Blessed
Life and Films of Val Kilmer
By
William Dean Hamilton
Copyright 2015
Introduction 3
Young Val Kilmer 5
Acting 11
Wesley 12
Another Side of the Journey to Julliard 14
Julliard 16
Theater 18
Movie and TV Introduction 23
One Too Many 24
Top Secret 24
Real Genius 27
New Mexico 28
Journey to Victory 32
Murders in the Rue Morgue 33
Top Gun 34
The Man who Broke a Thousand Chains 36
My Edens After Burns 37
Africa Unbottled 40
Willow 42
The Seventh Man 46
Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid 46
Kill Me Again 46
Joanne Whalley 47
The Doors 50
Children 54
Thunderheart 57
Girlfriends 59
True Romance 60
The Real McCoy 60
Tombstone 61
Christian Science 67
Wings of Courage 68
Batman Forever 69
Heat 74
The Business of Acting 76
The Island of Dr. Moreau 81
The Ghost and the Darkness/Man-Eaters of
Tsavo 85
Nelson Mandela 92
Dead Girl 92
The Saint 93
The Prince of Egypt 98
At First Sight 106
Africa project 112
Joe the king 115
Three Days 116
Red Planet 117
Pollack 119
TV 120
The Salton Sea /High Stakes at Salton Sea 121
Hard cash 126
Masked and Anonymous 126
Wonderland/24 Days in Wonderland 129
Advertisements 133
The Missing 135
The Night Job 135
George and the Dragon 135
Charities 136
Blind horizon/Black Point 142
Spartan 145
Stateside/Sinners 148
Delgo 148
Mark 150
Alexander 150
The Prophet 153
Collateral 153
A Killer Inside Me 153
Mindhunters 153
Awards 156
Troubled Val 158
Blessed 164
Extras 167
Introduction
Val Kilmer is on the set of a major motion picture, his lines have been memorized, he has a general picture of the character he wants to present in the upcoming scene. He has a concern about the depth of his character; he is in search of new insights that surround this old, and often times flat, character.
The obvious person to ask is the director. Val seeks him out, you can picture director Joel Schumacher trying to juggle actors, and oversee crew members. He’s a busy man who’s overseeing a monstrous project. Schumacher has already had some disagreements with Val, but Val is the star, right? Can the movie work if the star doesn’t get it right?
Val approaches Schumacher and asks him what his motivation is for the next scene.
Schumacher says, “You’re just f*****g Batman, just go out there and do it.”
I’m not 100% sure if the story is true, but I have included it here because I think that even if it’s not true it’s like a metaphor for Val Kilmer’s career. You can see Joel Schumacher’s point, it’s just Batman, you aren’t going to get an Academy Award no matter how you play the role, but you can also see Val’s.
This leads me to ask the question, could there be a star in Hollywood who gives too much. At what point does the quest for perfection stop being an asset and become a liability? If such devotion to craft is possible then Val Edward Kilmer is guilty. The actor has consistently chosen hard roles over ones that would have given him more money and fame, yet his total gross box office is well over 1.5 billion dollars.
Jim Morrison is one of the main roles people think of when you say the name Val Kilmer. I think this is because with Jim Morrison we can see, the videos, and pictures, and can hear his music. This gives us a better vantage point with which to measure his character by, we don't know who Moses, Doc Holliday, or his other characters are in such a real and personal way.
Polo magazine reported, “Kilmer learned 50 Doors songs, 15 of which he actually performed on-screen. All the live musical numbers in the film were done by Kilmer except for five lines, including a scream. The background vocals were Morrison’s.” According to Paul Rothchild, who was a record producer for “The Doors,” Kilmer’s and Morrison’s voices were so remarkably alike the Doors’ guitarist, Robby Krieger, and drummer, John Densmore, guessed wrong 80 percent of the time when he switched between the two. (The Doors' keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, refused to cooperate with the making of the film. ‘It hurts to disappoint someone who knows the truth ...,’ Kilmer told Jeffrey Ressner of Rolling Stone [April 4, 1991]. ‘[But] the people I was directly involved with convinced me I was on the right track, and what else can you ask for as an actor?’)
Polo magazine continued, “Kilmer's physical resemblance to Morrison was no less striking, once he had styled his hair and inserted black contact lenses that gave his eyes a permanently dilated appearance. ‘It was like having [Morrison] back for a while,’ Krieger told Ressner. ‘Spooky.’”
Robert Ebert said, “It was more like a case of possession.”
Even Jim Morrison’s own band members guessed wrong 80% of the time. Val became more like Jim than Jim was. This isn’t an isolated incident, Val’s acting abilities are apparent throughout his whole film career. Robert Ebert also has said of Val Kilmer that he is one of the most underappreciated actors in America. His portrayal of Doc Holiday in “Tombstone” has been often called Oscar worthy. Some say his portrayal of “Ice Man” in “Top Gun” stole the show from Tom Cruise.
The Saint grossed 169 million, Prince of Egypt 218 million, Batman Forever 335 million, and Top Gun 344 million.
