But maybe the most life-changing thing about my wonderful years on The Wonder Years was that I actually learned to read. I had already gotten a little bit better at reading from reading more and more scripts. I even ventured into reading books for fun every so often, once I discovered Harry Crews and Elmore Leonard, although they still took me a while, fighting through my dyslexia. The years of reading The Wonders Years stories out loud, week after week, year after year, vanquished my fear of reading out loud, of the dreaded “cold reading,” a fear I thought I would never overcome. I can now pick up any book or script or article and read it cold, almost flawlessly, with meaning and understanding. I have no idea how I do it, except that so many times I was handed a new rewrite of a Wonder Years script and had to read it cold, with meaning and understanding, so my brain learned how to process the information and make it come out of my mouth, while keeping me and my fears out of the way. I am still flabbergasted and proud every time I do that.
Narrating the show was the opportunity of a lifetime. Every script was great, and I loved my part in each one. Every week I got to tell my story to America. Sure, I was playing Kevin Arnold, remembering his stories. But his stories always felt like my stories—my first kiss, bad teachers, great teachers, my older sister, being a hippie, the music, and on and on. My connection to the show was bone-deep and the connection the show had with audiences, and still has, makes me deeply thankful to have been the voice of this seismic cultural experience.
The show ended after six years, one short of where I think it should have ended. If Kevin had had one more year, we would have watched him graduate high school and deal with the final coming-of-age rituals that happen at that time. But for whatever reason, they pulled the plug. It was a late decision, and the writers had to try to write a decent finale in a very short time, with no chance of the real groundwork being laid in the shows leading up to the last one. But like the true champions they were, they wrote a beautiful final script, wrapping up stories, giving glimpses into the future and saying a heartfelt goodbye to the audience that had been with us the whole time. In the final moment of the show, the premise of the whole series, that Kevin Arnold is now an older man telling the story of his childhood, comes into play for the first and only time. Suddenly there is another voice on the narration track, the voice of a child talking to the Narrator, interrupting his storytelling and asking him to come outside and play. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but that very last day, I brought my son Henry to the studio and he read those lines, playing the unseen son to my unseen character. Like I said, from the very first time I read it, The Wonder Years always felt like it was really my own personal story that I was telling every week, and having Henry there bringing it to a close was almost more than I could handle. The recording session lasted much longer than usual because I kept crying in the middle of the reading, so sad to see it end and so proud of what we had accomplished.
ENTER JOE ROTH
Life was very full at this point. California started to feel like home. With the money from the New York co-op and the movies, we bought the rental house in Beverly Hills Post Office. Henry and Sophie consumed our lives, driving them back and forth to each of their schools, play dates, sports teams. When Henry was five, I signed up to coach the T-ball team in the Beverly Hills Little League, loving teaching those little boys and girls the game and soaking in their innocence. (Throughout their childhoods, I coached all of my kids’ baseball and basketball teams.) The joy increased exponentially when our third child, Ella, was born. At her birth, we had a different doctor in a different hospital, but I felt the same awe when I got to pull her out by the shoulders and announce her arrival, “It’s a girl!”—which was the right call, because she was, in fact, a girl. (Two out of three ain’t bad.) I was only thirty-one and had a ton of energy, which was needed to put the time and focus into raising three very different kids, each with their own needs and at very different developmental stages. Laure had become the greatest mom, wife, and partner in the world, and kept our lives organized and our bellies full. And while the kids were young, we decided that instead of me leaving everyone at home when I got a movie out of town, everyone would come with me. When Laure was a teenager, her father was in the foreign service and was stationed in Spain, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Every time the family moved, Laure watched her mother find a house to live in, schools to attend, stores to shop at, and cultural experiences to learn from for the kids. Who knew that all of that would come into play in our lives, but she was built for this. Working on good films and bringing my family with me was my deepest dream come true.
