“The stunt guys are going to stop the bulls? How will they do that?”

“You know, like rodeo clowns. They distract them or something. Now, let’s get out there and give it a try.”

I can see why they saved this scene to shoot last, because it was one of the most dangerous and crazy things I have ever done. When they said, “Action,” Billy, Bruno, and I took off running with all of the extras and stuntmen. Then the wranglers released about fifty or a hundred wild bulls, who chased us down the street! When the shot ended, we ducked into a doorway or found someplace “safe” to hide until the bulls ran past us. Then the cowboys would herd the bulls back to the starting place so we could do it again. After several takes, the bulls were onto the game and stopped running so hard. You would think that would make it safer, but no. Instead, the wranglers started firing off shotguns to spook the bulls and get them to run even harder. Absolutely crazy. On one take, Billy got tripped up and fell down on the sidewalk. I was able to scoop him up and drag us both into a doorway. We were both kind of shaken up, and it was the only time I felt they were pushing us into unsafe territory. But having survived it, I am so glad it happened that way. I mean, I actually got to run with the bulls in Pamplona!

The movie wrapped, and I finally got to go home to Moss Beach. It would be good to have time to get to know my new house, my new town, and finally get to focus on my beautiful wife and magnificent children. And those fucking planes.

SEQUEL TIME

Moss Beach was beautiful. We committed to staying there at least through the school year, and we actually loved it. The planes still made me crazy, and I felt stupid for having not done enough homework on the property before we bought it, but we made the most of it. I signed up to coach Henry’s Little League team. The school seemed nice, and the teachers were good. There was a sweet little tavern just down the hill and Laure and I would go there for drinks on occasion. The neighbors were good people, and it was what we had hoped for living in a small town. Except for one thing—Home Alone. The movie was a worldwide sensation, and I had suddenly become more famous than I ever could have imagined. In the eyes of our neighbors, and especially the kids in school, Marv had moved to Moss Beach. It was a layer of weirdness that made us all feel a little out of place. I could hide as much as I wanted to, but my kids had to deal with it every day. Being the new kids without any old friends, they suddenly had to navigate these uncharted waters, trying to figure out who actually wanted to be their friend and who was just trying to get invited over so they could meet Marv. I still feel bad that they had to go through that confusion. It was weird enough being an adult and dealing with it.

Home Alone was so big that my agent got a call saying they were going to make a sequel to the movie, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and would I be interested in being in it. My answer was simple and to the point—Hell, yes!!! A sequel, are you kidding me? I had never even thought about being in something that would be worthy of a sequel, but this would be fun. And lucrative! Sequel money! It was announced in the Hollywood Reporter that Macaulay Culkin had signed up for the film and was being paid five million dollars and 5 percent of the gross box office. Not bad for a ten-year-old kid. I started fantasizing about what my salary might be, doing the calculus to try to figure out my relative worth. I knew Mac was the star of the show, but Joe and I seemed securely in second place. So I told my agent to just get me whatever Pesci was getting and that would be fair, and he said he would get back to me.

The movie wouldn’t start until the fall, so I tried to take my foot off the gas pedal, career-wise, and keep it simple for a while. I would drive up the coast into San Francisco once a week to record The Wonder Years and fly down to LA to direct a couple of episodes too, crashing at our Highridge Drive house. I was getting good at directing, freer with the camera, the actors and producers trusting me. And I had enough credentials to start making the leap into directing a movie. I interviewed for a couple of films, but my agents didn’t seem to have much of an interest in my directing career because I could make a lot more money as an actor.

But the negotiations for Home Alone 2 were going nowhere. It took months for them to even make me an offer, and when they did, it was for six hundred thousand dollars, double my original salary, but not quite the pot of gold I was hoping for. I asked if that was the same as Joe was getting, and they said it was not. They didn’t know what Joe was getting, but the studio wouldn’t tie my salary to his. It was every man for himself. I asked if I could see the script, and they told me it wasn’t ready yet. I thought it was crazy to ask me to sign up for a film that I hadn’t even read the script for. But I also felt that old feeling—“You almost fucked it up the first time, backing out of Home Alone because of a small amount of money and time. And you also almost walked away from City Slickers because of your pride. So don’t be greedy and fuck this up too! That is more money than you have ever made in your life!” But I did need to see the script to know what they were asking me to do, so I used that to delay closing the deal, which just added to the stress. I was on edge anyway, because by now, Laure and I had come to the decision that we had to get out of that house. Every time a plane flew over my head, my PTSD kicked in, which in turn made Laure feel horrible and helpless to help me.

