“Great,” I thought, “now we’ve got fifteen notes! Only fifty million more to go before we have a score for the film!” And that is when he pulled the rabbit out of his hat. He explained, through words and his piano playing, what magic these tiny themes held. He played me Henry’s Theme in so many different ways—Henry triumphant, Henry carefree, Henry afraid, Henry heartbroken—all with those same six notes at their center but with completely different emotions and orchestrations. He did the same with Mary’s Theme and Baseball’s Theme, expanding them with great flourishes and then bringing them back to their simplest truth. And then he intertwined them, showing me how the moment of Henry’s first time on the mound would play musically, with Henry’s Theme playing on top of Baseball’s Theme to create an enormously emotional moment. Bill Conti is a fucking genius, and it is my honor to have scored two films with him. I left his house thrilled beyond belief, and Bill went to work. Once he had the themes, the writing was easy for him, and the score was soon ready to be recorded. We had an eighty-piece orchestra record his score while the movie played on a screen, and it was thrilling to feel the movie come alive in a whole new way. Bill conducted the orchestra and kept checking in with me to make sure I was loving it, which I was. There was one patch where I told him I thought the energy wasn’t exactly right, and he rewrote that portion on the spot . . . for an eighty-piece orchestra! “Horns, you play measures 180–255 while the strings play measures 95–133,” or something crazy like that. All the musicians made notes on their sheet music and in five minutes Bill had made that passage of music perfect. It was truly amazing to be a part of that creative process, and the score still makes me cry in parts. We mixed in the music and the film was done. It opened to very good reviews and ended up making sixty million dollars in the United States and more in Japan and other foreign markets. The studio was very happy, and Joe Roth asked me to set up a production office on the lot to find my next film to make. I could not have asked for a better experience than directing Rookie of the Year.
NO-BRAINERS
In the meantime, the Malibu money-laundering case got resolved and we got a call from the federal marshals asking if we were still interested in buying the house with the path to the beach. We met them the next day, signed a contract for a price of one point one million dollars, gave them a deposit check, and suddenly the house was ours. At the same time, we had noticed the abandoned old house next door and had the realtor find out whose it was and if they wanted to sell it. We got the answer that they would take six hundred thousand dollars for this little beach bungalow, and we said, “We’ll take it.” We paid for them both in cash, since I had just socked away a couple of incredible paydays, and Laure and I suddenly owned two houses on three acres of prime real estate, with a swimming pool and a path to the premiere surfing beach in all of Malibu. I had the most beautiful wife in the world, my kids loved their lives, and since our house had access to Little Dume, we became the hangout place for all of our kids’ friends, which brought so much wonderful energy into the home. It really was the greatest and happiest time of my life.
When it came time to sign on to do the sequel to City Slickers, it was a no-brainer, for better and worse. I had loved making the first one so much that there was no way I would not want to join in the fun again. And this time, I had the all-powerful Creative Artists Agency as my representatives, so I would not have to handle the negotiations myself. Like I said, a no-brainer. But there was a fly in the ointment—the script. The original City Slickers was a film about friendship, about risking your life to honor your obligations, even if that obligation is just bringing a herd of cattle to safety, and it was one of the funniest and most heartfelt scripts I have ever read. City Slickers 2—The Legend of Curly’s Gold had funny things in the script, but its message was about greed and searching for gold to get rich, which was the opposite of the moral of the original story. Bruno Kirby told Billy he wouldn’t work with him again, so they had no choice but to leave his character out, which left a big hole in the heart of the film. In his place, they added a very annoying and unsympathetic character, played accordingly by Jon Lovitz. And even though he had died in the first movie, they brought back Jack Palance to play his long-lost identical brother, an obvious and flimsy movie device which undermined the reality of the world we were trying to create. Billy probably should have directed the film himself, but instead hired a very weak director who was expected to kowtow to Billy’s vision for the film, but who was very bad at kowtowing and wore his resentment on his sleeve. My part was okay, a few funny scenes and jokes but nowhere near the character arc and complexity of the first film. By the time I finished reading the script, I was having real doubts about whether I should do it. I was starting to get a reputation as a good comic actor and needed to have material I believed in. Then my agent called and said they would pay me two point one million dollars. I immediately shut off my brain and said yes. What am I, stupid? It was a no-brainer.
Sadly, the movie ended up kind of lame, but I had a wonderful time doing it. We shot it in Moab, Utah, which is an otherworldly, beautiful place. We worked at incredible locations where many classic John Ford Westerns were shot. I rented a little house on top of a mountain, with views forever, and a hot tub too. At the bottom of the mountain was a golf club, with membership included in the rental. I had tried golf a few times and liked it, but never took it seriously. But I played every day I wasn’t working and got pretty good. One of the set decorators on the film happened to be an ex-pro golfer, and he gave me lessons on the set, which I would take directly onto the golf course. In a scene directly out of Caddyshack, on my last day on the course it was pouring rain. I was the only person out there and I played the game of my life, powering through some lightning scares to finish one over par. One of the great accomplishments of my lifelong sporting activities. I have played only a few times after that and sucked as bad as ever. None of it stuck, but man, was I in a golf groove there for a couple of months!
