When the filming ended and we got back to New York, Peter continued to mentor and support me. He invited me to the editing room to learn how the film was really put together, where I got to watch him experiment with different pacing, different performances, different music, and all of the post-production elements that a director uses to tell exactly the story they want to tell. He and his wife, Virginia, had Laure and me over for dinner at their apartment in the famed Dakota building often, and we fell in love with their kids, Toby and Miranda. They were the definition of a classy English family and loved Laure’s sophistication (she had spent her teenage years in Spain and Manila when her father served there in the Foreign Service). And we got to meet all of their amazing friends from England—Michael Caine, Peter O’Toole, Jacqueline Bisset, and Roger Moore.
Peter also introduced me to his agent at ICM, the legendary Sam Cohn. Sam was not only Peter’s agent but also represented Woody Allen, Meryl Streep, Robert Altman, Nora Ephron, Bob Fosse, Jackie Gleason, Arthur Miller, Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, and the list goes on. So when he asked me if I would like to be a client at ICM, with him overseeing my career, I jumped at the chance. I felt bad to leave Mary Sames, but she understood, considering Sam’s status as the biggest agent in the business, and we stayed good friends. Obviously, Sam had too many important clients to really pay attention to my career, but he became a dear friend to both Laure and me when we started spending time with him and the Yateses. He was an avid tennis player with a membership at the very fancy West Side Tennis Club in Queens, and he took me to play once or twice a week. The other old men there were various Captains of Industry and even though I was a total novice at tennis, I was a six-foot-four-inch, athletic, twenty-one-year-old kid, and we kicked ass in doubles matches. Then we would all have lunch in the beautiful Club Room and head back to the city. Sam was a very eccentric man. He loved to eat paper. Not only did he have a box of Kleenex next to his desk to munch on, but on more than one occasion, he would tear off pieces of a script or a contract that was on his desk and his assistants would have to make new copies to sign.
It took a year for Breaking Away to hit the theaters, and in the meantime, I was anxious to work more. Laure and I had barely escaped financial disaster when I got started getting paid for Breaking Away, with only days to spare, and my only “career plan” was to try to make more money now that I had my Screen Actors Guild card. Strangely, I had started off my film career by landing a leading role, so it was a bit of a step backwards to take a bunch of one-scene parts, but they each paid a few hundred bucks and there was no way I could say no. Luckily, each one not only paid the rent but also gave me a chance to work with the caliber of directors that Sam was encouraging me to work with.
I did a one-line part in Alan J. Pakula’s Starting Over—a scene with Burt Reynolds—and I got four hundred dollars, which Laure and I used to buy our first television. I had a horrible day shooting a one-scene role in a cool-at-the-time movie called A Small Circle of Friends. I played a kid going for his induction into the draft of the Vietnam War, who tries to appear mentally unqualified by tying a ribbon around his dick when he is going through his physical, and the whole day was spent hiding my junk, pressing myself into the locker just like I did in junior high school gym class. I brought home another four hundred dollars and a bit of PTSD. I got a small part in a film with Jill Clayburgh called It’s My Turn, where I played a brilliant college math student. The director wanted me to do some “character research” and had me take the train to Princeton and sit in on some very heavy-duty math classes. It sounded good in theory, and it felt cool to be introduced to all those brilliant students as an actor doing his homework for his big new film, but the truth was I couldn’t understand anything and could barely stay awake. I came away from that job with eight hundred dollars and the knowledge that I am not the kind of actor who knows how to do any real homework or research on a character.
I was still a total unknown, waiting for Breaking Away to come out, but Sam Cohn got me an interview with Woody Allen for his new movie Stardust Memories. I idolized him (and still do). As a teenager, I must have seen Take the Money and Run, Sleeper, and Play It Again, Sam ten times each, hitchhiking to Georgetown just about every weekend to the art house theaters. David Rosenthal and I even saw him do his stand-up act at Shady Grove (Jim Croce opened for him) and we laughed for weeks about him “being breastfed by falsies.” So the fact that I was meeting him was almost beyond comprehension. The casting agent led me into a darkened office where Woody was sitting in a high-back chair, barely visible in the shadows. He was extremely uncomfortable, mumbled in vague terms about the movie for maybe a minute or two, and then the casting agent led me out. Of course, I was over the moon when I heard I got the job, but the problem was I had no idea what the part was or what the movie was about. I was very anxious because I wanted to do my best for my idol and had no idea how to prepare. They told me Woody was very secretive about his films so just to be patient about getting a script. The night before I was to shoot, there was a knock on our apartment door and an envelope slid under it. Sure enough, it was from the production. But there was no script, only one page—the scene I would be shooting with Woody the next day. I was to play a young actor who was trying to give his resume to a famous film director (played by Woody). I practiced all night, trying to think of good ways to do the scene. In the morning, I brought in my real resume and some pictures from plays I had been in, including Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. Woody let me improvise and loved the Tevye reference. It was like living a dream, to be doing a scene with my biggest idol, and I was on cloud nine. Later that week, I got word that Woody liked me and wanted me to come back and do a second day of shooting. The night before I was to do my second scene, I stared at the apartment door like a dog waiting for the mailman, waiting for the knock and my scene to be slid under the door. Nothing. Morning came, and I went to the set. I got into my costume and had coffee, still not knowing what I was supposed to be doing. I finally got called to the set and Woody greeted me warmly. I thanked him for inviting me back and told him I had not received my page, so I wasn’t sure what the scene was, and he apologized. He opened his own, personal script and turned to the scene but instead of giving me the whole page, he tore out just the one line he wanted me to say at the bottom of the page. I still value that scrap of paper more than two of my children.