So when the school year ended, we sold the Moss Beach house to a commercial pilot, who loved the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing. Go figure. We all moved back into the Highridge Drive house, but it still had all the same issues that made us leave in the first place. We spent that summer escaping up to Malibu to visit Cheech and to hang out at Westward Beach—a beautiful, wide, empty beach where the kids would play until the sun went down and we would eat peanut butter and lettuce sandwiches. And one day it dawned on us, “Why don’t we live out here? Instead of commuting out here to be at the beach, why don’t we live at the beach, and I will commute into the city?” We found a house to rent and moved in just before the school year started. Malibu was everything Moss Beach was supposed to be—a small town, a surf town, nature all around, great neighbors. The school was small but smart, and I could drive into town whenever I needed to. And I wasn’t the only famous person in the town. There weren’t that many celebrities out there at the time, but Johnny Carson, Lou Gossett Jr., and Barbra Streisand certainly outshone me by a mile, which was weirdly comforting and let me function like a normal person again. We would live in Malibu for the next twenty-five years.

I finally got the Home Alone 2 script, and it was so good! John Hughes is a genius. He had written another brilliant comedy and given my character a ton of funny and silly stuff to do. In the first movie, Harry and Marv start off feeling threatening, especially Harry, but by the end, you know what idiots they really are. In the sequel, John wrote them as live-action cartoons from page one. So that meant even more physical comedy challenges. I knew I had to do this movie, no matter what, but I also wanted to get a fair deal. Knowing Mac’s salary was five million plus percentages made my offer look pretty unfair, especially because the sequel would showcase my character just as much as anyone’s. I knew they couldn’t do the movie without me, but I was also insecure, since I almost blew it the first time. I didn’t want to be too greedy when I loved the movie and the part so much, which was why I was an actor to begin with. The studio upped their offer to eight hundred thousand dollars, but I also found out that Joe was getting somewhere between two and three million plus gross percentage of the profits. My agent told me this was the best he could do, that I should take the offer, and we would get a better payday somewhere in the future. So I did what any rational person would do. I fired my agent. It was a prideful thing to do, but I also knew that if this was the best he could do, then he wasn’t very good at his job.

The movie was supposed to start shooting in the winter, so I stayed home, took the kids to their new schools, and tried to deal with the game of chicken the producers were playing. With no agent, I now had to negotiate my own deal. I accepted that Mac was the star attraction. And I accepted that Pesci was a bigger star than me, so he could probably get more money than me. My position was that I wanted one point five million and 2 percent of the same kind of percentage that Joe and Mac were getting, whatever that was. They would not budge, and I would not budge. (I guess they hadn’t heard about my epic battle with the Washington Shakespeare Festival, where I held out for the hundred dollars I was owed.) The film was shooting in New York, and I wouldn’t go until I had a contract. By this point, it was days away from shooting and they were painting themselves into a corner. There was no way they could rewrite the whole script without me, and I wasn’t getting on a plane until it was squared away. I finally got a call from the head of the studio, my old friend Joe Roth. I explained my position and why I felt justified, especially compared to what my fellow actors were getting and the contribution I made to the success of the first one—and the one we were about to do. He was empathetic and said he would personally explain the situation to business affairs people. He said it would take time to resolve it and asked me to start shooting, even though I didn’t have a contract. I trusted Joe completely and agreed to go. Confident it would get resolved somehow, I finally felt the thrill of knowing that I was about to start filming a ridiculously funny film, with a great part, tons of old friends to work with, and making a boatload of money at the same time.