It was great to spend time with Billy, but he had a very full plate—starring in the film, producing it, and overseeing the direction as well. Lovitz was nice but always had a bit of an act going on, so I didn’t really get to know him much. The real gift of friendship on this film was getting to know Jack Palance a bit more. We had a lot more time together than on the first film, and this time I could see that his passion for his work outside of show business—his painting, family, poetry, ranching—was hugely important and necessary to his sanity. Living “the life of an artist” brought him deep satisfaction, with his acting career being just a small part of it. I started to conceive a plan. What if I made enough money that I never had to work again and could spend all my time at home, being a dad and a husband, with my work consisting of making art of all kinds and volunteering for causes I believed in? How much money would I need to save, invested in only the safest possible treasury bills and bonds, to be able to use the interest to pay for all of the needs of my family? The idea of “living the life of an artist,” having the freedom to pick and choose how I spend my precious time here on this Earth, seemed like not just a beautiful vision but a true possibility. And even more, an obligation. If I actually had the opportunity to buy my own freedom for the rest of my life, and didn’t take it, it would be an insult to every man and woman working their asses off just to get a few weeks’ vacation with their families and who would leap at the chance to be able to afford this kind of unheard-of independence. I wasn’t there yet, but I could see the path forward.
My production deal at 20th Century Fox was great. I hired a development team and assistants, all looking for books and stories to develop for me to act in, direct, and produce. We bought the rights to a few and dove into trying to develop them into scripts that the studio would want to make. We came across a film called Tenderfoots, a family, kid-empowering movie about a group of Cub Scouts who get kidnapped by a thief on the run. The script was not very good, but the idea was strong and the studio was happy to have me direct and star in a film that would appeal to the same audiences as the Home Alone movies and Rookie of the Year. We hired new writers, Goldberg and Swerdlow, who had written Cool Runnings, and who were really funny and great with structure and character development. We developed the script into an epic comedy, complete with climbing a mountain, fighting a bear, and riding the rapids of a raging river, and the studio greenlit the film. Having already directed Rookie of the Year, I felt comfortable and confident at the helm of the film and started hiring some of the great people I had worked with on other films. I was running on all cylinders, storyboarding the action sequences, scouting locations in Lake Tahoe, auditioning actors, working on the script, etc. Over the Fourth of July weekend, I had some time off. I was so exhausted I thought I must be coming down with something. But on Sunday, my lips were looking kind of blue, and my doctor met me at his office, just to be sure. He took one look at me and put me in the hospital immediately. It turned out I had a bleeding ulcer and had lost 50 percent of my blood supply. They cauterized it, and I spent a couple of days in the hospital recuperating before I was released. Now I just needed to rest, have my body build back up my blood supply, and avoid stress as much as I could—which is hard to do when you are directing, producing, and starring in a twenty-million-dollar comedy. We decided that I would still produce and star in the film but would hand over the directing reins to someone else so that my day-to-day workload would be that much less. We hired a very nice guy, Greg Beeman, who understood the situation. I had just watched Billy Crystal unofficially codirect City Slickers 2 and wanted to avoid confusing the cast and crew as to who was in charge, but since I had been directing the film up until my ulcer, Greg understood that the crew was my crew, I had cast the actors, scouted locations, etc., and we got along very well, personally and creatively.
He made it easy to focus on playing the role of Max Grabelski, the petty thief who ends up being a reluctant hero and father figure to a group of ten-year-old Cub Scouts. We had written some crazy set pieces, and now I actually had to shoot them. I got the fearsome pleasure of shooting a scene with the legendary Bart the Bear, playing dead as he was pawing me (which was so much more terrifying than having that fucking tarantula crawl on my face). There was a scene in which my character is climbing a sheer cliff and, sure enough, one day I found myself being lifted thirty feet into the air on a crane. A mountain climber, attached to the sheer cliff on ropes from above, met me, attached my harness into some rings that had been drilled into the mountain, and left me dangling in the air. I am terrified of heights, but somehow sucked it up and did the scene. Probably not the stress-free activity my doctor wanted for me but an experience I will never forget.
One of my favorite show business moments happened while we were shooting the sequence where the kids and I get swept into a river and free-fall down the rapids, heading for a waterfall . . .
(Side note—you need to know that the most important element on any film set is the catering. The flow of food on a movie set is mind-boggling. The major fuel source for the entire Entertainment Industrial Complex is Fritos. It has become Pavlovian, our need to be fed on set on a regular basis. I am not talking about three meals a day. Of course, we need those provided for us. Full breakfast, anything you want—from pancakes to burritos, BLTs, oatmeal, seventeen kinds of cereals, coffee, coffee, and more coffee. Keep the crew fueled! Craft Services keeps it popping with tables filled with peanuts, candy, donuts, peanut butter, and jelly. You name it, it is there. But that is not enough to keep the crew going. No! We need snacks as well! Pigs in blankets, sandwiches, dips! Who the fuck knows how they do it, but they bring new stuff all day, every day. God forbid they bring ham sandwiches two days in a row! Grumble, grumble, the crew must be fed something surprising! This all takes place before eleven, and then we finally make it to lunch, the big meal of the day! This can be anything and sometimes everything. Meat, meatless, salads, desserts, beverages, ice cream. Sometimes a sushi chef might show up and the crew goes crazy. Then it’s back to work, another few rounds of snacks, both served and self-serve, and then, if you go late enough, they might bring in fifty pizzas, or Chinese food from local restaurants, which is called the Second Meal, a misnomer if ever there was one.)
