thick gray cigarette smoke. He had dark unruly hair, he dressed badly, and he seemed to be perpetually sleep-deprived. To my eyes, he could even have had some firsthand experience with the material he was filming. But none of that mattered now, because he had done it. He'd found a way to reach me and get his movie made. I felt like I had compromised my integrity.

There was just one problem.

“We're closing a deal with David Arquette to play your part,” Mark said. “But I think we can get him to take the smaller part you had agreed to play, and you can play the bigger part.”

Sounded good to me, although there were a few other stipulations. Mark wanted me to visit a juvenile detention center and interview some of the kids there. He wanted me to meet with doctors to discuss the ravages of heroin abuse.

“One other thing…,” he said.

“What?”

“You have to lose ten pounds in the next ten days.”

“No problem.”

Not exactly true, as it turned out. With the help and guidance of a doctor and nutritionist, I shed the weight. I subsisted on four hundred calories a day, mostly raw vegetables and chicken breast, and by the time shooting started I was carrying only 125 pounds on a five-foot-seven frame. (As a point of reference, my ideal walking-around weight these days is about 165; for the role of Samwise Gamgee, I deliberately packed on another thirty to forty pounds, bringing me up to a nearly corpulent two hundred.) The benefits of this transformation were instantly evident on screen: I was gaunt, haggard, sickly. In other words, I looked like either a drug addict or someone who is terminally ill. Not quite Tom Hanks in
Philadelphia,
but definitely moving in that direction. The unwanted fallout of this rapid weight loss was that it wreaked havoc on my metabolism, a problem I still face to this day. But I have no regrets.
Where the Day Takes You
remains one of the greatest creative experiences I've known. It showed me what I could do as an actor, how it was possible to develop my craft through hard work and sacrifice and research. I've done some good movies, and I've done some bad movies.
Where the Day Takes You
is a good one. It belongs in the pantheon of really interesting films about drug abuse, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as
My Own Private Idaho
and
Drugstore Cowboy
. I'm proud to have it on my résumé. Thank goodness things worked out the way they did, and my initial thoughts about Mark turned out to be wrong. I regret that I underestimated him as an artist.

Oh, by the way. That hockey equipment? It's still in the bag. Never been used.

CHAPTER TWO

While I was working on
Where the Day Takes You,
a friend of mine named T.E. Russell stopped by the set to pay a visit. T. E. and I had gotten to know each other a few years earlier when we worked together on a movie called
Toy Soldiers
. T.E. is an African American with a sturdy presence and a beautiful voice. When Christine and I were married, the ceremony was held in Idaho, and T.E. helped make the event complete by graciously agreeing to sing an a capella version of “You Send Me.” His voice poured out majestically through the pine trees, and I like to think that it drifted right up to the front doors of some of our neighbors, most notably an avowed leader of a white supremacist organization.

But I digress.

Shortly before T.E. visited the set, I had received a script for a movie called
Encino Man
. I respect T.E.'s opinion, so I asked him if he'd mind looking at the script with me. It was an almost surreal experience. Here I was, enjoying another day of important work on a thoughtful, considered movie about homeless kids having remarkable, real-world experiences on the streets of Los Angeles, and I was reading a script about a caveman who becomes a high school student! I'd studied with Stella Adler. I'd worked with David Putnam. In my mind, at least, I was finally getting a chance to flex my acting muscles and do the work I'd always been capable of doing. If I hadn't exactly “arrived,” at least I was on the right track.

That's how I felt, anyway. But perception is one thing and reality is another, for the script I held in my hand was not really the sort of script that gets sent to an important actor. The biggest, most important issue in
Encino Man
was how a couple of high school students could exploit the caveman to make themselves more popular. Deep stuff. And so T. E., Christine, and I read the script out loud while standing just off Hollywood Boulevard, snorting and laughing and dismissing it as we went along. When we finished it, I can vividly remember looking at T.E. and saying, “This is the biggest piece of shit script I have ever read in my entire life.” T.E. just laughed and nodded. That, I thought, would be the end of my association with
Encino Man
. But I was wrong.

I had recently moved from a small, boutique agency to CAA, which at the time was seeming to gobble up all of Hollywood. In one respect, it wasn't a move I enjoyed making. The agent I left was heartbroken, and Marion Dougherty, who had cast me in
Memphis Belle,
was so outraged that she called CAA and chastised them for poaching clients. But I was far from an innocent bystander. I no longer believed that my small agency had the power and influence to take me where I wanted to go. We had made a lot of money together, and I liked them as people, but as I became more knowledgeable, I asked more questions, and they didn't always have answers. It seemed to me that they weren't prosecuting my career interests in the way I knew the people at CAA would. My parents did not really respect my decision, but they didn't attempt to dissuade me.

I sensed that while my new agents were good at representing talent, when I walked into their agency, I didn't feel like it was a power center where information is currency, decisions are made with lightning speed, and careers are built and broken from moment to moment. I don't know if that speaks to the quality of the agency or Mike Ovitz's genius at designing an architectural space (at CAA). My instincts told me that if I wanted a shot at a “big” career, I should try to mix it up with the sharks. I was willing to terminate my professional relationship with people who had genuinely cared about me to go to a place where I thought the agents could capitalize on my success and plug me into the action at the highest levels. I'm not proud of my decision to the extent that I was not necessarily a loyal client, but I understand the mandate of ambition that was burning within me. I would enjoy the fruits of this choice and suffer its consequences. After years of reflection, I can honestly say that the most important characteristic for an actor to look for in an agent is genuine passion. In this regard, my first agents were successful.