I got to New York and reunited with Chris Columbus, Joe Pesci, and John Hughes. My dearest old friend John Heard was back playing the dad and our insane stunt men, Leon Delaney and Troy Brown, were back too. I hadn’t worked in New York since we moved away, and it was exhilarating to shoot a big movie there. My dad had a meeting in New York and came to the set, one of the only times any of my family have been on one of my movie sets. I was dressed as Marv, with an iron-shaped scar on my head, hiding behind a tree or whatever stupid thing I was doing that particular day, and my dad was there to try to find solutions to homelessness and social justice. But I have a picture of us on that day, and I do see a hint of pride beaming through. He knew this was something extraordinary and was tickled to see his kid being good at what he does.

One of my favorite New York scenes was the one where the bird lady throws bird seed on us and we get attacked by a flock of pigeons. The pigeon wrangler told us the plan—Joe and I would lie down, he would throw food on us, and the flock of pigeons would land and cover us up. And he wasn’t kidding. There were so many fucking pigeons! It felt weird lying under them, having them walk around on us and peck food off us. Joe decided he wasn’t going to do it, so Troy laid down with me instead. I had the idea that when we were attacked, I would rise up out of the pigeons and recreate the scream I used in the first Home Alone when the tarantula crawled on my face. We got in position, the wrangler covered us in bird food, and an enormous flock of pigeons practically drowned us. My eyes were squeezed tight because I didn’t want to get shit or piss in my eyes, or get my eyes scratched out by pigeon claws as I waited for the director to yell “Action.” It seemed to take a very long time for him to give the command, but he finally did. I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to emit my trademark howl, only to have my tongue meet the raw belly of a live pigeon! It was a taste and a sensation I will never be able to forget—salty, slimy, warm, goose-fleshed, alive—and instead of a scream, I could only leap to my feet and try to spit that shit out of my mouth, and mind, as fast as I could. We did take after take, 50 percent of which included having more live pigeons in my mouth, but we got the scene the way we wanted it, so I guess it was worth the recurring nightmares I experience.

One of the bit players in the movie was Donald Trump. He was a crass and ridiculous New York character at that point, and he had just taken another bite out of the Big Apple when he bought the famed Plaza Hotel which, at the time, was the opposite of crass and ridiculous. Donald ended up doing a cameo, but his real contribution was letting us film there, lending the luster of the Plaza to the movie. The day he was filming, he asked to meet me. He was a “huge” fan of mine and the producers wanted me to chat him up, so I did. He was not a great conversationalist and kind of a nothing personality, but the meeting paid off brilliantly. The Oak Room is the bar inside the Plaza Hotel. One night Leon, Troy, and I were hanging out there drinking, when who should walk through the bar but Donald and Ivana, his wife at the time, waving to the guests and wanting to have his picture taken. (I now recognize that behavior when he crashes people’s weddings at Mar-a-Lago.) Donald spotted us and proclaimed so everyone could hear that he would be picking up the tab at our table. We all raised a glass to him in thanks and he left the bar, feeling like the host-with-the-most. We drank until there was no more booze left in that bar. We stayed until four in the morning, closing time in New York, and bought round after round of drinks for the entire bar. To this day, Leon and I dispute how much the final tab was, but it was at least seven thousand dollars. We still feel really good about that.

The bulk of the movie was shot in Chicago. I had a breathtaking two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, so Laure and the kids could come visit. I was recording The Wonder Years every week at a great recording studio, and I felt incredibly lucky to be doing those wonderful scripts and picking up that paycheck at the same time. Downtown Chicago has great music, and I went to the Blue Note jazz club as many nights as I could, blown away by the level of talent and creativity. (Side note—speaking of Home Alone and jazz music, you need to listen to Joe Pesci’s music. Joe is an extraordinary jazz singer, and it is not an overstatement to say that his talent is on par with the greats like Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald. He records under the name Joe Doggs, and his voice will blow your mind! He sings in a high tenor and his interpretations of classics like “All or Nothing at All” and “Love for Sale” are so full of insight and love that you will never look at Joe Pesci the same again.) It was great to hang out with my old friends from the first movie—Pesci and Heard and Leon and Troy—and make new friends on this one, notably Mr. John Hughes himself.