My other idol growing up was Paul Simon. I love every song he has ever written and know every one by heart. I taught myself to play the guitar from his epic songbook, and felt my life was basically his songs come to life. “The Only Living Boy in New York,” “Duncan,” “The Boxer,” and “Homeward Bound” were coming of age stories that hit me as hard as Holden Caulfield did in Catcher in the Rye. Paul was making a movie called One-Trick Pony that he wrote about his life as a musician. Sam Cohn represented the director and amazingly, I got cast again with no audition. The part was to play a Hare Krishna zealot who hassles Paul Simon at the airport, which was a big thing at the time. I really wanted to nail the part, even getting the official prayer book, Bhagavad Gita, to try to do some “character research,” although once again I failed miserably in that regard because the book was incomprehensible. The Hare Krishna all had shaved heads with little ponytails in the back, so even though it was a small part, I thought doing a character that looked so different would show some “range” in characters I could play. I flew to Cleveland to shoot the scene. The scene took place at night in the airport and so when my plane landed, I was already on the set, and they took me directly to the makeup trailer. I was disappointed to find out that I would not be having a shaved head with the little ponytail in the back. The director had decided my character was a Hare Krishna who was trying to not look like a Hare Krishna, so he was covering his shaved head with a bad wig. I ended up looking ridiculous, my head covered with a bald cap topped with a black polyester wig, but there was no time to fix it because I was immediately escorted to Paul Simon’s Winnebago. Paul met me with such warmth, and I was so beside myself to be sitting there with him that nothing else mattered. His brother Eddie, another great musician, was hanging out in there too that night, and I spent the next twelve hours going back and forth from Paul’s trailer to the set, doing the scene and then hanging out with Paul and Eddie. Paul treated me like a friend and made me so comfortable that it wasn’t until we wrapped at dawn, said our goodbyes, and I took off my costume that it dawned on me how ridiculous I had looked the entire night in front of someone I looked up to so much. I got back on the earliest flight out of Cleveland and was back home, with two thousand dollars and a dream realized, having never left the airport. Years later, Laure and I were walking up Columbus Avenue when a limousine stopped right in front of us and Paul jumped out. He gave me a big hug, told Laure what a great actor I was and how much fun we had had, told me how much Eddie liked me and that he hoped we could do it again sometime, and then he got back in the limo and drove away. It made me feel so good not only that he recognized me without the stupid wig-overbald-cap look but that he actually took the time to stop the car and tell me all of that. His talent is only surpassed by his menschiness.
By this point, Laure had wisely decided to stop pursuing her acting career and shift her focus to become a chef, at which she was immediately brilliant and successful. And finally, after a year of waiting, Breaking Away opened in the theaters and was a hit with the critics and audiences. It was only playing at a couple of theaters in New York, and I remember Laure and I standing across the street from one of them, watching in disbelief as audiences lined up around the block to see it. I was in a hit movie right out of the gate, soon to be Oscar-nominated. If I was just starting out now and got a great part like Cyril in Breaking Away, my agents would probably help me to map out a “career,” hire a publicist, and choose my next projects carefully to build my brand. But at the time, none of that entered my mind. I’d had a good start, but really my only career goal at this point was to have one.
COCAINE COUPONS
Once Breaking Away came out, I started to get auditions for good parts. The most exciting shot I got was for the role of Conrad in Ordinary People, Robert Redford’s directorial debut and another absolute masterpiece of a film. I got flown out to Hollywood to do a screen test. This was a ground-shifting event for me. The only time I had ever heard about “Hollywood Screen Tests” was in the old “Hollywood Movies About Show Business” I might have seen as a kid, and now I was flying in an airplane for maybe the third time in my life, in First Class, going to meet with Robert Redford and do a Hollywood screen test for what was obviously going to be an extraordinary film. Literally living the dream.