In acting, like other arts, you cannot say that there are absolutes, like a certain person is the best actor to ever live, but rather that there are plateaus at which many actors and actresses reside. Most people are at a certain level most of the time, but at the top level, there are only differences in style, or in certain characters one plays. Without a doubt Val Kilmer is at the top plateau of acting, there is no one in Hollywood is at a higher level; Val has earned a reputation for being anything a writer can dream.
Young Val Kilmer
The year is 1959; it’s New Years Eve in the small community in the northern tip of the San Fernando Valley known as Chatsworth. The city is a sleepy place destined to be overtaken by the metropolis of Los Angeles, but for now it is a place where people who have a few coins in their pockets can maintain a slow rural pace surrounded by the beauty of mountains, while being close to the tireless diversions of LA.
The chill would hang in the air, but there probably was no snow that night, even though it was one of the coldest of the year, because of the southern Californian climate. The night would be more exiting than the usual night, parties would be sprouting up, and lovers would gaze up at the sky and wish for things the future year would bring.
In LA, two of the city’s residents would get their wish for the future, a little boy. Gene and Gladys Kilmer decided to name him for a vice president in Gene’s company, Val Edward Kilmer. Val isn’t short for anything. That little boy was like a little melting pot, with Swedish, German, Mongolian, Scottish, Irish and Cherokee blood
flowing through his veins, some have suggested that this is the reason he turned out so handsome.
They would raise the boy next to, and eventually in, Roy Roger’s ranch, send him to school with Kevin Spacey, and Mare Winingham. The Manson family lived not far away before anyone knew who they were, Val would visit Spahn ranch. People who were great and those who would be great surrounded Val, like a portend of the future.
Val’s immediate family had money when he was growing up, but had very humble beginnings. “My parents were completely non-materialistic; they just don't care about ‘things.’ But still, put it this way: if I became interested in motor cycling racing, I didn’t have to get a paper route to get a bike.” Val’s father owned an aerospace parts distributor, and made then lost a fortune developing real estate.
Gene Kilmer was born to a Cherokee mother and gold-miner father, originally from Tennessee, who was 60 at the time of his birth. He was raised “in a log cabin” and “dirt poor” on Zuni Indian land in the Apache Mountains of New Mexico, although he was born in Texas.
Val remembers, “instead of Mother Goose, we were brought up on true stories from his life. His stories were like the Southwest version of Mark Twain – full of piercing insights into character and culture and nature, with perfectly satisfying plots.”
“(My grandfather) played the fiddle and he was very opinionated. Once, while he was playing at a hoedown, these two guys got into a fight. One guy shot the other one through the heart and killed him. My grandfather broke his fiddle and said he’d never play it again. And he never did. It’s strange coming from that kind of background. When I’m not working, I don’t like to be the life of the party.”
“Once my grandfather was off prospecting, and my father was about eight, and there was a bear in the wilderness neighborhood. So he decided he was going to protect his mom and go capture and kill this bear. And so he dragged the rifle out, which he couldn't carry. He was dragging it -- and they found him asleep under a tree with this gigantic rifle across his feet, under a tree in the wilderness.”
“My dad was very eccentric, extreme in his personality, elusive, powerful but shy... My grandfather built the house that he was raised in. They were attacked by Indians, robbed by Mormons. My grandfather and his gold-mining partners killed a bunch of Italians, blew ‘em up inside the mine. At one point my grandfather was knocked unconscious either by a tomahawk, or rifle butt, or a rock, and was in a coma for the better part of a year. Finally he got a metal plate in his head, which would make him go crazy in the winter when it got cold. My grandmother was younger and couldn’t take him being crazy anymore—sixty-seven years old and still living outside—so she came to California.” Val’s dad was attacked by a bald golden eagle when he was eight. He fought the bird off until his dog Zuni chased it away, but not before the bird scarred his chest.
“It really was a wild life that (my father) grew up in. There were no fences. There were Indians, Hispanic communities as well and wild animals.” Occasionally his dad would kill for meat for their survival. “I grew up thinking there was still wild life here, real primal nature. So I went looking for that same feeling. Maybe I was born with it, with that desire, that I’m just in the wrong time for.”
“We grew up on the edge of Los Angeles County... and it was still wonderful country then. L.A. was once really and truly Shangri-la. An hour away from where we’re standing, there’s every kind of terrain that exists in the world… We were still in (Los Angeles County), but there were deer and bobcats and mountain lions in Chatsworth, in the hills. So I grew up really craving this wilderness my father had described and found it in Africa and other places, but I also migrated toward places we visited that made me feel good. There’s something so inspiring about wilderness; it’s humbling, yet it’s just inspiring. Fills me with a lot of hope. Something just so fascinating about the smallest things. I’ve a great time with my children too. I’m lucky, because they love it.”
Val grew up doing “Tom Sawyer stuff.” He caught rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and scorpions with his younger and older brothers Mark and Wesley, they raced the train through the Chatsworth tunnel, set fires in the caves. Val once got stuck at the top of a 45-foot eucalyptus tree.