John hadn’t been around too much on the first Home Alone. As I would learn, John was a bit of a recluse who devoted himself to his writing. He lived on a stunningly beautiful three-hundredacre farm outside Chicago, with his family and his office and natural beauty, so I can understand why. But for whatever reason, once we got to Chicago, John visited the set on a regular basis. He was deferential and supportive of Chris Columbus as the director, and he was mostly just there to have some laughs and see his creation come to life. He had written so many funny things for my character to do and I wanted nothing more than to make John and Chris laugh in every scene. One of the greatest moments of my acting life was when we shot the scene where Marv comes into the basement, goes over to the sink, which the kid has rigged with electricity, and proceeds to electrocute himself. The first shot of the sequence was a wide master shot, with the camera and crew backed up against the wall so the whole basement and all the action could be seen. I asked Chris if he had any direction or notes before we shot the first take, and he said that I should just try one and see what happens. I had some idea what I was going to do but, having never been electrocuted like this before, it was going to be a new experience, and I was kind of curious as to what I was going to do myself. When Chris called, “Action,” I came into the room, went over to the sink, grabbed the spigots, and just went for it, instinctively channeling the Saturday morning cartoons I loved as a kid, or maybe the Chaplin movies or Jerry Lewis movies that made me laugh so hard. I started shaking and yelling and acting as electrocuted as I could, for as long as I could. I was very into the physicality of the moment, but the moment wouldn’t seem to end. I don’t know a lot about acting, but I do know that it starts when the director says “Action,” and it ends when the director says “Cut.” The electrocution went on a very long time and there was still no call to cut the scene. Having taken more electricity than is healthy for one man, I finally let go of the spigots and reacted to the aftermath of that trauma, dancing around like electricity was still coursing through my system. I thought maybe this would be a fun ending and Chris might be satisfied with the first take and call “Cut!” But there was not a peep. By this point, I was starting to run out of gas, so I incorporated my exhaustion into the scene, the electricity wearing off both for the actor and the character. I dropped to my knees and then to the floor, final spasms jerking my body until I became still, a heap of ash. I had nothing more I could do, and still I didn’t hear “Cut.” What the fuck? As I lay on the floor, I finally broke character and refocused my eyes to reality. I saw the crew and equipment at the end of the room and right next to the camera, rolling on the floor in laughter, I saw Chris Columbus. It turned out he was laughing so hard that he couldn’t say “Cut.” That is still one of the greatest compliments I have ever received as an actor. Such a confidence booster, and a validation that I was on the right track.

Knowing that I was free to be as much of a classic-style physical comedian as I was capable of being opened the door to the silliest side of me and let me pay tribute to all of the physical comedians I had always loved dearly. There is the scene when I pull an entire wall of paint cans onto myself, covering myself in paint and making the floor very slippery. I had a blast doing as much slippery silliness as I could, trying to look as out of control as possible. But if you notice, I do take one beat in the middle of it to do a rather graceful little cha-cha move, trying to feel as much like Dick Van Dyke as I could channel. Doing the scene of getting hit in the face with bricks is about as classic a cartoon moment as one could ever hope to get. What kid wouldn’t want the chance to hop inside a cartoon and do the silly stuff I got to do? I took full advantage of the opportunity, with such realistic-looking props and sets. I remember Chris standing just off camera, laughing his ass off and throwing foam bricks at my head, with me doing a stupider and stupider reaction with each new brick. I think the crew might have taken turns throwing them at me too because it was such a fantasy from all of our cartoon childhoods.

Because the physical comedy in this film was even more exaggerated than in the first film, the danger of the stunts that Leon and Troy had to do was even greater. There is a scene where Marv comes into the house, falls through a hole in the floor, and lands face down and spread eagle on the concrete basement floor. My part of that sequence was to step into the close-up shot and then fall out of frame. Leon’s job was to do the fall itself, and then I popped back in, post-fall, for the reaction shots. It was quite scary to watch Leon do this stunt. He really did fall from the first floor to the basement floor, face-down and spread eagle. The only concession was that instead of an actual concrete floor, he landed on a bunch of cardboard boxes they had covered with a tarp to look like a concrete floor. I was worried and asked Leon if there wasn’t anything better to fall into than cardboard boxes, perhaps foam or an airbag. He said that this is what the generals had decided and he was just a soldier. And he fucking did it! Wile E. Coyote could not have done a better face-plant than Leon did!