I worked very hard on the part. I even read the book—the whole book, start to finish, which took a long time for old Dyslexic Dan. I met with Redford before the test and we talked for a long time about the script, the part, the book. He must have known how nervous and excited I was, and took all the time necessary to put a green actor at ease. He wanted me to succeed, after all. That’s why he flew me out there. And he also wanted to get a feel for who I was as a person, how I would be on the set, and how I would handle it all. We went onto a small set with a skeleton crew and did take after take as he gave me great notes and I did my best to make the adjustments. Anyway, I did not get the part and was crushed. I had so clearly imagined myself in the part, as well as the leap I would make in The Biz. It was a good wake-up call, letting me know that my story was not going to be “the kid from nowhere gets a Hollywood Screen Test, shows his amazing acting skills, lands the part of a lifetime, and the doors of Hollywood Heaven open wide.” And when I saw the movie, I knew there was no way I could have played that part. In the vision that Redford had for that film, there is no one who could have played that part except Timothy Hutton. He gave an unbelievably beautiful performance that won the Academy Award, deservedly so. I felt good that I had at least been in the running, got to take my swing and be taken seriously for such a serious part. I mean, I had a Hollywood Fucking Screen Test with Robert Fucking Redford! Not bad.
John Schlesinger was one of the premiere directors in the world at the time, having directed Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man, and other iconic films. So when he cast me in his newest film, Honky Tonk Freeway, I felt I was taking a huge step in my career. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing that his best days were behind him and I would be participating in one of the biggest flops in American film history—luckily overshadowed by an even bigger flop which had come out a few months earlier, the infamous Heaven’s Gate. The script didn’t seem that great to me, but what did I know, I had only read about five film scripts at that point (plus the one-and-one-sixteenth pages of Woody Allen’s movie) and was not going to question the legendary Schlesinger. The movie was a huge ensemble filled with amazingly talented actors like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, William Devane, Teri Garr, and Beverly D’Angelo. All of the characters are taking the same freeway to the same final destination for some ill-conceived finale at a big hotel or something, and I played a hitchhiker named Spanky, who was a coke dealer and got rides in various characters’ cars. With so many characters, I didn’t have all that many scenes, but the ones I had were okay. In my pathetic Method acting attempt to create a memorable character, I decided to get my ear pierced with not one, but two earrings, and grow my hair out into a ponytail. My ear got infected right away, probably because I had it done at the pharmacy in the neighborhood, and the holes in my ears are still with me today, a forever reminder that for an actor like me, there is only madness to the Method. The movie was supposed to be a comedy, and even though we all were trusting Schlesinger’s track record to make it come together, the scenes all felt pretty lame. There were spectacular stunts being performed—car crashes, explosions, a water-skiing white rhinoceros—but the main source of entertainment on the set was cocaine.
The movie was a five-month shoot in Florida and Los Angeles and seemed shady from the beginning. My salary was fifteen hundred dollars a week, just over minimum, but the living expenses, the per diem, was two thousand dollars a week, which was paid in cash. So each week I was handed twenty one-hundred dollar bills to pay for all of my expenses. That is way too much cash to be carrying around, especially in Florida, and I just squirreled it away in a sock in my duffel bag. This was 1980, and cocaine was rampant. I had never tried it because I could never afford it, but on this movie, everyone was doing it—the director, producers, actors, prop guys, drivers—carrying around little vials with tiny spoons attached, filled with white powder, and whiffing it up all day long. I was playing a coke dealer in the movie, and there were scenes where I was supposed to snort the stuff, for which the prop department provided ground-up B-12 vitamins, but the real stuff was as available as the coffee at the catering truck. A gram of coke cost one hundred dollars, and the hundred-dollar bills everyone was getting for their per diem were soon referred to a “coke coupons.” I cashed in a few of mine, but I was still way too poor to be burning up my money that way. My gram would last a week or two while most people could snort theirs in one good night of partying.
One day, one of the head honchos called each actor into his office, one at a time, for a private meeting. When I went in, he had a grave look on his face. “I know there is a lot of cocaine flowing around on the set and I am very concerned. I hear there might even be an undercover NARC on the set and that would be very bad for the movie and the production. So you need to be very, very careful. I am not saying you are doing coke or not but please, if you are, I want you to promise me that if you want to buy coke, you will only buy it from me. That way you know it will be good and safe.” Not quite the ending to the lecture I was expecting, but eye-opening. Maybe the coke sales were funding the film? Who the fuck knows, but it was crazy.
And it turned out Schlesinger was one of the biggest abusers. He was an abusive man, anyway. He was nice and wanted to be liked by all of the actors, but he was absolutely terrible to his crew. He was semi-closeted gay and had a lot of gay men working around him, but treated them worse than anybody else on the film. The first assistant was a great guy named Michael, but John would only call him by the humiliating nickname he chose for him, “Cunt,” said with such an ugly bite I can still hear it today. John might have made one of the best movies I have ever seen in Midnight Cowboy, but he had a total lack of understanding of our movie or comedy in general, and was incredibly unprofessional and cruel. He ended up working the rare water-skiing white rhino to death, literally, refusing to stop doing takes with the poor animal until it finally had a heart attack and died. The ASPCA was on the set after that, and it is one of the few movies that cannot claim “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.”