Joe Roth is one of the most brilliant movie producers and executives ever to participate in show business—starting his own company, Morgan Creek, then running 20th Century Fox, then Disney, Revolution, and on and on. I didn’t even think about who had those executive positions at this point because my boss was always the director, and I didn’t need to please anyone but them. Morgan Creek was producing some of the best films around, but Joe decided to take a break from producing and to get behind the camera and direct a sweet little film called Coupe de Ville, another terrific coming-of-age story of three brothers on a road trip needing to readjust to life with the news that their father is dying. I really liked the script, and the part was a tough Air Force pilot, the oldest brother and disciplinarian, very different than any role I had ever gotten to play. Joe and I met, and he gave me the part. He had loved the coming-of-age movies I had been in, Breaking Away and Diner, and I think wanted to capture some of that feeling in this movie. We shot the film in Florida and South Carolina, and Laure packed us all up and moved us into houses and neighborhoods in both places, even finding summer camp for the kids. Not only did Joe and I hit it off right away, but Joe’s wife Donna and Laure became fast friends. They were in the same boat as us, with a newborn baby, finding housing, shooting the film, and we all became friends for life during that time. Joe was a really good director, very encouraging and focused on the nuances of each character. He had a clear vision of the film but was also open to letting the actors own their characters and improvise. Maybe a little too open.
It was a comedy, but the storylines were filled with conflict, which the cast was more than capable of creating. It was an intimidating joy to do scenes with the hyper-talented Alan Arkin. He played my father, and watching the subtlety he brought to everything he did was like getting a masterclass acting lesson in real time, forcing me to find the simplest truth in each and every beat of a scene. And off camera, his humility as a person and an artist were life lessons in themselves. My younger brother was played by Arye Gross, the actor who had temporarily replaced me on The Wonder Years. Arye and I became fast friends, had a great time doing our scenes together, and really bonded over dealing with the actor who played our youngest brother, Patrick Dempsey. Patrick was an up-and-coming young star, handsome and funny. He had done a couple of teen comedies, but he acted like he was a major movie star. He was probably around twenty-three, and he had recently married his acting coach/manager/guru, Rocky, who was about twenty-five years older than him, and the two of them set out to undermine the director and take over the film. I have worked with arrogant actors, but I have never seen anything like this. Rocky would be on the set, and after we did a take, instead of coming over with the rest of us to talk to the director about adjustments he might like to make in the scene, Patrick would beeline to Rocky, who would whisper her notes to him. It was incredibly disrespectful, but Joe didn’t want to cause a problem with one of his lead actors, so he tried to manage the situation rather than confront it. Rocky’s notes to Patrick seemed to be all about how to draw attention to himself at every moment of every scene, even if that meant not doing the dialogue, taking other people’s lines, doing extraneous physical business to distract, and whatever else the two of them came up with in their fucking little confabs. I got tired of that shit real fast and told him so. He said his character was a clownish person and he was just playing it to push my character’s buttons, which would be fine if that was what the director asked us to do. But this had nothing to do with the collaboration that needs to take place on a film set and everything to do with ambition and self-aggrandizement.
I finally lost my shit one day. The movie is called Coupe de Ville because the three brothers are driving their father’s prized car across the country so he can have it back before he dies, and my character is the one who does all the driving. The picture car was a beautiful and rare car and, both as the character and the actor driving it, I had to take really good care of it. We were shooting a scene of us driving down the highway, talking about something or other, and Patrick was riding shotgun. In one of the stupidest improvisational moments in film history, Patrick slides over to me, pins my foot down on the gas pedal, and tries to wrestle control of the steering wheel from me. The camera crew was driving right beside us, filming from an open truck, and this putz risked crashing into them, running us all off the road, and killing people. I slammed my elbow into him to get him off of me and he finally slid back to his side of the bench seat. I pulled the car over, went around the car, and pulled him out. I think he scared himself, or at least knew he had crossed a line, but still tried to laugh it off as just “improv.” The crew pulled us apart before a real fight began, but I made it clear I wasn’t going to play that way anymore. From then on, Joe took more control of things, Rocky was not allowed on the set, and Patrick got moved to the back seat. Assholes.