Anyway, I had to jump into an actual raging river and be taken along by the current through some rapids. It was really fun and physically challenging. There were so many safety people around that I knew I wouldn’t get hurt, so I let myself really go for it, even though it felt dangerous each time. I went pretty far down the rapids each take, and there was no easy way to get me back to the starting place for the next take because the riverbank was such tough terrain. So we hired some Olympic kayakers—amazing athletes who had the strength and ability to paddle their kayaks back up the river and the rapids. I would jump in the river and float downstream, doing the scene while trying to stay on the route I had practiced, and when they yelled, “Cut,” my kayaker would come get me. I held onto a rope attached to the back, and he paddled me back up the river to the starting place. In one of my great “Only in Hollywood Moments,” on one of my trips back up the river, I saw another kayak coming up beside us and passing us by. His strength was impressive, but even more impressive, he was balancing an entire tray of cappuccinos on the fucking kayak! Balancing a fucking tray of cappuccinos while paddling upriver, through rapids going the wrong way, and not spilling a fucking drop. All to get a caffeine fix for the crew upstream. It had to be the World Record Time for such a challenge, which I hear will be an Olympic event in 2032. I nearly drowned laughing as he passed me by.
I had a great time filming the movie with my friends and crew-mates, rewriting as we went and using everyone’s creative input to make a really funny movie. I loved working with the kids on the film, and had gotten Freddie Hice, the stunt coordinator from Home Alone, to do the stunts. We had a blast doing the physical comedy. Once we finished filming, the director announced he had taken another film and left, leaving the editing, scoring, and other post-production activities to me. Since I had been codirecting the film all along, that made it much easier to do my job, which was to make the film as good as it could be, and then help market and sell it as best as I could. The movie came together well, and the test screenings went great, with lots of wild laughs from the family audiences. But we got caught in a pickle. The film went before the Ratings Board, and they gave the film a PG-13 rating instead of the PG rating we were hoping for. There were two scenes in particular they deemed too risqué for a family audience and that they wanted us to cut, and they happened to be two of the biggest laughs in the whole movie. One was a scene where the Cub Scouts piss off the side of a mountain while singing a song, and the other was a scene where my character is teaching them about the birds and the bees while demonstrating with Barbie and Ken dolls. We tried recutting the scenes but nothing we did, short of cutting the scenes altogether, would satisfy the Ratings Board. I really wanted to keep the scenes and thought it wouldn’t matter that much between PG and PG-13, and the studio backed me up. We finished the movie and, once again, I got to score the film with Bill Conti, who brought his magic to it. I was very proud of what we had done, but when the movie opened, I learned a very hard lesson. That PG-13 rating really did matter. This was a movie about ten-year-old Cub Scouts doing heroic things. The people who look up to ten-year-old heroes are six-year-olds or eight-yearolds. But if the youngest audience member can only be thirteen years old, then, to them, the heroes of this movie are a bunch of little babies. A thirteen-year-old doesn’t look up to ten-yearolds; they want to be like sixteen- or eighteen-year-olds. Parents didn’t want to bring their impressionable little kids to it, and slightly older kids didn’t want to watch a movie about kids younger than them. So the movie did not open well. I am still very proud of the film and all of my work on it, and I loved the experience of making it. But I still like to win and be successful, and having it not be a hit hurt.
Now, I don’t usually do extravagant things or waste money, and I don’t like to leave home either, but the legendary Boston Garden, home of the Celtics, was closing and I went crazy and bought myself a trip back to see the final game. I had loved the Celtics at times, and also hated them passionately sometimes too, and the history of that building and all of the amazing moments that had happened there inspired me enough to get off my ass and make the trip to see it before it closed. Unfortunately, the final game was sold out and I could only get a ticket to the next-to-thefinal game, but I took it anyway. The building was everything I had imagined it would be—the parquet floor, the steel rafters, the intimacy of the place, and the crazy, die-hard fans. I had a good seat, and at one point a young man came over to me and asked if I was Daniel Stern (which I was). He was a producer for the radio broadcast for the game and asked me if I would come on the show at halftime and do an interview with Tommy Heinsohn, the great ex-Celtic player. I said “absolutely” and did a really fun interview. After the show, the young producer, Mike Casey, who also happened to be the son of one of Boston’s bench coaches, asked me if I wanted a ticket to the final game. Are you kidding me? Fuck yeah! The gods were with me! Being at that last game at the Garden was maybe the greatest sporting event I have ever been to. They had the all-time great Celtic players take the floor and take a bow. The fans went nuts, kissing the floor, never wanting to leave. I stayed until the end, then went with Mike to the bar where the players go to drink, and we drank with everyone. One of the great nights of my life. Who could have ever predicted that just a few months later I would be back in the Boston Garden, on the parquet, playing hoops, making a film, and getting paid millions of dollars to do it? You are looking at the luckiest man in the world.