And he almost killed me too. I had a scene where my character is sitting on the hood of a school bus, snorting coke. It was the end of the day and the last shot on location in Sarasota before the whole crew had to pack up everything and move to Fort Lauderdale, so tension was already high and everything was being rushed along. They brought me onto the set, I got up on the hood of the bus, and John yelled, “Action” as quickly as he could, before we had even rehearsed the scene. I had to stop the scene because I didn’t have the prop vial of cocaine to snort and John got pissed. He started calling everyone “cunts,” screaming for the prop department to hurry up and get me the prop. But the prop guys were either in the truck packing up or getting high, or both, and couldn’t be found, further enraging John. He finally yelled to his assistant, “Cunt, get me my briefcase!” The assistant brought John his briefcase, from which he pulled out his own little vial of coke and handed it to me. “Here, use this! Now let’s shoot this piece of shit and get the hell out of here.” At first, I thought, “Cool.” Not only would this satisfy my hope to be a Method actor and be more “real,” but I was going to get some free cocaine and save my “coke coupons” to take home when the movie was over. But I almost didn’t make it home, because with everything so rushed and the crew scattered, the crane with the camera kept fucking up as it came zooming into my face for a close-up. We did take after take, each time John getting more pissed, and each time me taking a big whiff of cocaine. I finished his first vial, so he gave me his backup. I must have done fifteen hits, one after another, and my heart started racing like it never had before. I didn’t want to die, but I also didn’t want John to yell at me. They finally got a usable take, John yelled “Cut and wrap!” and everyone launched into packing mode to hightail it to Fort Lauderdale. I smoked a pack of cigarettes and didn’t sleep for two days.
Sam Cohn opened a new restaurant and market in East Hampton that summer called The Laundry and hired Laure to run the market. Laure lived in Sam’s guesthouse, right on the beach, and was having the time of her life working with food and living in a million-dollar house. We missed each other so much but were both too busy to be able to visit. We talked on the phone but could both feel ourselves drifting away. Five months is a long time, and we were both living in worlds the other one knew nothing about. The final sequences of Honky Tonk Freeway shot in Los Angeles. To save money, I stayed at the Tropicana, the cheapest motel I could find and as sleazy as you can imagine. I was robbed there, someone breaking into my room while I slept, but luckily, they only took the wallet from my pants and not the huge roll of hundred-dollar bills in the sock in my duffle bag. By this time, Breaking Away had been nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture. Peter and Virginia Yates came out for the ceremony and invited me over to their suite at the four-star Beverly Wilshire Hotel to have champagne and caviar with them beforehand. When the limo took them to the awards show, I went back to the Tropicana and watched the Academy Awards sitting on the end of the flea-infested bed. Steve Tesich won for his screenplay and Barbara Barrie won for her acting, and it was incredibly exciting. When it came time for the Best Picture award, they showed a clip from each of the nominees. To my absolute astonishment, the clip they showed for Breaking Away was my biggest scene in the film, a sweet and funny monologue about how my father loves when I fail so that he can be sympathetic. I was stunned as I watched myself on the television, and even though another movie won, I felt as proud as if I had just won an Academy Award myself. Laure called me within seconds and we both screamed in amazement and joy. My parents called and none of us could believe that they had shown my biggest scene at that crucial moment. One of the biggest thrills of my life.
Honky Tonk Freeway finally ended. I flew home with my huge wad of cash. It had been so long since Laure and I had seen each other, and so many things had happened to each of us, that we were both a little anxious about seeing each other again, hoping we still had our connection after five months apart. That first night we went out to our neighborhood bar, the Dublin House, a very old-school Irish pub, for a drink. We sat in a booth in the back room, which we had to ourselves. Any awkwardness was gone within minutes, and we sat and drank and talked for a couple of hours, falling in love all over again. I mean, really falling in love, harder than I ever knew I could. In fact, my love for her exploded so much that at the end of that first night back, I surprised us both when I asked her to marry me. I had no idea I was going to do that, no ring or anything like that, only pure, overwhelming love. She said yes, and six weeks later we got married in my parents’ backyard in Chevy Chase with just our families and a few friends present, catered by the same people who did my bar mitzvah and paid for in hundred-dollar bills.
SHREVIE AND FRIENDS
Laure and I getting married took a lot of people by surprise, including us. I had just turned twenty-three, and even though all my New York friends were ten years older than me, none of them had even gotten close to getting married, and as my high school buddies had just graduated college, marriage was the farthest thing from their minds. Sam Cohn loved Laure after working with her all summer, but even he told me not to get married, that it would be a distraction from my career. Laure had already been married and divorced, and her parents were rightfully skeptical about her trying it again so quickly, especially with a mostly unemployed actor six years her junior. My brother and sister were both confused by it. My dad was smitten with Laure and my mom thought she was great, although they did have a long talk with her to try to talk her out of it, because they thought she could do a lot better than me. But there was no doubt that Laure and I were destined to make our own family together. Peter and Virginia Yates threw us a wedding party at their home in the Dakota and had us invite all of our weirdo New York actor friends, none of whom had ever been inside the historic building. It was eye-opening to see how out of place my friends were inside such a classy apartment, with beautiful trays of hors d’oeuvres and fine china and the Yates’s kids and the feeling of a substantial home. Laure and I looked up to the Yateses so much; they were role models of what we were striving to be, and they gave our marriage an auspicious beginning.
