Hollywood Monster Page 6

  One afternoon, I was passionately prattling on and on about a play I’d done back at the Meadow Brook Theatre, and at that moment Henry—who considered himself first and foremost a man of the theater—totally warmed up to me. Then the flood-gates opened. He told me about the first time he met Jimmy Stewart, and how charismatic a young Bette Davis was, and how when Barbara Stanwyck started filming a movie, she made it a point to learn everybody’s name in the cast and crew. It was a steady diet of Old Hollywood tales, and I devoured every word of it. Hollywood history from the horse’s mouth.

  Henry liked to bitch about the truck situation. His character drove an eighteen-wheeler throughout most of the movie, so several weeks before shooting began, he took about a dozen lessons. Turned out that for insurance reasons, the producers wouldn’t let him drive the truck. He was serious about preparing for a role, so when he realized he’d wasted all that time in truck-driving class, it pissed him off.

  This movie was a turning point in my career. Knowing I was accepted by the likes of Susan Sarandon and Henry Fonda gave me another shot of confidence that would fuel me through the countless interviews, auditions, and rejections that lay ahead.

  SOON AFTER THE LAST OF THE COWBOYS wrapped, Jan and I moved out of our Schindler apartment, and we rented our own place by the beach in Santa Monica, smack in the middle of what the surfers and skateboarders referred to as Dogtown. Our upstairs neighbor was comic actor Andy Kaufman, and he was every bit as eccentric as you might imagine.

  Most every Saturday night, Jan and I invited friends over for pizza, beer, a little weed, and some Saturday Night Live. (This was during the show’s early glory days, when people’s weekend plans revolved around staying home to watch SNL.) Andy had been on the first episode in 1975, and to us he was synonymous with the show. One night in 1976, we were hooting and hollering at a particularly funny sketch, after which, during a commercial break, we heard a knock at the door. I opened up, and there stood Andy. He spoke in the timid, foreign voice that was one of the signature shticks of his act: “Excuse me, please, could you not be making so much noise, please? Tenk you veddy much.” We all knew that Andy was from Long Island, and the voice was a put-on. Funny guy, still in character.

  I said, “Andy! Come in! We love you!” I didn’t think the pervasive scent of marijuana would bother him too much.

  He shook his head. “Please to just keep it down. Tenk you veddy much.” To this day, I don’t know if he was messing with us, or if he was practicing. Maybe he had an audition the next day and he was annoyed that we’d awakened him. Or maybe he was testing his “foreign man” character on a captive audience. Or maybe Andy Kaufman was just a strange, strange guy.

  Several months later, I was auditioning for a little television show called Taxi. I was up for the role of Bobby, the vain actor who drives a cab to supplement his income while he tries to make it in New York City. I had a couple of callbacks, and the casting people decided I wasn’t right for Bobby, but they saw something in me and asked me to read for the role of Latka, the sweet mechanic from a country of unknown origin. After a quick skim of the script, I asked, “So what do you guys want here, an Andy Kaufman impression?”

  They collectively shrugged and asked, “Who?” I don’t think they knew who Andy Kaufman was. I gave it my best shot. Next thing I knew, Andy had the part. Me and my big mouth.

  IN 1977, MY FRIENDLY nemesis Gary Busey and I both auditioned for a surfing movie called Big Wednesday; this time, however, we weren’t up for the same part. Fortunately for Gary, he got the role he’d tried out for. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t, which stung, because I was an honest-to-goodness surfer. But as was the case with A Star Is Born, again the casting folks at Warner Bros. threw me a bone. It turned out to be a lucrative bone because even though I only had a featured part, the production went over schedule, so I ended up taking home more money for this small role than I had for any of my starring roles to date. Plus I got to hang out on location at one of the most beautiful beaches in all of California. All things considered, there was nothing to complain about. (There’s that famous saying in the theater, “There are no small roles, only small actors.” In Hollywood, that axiom could be changed to “There are sometimes small roles that lead to big paychecks.”)