Joe and I really bonded over it all. When we got back to LA, our families were still seeing each other regularly. He knew that I was interested in directing, and when he decided to shoot an additional scene to open the movie, which had younger actors playing the three brothers, he asked me to come to the shoot and help him direct the child actors, since I had experience doing that from The Wonder Years. I offered absolutely no help whatsoever, but it was flattering to be respected in that way. And this was just the beginning of the influence Joe had on my career and my life. Joe was not only editing the film, but secretly negotiating to leave his own company and take the job of running 20th Century Fox. Only a couple of months later, I was in Chicago shooting a film, and Joe had taken the reins at Fox. He called me up one day with very exciting news: “Hey, I just bought your movie.” That movie was Home Alone.
“SO WHAT ISJOE PESCI REALLY LIKE?”
Iwish I had footage of myself the first time I read the script for Home Alone. I was alone in the house, lying on the sofa in the living room, and it was the first time I read a script that made me laugh so hard that I got stomach cramps. John Hughes’s screenplay was a masterpiece, the perfect family Christmas story. He thought of some of the best physical comedy gags ever and he wrote them with such specificity, shot by shot, that it was like watching the movie already made. It would be a riot to see what I must have looked like reading it—rolling off the sofa in laughter and then tearing up when the neighbor saves the day and the family reunites—like a crazy person going through every emotion in the world by himself in a room. From page one, I started to see myself in the role of Marv Merchants. I absolutely loved physical comedies when I was a kid—Stooges, Chaplin, Keaton, Marx Brothers, Bugs Bunny—but that kind of comedy had fallen out of favor, and John’s script was brilliant in bringing that lost art form back to the big screen. By the time I put the script down, I was determined to get that part!
I can’t remember what scenes were used for the audition, but I met the director, Chris Columbus, in the National Lampoon offices at Warner Brothers. I listened to Chris’s vision for the film and then did the scenes a few times. He seemed to like what I did, but when I was driving home, I felt disappointed in myself. I replayed the scenes in my head, and thought about the vision Chris had talked about, and I suddenly understood exactly how I should have played it. I pulled over, called my agent, and asked them to call Chris and ask if I could come back and try it again. My agent assured me that wasn’t necessary, but I insisted, and I stayed on hold until he got the okay that I could go back to Warner Brothers and try it again. So I did. Chris told me later that he had already decided to cast me and there was no need to come back, but I didn’t know that. I wanted to give myself my best chance to be a part of something very original and laugh-out-loud funny. And it was a good chance to really try to play Marv for the first time and lock in with Chris and John’s vision of the film.
My agent made the deal, the same as I had gotten on Coupe de Ville, three hundred thousand dollars for six weeks of work. I was very happy with the deal but feeling anxious and guilty about leaving the family behind; it was too much to ask Laure to move us all again. Just before I was about to leave, I got a call saying they had redone the shooting schedule and they would now need me for eight weeks instead of six. They were asking me to add on 33 percent more shooting time, so I asked if they were going to raise my salary the same amount, and they said they were not. My agent said to just do it anyway, that when you get to this pay level, you commit to the project, and the weekly salary doesn’t matter. But I was still in the blue-collar work paradigm of getting a daily or weekly rate for one’s work and I didn’t think it was fair, since the deal had been set for a month or so. My guilt at leaving my family further clouded my thinking, and I ended up making one of the stupidest decisions in my show business life—I backed out of the movie. They hired another actor, and he and Pesci started rehearsals in Chicago. I still had The Wonder Years directing and acting work, but I realized quickly what a mistake I had made and was kicking myself for letting my pride get in the way of doing something I deeply wanted to do. The gods somehow intervened (and when I say “gods,” I mean Joe Pesci), because after a couple days of rehearsal, I got the call that they wanted me back in the movie and that they would honor the original contract and make the schedule six weeks. By that point, I was so full of regret that I would have done it even if it took six months to shoot!