ON THE PARQUET WITH LARRY BIRD
Playing sports has been a huge part of my life. I was so bad at academics, but good at sports, which gave me a feeling of success—although I was the slowest fucking kid in the class, which was always so embarrassing. I could punt, pass, kick, shoot, and throw better than anyone, but anytime we had to run fast and jump high, I literally came in last, beaten not only by all of the girls (humiliating!) but also by Fat Petey (as we horribly called him) and Charlie Aquista, who I believe had braces on his legs. In kickball, I could kick the shit out of the ball, over the outfielders’ heads (even though they played deep when Stern came up), but I was lucky if I could make it to second base by the time they retrieved the ball from where the girls were playing Four Square and get it back to our game. I am talking slow.
In junior high and high school, I started to love basketball. We mostly played half-court, so running was not a big part of the game. My jumping abilities were pathetic, but I was already taller than almost everyone so I could rebound well, my passing skills were excellent, and I could hit from outside with uncanny accuracy. When I got to New York, I played in some tough games on the playgrounds and in a league at the YMCA, and in LA played almost every day in very intense games at the gym in Cheviot Hills Park, across the street from 20th Century Fox. Anyway, I love playing basketball!
So I was over the moon when I got the job for Celtic Pride, a movie about two crazy fans, played by me and the legendary Dan Aykroyd, who are diehard Celtic fans and who kidnap the opposing team’s best player, played by also-legendary Damon Wayans, to help the team win the championship. The best part was that the movie was going to be shooting the basketball scenes at the Boston Garden. My experience of being at the last game there sealed my love for that building and the history of that team, and the stars aligning so that I was going to go back and shoot a movie there, with Dan Fucking Ackroyd, playing a character that lives and dies for the Celtics, was mind-blowing. Not only that, to get Damon to look like the best basketball player in the NBA, the producers held a month of professional basketball training camp, first in LA and then in Boston. Even though I had no basketball-playing scenes, I talked my way into being part of the practices with the professional basketball players, which was humbling, to say the least. Damon had all the pressure on him to get into tip-top shape, and he did, but I could come and go as I wanted. I was playing an out-of-shape gym teacher and had the perfect excuse to skip the tough parts of the workout and go have a hoagie or two.
Truthfully, I don’t remember too much about the actual movie, and to this day I have never seen it. It was Judd Apatow’s first script, and it was really funny, but life off-screen was so incredible that making the movie was the least interesting part of the experience.
I had a huge, two-bedroom suite with an enormous living room on the thirtieth floor of a fancy downtown Boston hotel. Laure and the kids came to visit, and even my parents stayed with me for a couple of days. I got Mike Casey, the coach’s kid who got me a ticket to the final game, a job as a production assistant on the set. Mike became a great friend and, boy, did he know how to have fun in Boston. We went to bars, sporting events, and great restaurants. One of his friends owned a pizza parlor and we would go there after getting really drunk and make pizzas. So fun! But getting to run around with Dan Aykroyd was like being in the presence of a High Priest of Partying. Dan arrived in Boston from LA by train. Not a regular train; Dan had been loaned a private train car by someone rich and famous (maybe the owner of Rolling Stone magazine?) and had it attached to Amtrak trains that took him across the country. When he arrived in Boston, he had the train parked at the rail depot behind Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he lived there while we shot the movie. The first time I met him was on his beautiful, old-fashioned-feeling train car—carpeted walls, wood paneling, a bar, private bedrooms, and a porch off the back to watch America go past you, backwards. We drank and smoked cigars and got really fucking high. I loved him from the first minute I met him. Dan owned part of a nightclub in Boston, the China Club, and put me on the list where I could go in any time and have a table and free drinks. Crazy disco blasting, beautiful people all around me dancing their asses off, and unlimited drink and food. But Dan never went. The only time I was there with him was when he invited a bunch of the cast and crew to all go together. But instead of joining his guests, Dan had a walkie-talkie and acted as security for all of us. He didn’t have a drink or dance, just kept on his walkie, taking us through the secret back channels of the club and into crazy, private rooms. Goddamn, that was wild!
Laure came to visit for our anniversary, and Dan found out what restaurant we were going to and set it up so that Laure and I had a private room there, with a twenty-course meal, matching wines, and romantic music. We stayed there for four hours having dinner and, of course, Dan picked up the bill. Crazy generous man. We got a break in the filming to go home for Christmas, and Dan and I had to try to make it from the set to the Boston airport, known for its horrible traffic, at rush hour on the busiest travel day of the year. Dan had his motorcycle brought to the set, a motorcycle, he was proud to tell me, that was an officially decommissioned police motorcycle, the kind with the windshield. I hopped on the back of the bike and Dan whipped through traffic like a fucking stunt driver, weaving in and out of tight spaces and tilting it at extreme angles until we arrived at the tunnel at Boston Harbor, where traffic was just too clogged for even Dan to penetrate. Time was running out for us to make the plane, but have no fear, Dan had it handled. You see, he had arranged for a boat to meet us wherever the hell we were on the side of the highway. One person got out of the boat and took the motorcycle from Dan, we got into the boat, zoomed across the harbor and right to the airport, where a car met us and took us right to the terminal. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (and Motorcycles and Boats) in real life!! Dan is a one-of-a-kind person, a friend and a hero.