  Our director, John Milius, also wrote the movie, and the rule on the set was that you shouldn’t fuck with a single word or change even a comma in the script if you knew what was good for you. I could respect that because Milius had written one of my favorite flicks, The Wind and the Lion, as well as Dirty Harry, and Robert Shaw’s monologue about the torpedoed USS Indianapolis shark-feeding frenzy in Jaws, so who was I to start improvising?

  But I did.

  Near the end of the film, in a scene where one of the leads, played by The Greatest American Hero, William Katt, is headed off to fight in Vietnam, I improvised the line “Stay casual, Barlow,” which was my interpretation of how a surfer would say “Keep your head down.” Milius didn’t flip out; for that matter he left it in, and it became one of the most memorable, oft-quoted lines in the movie. To this day surfers still shout “Stay casual!” when they see me at the beach.

  TV Movies of the Week often get a bad rap—we’ve all suffered through a disease-of-the-moment chick flick—but I’ve appeared in over a dozen MOWs, most of which were quality fare with stellar casts. In 1979, I did one for CBS called Mind over Murder, directed by Ivan Nagy, a Hungarian director whose name turned up some fifteen-odd years later in the Heidi Fleiss scandal. One of the stars of the movie, Andrew Prine, played a serial killer who was pursued by detectives through a dreamlike ESP connection. Andrew had shaved his head for the role, giving him a distinctive, haunting look. (Sound familiar?) Andrew was so effective in that dark little TV movie that I believe I subconsciously drew on his work when I began my own filmic killing spree five years later.

  But before I drew first blood as Freddy, I had to endure a Galaxy of Terror.

  * * *

  CUT TO 1981. WITH an impending actors’ strike, I was taking any job I could get: bit parts on Charlie’s Angels, Alice, CHiPS, and a low-budget horror film called Dead and Buried, anything to gather myself some acorns for what might turn out to be a long winter.

  At that moment, for us actors, timing was everything. If a film or television show went into production before the strike, it wouldn’t have to shut down, but if a project hadn’t started shooting, regardless of how far along in preproduction it was, it had to be shelved until an agreement was reached.

  Fortunately, an old inspiration, and one of the busiest producers in Hollywood, came to my rescue with a role.

  For his movie Galaxy of Terror, B-movie impresario Roger Corman assembled one of the most eccentric ensembles I’ve ever worked with. We’re talking Ray Walston (Judge Bone from Picket Fences); Erin Moran (Joanie from Happy Days); Grace Zabriskie (Sarah Palmer from Twin Peaks, Mrs. Ross from Seinfeld, and Lois from Big Love); Zalman King (writer of Nine ½ Weeks, and creator of Red Shoe Diaries); and yours truly.

  It was certainly great to be working for Corman from a creative perspective, but—how do I put this politely?—well, let’s just say, Roger’s a bit of a tightwad. We’re talking killer hours, and catering that consisted of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My dressing room was fashioned from two bookended canvas flats, furnished with a white plastic chair, and a single bent nail to hang my clothes on. It’s not the most glamorous way to make a movie, but you have to give the guy credit: as of this writing, he’s been making films for fifty-five years and has executive-produced and/or produced and/or directed and/or written something like four hundred movies. Roger also has a remarkable eye for talent; he was an early supporter of such stars-to-be as Jack Nicholson, Barbara Hershey, and Francis Ford Coppola, just to name a few. Point being, if you ever have the opportunity to appear in a Roger Corman movie, jump on it no matter how shitty your salary might be, because that is one man in Hollywood who knows what the hell he’s doi
ng.

  I also wanted to work with Roger for another reason: Boxcar Bertha, the Scorsese-helmed movie Roger produced, was what helped inspire me to leave the theater for the movies in the first place. I’d come full circle. The gig was meant to be.

  We shot at Roger’s new studio/backlot in Venice Beach, a once dicey area that was just beginning to gentrify; out with the hippies, in with the yuppies. My first day on set, I was really impressed. We had zero budget, but the production design looked as if it cost a million bucks. I noticed that the art director’s office was right across the hall from my lean-to dressing room, so I wandered over and saw a guy with a long blond ponytail sitting on the floor, surrounded by rough blueprints and really cool drawings of the monster who would be terrorizing our cast over the next couple of weeks.