Within a day, I was sitting in a restaurant in Chicago with Joe and Chris, laughing, drinking beer, and talking through the film. Chris wanted us to be as scary as we could at the beginning of the film so the audience would feel a real threat to the kid, and who better to scare people than Joe Fucking Pesci. Joe said he was going to make up a cartoon language for when Harry gets angry and frustrated, which Chris loved. Marv was always the dumber and sillier one, so I was looking for my way to play against Joe. In Stooges talk, Joe was Moe, and I was a cross between Larry and Curly. It was so fun to work with the costumer to find just the right look—the coat, sweater, and shoes—and with the makeup artist to figure out just what kind of damage an iron was going to do to my face. We shot on location at the house that has now become a tourist destination spot but at the time was just a nice house in a nice neighborhood, with the locals hanging out on the sidewalk right there with the movie crew. It was winter in Chicago, so it wasn’t pleasant, but it was perfect for creating the look of the Norman Rockwell Christmas that we were going for. Joe and I started with a few of the scenes parked in our van, plotting our fool-proof strategy, and it was a nice way to break the ice, but the fun began when we actually started to try to break into the house.
This film had absolutely no special effects. Everything in it really happened, relying on great camera work, great props, and great stunt people. The first physical comedy scene I shot was Marv going down the outside stairs to break into the basement. Kevin, that little devil, has made the steps icy, sending Marv falling and sliding down the stairs on his back. We started shooting the scene. I walked to the top of the stairs, scanned my surroundings, took my first step onto the icy stairs, slipped, and fell backwards out of the shot and onto a nice soft landing pad behind me, just off camera. We did a few takes and got some funny ones. Then they set up for the stunt of Marv actually sliding down the concrete stairs. Leon Delaney, my brilliant stuntman, took his place at the top of the stairs, Chris said, “Action,” and I watched in painful amazement as Leon threw himself up in the air, landed hard on his spine at the top stair and proceeded to slide down the entire flight of concrete stairs on his back, landing in a heap at the bottom. Holy shit, it was something to see, so painfully funny, and the whole crew applauded loudly—and set up for take two. Leon did it again, and then again, each time adjusting to Chris and the stunt coordinator’s notes to “Jump a little higher,” “Slide a little bumpier,” and “Keep your face hidden,” until they got it exactly how they wanted it.
I vividly remember sitting with Leon that night between takes and asking him, “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Fuck yeah, it hurts.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Because I have two girls in college and Daddy’s got to pay the bills . . . and besides, it’s really fun.” It started to dawn on me just how far we were going to take the physical comedy, that it really was a live-action cartoon. They moved the camera to the bottom of the stairs for the shots of me sliding down the last few stairs, getting up, and breaking into the house. Leon gave me his body pads, apologizing for how sweaty they were (even in freezing weather). They felt good to have on, ready to take a hit like I was wearing football pads, and I decided to go for it as best I could. I slid down enough stairs to get good momentum to crash land on the bottom landing. I thought it would be fun to make it super slippery when I tried to stand up, and I had the set decorators grease the landing to make it easy to slide around. At one point, I brought my slip-and-slide to an abrupt end by sliding my feet out to the side to brace myself in the narrow stairwell, channeling a Roadrunner cartoon, the way something chaotic comes to a sudden, frozen, comic halt. It was a small beat but felt just right, and the crew and Chris loved it. The scene was really funny, and I now understood how this movie was going to work—Leon would do the big stunts, but I was going to have to keep up my end of the bargain and bring this cartoon to life when it was my turn in front of the camera. Joe’s stunt double was Troy Brown, a former rodeo rider who was tough as nails. I watched him and Leon do such dangerous things that any other normal human would end up in the hospital if they did them—falling from the staircase after the paint cans to the face, climbing across the rope in the backyard and then crashing into the side of the house—but because of their professionalism, they not only survived but thrived in their craft.