Troy had to do a stunt where Harry falls flat on his back onto the top of a car. Again, terrifying to watch. They had a real car and had “scored” it, meaning they had made cuts in the roof structure so that it was barely staying together and would break away when Troy landed on it. Troy was lifted by a crane, lying flat on his back, ten or fifteen feet above the roof of the car, and when Chris yelled “Action,” dropped onto the car. Evidently the roof was not “scored” quite as much as it should have been and therefore did not give way completely upon impact. It looked right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon—until the shot cut and Troy didn’t move. He was knocked unconscious, but he was a rodeo rider and shook it off pretty quickly. I got a little banged up (strangely, the worst was climbing out of the basement on a tower of tables, TV sets, and other junk, all of which had very sharp edges. My legs were black and blue for a month!), but Leon and Troy took the physicality to a genius level that contributed to the success of those movies as much as anything.

Laure and the kids came to visit, and we had a blast in Chicago, eating at restaurants and going to see Michael Jordan play. Macaulay was staying in a different hotel, but we picked him up and took him to the park with us to play. He was a sweet kid but had lived a very different life than my kids. He didn’t know how to play tag or throw the ball around. He was more of an indoor kid and had a lot of adult pressure on him from show business and parents and such. We realized he had formed a friendship with Michael Jackson, because when we picked him up, his hotel room was stacked, literally from wall to wall and ceiling to floor, with toys. Every conceivable toy, as if someone went through Toys “R” Us, took one of each, and dropped them in his room. All a gift from Michael Jackson. It made all of us feel really bad for Mac. My kids had experienced a taste of the distortions that fame can bring, but seeing what Mac’s life was like put things in a different perspective.

John Hughes and I started spending time together, mostly giggling. He was so smart and experienced, and I loved hearing his thoughts on moviemaking. He gave me some of his unproduced scripts to read, one of which was called The Bee—a pure physical comedy movie about a man who is trying to get his work done in his home office, but becomes completely distracted by his determination to kill a bee that has gotten into the house, eventually destroying his entire home. John had been having problems with the structure of the story, how to keep the tension up and not be repetitive. I loved the script and came up with a couple of solutions, and before I knew it, John asked me to come on board as the director to help develop the script and star in it. (We worked on it for the next couple of years, and I even got to spend time at his farm with him, and it is one of my biggest regrets that we never got to make that film.)

The more film they shot of me, the more I had them over a barrel in terms of my contract, especially because they liked my footage so much. With no agent and no lawyer, I negotiated the contract directly with the head of the studio, my friend, Joe Roth. Joe was truthful, respectful, and fair, and although Mac and Pesci got a lot more than me, I did get more money than I had ever made in my life: one point five million and 1 percent gross point of the film. Of course, I still had to pay my former agent 10 percent, and lawyer 5 percent, and accountant 5 percent, and 35 percent for taxes, so I probably came away with five hundred dollars in fresh cash, which was awesome! Having Joe Roth’s confidence and friendship meant the world to me. Our families loved each other, and we had so many laughs together. I respected him so much as my director in Coupe de Ville and now as my studio boss. But his influence on my life as storyteller was just getting started.

ROOKIE DIRECTOR—MIRACLES ON WRIGLEY FIELD

Life was very good. The house we rented in Malibu had fruit trees and a swimming pool and the kids were so happy living there. There was so much activity at the house with the three kids’ schedules, so we hired an incredible young woman named Robin Landon to be our nanny and help Laure manage our life. We started looking for a house to buy and soon found a place we loved—it was at the end of a dead-end road, on an acre and a half, and best of all, it had a path from the backyard directly to a private beach called Little Dume, a surf mecca and the most perfect little family beach you could imagine. The house was kind of shitty, but we didn’t care about that. If “location, location, location” is the ultimate guiding principle in real estate, this was a one-in-a-million opportunity. We were ready to meet the price of one point three million, because I had now saved enough to pay in cash. I still had The Wonder Years paycheck coming in every week, and once we had sold the house on Highridge Drive, we would be in great shape. There was only one problem. Before we could buy it, the house was confiscated by federal marshals, who had arrested the owner for some kind of embezzlement or something. They told us that once the trial was over, the government would probably put it back on the market, but they had no idea how long that would take. We were very disappointed and went back to house hunting but were happy in the rental house and in no rush to move again.