Which is why it was such a perfect time to land the role of Shrevie in Barry Levinson’s first film, Diner. Whereas Breaking Away was a coming-of-age film about how childhood friendships get tested by the diaspora that occurs at the end of high school, Diner was a coming-of-age story about how childhood friendships get tested when everyone starts getting married. Barry saw me in a really good play I was doing, How I Got That Story, and asked me to come in and meet. There was no audition; we just sat and talked for a half hour about the movie. The script was great, and the part was perfect for me at that moment in my life. Shrevie was the first one married among his friends and so was
I. The movie took place in Maryland (where Barry had grown up too) and we knew all of the same sports trivia about the Colts and the Orioles. I got the part and was in Baltimore before I knew it, sitting in a hotel room reading the script out loud for the first time with some of the best actors and best people I have ever gotten to work with—Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, and Mickey Rourke.
Barry Levinson has got to be the coolest cat to ever get behind the camera. It was his first film to direct and he had written the script. You would think he would hold on tight to his vision and his words, but his vision was about recreating the friendships and the world he grew up in—about hanging out, making each other laugh, riffing on each other’s bullshit, talking about girls—and we soon realized that Barry had cast each of us for our bullshitting prowess. We were all young men who knew how to hang out in a bar and kibitz the night away, which is what is at the heart of the Diner story. From the very first reading of the script he had us improvising, Barry telling his assistant to jot down some of the ideas we came up with. And it only got more loose as we started filming the movie. In the scenes we did with other actors, we stuck to the script pretty closely, although Barry always had an extra line or joke for us to try. But when it was just the guys, most of the script went out the window. He knew the film he wanted to make and was determined to make it, even though no one had ever made a movie that way before. There were about three or four weeks of night shooting where we did all the scenes of us hanging out in the diner. We would go to work when the sun went down, stay up all night improvising the hanging-out scenes, smoking cigarettes, and eating the prop food, and when the sun came up, we would go back to the hotel restaurant, order breakfast and Bloody Marys, and hang out again, with even more bullshitting and cracking each other up. We’d go to bed at ten in the morning and wake up at sundown to go to work again. It was absolute heaven! So many fucking laughs, but here are two I will never forget.
There is a scene when Guttenberg’s character is giving his off-screen fiancée a quiz about Baltimore Colts trivia to see if she is worthy of marriage. Steve thinks she will flunk the test and has a line where he wonders, “Do you think she’ll go down for the count?” When Reiser improvised the response, “No, but I heard she blew the Prince,” we laughed so hard and for so long that they had to shut down shooting for the night, because every time that line came up in the scene, we started laughing all over again. Reiser is as sharp as a razor and his quick-wittedness kept us all on our toes.
Steve, Tim, and I were all solid actors, but Kevin Bacon and Mickey Rourke were movie stars, even then. They had the animal presence and magnetism that defines all the biggest movie stars I have met, insisting on operating at their own rhythm, which can create moments of electricity that are priceless on film. But sometimes marching to your own drum in a scene can create moments of absurdity too. In one scene, Mickey’s character, a gambler, is in the diner having a conversation with his bookie, a guy named Bagel. Mickey’s character comes over to the table where the rest of our gang is sitting and tells us, “Bagel heard about my basketball bet,” to which we respond with some things like, “I hope you win” and “That’s a lot of money.” In trying to create a really interesting line reading, Mickey threw in a few extra punctuations marks, which totally changed the meaning, so that when he came over to the table, he said the line this way—“Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?”—as if Bagel was sitting at our table, which obviously he was not, and he was asking him if he heard about his bet. The scene came to a grinding halt and Barry explained to Mickey that Bagel is the guy he just came from, who heard about his basketball bet and now he is coming over to tell his best friends that “Bagel heard about my basketball bet.” Mickey nodded, and we began take two. Mickey started at the table with Bagel, walked across the diner to our table, and delivered the line the same way: “Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?”
We lost our shit laughing. “Bagel isn’t here! He’s there, at the table you started at. That actor there is Bagel. None of us are Bagel. We are Shrevie, Fenwick, Eddie, Modell, and Billy! No Bagel here. You are telling us that he heard about your basketball bet!”