There were so many fun gags to play—the nail in the foot, glass Christmas bulbs crushed into my feet, paint can to the face, iron to the face, BB gun to the face (my face took a beating!)—it’s hard to pick a favorite because I loved doing them all. John had written each one so vividly, and the way Chris and the cinematographer shot them brought them to life just as I had imagined. I knew just what Marv was supposed to look like in each shot, with each lens, just how Redford had taught me, although in a very different milieu. The prop department was genius, creating such realistic props that it made you feel like each gag was really happening. Christmas bulbs made of sugar crunching under my feet made me feel the pain that poor Marv was feeling. Driving a rubber nail into my foot and feeling a foam iron smash me in the face are as close as I ever want to get to having those things really happen, but what an opportunity to get to play it out in such a funny and safe way. The worst I ever got hurt was doing one of the simple scenes. It was a perfect comic frame, sticking my big face through the doggy-door and right into the camera, with a big shit-eating grin, only to get shot in the face with a BB gun and have to pull my head back out again. The problem was that my nose is so fucking big that not once, but twice, I clipped it on the frame of the doggy-door when I was pulling my head out and gave myself a bad bloody nose. It’s those little ones you think are simple that will get you every time.
But the weirdest one had to be the scene when I have a tarantula crawl on my face. The day came to shoot that scene and I assumed the genius prop department would come up with a realistic-looking tarantula, but when I got to the set, the prop was just a rubber bug, no mechanics for it to move or crawl. That’s when they brought in the “Tarantula Wrangler” and introduced me to a very large and scary-looking spider. The wrangler explained to me that they had done some tests where he had let it crawl on his face and nothing bad happened, so it was probably safe. I asked how he trains a tarantula and he said that they are not really trainable, but as long as I didn’t make any sudden moves, I should be fine. He explained where the poison is located on the spider, how it bites, and how long you have to live once you get bitten. He told me that they could remove the poison, but that the tarantula would then die. I said I understood, but if the tarantula bit me then I would die, so maybe we should think about removing the poison. But I could tell that was not going to happen. The scene had me lying on the floor, not noticing the spider crawling up my body until it eventually crawls across my face, at which point I scream with fear. I was concerned that when it came time for me to scream in the scene, that might scare the tarantula and cause it to attack me, but the wrangler brushed off my concern, telling me that spiders can’t hear. I guess that could be true, since as far as I know, spiders don’t have ears, but this question had never come up in my entire life. I was going to have to hope for the best. Before the camera rolled, they had it crawl around my face, just to get it used to the terrain, and I started to get comfortable with it. By this point in the filming, I was loving the challenge of each individual stunt and gag, and ready to take a few chances. Once I got comfortable, I could really let it rip. They rolled the cameras and released the tarantula onto my face. It just walked around randomly but any time it got into a good camera position, I was ready to go. The crew squirmed, watching it go in my mouth and all over my head, and that only made it more fun. I wanted the scream to sound like the woman being attacked in the shower in the movie Psycho, and I think I got pretty close. Once we got those shots, we moved on to the equally dangerous part where Pesci beats me with a crowbar. Joe had a rubber crowbar, and I had a pad protecting my stomach, but he got me good a couple of times on unprotected areas. Quite a badge of honor, to have been beaten by The Man himself. God, did we have fun!
There were only a couple of scenes where Joe and I got to act with Macaulay, and he was as sweet a kid as he appears in the movie. Chris was so great with all the kids, directing them so that they felt they were doing a great job, making them feel safe, keeping things simple, giving them line readings, and acting out for them so they could mimic him and clearly know what he wanted. John Hughes didn’t really spend much time on the set, trusting Chris completely—and probably spending his time writing all the great scripts that came after this one. We didn’t have scenes with any of the cast except Macaulay, but we did get to cross paths with everyone and watch them work—Catherine O’Hara was a hero and great in the film, Kieran Culkin was just as funny at age seven as he is now, and John Candy’s improvisations had everyone rolling on the floor with astonished laughter. But the biggest treat was that John Heard played the dad. An amazing twist of fate that the stranger who took me into his home my very first day in New York and I would now be doing our third movie together.