One day I got a call from Joe Roth. He had a movie for me to direct called King of the Hill, about a twelve-year-old kid named Henry who loves baseball and ends up pitching in the major leagues for the Chicago Cubs. He thought the script needed work, but he wanted to make it in the summer and felt I could make a really good movie out of it. “Do you want to read the script?” My mind was blown. I had been trying to get a movie made as a director for a long time. By this point, I had been hired as a director to develop a script at Imagine Entertainment called Clipped, about a man who gets a paper clip stuck deep inside his ear and suddenly possesses magical powers. I was the original director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. I worked on that movie for a year, trying to make sense of the story and the script. The jokes were lame and the plot was obvious and hokey, and I finally left the project because I couldn’t see how to pull it off. Well, Jim Carrey was hired after that, and it turned out the script didn’t have to make sense and the jokes could be whatever they were, because a force of nature was unleashed in that movie, and that was the magic element I did not see coming. I had probably developed four or five movies by this point, but none of them felt close to actually getting made. King of the Hill was already a green light. Joe sent me the script and we set up a meeting for the following week to talk about it.

The script did need work, and I dug in. This was another story about Kid Empowerment, one of my favorite genres of filmmaking. Between the two Home Alone movies and all of the great Wonder Years episodes, I had read enough top-notch scripts now to understand structure, character arcs, defining stakes, building comedy moments, and how to get the audience fully invested in a film. When it came time for our meeting, I was fully prepared. I told Joe about all the work I wanted to do on the script—developing the characters, new storylines, and expanding the fun of the kid’s journey into the world of major league baseball. I had page notes, dialogue fixes, and new characters to share, but Joe stopped me.

“This all sounds great, but I really don’t need to know about all of this. You would be the director, and you can make any movie you want to. All I really need are just five trailer moments.”

“Five trailer moments? What do you mean?”

“I need to sell this movie to make money on it, and I need five big moments in the film that we can put in the movie trailer and commercials to make people want to come to see it. That’s how this works.”

Coupe de Ville was an intimate comedy about family and small moments, and I don’t remember him as a director trying to make any big moments that would play well in the trailer. (Maybe that’s why it didn’t do so well at the box office.) But as the president of 20th Century Fox, Joe had his eye on the prize, and it was a great lesson. It turns out that not only are those Five Big Trailer Moments great selling tools, they are also really fun and big moments in the film, helping to make the rollercoaster ride of the movie constantly entertaining. What a gift he was offering! We shook hands on the spot.

I had my first meeting with the writer, Sam Harper, and the producer, Bob Harper, in a conference room at Fox. I told them how much I liked the idea of the film, and how I had some thoughts on how to make it better, and we opened our scripts to page one. Since the film is about an extraordinary season of baseball, I had the idea of the movie starting out on Opening Day at Wrigley and then, through a fly ball, transition to our hero, Henry, and his friends playing baseball in his backyard. This was a very different opening than was written in the script, and my proposal was met with a resounding silence. Another peripheral producer who was in the meeting was the first to speak. “Well, I think the opening in the script works just fine. Are you planning on making changes on every page? Because we will be here forever.”

I said something to the effect of “Yes. Yes, I am. This is what I talked to Joe Roth about. I am going to make the changes that I think the script needs to make it great. I am going to lay out my ideas, and I want honest feedback on what you think. So yes, this is going to take a long time and a lot of work. So let’s keep going.” Bob and Sam were great. This was the first film for both of them, and they trusted my experience. My ideas were strong, well-thought through, and necessary. And once they saw that I was open to their ideas too, the floodgates opened. Sam and I dove into the script, stripped it down, and rebuilt it together.