To add to the adventure, Val lived next to one most famous cowboys of all time, Roy Rogers, Val says it “was great fun. Trigger was stuffed in the recreation room, where you could see him through the curtains… Roy's Cadillac was suede throughout with inlaid silver dollars all over it. The car had saddles for bucket seats, a Winchester for a steering wheel and giant horns on the hood… You’d see it at the market.”
“I had five girl cousins and two brothers, and there was always a small army of us goofing around with some of the neighbor’s kids.” Val was elected to ring the bell and talk to Dale Evans, who answered the door in hair curlers,
“Hi Darlin,” Dale said.
Val’s said, “Can Roy come out and play?”
“No, I think he’s a little busy right now.”
Val talks more about living next to a living legend, “When Trigger died, they stuffed him – standing on his hind legs – and put him in the living room. Then their dog Bullet died, and they did the same thing to him. We were always afraid that if Dale died, we’d walk in one day and find her, stuffed and holding a tray, in the kitchen.”
When they moved into Roy’s house, Trigger still stood in the living room, Val describes the rest of the house, “Our house was 60 years old, the original owner was a woodcarver, and one of the things she made was the marvelous mantel over the fireplace with the inscription ‘You Cannot Be Grand and Comfortable’ -- meaning you can’t have it all.”
“I think spiritual perception comes from natural and healthy relationship to the land, and I’ve had that. I get an easy, automatic sense of myself in nature, a wholeness and I feel nowhere else. I think people should live where praying is most immediate… The physical terrain, the feeling, the environment and culture improve my life just by waking up there (although he is speaking of his current house in New Mexico, you can see that he got this attitude from his dad’s stories and tearing around in the wilderness when he was young).”
“I grew up in a religious background, but ended up pursuing the study of religions, I always had a real, real spiritual bent to what I liked in literature, what I liked about art. It’s the way you look at life that’s really inspiring. But I left home when I was 15, and … I didn’t give my parents much choice, they had to be supportive or not. But they were great.”
“My dad was a strange, eccentric guy. He was supportive, but at the end of the day, not all that interested,” Kilmer say. “He wouldn’t go see a Marlon Brando movie with me just because I like Marlon Brando. Which is fair. But my daughter now likes these stories call Famous Five. I bought them all. That’s what I do with my Family. And I did that with my dad, I worked at things.”
”Now that I’m a parent, I, of course, respect how (my parents) raised us much more. I really appreciate that they were encouraging for whatever we wanted to get into in a way that made us more open-minded.”
“It took me a while to learn that you relationship to your father and your mother has nothing to do with whether they’re in the room or not. You’re going to meet them everywhere, so you might was well confront whatever problems you have with them.”
“You never stop wanting your parents to love you, then, when you become an adult, you never stop wanting them to grow up. By the time my dad died, I’d already had resolution.”
Gene didn’t just have a rocky relationship with him, he divorced Val’s mother when Val was nine. “I remember being very sad. I suppose if they had said, ‘And we'll never argue again,’ I'd have a fond memory of it. Because they argued.” The boys lived with their father most of the time in Chatsworth.
“My parents’ divorce came at a time when we were the only divorced family that I knew in my whole world, and afterwards I felt quite at bay because I had no experience with it… My mom got a house
near the school we went to in Beverly Hills, and my two brothers and I bounced between them.” Eventually she wound up in Pittsburgh.
Acting
Val knew since he was very small that he wanted to act, but “When I figured out that to have money you had to work, I knew I couldn’t hack a regular job. So I thought acting would be good, because basically you made your own hours, were ridiculously overpaid and got the girls. Don't laugh! That was the truth!”
Val was around twelve when he got what could have been his first break. A school buddy’s father, who managed the Osmonds, had an agent friend who sought out Val after a school play. Val says, “He sat me down and asked me if ‘I’d like to do acting, son?’ And I said ‘sure, sounds fun’... I remember him going on and on about [my] concentration – that’s what he kept talking about -- and thinking it must be something he doesn’t see very often… So he explained to me how you do acting, and he got me a commercial for a, um, hamburger franchise which will go nameless. The director was upset because I guess I wasn’t giving him what he wanted. Even then I was trying to be friendly, but I knew they just wanted to scream, ‘Why the f**k aren’t you doing it right!’ But I was honest and said, ‘I don't like these hamburgers.’ And the director said, ‘Yes, but can’t you convince us that you do?’ And I said ‘no’… I was a junior method actor. If I didn’t enjoy the hamburger, it was a problem. I guess I didn't mind telling the people who were doing the commercial.”
Wesley
Val talks about his little brother Wesley, “(I was) probably five or six when (Wesley and I) started doing these silly skits… Eventually my folks bought a guest ranch so, we had a captive audience. There was nothing they could do since they’d paid their money to stay for the weekend. So we’d do skits in the lodge after dinner.”
”My little brother was brilliant. He’d write them and we would work things out or just things we’d seen, y’know... or where we could steal stuff off the television, whatever.”
“Wesley was a genius...I don’t use that word lightly...He did everything: acting, directing, skits...He even started making films. He became obsessed with “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” for no apparent reason and decided to remake that film.”
Blessed, Life and Films of Val Kilmer Page 1