Unfortunately for the film, the director was the wrong man for the job. Not only was he inexperienced and a bit intimidated, but he had absolutely no understanding of basketball. (And the whole movie is about basketball!) I knew we were in trouble when I saw him on the court one day at rehearsal trying to take a shot. He looked like Jim Carrey attempting to make the worst basketball shot ever. Steven Hawking had a better chance of hitting the backboard. He didn’t even know the rules of the game, let alone the rules of how to film the game. Having just directed a sports movie, I knew how many individual shots you need to make a sports sequence feel real and exciting—hand on ball, following the passes, geography, defenders’ POV, clock ticking, etc. But the director only spent a few days filming the basketball sequences, which was a waste of the talent and effort that had gone into staging the games to look authentic. Instead, he spent weeks filming Dan and me in the crowd, being super fans, as well as other crowd stuff. I had a blast improvising with Dan and acting like insane fans, so I hope there is funny stuff in the movie (like I said, I haven’t seen the film). But I am pretty sure the basketball sequences are underwhelming.
The film had a lot of cameo appearances by the legends of the Celtics. The same giants I had watched take their curtain call at that Final Game at The Garden just few months ago—John Havlicek, Bob Cousy, Kevin McHale, and Red Auerbach—I was now standing next to, doing scenes with, and listening to their stories and jokes. These were incredible athletes I had looked up to my whole life. But the legend of legends was Larry Bird. He was a competitor like no other, an athlete who used every ounce of talent he had and knew how to win. People have called me Bird throughout my life—some because I looked a little bit like him, some because I played basketball a little bit like him, and some because they thought I looked like Big Bird. I had narrated a documentary about him, learning a lot about what a hard, hard life he led, which only made me admire him more. So the day Larry Bird came to the set to act in a scene with me and Dan, I was as star-struck as I have ever been. He was a reserved person, but I used every ounce of charm and humor I could muster, and he warmed up. I have a photo of us laughing together that I cherish not only because I revere him but also because I got him to laugh, which isn’t easy. When the crew broke for lunch, I watched as Larry got his tray of food and went back to his camper. I made the bold move of knocking on his door and asking him if he wanted to have company for lunch and, to my utter disbelief, he said yes. So Larry Bird and I sat at the little table in that Winnebago having lunch together, just the two of us. I literally cannot remember anything we talked about because it was such a near-holy experience, being that close to a true legend. I just hope I wasn’t drooling.
When the parquet was not being used for filming, I went down on the floor and played basketball during the breaks. So many great players were just standing around, and I got to shoot around with them for hours. And because I was playing all of the time, I started to really feel at home on that court and impress some of the players with my long-range shooting abilities. This led to what is truly one of the greatest days of my life, right up there with becoming a father and my wedding day. One of the technical advisors on the film was an incredible player named Gus Williams, an All-Star during his twelve-year career as point guard, who I loved when he played for my hometown team, the Washington Bullets. Gus was a great guy and an amazing shooter, and we had had fun hanging out on the court while the director was off making whatever movie he was making. On this magical day, I challenged Gus to a game of H-O-R-S-E (maybe there was a small bet on it, but I don’t remember). We were both really in a groove that day, and we played a fierce game with the whole crew watching. We hit half-court shots and behind-the-backboard shots, and then the other guy matched that incredible shot with another. But in the end, I beat him. I couldn’t believe it—and he couldn’t either. He said, “Let’s play again,” and we went right back at it. Again, magical shot followed by identical magical shot—and the game lasted a long time. We stopped to shoot a scene and then came back during breaks. This time, Gus won. We had to go back to filming at some point, but we met on the court for one last game to determine the real winner. The crew was heavily invested, cheering us both on. I wanted to win really badly, but Gus had much more pressure on him—an NBA great being beaten by an actor is not something he wanted to have happen on the floor of the Boston Garden. But it did. I beat him in that final game. Truly the greatest sporting achievement of my life. Gus was a little pissed, but his begrudging acceptance of how good my shot had gotten is one of the greatest compliments a man could ever receive. Celtic Pride was an experience of a lifetime, if not the movie of a lifetime. It is still hard to believe it all really happened.
The movie finally finished, and I went home. I had been away for three months—three months of my marriage and my kid’s lives that I couldn’t get back, and once again I had to catch up with everyone and everything that was going on. Life went on without me. Even though I was having these amazing experiences, I was the one missing out on the good stuff, not them. No matter how much fun I had on the film, it didn’t compare with living the messy, joyous life Laure and I had built at home. My paycheck from Celtic Pride put me over my goal of saving enough money that we could live off the interest. If I played my cards right and was smart, I would never have to take another job for money again. So it was time to put my money where my mouth was. It was time to stop working for a while and just be home.
BARBRA STREISAND IS GETTING MARRIED AND I’M NOT INVITED 207 DEEP DIVING INTO MALIBU
Ihad been working for a paycheck since I was eight years old and pretty much said yes to any opportunity to bring home cash. I have been driven to make money my whole life to take care of myself and I do everything in my power to give my family security and provide for them what they need and want. So I never imagined making enough money to say, “I have made enough money.” Now that reality was staring me right in the face. I had to face the fact that I also liked making money, because psychologically, it made me feel worthy, worthwhile, valuable, validated, hardworking, smart, and all the other feelings work gives us. To turn down work was hard to do, but also liberating. My whole life I had wanted to be a hippie, live close to the land, get married, find a community, and raise a family. I now had the chance to do just that, in the most amazing, financially free way possible, and I would be a fool to pass it up.