Movies are successful when the casting is right. I first offered the role of Henry to Jake Gyllenhaal, who was such a sweet kid on City Slickers and was perfect for it, but his parents had different plans for his career. I think we were turned down by the kid from Free Willy too, but mostly we put our energy into a nationwide search for The Kid. The kid who would have the innocence, cockiness, humor, and awkwardness that the role demanded. We watched videotapes of kids from all over the country, and even flew some in for screen tests, but were having trouble finding the right kid to play Henry. My son Henry, who had absolutely no interest in show business, saw me struggling to find the right kid and said that if I needed him to play the part, he would try to do his best. He was so adorable in wanting to help out his desperate dad. Luckily, one day Thomas Ian Nicholas walked in the door. He was so perfect for the role I could barely contain myself. He read all of the scenes with heart and humor and could make acting adjustments when I asked him to. Once we locked him in, the movie came into focus. We just needed to cast our leading man to play Chet Steadman (named after my childhood best friend from Bethesda, David Stedman), the old, washed-up baseball pitcher whose life will be turned upside down by this twelve-year-old boy. We rewrote the character with Sam Elliott in mind, but he turned us down. One day Gary Busey came in to meet about playing the part. I had loved him in The Buddy Holly Story and Point Break but didn’t know too much else about him or his reputation as a bit of a madman. But I found out quick. Gary burst into the room with an energy that only Gary possesses. “Good morning, Mr. Stern! I am Gary Busey, and I am here to bring you the NEWS! Are you ready for the NEWS!? Are you ready for me to bring you the NEWS?”

I guess I was a little dumbstruck by the question and didn’t quite know what to say, so he continued. “Do you want the NEWS?! Do you even know what the NEWS is!??!”

I was a little taken aback and getting slightly annoyed, so I said something like, “The news is reporting on when new things happen. Right?”

“Wrong!! The NEWS stands for North, East, West, and South! Every direction! And that is how I am going to play this character, from every direction. I am going to bring it from the North, the East, the West, and the South! I will make you laugh and make you cry and everything in between. Now, feel my head.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Feel my head!” He grabbed my hand and placed it on the side of his skull. I didn’t want to be rude and resist too much but he did have to use a little extra force to keep my hand there to complete the examination of his skull. “That is a steel plate you are feeling. I had a pretty bad motorcycle accident a couple of years ago and they had to put this plate in my head. And ever since they did, I have had such a new connection to the world. I am so blessed to be here, and I want to be a part of your movie!” There was more bizarre conversation, and he did some sort of theatrical exit, leaving us all in shock and hysterics at the nonsensical behavior. He looked perfect for the part, was certainly charismatic, and had been great in other movies but, no way, he was too crazy. We made an offer to Nick Nolte, who turned us down, and maybe one other person, but we were getting close to the start of shooting and had to have someone who had some kind of box office track record for the studio to be comfortable. Joe Roth said that if I could handle Patrick Dempsey’s nuttiness, I could handle Gary. And so we cast him.

I had a good cry when it was time to leave the family, upset to have to leave these wonderful people and the complicated and beautiful life we had made in Malibu. I moved back into the Four Seasons in Chicago, into the same two-bedroom suite I had on Home Alone 2. I knew the staff at this point, the jazz clubs, and restaurants, and felt weirdly at home there. The job was intense. I only had a few weeks to get everything ready to start shooting: writing the script with Sam, auditioning local actors, scouting locations, setting the shooting schedule, and hiring the local crew. The talent pool in Chicago is deep, and we put together an incredible cast with actors from Steppenwolf and Second City. The crew was outstanding, bringing their creativity to every aspect of the film, from costumes and props to set building and camera operating. But the most amazing part of the experience was the baseball itself. I loved to play baseball, coached Henry’s Little League team, and went to major league games whenever I could, but I had never seen the game played at the highest level up close and personal. Wrigley Field is the oldest baseball stadium in the world, the Vatican of Baseball, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life to get to know every square inch of it as we searched for the best places to shoot our scenes, put our cameras, build our sets, and store our equipment. We hired Tim Stoddard, a former major league pitcher, as our technical advisor. Tim was in charge of training the actors to look like baseball players, as well as helping choreograph the baseball action in the movie. We spent weeks on the field planning the shots, although I did not pass up the opportunity to goof off a little and take batting practice, infield practice, and catch fly balls in the outfield, crashing into the famous Ivy Wall. It was my deepest childhood dream come true. Unbelievable. The baseball players were astonishing. Their skill level, accuracy, strength, fearlessness, and discipline are beyond belief. We had Barry Bonds, Pedro Guerrero, and Bobby Bonilla do cameos, and the way they hit the baseball sounded like gunfire.