I rented a little apartment outside of Winnetka and ate at the Wendy’s next door just about every night, barely able to take care of myself on the road. I missed my family so much, but it was frustrating trying to talk to the kids on the phone because, frankly, they were boring as hell. In person, we talked and played and did homework, but on the phone, everything was a monosyllabic answer. They wanted to get back to real life, not answer questions from a disembodied dad on a phone call. At some point during the shooting, Warner Brothers decided the budget was getting too expensive and wanted to unload the movie. I got that call from Joe Roth, who had been running 20th Century Fox for less than a week. He saw the footage of what we had shot and scooped up the movie, seeing the potential the film had. I finished my six-week stint and was glad to get home to Laure and the kids and our friends—and started looking for my next job, with no idea that the film I had just put in the can would become the worldwide cultural phenomenon that it has become.
THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS? . . . GETTING FIRED!
I loved our sweet little house on Highridge Drive in Beverly Hills Post Office. I was so lucky to have found this little oasis. It was a last-minute decision not to move to Woodstock, which was going to be the cure for the claustrophobia and pressure caused by living in Manhattan for twelve years, and our house on the top of the canyon felt like we had moved to the country. But our little, secret, natural hideaway had been discovered by rich assholes bound and determined to make it theirs, and in doing so make it not little or secret or natural or a hideaway.
Some pretentious prick bought the house next door and started doing major construction to transform a modest house into a palace, including drilling pylons right next to our house to support the upper deck swimming pool he was putting in. It drove me insane. Pastureland a block away, where sheep used to graze, was plowed over to build Beverly Park, now one of the most exclusive gated communities in the world, home to Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, oil barons, and such. We started looking around LA for what would be the equivalent of Woodstock, a couple of hours outside of town where we could buy a house in nature, with a lot of space and privacy. We looked in Ojai and Santa Barbara, but they were too expensive and had already been discovered by the pompous glitterati anyway.
Laure’s family had a tiny, nine-hundred-square-foot summer cabin in the middle of a national forest in Lake Tahoe that we got to use for a couple of weeks each year, another little, secret, natural hideaway, with no entitled assholes in sight. The water was pristine and icy, and we spent every day at the beach, playing and swimming with the kids. This year in particular was fantastic. Our kids started hanging out with some other kids on the small beach, and Laure and I got to be friendly with their parents and grandparents. We had cookouts and got to know each other and told them of our desire to move out of LA. One of the families was from a place called Half Moon Bay, a small town right on the beach, an hour away from San Francisco, with good schools and modest prices. It sounded like the perfect town for us but was probably too far from LA to move to. But I decided to take a peek at it on the drive home, and the amazingly generous people from the beach gave us the keys to their house so we could spend the night there. Since it was going to be a lot of extra schlepping, Laure and the girls took a plane home, and Henry and I drove the loaded-up Chevy Suburban to Half Moon Bay. It was spectacular, with a Pacific Ocean beach with huge rock formations. The farms on the hillside were like out of a painting. We drove through the neighborhoods, by the little league field and the elementary school, and I could really envision raising our family there. The house we stayed in was in a very nice, suburban-feeling neighborhood, and Henry and I went to dinner that night at a place called The Distillery, right on the water. We decided to eat on the outdoor porch, with the waves crashing and mist overtaking us. It was an incredible night with Henry, but I was really wishing Laure was there so we could have shared the absolute romance of this day and night.