Besides, I had done three movies in a row that did not have great success at the box office, and that meant my turn at the trough was going to come to an end soon. When I started as an actor, the movie’s commercial success or failure had nothing to do with me. My only responsibility was to give a good performance. But when your name is above the title and the studio banks on your personal popularity, the box office numbers are a direct reflection of how the studio thinks their investment in you worked out. I never made the huge bucks—the five-million-, ten-million-, and twenty-million-dollar paydays that actors can make on a film—but even at my pay level, it is a very different kind of pressure and expectation that has nothing to do with how well you acted. Frankly, I was kind of tired of acting anyway. Directing films was the right job for me. So as I settled into my family life in Malibu, professionally, I decided to invest the next few years of my time into finding a great film to direct, and to only take acting jobs in Los Angeles.
In hindsight, the least interesting thing I did during this time was develop movies. I wasted so much time working on scripts that never turned into films. They were all great, and I believe all of them would have made great films, but the sad truth is that a script is only a blueprint for a film, so if the film doesn’t get made, the script is as worthless as the paper it is written on. The accompanying heartbreak that comes with realizing that the film is not going to get made, and that you have wasted all of that time and creativity, is hard to recover from. Guam Goes to the Moon, a wonderful script I developed for Paramount about a ragtag group of ex-astronauts flying old rocket equipment to the moon, actually paid for actors and set building, and pulled the plug just weeks before we were supposed to start the film. And I had turned down a great movie called Varsity Blues to do it, so I felt like I lost two scripts I loved. I worked for years on a wonderful film called Winterdance, adapting Gary Paulsen’s non-fiction book about being a novice dogsledder and running his first Iditarod. I wrote that script with Goldberg and Serdlow, going to Alaska to research and getting to run with the dogs through the Alaskan wilderness, but Fox wouldn’t greenlight it. Years later, they sold it to Disney, who turned it into Snowdogs with Cuba Gooding Jr., and it was heartbreaking to see the story contorted into a lame Disney comedy. I worked on a script about professional bass fishing for a year and a half, called Don Wayne Wyoming, only to be asked by the head of the studio, “Does it have to be about bass fishing?” What a waste of my fucking time. The most painful one was not getting The Bee made with John Hughes. John had so many projects going on and by the time I could focus on it, he was too busy to work on it. Working on so many scripts did get me more confident in my writing abilities, so that had value. But when I think about the man-hours that I and thousands of other screenwriters have wasted on unproduced movie scripts in Hollywood, it is almost too much pain to comprehend.
Those years I stopped working turned out to be the most productive of my life. I got really good at living a life of freedom and didn’t waste a day. We had a gardener named Vitalino, who was a genius at his job. He carved pathways to connect our two houses, repurposing all kinds of stones and wood he found on the property. He planted an enormous vegetable garden, and over the years, turned our three acres into a beautiful, natural wonderland. Laure speaks fluent Spanish, having spent her high school years in Madrid, and so she can communicate with everyone in California. But Vitalino didn’t speak English and I am a dummy and still can’t learn Spanish, so our verbal communications were always a comic event, a combination of physical gesturing, pointing, attempts at a foreign language, and always ending in one last non sequitur that would make us question what we had just decided or discussed. But we both knew who was boss. It was him. He taught me what “getting back to the land” really meant—the hard work, the inventiveness, using the right tool, understanding physics, weather, waterflow, and all kinds of land management that go into every agricultural endeavor. He inspired me to get my hands dirty, and I worked with him many afternoons. He would assign me menial tasks he thought I could handle—digging a hole or carrying rocks for the wall he was building. Eventually I broke out on my own and claimed the land around the little house as my area to work. I carved out the White Trash Sculpture Garden, where I made an installation of discarded washing machines, toilets, and other junk I had acquired and painted, including a dismantled Coke machine that the previous owners had left behind. My biggest accomplishment was building a chicken coop on the back of the garage. I hadn’t built anything since I was a carpenter’s apprentice for a time back in New York between auditions, and it felt good to see it completed, filled with chickens, and producing a dozen fresh eggs every day. I adapted immediately to the laid-back, surfer lifestyle of Old Malibu. Our neighbors were a firefighter, an electrician, an architect, a retired couple, and Clark Gable’s grandson, all in modest houses like ours. I never wore shoes, and on more than one occasion left the house without them on my way to somewhere that definitely required shoes, like the doctor or something. I made the little house next door my office/man cave. I had never in my life had my own place before, always sharing a space with family, roommates, wife, and children. It was very freeing to be able to completely focus on whatever I wanted to without distraction. And when I was done, I just walked up the path, back home.