“Okay, I get it now,” said Mickey. Take three, I swear to God he did it one more time. I don’t know if he had not read the script or he had just practiced the line so much one way that he couldn’t stop himself from saying it that way, but to this day, when the rest of us get together, “Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?” will still make us giggle. One night, I made the mistake of clashing with Mickey over the use of the single land-line phone we were allowed to use on the set. I wanted him to get off the phone because he was taking too long, and evidently, he wanted to put me in a headlock. Well, we both got what we wanted. Lucky for me, the fight was broken up quickly because Mickey is a beast—he went on to have a second career as a prize fighter.
Diner was one of the best creative experiences I ever had on a film, and the whole cast are still dear friends to this day. But the game-changer at the time was that I made thirty-five thousand dollars, which was a mind-blowing amount of money and made us able to afford to have a kid. The news of Laure’s pregnancy was another shock to friends and family, but Laure and I were more in love than ever, now bound together in a way that we didn’t anticipate. She couldn’t wait to be a mom and I couldn’t wait to be a dad. I had so much time on my hands between projects and wanted to put my energy into something real instead of wasting time living the unemployed actor’s life of Frisbee and smoking weed. Sam Cohn told me I had to be picky and patient in my career choices and that getting married and having kids leads to “selling out,” and he was right. I still had standards—no TV shows, no commercials, only good directors—but at only twenty-three with a kid on the way, I was in no position to turn down anything in the ballpark.
I got offered a role in my third Jill Clayburgh film, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, in which I played a young man in a mental institution who has an affair with Jill’s character after she is admitted to the facility. One of the best and one of the worst film experiences of my life happened to me filming that movie. The worst thing happened my first day of shooting. The movie had already been shooting for a few weeks when I got to LA to do my part. My first scenes were supposed to be on the mental hospital grounds, but because it was raining outside, they decided to go to the “cover set,” an indoor scene set aside for just such a situation. Unfortunately, the cover set was the scene where Jill and I are in bed making love. I had been dreading this scene ever since I read the script, but it was scheduled for the end of the shoot, and I figured I would be comfortable with Jill and the crew by the time it came up. The day’s schedule was already screwed with the change of locations, so they hustled me right up to the set. I walked in, clothes wet from the rain, and saw the situation. There was a bed with Jill Clayburgh in it, wearing a sexy nightgown. There was a camera mounted directly above, looking straight down on it. There were lights shining and a crew of about fifty men and women surrounding the bed. The director, who I had never met, came up to me and introduced himself, and told me the scene. “The scene will be you fucking Jill Clayburgh. Ready? Okay, let’s go. Get in the bed. We are running very late!” Get in the bed? This was my worst dream coming true before my very eyes. I was standing in my cold, wet clothes in the center of a room full of strangers who were waiting for me to strip naked, get in the bed, and start fucking Jill Clayburgh while they watched and photographed it. And somehow, I did it. I reintroduced myself to Jill, who unbeknownst to me thought I was great as her student in It’s My Turn and had them cast me in this. She joked about how sorry she was that we had to start with this scene, while I stripped off my wet clothes down to my tighty-whiteys and crawled under the sheets, freezing cold. The director quickly gave us his choreography—first kissing, then her on top of me, then me on top of her, etc.—and said it was time to remove my underpants. I was numb not only with hypothermia but with the out-of-body experience of acting out an actual nightmare in real life. My memory of the scene is quite hazy. Jill was a good sport. I think my balls finally thawed out from their initial raisin-like state into something more along the lines of a date or a kumquat. I had my butt up to the camera, pretending to pump away, although I probably looked more like a walrus making its way across the sand and back into the sea. Thankfully, we will never know, because I was cut from the movie.
The best part of making that movie was that Joe Pesci was playing a fellow inmate at the mental hospital and we became good friends. Even though this was a serious drama, Joe and I loved making each other laugh, a precursor to our future partnership. Joe put me on the floor with laughter one day when he walked over to the ping-pong table in the therapy room, took the huge roll of maps his character was walking around with, put it up to his nose like a straw, and pretended to sniff up the entire white line down the middle of the table. We still laugh about it. It was also the first time I stayed at the Chateau Marmont hotel, living in the bungalow next to my old friend, John Heard, who was shooting Cat People at the time. Having my big brother there was a blast, and the hotel ended up being my home away from home for years to come. Just goes to show that you never know what magic mushroom might grow out of a pile of cow shit.