The next morning, we packed up for the drive to LA, and as we passed through town, I spotted a real estate office and decided to pick up one of those real estate listing magazines to bring home to Laure, just so we could fantasize about it together. I spoke to a very nice realtor there. The prices for homes with land were so affordable compared with Ojai and Santa Barbara, the schools were great, and it was so easy to get to the San Francisco airport and get a plane to LA if you had to. She told me of a house in an even smaller town a few miles up the coast called Moss Beach. This house was on seven acres, overlooked the ocean, and was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. She asked if I wanted to go look at it right then, since I was there, just to see, and that is what we did. Moss Beach was a tiny town that consisted of one block with a bar, a pizza place, and a video store, all a person really needs. We drove up the hill above the town to a dirt road and took that small road until it came to a dead end and some impressive-looking gates. The gates opened, and an incredible, tiled villa and guesthouse laid out in front of me, with the Pacific Ocean right below. We went inside, and it was like out of a magazine—huge windows, professional kitchen, bedrooms galore, and an interior courtyard, complete with swimming pool. There was a sauna and steam room, but my mind was officially blown when I got to the “his and hers” bathrooms and the “his” bathroom had a urinal. Who ever heard of having a urinal in your house? It all made me laugh, especially the thought that all of this could be had for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I called Laure from a pay phone and told her I thought I found our new house. We talked about it all week and flew up the next weekend so she could see it. She was blown away by it too, and we felt our vision of living in a small town in the countryside with a bit of land was finally within our reach. We bought it the next day and started making plans to move in time for the kids to start the new school year there, which was only about six weeks away.
I was prepping for directing an episode of The Wonder Years—scouting locations, casting, scheduling—when I got a call to go in as soon as I could to audition for a new Billy Crystal movie called City Slickers because Rick Moranis had just dropped out and the movie started shooting very soon. I got the script delivered to my house that night. Like Home Alone, the script was absolutely perfect, full of great characters, inventive, truthful, insightful, action-packed, and with fall-on-the-floor laughs. The character was Phil, a sweet, self-loathing guy with a terrible wife, who had so many good moments of comedy, heroism, and friendship over the course of the movie. By the time I finished the script, I wanted this one a lot. I went in the next day and, holy shit, there was Billy Crystal! And a bunch of other people who I would end up knowing well but at the time were a blur because, holy shit, I was going to read the scenes with Billy Crystal! I knew this character very well, the jokes were natural to me, the rhythms perfect, and the audition felt like a home run. Sure enough, I got the job. It was shooting in Colorado and New Mexico in ten days, but I needed to start right away with horseback riding lessons at a ranch in Griffith Park, because so much of the movie takes place on horseback. My agent got me four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a surprising and enormous leap in salary. The tough part was it was going to take three and a half months to shoot. I was in almost every scene, so there would probably be no time for any trips home, and it was right when we were supposed to be moving to our new house in Moss Beach. But I had to say yes, and I had to say it fast. The producers at The Wonder Years were great and said of course to take the job and that I could direct a different episode when I got back. The nice thing was that they agreed to replace me with my first assistant director, who would finally get his break to make the leap to being a director. Before I knew it, I was in Griffith Park staring at TJ, who had been chosen to be my horse in the movie.
Horses and I do not get along. I have already told you of my death-defying horse-riding experience on the set of Samson and Delilah in Durango, Mexico. The only other time I had been on a horse was when Laure and I were on our honeymoon trip to England. We took a very freaky side trip to the Moors, land of ghostly spirits (check out my episode of the TV show Ghost Stories), but it got dangerous when the owners of the inn we were staying at gave Laure and me their trail horses and sent us on our way. The horses were very old and slow, and I started to relax, letting go of my PTSD. Laure was a natural on the horse (and is now an accomplished rider), and it all felt right out of a postcard or TV commercial—young lovers on horseback, sun shining, flowers blooming. But things changed rapidly when, from out of nowhere, a helicopter came tearing across the landscape, flying as low as a crop duster, and buzzing right over us. Both of our horses reared up on their back legs, something they probably hadn’t done in fifteen years. I held on for dear life and watched my wife hold on for hers. The horses bolted, galloping across the moors. Luckily, they were old, so they ran out of gas after a couple hundred yards. We got off those fucking horses, walked them back to the bed and breakfast, and drank whiskey with the weirdos in the bar until our nerves calmed. The point being, horses and I don’t get along.