  A few days later I stole one of the crumpled illustrations from the art department floor and pinned it up in my dressing room. I later learned the name of the young ponytailed guy on the floor: James Cameron. Considering what James went on to direct—Titanic, The Terminator, True Lies—I wish I’d kept those discarded drawings.

  James wasn’t even thirty years old and was already a genius. For the spaceship that flew all around the infamous galaxy of terror, he took his buck-ninety-nine budget (or however little Roger gave him to work with) and turned the spacecraft’s hexagon-shaped corridor into a set worthy of something from 2001: A Space Odyssey using only milk crates and Styrofoam take-out containers that began their lives as the home of a McDonald’s Big Mac. The crates were hanging from the ceiling, and the light shone through the grates, creating an eerie dappled effect. The hamburger boxes were stapled open on the walls, completing the design. It’s not an exaggeration to say that dozens of movies had budgets fifty times greater than ours that didn’t look nearly as good.

  During the shoot, a rumor started going around that Roger had rented out the set to a German watch company for a commercial shoot and they paid him enough to make back the entire budget of Galaxy of Terror and then some. We never found out if that was true, but if it wasn’t, it should’ve been, because that is Roger Corman in a nutshell.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, IT was off to the Philippines for a Vietnam movie with the awkward title of Don’t Cry, It’s Only Thunder. This was my first time shooting outside the USA, and my first trip to the Far East, so a couple weeks before I was scheduled to catch my plane, I went to see the studio-appointed doctor so I could schedule my series of malaria inoculations. (If Roger Corman did a movie over in Asia, I’m pretty certain he would’ve made us pay for our own shots.) I was then flown to Manila and put up in a five-star hotel for a whole two weeks before filming started, so I could get acclimated to the time change, the punishing humidity, and the culture shock.

  We soon shifted locations to an air force base in a province up north. I reluctantly checked out of my fancy Manila digs and naively hoped my next lodging would be as plush. The military folks had reserved a few rooms for us near the officers’ quarters on the base, and they were homey, clean, safe, and comfortable. Unfortunately, there was only enough housing for the director and the two stars. We costarring types were bivouacked at a brothel off-base.

  The rooms at our cathouse were spartan—especially compared to where we’d just come from—but on the plus side, a twenty-four-hour restaurant/bar was on the premises, and we were surrounded by jungle and roaming bison. Each room was furnished with a simple bed, a chair, a lizard on the wall, a portable black-and-white TV, and a prostitute. And you couldn’t refuse. She was part of the deal. You get a room, you get a whore.

  My fellow costar James Whitmore Jr. was staying across the hall. Our first night there, he knocked on my door. I let him in, and he glanced at my hooker and whispered, “I need a favor.”

  “What?”

  “Switch girls with me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I like yours. We hit it off in the bar last night. Come on, take mine. She’s cute.”

  I wasn’t intending to avail myself of my hooker’s services anyway, so I said, “Sure. But you have to tell them it was your idea. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings here.”

  Everywhere I went—which wasn’t too far; I didn’t stray much farther than a three-block radius of the whorehouse— my prostitute came with me. She was a nice enough girl, but she had one strange quirk: whenever we were in the bar, she ordered several double screwdrivers but never got drunk. I had to pay for them out of my per diem, and, man, were those things expensive.

  I mentioned it to James, and he whispered, “She’s not ordering screwdrivers. That’s just orange juice.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of orange juice.”

  “She’s not drinking it. Watch her carefully. She just pretends to drink it, then she hides the glass under the table and pours it into a baby bottle. She’s taking it home for her kids.” That broke my heart. After I found that out, I was happy to let her tag along with me, to buy her a meal or two, as well as all the OJ she wanted. I had become an accidental ambassador of American goodwill at a house of ill repute far from home.

  None of my recent locales—Oakland, Michigan; New York City; Statesboro, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; or, for that matter, Hollywood—had prepared me for my overseas adventures in the Philippines. Now I was a seasoned veteran of exotic foreign locations ready for anything that show business could throw my way.