Laure was very pregnant by the time I got into my first action movie, Blue Thunder, starring Roy Scheider. Sam Cohn had gotten me eighty-five thousand dollars for the part, which was almost triple anything I had ever made before, so Laure quit her job and for the first time was able stay on location with me. She was gorgeously pregnant, and this was our last hurrah at being footloose and carefree. We would swim in the pool at the Chateau, go to nice restaurants and explore LA, all while making money and being in a movie. It was a time of perfection. The movie was easy and fun. Flying in helicopters, crashing helicopters, doing a few stunts too. I played a rookie cop who gets killed, and I got to do a whole sequence of being chased by a car with my hands tied behind my back before getting run over. So fun! Roy was a client of Sam’s, and Roy’s wife Cynthia was the editor of Breaking Away who I got to know when Peter Yates took me into the editing room, so Roy and I were very comfortable with each other right off the bat. I knew Roy was a great actor and a huge movie star, but what I did not know was that he was a sun-worshiper, with an almost religious fervor. We wore one-piece flight suits as our costume and Roy had nothing on underneath his except a Speedo bathing suit. He kept a chaise lounge nearby at all times, as well as a reflector pan to hold under his chin, like you have seen in cliché movie scenes with rich movie stars sunning themselves. Whenever the crew had to set up for another shot, Roy would strip down to his Speedo, lie on his chaise lounge, flip open the reflector pan, and bake himself in the sun. It seemed funny when we were shooting on the Warner Brothers lot, but it was kind of weird when we were on location. I will forever remember the image of Roy sunbathing on one side of the chain-link fence and on the other, a crowd of South Central LA residents staring at him and yelling questions about Jaws or The French Connection. Blue Thunder was also the only time I was ever stoned on a movie set, although it was by accident. They had wrapped me for the night, and I had smoked a joint with the prop guys when the director realized he had forgotten to get a shot and asked me to come back to the set. All I had to do was walk up to my apartment, put the key in, and go inside. It sure seemed simple enough, but my heart was pounding and my guilt raging at being so unprofessional, so it took a few takes for me to get it right. Making movies is all about creative precision and focus, and being stoned never felt more wrong.
We came back to New York when the film was done and had money to buy a crib, do Lamaze classes, and get ready for the baby. I was in midtown when I called from a pay phone to check on her, and Laure said her water broke. I raced home and we gathered the baby bag, but when we got outside, I could not get a cab to save my life! Our doorman, Sammy, who still is a dear friend to this day, was an auxiliary policeman in his spare time and he was as nervous as we were about getting across town to the hospital while Laure was starting contractions. Sammy locked up the building, got his car, put his blue flashing light on the roof of it, and sped us across Central Park with his horn honking the whole way to Lennox Hill Hospital.
Life changed that night. I watched Laure go through labor and finally understood the near-mythical strength and power that women have that men can’t even begin to conceive of. At the moment of truth, when the baby’s head first popped out, the doctor let me reach in, grab the shoulders, and pull the baby out the rest of the way. I held the baby up, facing his mother, saw his balls hanging between his legs, cried out “It’s a boy!” and put him on Laure’s chest. The whole thing was utterly miraculous. I went to the coffee shop downstairs, got Laure some food, and we sat and stared at Henry until Laure was ready to go to sleep. I met my best friends at a bar where we drank and celebrated until dawn. I went back to the apartment and shot a little Super 8 film of myself, which to this day I have never had the courage to watch. I have been a father since that moment, and having our children is the most powerful, profound, religious, meaning-giving experience of my life, with nothing else even a close second.
Diner came out a few weeks later to an outstanding critical response. Another underdog film like Breaking Away—the audience and critics fell in love with it (and continue to hold it in high regard). The Diner boys and I did some publicity for the film, and we had a blast hanging out again, amazed that all the improvising we had done was actually in the movie! They were so excited and awed that I now had a child, and had tiny little T-shirts made saying “Hank,” “Dr. Stern,” and “Bird Jr.” I was only twenty-four years old, but I had it all. A wife and child, a budding career, incredible friends, an apartment, and even a little money in the bank. The tricky part of “having it all” is that in order to keep “having it all,” you have to work your ass off or else you end up “having it all turn to shit,” which is something I always try to avoid.
CALIFORNIA HERE WE COME
When Blue Thunder came out, I was invited to go on Late night with David Letterman to promote the movie. I was such a fan of the show and Dave was a fun and funny interviewer. A day or so before I was to appear, I got a call from the producer asking what I wanted to talk about on the show. I told him that we could talk about whatever Dave wanted to talk about. He told me that is not the way it works. He wanted me to tell him stories of things that had happened on set, anecdotes about my career or my life, and then they would pick the ones they thought were funny and have Dave ask me about them. I had no idea that was how it worked and had to come up with something funny and interesting enough for Letterman on the spot. I told him something off the top of my head, but there was dead silence on the other end of the phone, followed by, “Anything else?” I tried again, same reaction. I was getting desperate and realizing just how uninteresting a person I am, and getting the feeling that if I didn’t come up with something immediately, I might not be appearing on the show after all. I have no idea why I said it, but the words, “My uncle is a helicopter pilot,” came out of my mouth, trying to pick up the theme of Blue Thunder.