TJ was different. TJ was a real movie horse. He had done a lot of movies, maybe more than me. His trainer was Jack Lilley, a legendary horseman and stuntman. I told Jack my bad experiences and fears, but he didn’t care. He knew I had to learn to ride because the movie started shooting in a week and the first scenes were on horseback. Billy, Rick Moranis, and Bruno Kirby had all been training for months to prepare for the riding, and I had a lot of catching up to do. Jack basically took me on a pony ride, leading TJ around the arena and teaching me the fundamentals of how the gas pedal, brakes, and steering wheel work on these things. I held on tightly to the horn of the saddle and Jack kept telling me to let go, because “You can’t ride like that,” but my survival instincts were on high alert. Eventually I got the reins and walked TJ around the arena by myself. Well actually, TJ walked me. All I had to do was hold on. They had picked the mellowest horse in the stable, and he knew just how to handle me. It’s supposed to be the rider who is the leader, in control and command of his horse, but every horse I have ever been around can read me easily and knows they are in charge of the situation, and TJ was no different. TJ was a pro. He knew his job. Jack and his trainers would tell TJ to do something, and he would do it. He broke into a trot when Jack clicked his tongue and stopped when he raised his hands. I moved the reins to guide him through a figure-eight pattern, but he already knew what he was supposed to be doing. My first-day confidence was building. I got a tiny glimmer of how this could work, although knowing all the herding of cattle, stampedes, and galloping that were written into the script, I was still very intimidated. But not as intimidated as when Billy and Bruno arrived at the arena.
Billy and Bruno had done When Harry Met Sally together, playing best friends, and the friendship stuck. Billy and the writers, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, had written the part of Ed especially for Bruno. So just like the story, these two best friends were living their fantasy, getting horseback training from the best in the business and making a real Western movie. We kibitzed for a few minutes, and then they hopped up on their beautiful horses, already saddled by the wranglers, and took off. I watched them gallop and trot, even ride backwards. I watched them herd and rope cows. These guys had been training a lot and were proud of all they had accomplished. They tried to encourage me, but I obviously had a long way to go.
I was no better the second day than I was the first, which is to say ridiculously bad, especially considering the riding challenges that were coming up very quickly. The director, producers, and writers came out to Griffith Park to watch and work that day and I got to know everyone a bit more. The one issue seemed to be that I looked a little too young. We were all supposed to be having a mid-life crisis. Billy and Bruno were both ten years older than me, and everyone felt I didn’t look “mid-life” enough. I tried on some glasses, which helped make me look a little older, and that seemed to solve the problem.
When I went for riding lessons on the third day, they had a makeup trailer in the parking lot. Billy and Bruno were doing tests on the progression of how dirty they should get over the course of the film. Evidently people were still a little nervous about how youthful I looked because the makeup folks tried some aging makeup on me. They put lines around my eyes, which I thought looked pretty fake. They tried more lines on my forehead, which looked even worse. But it hit an absurd level when they said they wanted to try a bald cap on me. I said I didn’t think that was going to work. They agreed, but insisted I try it, just to show the producers. They squeezed a terrible-looking bald cap over the top part of my head, leaving my hair on the sides and the back showing. I guess they were going for the classic Larry David look, but with the aging makeup on my eyes and forehead, the look was much closer to Bozo the Clown. While Billy and Bruno were trying on their sexy, dirty cowboy look, I was looking in the mirror, horrified and embarrassed, thinking how terrible it would be to ruin such a wonderful script and movie by looking like I came straight from Ringling Brothers. The producers knocked on the door and said they wanted to speak with me, so I stepped out of the trailer to show them how ridiculous this look was. They agreed it was not the right look but said that was not what they wanted to talk to me about.
“We don’t know if you know this, but the reason Rick Moranis left the film was that his wife has been diagnosed with a very serious form of cancer and Rick left to be with her.”
“Oh my God, I had no idea.”
“Yes, it’s terrible. The thing is, he’s changed his mind. He wants to come back to the movie. He and his wife decided it would be best for Rick to keep working and carry on with life. And so he wants to come back and be in the film.”
“Oh, okay. So I guess I’m out?”
“We are so sorry. You would have been great. And thank you for being so understanding.”
“Sure, I understand.”