Our cast was terrific, but we didn’t have any major movie stars in it, and the studio asked me if I could play a part in the movie. They thought my connection with the target family audience from Home Alone might help get some butts in the seats. I told them I really had my hands full trying to direct this very complicated movie. Besides, there wasn’t really a part for me. But when they told me they were willing to pay me seven hundred thousand dollars to be in it, I was suddenly inspired to write one, and that is how the baseball coach Phil Brickma came to be born. Since the movie was an homage to baseball, I thought it would be fun to have an oldtimey character like Brickma, who has maybe taken one-too-many fastballs to the head in the pre-helmet era of the game. (There is a scene in the movie when Brickma is taking batting practice, fouling balls off the top of the batting cage and having them ricochet back and hit him in the head. I had gotten pretty good bat control from taking batting practice, and it took a few takes, but I finally got a couple of them to actually come back and hit me in the head. It was such a tiny moment, but one of the most satisfying I have ever filmed, combining my love of athletics and physical comedy, with the pressure of the whole film crew watching.)

The other thing I wanted to accomplish with the character was to have him not be in too much of the film. I wanted to be behind the camera when we were filming, and not have to be in front of the camera focused on my acting. So I came up with the idea of having Brickma get himself trapped in various places, so that he would miss all the big games in the movie. It was so fun to come up with new ideas and have the crew carry them out so perfectly. I was in my hotel suite when the idea of getting trapped in the tiny space between the two doors of the adjoining rooms hit me and made me laugh. I told the set designer the next day, and in three days, they had built the set and we filmed it. The production designer and crew were so good and flexible.

It dawned on me that a great model for the film was The Wizard of Oz. Henry Rowengartner slipping on the baseball, breaking his arm, and then being able to throw the ball so hard that he winds up playing for the Cubs is the tornado that takes Dorothy to Oz, and they both enter worlds beyond their imaginations. So I asked the set designers to make the doors to the Wrigley clubhouse look like the doors to Oz. Sure enough, when we came to the set to shoot the scene of Henry entering his Oz, they had built doors just like the originals. We played the scene as an homage to that film, including the gatekeeper saying the famous line, “Well, why didn’t you say so? Now that’s a horse of a different color!” I saw the Ray Charles Pepsi television commercial one night after shooting and thought it would be great to have Henry Rowengartner become so famous that he does the same ad. Before I knew it, Pepsi had given us permission, the crew had built the set, found backup singers, made the kid’s tuxedo, and we filmed the scene, which turned out to be another big “trailer moment” in the film. What a gift directing is, leading a collaboration of so many brilliant people in a coherent direction to tell a story to an audience. It was everything I hoped it would be and so much more.

But you do have to be the leader. The very first shot of the very first day of shooting, I looked to Jack N. Green, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer.

“So where do you think we should put the camera?”

“Where do you think we should put the camera?”

“I’m not sure. I thought you were the cinematographer.”

“You’ve been working on this script for months and seeing each scene in your mind. So you know the story better than anyone. I just got here a week ago and I’ll be gone when we’re done shooting. This is your story. So when you have been imagining this scene, where was the camera?”

It was such the perfect thing to say, empowering me in a way that has informed the rest of my work and my life, and it made me take the reins of the film in just the right way.

I loved the actors. I embarrassed myself more than once on the set as I cried watching their performances. Directing Gary Busey was a bit challenging, but he gave a great performance and I grew to like him a lot. But one day I lost my shit on him. The Cubs had a doubleheader and had granted us twenty minutes between games to film on the field, with a real sellout crowd in the background. It was an amazing opportunity for a Big Trailer Moment for our little film, but twenty minutes is not a lot of time. We rehearsed a lot and knew we had to execute our plan perfectly. Our movie crew and cast stood in the runway to the field as the first game reached the bottom of the ninth. The only one missing was Gary Busey.