But the most satisfying part of controlling my own schedule was being able to spend so much time with my kids. The biggest miracles in my life are my children, and I reveled in taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunity of not working and just being there for the kids. Malibu was still a small town, having just opened their own high school a year before we got there, and it gave space for all the kids to find themselves. With our path to the Little Dume surfing beach, our house was where all our kids’ friends came after school, to do homework and then go to the beach, and Laure and I were in heaven getting to witness all of these amazing kids growing before our eyes. Henry was a star athlete and student and had a wonderful group of friends. We loved to play intense games of basketball in the driveway or Risk in the living room. He was in so many advanced classes, and I was astounded by the seriousness with which he took his studies. We had a blast working on his bar mitzvah together, after which all my friends were sure that he would be the future president of the United States. He started clubs in school to bring kids of different cultures together. He organized a weeklong Holocaust Survivor celebration, where a dozen or so survivors and liberating American soldiers came to the school and spoke directly with the kids about their experiences. He was an amazing kid, and obviously on his way to great things. We had a big, old Chevy Suburban, and that is what I was teaching him to drive, taking him on the small streets of Point Dume.
Sophie was coming up right behind him. Very different kid than Henry, much more like I was as a kid. She was not a good reader and wasn’t particularly interested in school. But she was great at music and dance and was funny as shit. Watching her journey as a girl growing up taught me more about life than just about anything I have experienced. I only knew how boys grow up in a society, with Henry following basically the same path as me, and I guess I assumed that a girl’s journey was similar. And it was, for a while. But around fourth grade, Sophie’s friends all started forming subgroups, gossiping about each other and doing “mean girl” things to each other. I knew and loved all these kids, so I was shocked to see them hurt each other like that. I said to Laure that I felt bad that Sophie’s friends turned out to be this way, and she explained to me that this was just how girls are and that this behavior was perfectly normal.
“Normal? Playing head games with friends and gossiping about them is normal for girls?” It turned out she was right. I did not know that while boys were torturing each other in physical ways, girls were learning to play three-dimensional chess in the emotional and psychological Game of Life. It was an eye-opener. Sophie also had to deal with having such a brilliant and accomplished brother, much as I had to deal with my sister’s academic success. So when we worked on her bat mitzvah speech, I told her that I wanted her speech to kick Henry’s speech in the ass. And she did just that—talking about women’s representation in the Torah, her role models, her dreams, her vision of how the world should be, as well as so many great jokes and laugh lines. She blew us all away.
Ella was still a little kid through these years. She always had the odd mix of a total academic nerd and terrific and fearless athlete. She rode her bike to Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School and excelled in reading and science. They took kids to the beach and did experiments and studies; Ella loved doing all of it. She also loved dance classes and soccer, but it got a little scary when she started taking horse-riding lessons where they learned to do rodeo tricks like standing on the horse and sliding around the saddle while the horse gallops. I hated watching that shit, but she loved it. She was so innocent, and we could still play pretend games and roll around on the floor, but I knew it wouldn’t be long until I would lose a big part of her to the mean girl games, where dads are sidelined for a lot of the time. Laure and I loved taking them all to the local diner, Coogie’s, for dinner and then getting frozen yogurt and window shopping at the surf shop. Just hanging out together as much possible, listening to them, guiding them, helping them become who they wanted to be. We were making it up as we went along, like every parent does, and we were committed to trying our best.
I also realized that my celebrity from being in movies about empowering kids could be used to help empower real kids, in real life. I had already coached my kids’ sports teams, as well as being a classroom dad to help tutor math and reading and playground supervision, but there was more I could do. My fame from Home Alone gave me an immediate connection with kids and parents. I noticed that the most common question they wanted to know was if it hurt when I got hit with the paint cans and the bricks. The parents were as naive as the kids in terms of the editing, stunts, music, and photography tricks that go into making any kind of media, and I found that concerning. It is great to enjoy television and movies, but you must be wise to the manipulation that the media-maker is using to tell the story they want to tell, otherwise you will be ripe to be manipulated in ways that can be dangerous. The need to be literate in understanding media is just as important as the need to be a literate reader. I met a terrific woman who ran The Center for Media Literacy, an organization that trains teachers and develops textbooks and lesson plans for teaching Media Literacy to kids of all ages. I took the training and bought the materials and signed up to teach a three-week course at Malibu Middle School and High School. It was so much fun, teaching five classes a day for three weeks, and the kids loved having a class that talked about movies, television, current events, and marketing. I saw how well the course worked and wanted to see if I could help get it into schools throughout California. Laure was already serving on the PTA and connected me with the director of the statewide California PTA. I gave a talk at their monthly meeting, going through some of the highlights of the class I was teaching, and they totally got how important it was. They arranged for me to meet with other PTAs throughout the state. The next year they named me Honorary Chairman of the California PTA, which enabled me to spread the message and get into meetings with boards of education and nonprofit education committees. I taught the course for three years at Malibu High and up and down the state of California. (I believe in my core that this should be a mandatory course in every school, in every state, in every grade, and should now include the critical thinking skills to analyze social media and disinformation, as well as mainstream media and entertainment. We need to be literate in all of it to navigate this clever world we live in.)