The producer perked up immediately. “That’s fantastic. What did he think of the film? Did he give you any tips?” I have no memory of the lie I spun for him, but it was enough to get myself off of that disastrous phone call and onto the show. Walking into the Ed Sullivan Theater, I couldn’t believe any of it was happening—me on Letterman in the theater where I saw the Beatles play on TV. The producer came into my dressing room and told me that Dave loved the stuff about my uncle and was going to go with that story. I feebly tried to guide him back to one of my other scintillating stories, but to no avail. Sure enough, when I sat down Dave’s first question was about my uncle, the helicopter pilot. Although I have not often been compared to George Washington for my unflinching truth-telling, the old adage, “Honesty is the best policy,” really came into play that night. Instead of trying to make up a fake story about a fake uncle, I told Dave and his audience I had lied. I told them how I had panicked when the producer asked me for funny stories because I did not understand how talk shows work, that I thought they were real conversations, not discussed beforehand and written on cue cards. Dave thought this was a fucking riot, and the whole segment turned out to be Dave loving the chance to go completely off script. Boy, did I pull that one out of my ass or what?
I wanted to keep making money. I took a terrible movie, a remake of Samson and Delilah, having to say phony biblical dialogue: “I anoint thee with this oil of hyacinth, on this day of days and this night of your nights,” which I still cannot get out of my mind. We shot it in Durango, Mexico, and I had to ride a horse, which was as foreign to me as being in this new country. I nearly bit the dust when the asshole who was supposed to teach me to ride put me on a horse bareback and with no reins, slapped the horse on the ass, and yelled “Hold on!” I barely clung to this wild animal’s mane while it raced across the dry plains of Mexico until it finally threw me off. (After that, I did my horseback riding scenes sitting on a tall ladder with wheels on it, being pushed by underpaid locals.) I did a movie called Get Crazy, a weird little film about the Fillmore East concert scene with Malcolm McDowell, Lou Reed, some awesome punk rock bands, John Densmore of the Doors, Dion, and Ed Begley Jr. The movie was silly, and I was terrible in it, but Laure, Henry, and I rented a house from Scherrie Payne of the Supremes, which included a swimming pool and a disco room, and we had the time of our lives. Laure and Henry went back to New York a couple of weeks before the movie ended. It was the first time I had been away from them, and I felt the punch in the gut of “life on the road when your family is at home.” It was bad enough before, being away from Laure, but with the baby in the mix, it was nearly unbearable. Henry and I were buddies in New York; we played all the time, going to the park, restaurants, food shopping—and being in a movie didn’t hold a candle to those simple pleasures.
When I got home, we had enough money to buy an old VW Bug and started driving out of the city so we could all experience nature a bit. We eventually rented a small cabin in Woodstock for two hundred dollars a month, and it gave us an entirely new lease on life. I had grown up a little hippie and so had Laure, and we were realizing that this was the dream we wanted to be living: getting back to the land in the ultimate hippie village. We spent more and more time in Woodstock, and it started to make New York seem claustrophobic. We still loved our friends, but we were our own family now, and our role in the group was changing.
One of the gang, Shep Abbott, wrote a script called C.H.U.D. Doug Cheek found a producer who would let him direct if he got John Heard and me to star in it, since we both had a bit of a movie career going. John didn’t even read it before he said he would do it. I read it, but there wasn’t really a part for me, so I said I would do it, but I had to write a part for myself to play. It is a story about homeless people who live underground and get poisoned by a secret toxic waste dump in the sewers. I decided to play a social worker who, like my real-life hero, my dad, fights for justice for the marginalized. So I invented The Rev. I rewrote the script from top to bottom, giving myself a great part, the hero who kills the bad guy in the end, and Doug was wide open to all the changes. We hired our friends and family in the cast and crew, including Laure as the first victim in the opening scene. We spent the summer filming in the sewers of NYC, and we were all in creative heaven. I got to go into the editing room as much as I wanted and for the first time helped make a movie from start to finish. The producer had the final cut, of course, and added some really terrible, cheesy monsters for the C.H.U.D.s, so the final product was kind of disappointing. But it was one of the best learning experiences of my life, and the movie has held on as a cult classic. I have even met people with C.H.U.D. tattoos on their bodies, which is nuts.
I was working on good films, but their success was hit and miss. I got to work with legendary director Sidney Lumet on Daniel, performing a page-and-a-half-long monologue as a 1960s revolutionary lecturing Tim Hutton’s character, but it was eventually cut out of the film. I had a great part in a mediocre movie based on a very good play called Key exchange, although the worst part of the film was that I had to do another nude scene, which went better than the two previous ones but was still absolutely traumatizing. Disney decided they were going to bring back “the short,” popular when movies first started showing in theaters in the 1930s and 1940s, a short film that plays before the film you came to see. Their first effort was a short film called Frankenweenie, about a dog who is killed and brought back to life by his young owner. A young animator named Tim Burton wrote and directed it, his first film. I am so proud to have been able to teach Tim everything he knows about filmmaking in our short time together and I accept his gratitude for my guidance. Seriously, he was a genius right out of the gate, shooting in black and white, with strange camera angles and an extraordinary set built on a soundstage. Such a great little film; but after we shot it, Disney basically abandoned the idea of showing shorts, and decided to focus instead on taking over the entire world.