  CHAPTER 5

  NIGHTMARE #5:

  I’m backstage in a vaguely familiar old theater. A Shakespearean tragedy is being performed onstage under the lights …. I’ve forgotten my lines…. I feel pressure in my chest, a shortness of breath, I am pacing back and forth in the wings and looking for something I’ve lost…. I can’t find a script I’ve hidden that contains my dialogue…. I hear my cue from onstage…. I search every where for the script and can’t find it…. Then the dream starts all over again, repeats itself…. I have this nightmare once a year, without fail, and, man, does it suck.

  JAN BEGAN WRITING AND PERFORMING WITH AN improvisational comedy group in L.A., and before long they got good, real good, so good that they started making regular appearances on NBC’s Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, a pre-MTV promotional-rock-video-clip variety show that came on right after Saturday Night Live. Her comedy group, the Village Idiots, was loaded with talent, and one of their go-to guys was an energetic kid with a quick wit and a receding hairline named Michael Douglas. Not wanting to compete with that Michael Douglas, he changed his name to Michael Keaton and, within two years, was one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office draws. (Attention sci-fifans: when Michael left, he was replaced by Peter Jurasik, who later went on to star in Babylon 5.) When the Village Idiots gigged at the local comedy clubs, we’d run into unknown, hilarious performers such as Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, Sandra Bernhard, and Comedy Store emcee David Letterman, who introduced Jan to her eventual favorite cocktail, J.B. on the rocks.

  Horny-pigeon performances notwithstanding, I wasn’t trained as an improvisational actor, and I picked up a lot about making people laugh just by being a fly on the wall during the freewheeling sessions in those late-night clubs, watching a generation of new talent incubate on those stages in the wee hours. It also nudged me closer to being an official cog in the New Hollywood machine. For better or worse, the stage, my classical training, and Lee Strasberg’s class were becoming a somewhat distant, albeit beloved, memory.

  Whether I knew it—or admitted it—Jan’s gang affected my acting. Despite my “Stay casual, Barlow” moment during Big Wednesday, I generally stuck to what was written on the page, but Michael’s, Jan’s, and Peter’s ease with improv—and their joy when they came up with stuff on the spot that worked— gave me the confidence to play with my scripts a little, both on the set and at auditions. I realized that some TV-audition material wasn’t exactly Shakespeare; it wasn’t written in stone. Plus I’d done enough solid work, and I had a good enough reputation, that I wasn’t concerned about getting fired for saying, “Hey, fella, the 1950s called,
and they want their leather jacket back,” rather than “That outfit isn’t exactly your best look.” When I was at ADA, it was drilled into us: The text is sacred. Anything you need, you can find in the text. Serve the writer, then the director, then yourself. The play’s the thing. I don’t think Robin Williams always played by those rules and he did okay, so if a little improv was good enough for Mork, it was good enough for me.

  IN 1983, I MET Gregory Harrison of Trapper John, M.D. fame while costarring on a TV movie called The Fighter. Greg, who was also a stage actor, had just finished a sold-out run in downtown L.A. in a play called The Hasty Heart and was able to parlay that success into producing the play Journey’s End, which ended up being filmed by a fledgling entertainment company called Home Box Office. I hadn’t done any stage work for a while, so Jan dared me to audition for it. I was asked to do a part and I’m glad I did because I had the opportunity to work alongside an improvisational comedic genius named George Wendt. George had replaced John Belushi at Second City back in Chicago, and acting with him made me feel as though I was six degrees of separation from the original SNL cast. The play was a huge hit and attracted a whole flock of agents, producers, and casting directors to our postage-stamp–size stage adjacent to Paramount Studios.

  (A side note: during the run of Journey’s End, George auditioned for the television show that would all but define his career, Cheers. When he was told the part of Norm was his for the taking, he was on the fence between accepting that role or another pilot he had been offered. When, over a couple of beers, he asked me my opinion, I said, “You know what? I loved Ted Danson in that movie The Onion Field. I think you oughta do that Cheers show.” The rest is television history.)