I gave my time to environmental groups, media literacy groups, and NORML, which wanted to reform discriminatory marijuana laws that sent people to jail for ridiculously long terms. Owning and using my celebrity for these causes made the distortion it caused in my life feel worth it. Home Alone opened so many doors and gave me people’s attention for a minute. My message about educating and empowering young people aligned perfectly with the message of the movies people knew me from. It was different than the social justice work my dad did, and different than the hard work my mother did as an elementary school teacher, but giving back to the community was in my blood, and it felt good to be getting those muscles back in shape, using my unique toolbox to get stuff done. By this point, Laure had become very involved in the schools, moving up the ladder in the PTA and making a name for herself as an incredible community helper. She had befriended Robyn Gibson, another powerhouse woman who had children in the same public schools that we did, who wanted to support our fledgling school system. Laure and Robyn launched a plan for a big party called Celebration for Education to raise funds for the school system. The famous record producer David Foster agreed to host it on his twenty-acre Malibu estate and to organize a celebrity show that would attract high-end donors and raise a boatload of money. And they wanted me to be the master of ceremonies, along with Robyn’s husband. Did I mention her husband is Mel Gibson?
Mel is a serious filmmaker, actor, and producer, but underneath that sexy exterior is a silly man who loves to laugh and tell jokes and puns. We all started hanging out together, planning the big show. Mel was the biggest movie star in the world at the time, and he could get anyone to do anything. We had the biggest studio executives buying tables, and Jay Leno agreed to do stand-up. David Foster got Lionel Richie and Natalie Cole to perform with a huge band and erected an enormous tent to do the show in. Laure and Robyn sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in tickets and set aside tables for kids and teachers and school officials. They got auction items donated for trips on private planes and vacations in Australia. Mel and I were lucky enough to get an incredibly funny Simpsons writer, Mike Scully, to write us some jokes and schtick. We played really well together and egged each other on, daring each other to do something sillier. The show was a fucking home run, one of the greatest pieces of crowd-pleasing theater I have ever been a part of. The audience went nuts for the music and the jokes. We had kids perform that night, including Sophie, who crushed it playing in front of all those people. And when it came time for the auction, Mel and I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only did we auction off the high-end items Laure and Robyn had secured, but we made money auctioning weird shit too. We got bidding up to three thousand dollars to be the first one to get their car from the valet after the show. I got five thousand dollars from a woman to come on stage and pour a bottle of champagne down Mel’s pants. I will never forget the deliciously sinful look that woman had in her eye. We stayed up late that night in the tent at David’s, counting the money, imagining the improvements to the schools this was going to pay for, and feeling the buzz of the electric night of performances. The money went to the school district and paid for so many things, from programs to teacher’s aides to building a theater at the high school, which I got to help design and open. But the long-term win from Celebration for Education was the unleashing of Robyn and Laure and David and Mel and me as a fundraising team.
Life was fully engaging with the family, our house, and my volunteer work, but I was also a creature of show business and had been my whole life. I was forty years old and felt like I still had some stories to tell, that I might have something to say, but developing movies was not the way for me to say it. One evening Henry was doing his homework, and he had a book from his English class called Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, which is a book about how to write. I looked through the table of contents to see what it was about, and a chapter heading caught my eye—“Shitty First Drafts.” Of course, juvenile as I am, it made me giggle that they had the word “shitty” in a schoolbook. But I was intrigued enough to open the book and read the chapter. The point of it was that every single thing ever written, from Shakespeare to the Declaration of Independence, started with a Shitty First Draft. A new writer can’t be afraid of writing a shitty first draft, because that is mostly the only kind of first draft there is, and without it you have nothing. Nothing to work on, to shape, to throw out. Resign yourself to the fact that it will be shitty. The “Shitty First Draft” theory has become a guiding principle in my life as an artist and has freed me to give myself a break when trying to create a new sculpture or a new character (or a new book!). It’s going to be shitty to start with, but have faith that it can only get better. Something opened up in me that night and before I knew it, I was sitting at a typewriter (yes, a typewriter) writing a scene.
They say you should write about what you know. Laure and I were twenty-something years into our relationship at that point. At forty, I had already lived more than half my life with her. She is the most fascinating, brilliant, loving, sexy, frustrating, selfless, selfish, nurturing person in the world to me. So I spent a day or two writing dialogue between a husband and wife. I can’t remember what exactly, but I can guarantee you it was shitty. And then, that next day, July 1, 1998, a strange idea hit me from above. I was in the little house trying to write again when a helicopter started hovering very low in the sky and just sat there. Then another one joined it. The sound was unbelievably loud and disruptive, and they just stayed there. I couldn’t focus on writing, so I gave up for the day, went back to the big house, and asked Laure what the fuck was going on with the helicopters. She said, “Barbra Streisand and James Brolin are getting married today. Those are news crews and paparazzi. She lives on Point Dume and there are a whole bunch of celebrities there.”
“So how come we weren’t invited? I’m not famous enough?” I asked, which made us both laugh.
When I sat down the next day, I realized who the husband and wife were and what they were talking about, and I started writing a play called Barbra’s Wedding. It was about Jerry, an unemployed actor, and Molly, his wife, who happen to live next door to Barbra Streisand. It takes place on the day of her wedding, to which they have not been invited. I was giving myself a chance to vent all of my frustrations at being an actor. The neuroses, fears, shame, and ego that I felt about show business could come through Jerry in a comic way. And all of Laure’s frustrations, compromises, and sacrifices she has made by being married to me, as well as our deep-seated love for each other, could come out through Molly. I didn’t know where it was all going, but I wrote this dialogue that day and made myself laugh out loud. It was enough to inspire me to pound out a shitty first draft. Then a little less shitty, but still very shitty, second draft. An equally shitty third draft. A much-improved fourth draft, and on and on . . .
