I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  Then another call. Marty’s assistant was freaking out as she conveyed another message.

  “Mr. Brando would like to invite Illeana to lunch at his house on Mulholland Drive. He will send a car. Any day this week.”

  I said, “Absolutely, yes, please tell him yes. I accept.”

  Marty’s assistant was aghast: “Illeana, you’re not going to do it!”

  I said, “It’s Marlon Brando!”

  She sputtered, “He probably wants to have sex with you!”

  I said, “Yes, I will probably have to have sex with him. It’s Marlon Brando!”

  She then launched into the many reasons why this could not happen under any circumstances. I will spare you some of the reasons—especially those having to do with imagined sexual positions with a man of his girth and how that could either smother or suffocate me. But mainly it was that I had a boyfriend, that his name was Marty, and that if he ever found I was even thinking of going, he would cook my goose and personally serve it to Mr. Brando!

  We stayed on the phone arguing the pros and cons, but eventually I was convinced that it would be a very bad idea. She called Marlon Brando’s secretary and declined on my behalf. The little excitement was over.

  I was alone in my hotel room with my roses and my letter, and I could actually feel Marlon Brando’s disappointment with me when he got the news from his secretary. Hadn’t I learned anything? I was a tuning fork! We were on the same frequency! He had just given me the greatest Method master class on being yourself, and now I was being the one thing Marty said he hated—a phony. A phony because I really wanted to go.

  And who knows how differently my life would have turned out if I had gone. What great stories had I missed? What wisdom would he have imparted? How many great conversations or Marilyn Monroe conspiracy theories? At the very least I could have seen if he had actually had electric eels in his swimming pool. And who knows if he even wanted to have sex with me? What I regret is that I had declined out of fear. Fear of how it would look to Marty. I was Marty’s girlfriend, and I had to “act” like it.

  I loved Marty, of course, but my identity was becoming trapped under his, and part of me was becoming lost.

  I couldn’t accept that I had anything to offer anyone except through him, even when it was coming from Marlon Brando. Marlon saw something in me that day, something I couldn’t see in myself. I was a tuning fork. He wanted more of the feeling that I had given him. Marlon Brando identified in me that I had the ability to affect people. It was real; it was vibrating; it was love. It was the beginning of my believing in myself.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Roulette Wheel of Insanity

  Nastassja Kinski, Gina Philips, Jennifer Tilly, Vanessa Redgrave, and me all calling our agents on the set of Bella Mafia.

  I do not experience happiness as much as relief when any movie, or television show or Web series that I am involved in turns out well, or even moderately well, for that matter. As Robert Altman said when describing making a film, “A group of people come together to build a sand castle.” I wrote and directed a documentary for the IFC network about the trials and tribulations of filmmaking called Everybody Just Stay Calm. One of my favorite quotes came from director Alexandre Rockwell, who described making movies as “stress … a little more stress … intense stress!” So if every moviemaking experience is so unpredictable, can you tell the difference between the movies that will be good and the movies that will be bad before they’re finished? Can you know when you are shooting that a film will be a flop, a bomb, a cult classic, or a brilliant work of art? Sometimes the answer lies in a coffee shop.

  I recently sat down with a first-time director—he had already given me the part—for a nice cup of coffee. We were going back and forth discussing the film we were about to start shooting in three weeks.

  The meeting started out great.

  He said, “I’m just so excited that you agreed to be in my movie. I wrote the part with you in mind. I’m just such a huge fan.”

  “Great,” I said. “I like fans.” And I was a fan of his. I loved the script, but I saw some holes in it, some unanswered questions. So as we sipped our coffee I started asking him questions—which is a habit I have—about what I thought were some missing beats in the script. The more I pressed, the more I discovered that he didn’t have the answers to my questions. Pretty soon his coffee was starting to get cold, and he was becoming less and less a fan.

  “Listen,” I said. “You need to know the answers, because if you don’t know, then I won’t know how to play it, and if I don’t know how to play it, you won’t know how to shoot it, or light it, or stage it, and we could be heading for a nightmare instead of a comedy, which is what we are shooting in just three weeks.” And he sipped his cold coffee and told me, with great confidence, “Illeana, we can fix all of that on the set.”

  And I knocked over his coffee. Not on purpose—I was making hand gestures, but I did get pretty excited. I said, “No. We need to fix this now. Because when we are on set it will be too late.”

  He ordered more coffee. I took out my pen and got ready to make notes and waited for him to do the same. Instead he sipped his fresh coffee and said, “I’ll tell you what. Can I think about it, and get back to you?”

  “Sure,” I said, putting my pen away. “Absolutely. It’s your movie. I am here to serve.”

  And I meant that sincerely. If someone doesn’t want my help, I am not offended. I may have an opinion—a strong opinion—but I am not offended. You can only warn folks that hey, there’s a pretty big iceberg up ahead, and if they don’t want to listen, it’s up to them, they are the captains of the ship. In my mind, the roulette wheel spun, landing on a problem: overconfidence of an inexperienced director.

  To me, a movie is like a roulette wheel with a series of problems where the numbers should be. The wonderful mystery of a movie is that you can never predict those problems, so fixing as many things beforehand as possible, such as answering questions in the script, is a good idea. Because the day you shoot the scene that Illeana asked you about in the coffee shop is the day the movie roulette wheel spins and lands on another problem, such as rain. Rain is a problem? Oh, yeah.

  Here is an imaginary scenario in which something as simple as weather can ruin a movie:

  It’s raining in L.A., which it never does, so you didn’t plan for it. You didn’t build into the schedule what is called a “cover set.” You gambled that it would clear up. It didn’t. Problem. You have six hours, and your location has now changed. The scene was scheduled for a park. You paid $2,000 for permits, and you have a park ranger standing by. Make that $3,000 for the day. The scene now moves to the producer’s house, because it’s free. Problem. You’ve spent all your money on locations. Now we’re all on the producer’s porch instead of in a park. Problem. The art department is furious because they never dressed the porch, because they were supposed to be in a park. They need at least two hours to dress the porch properly. Problem. Hair and makeup needs to set up in the producer’s house, because the actresses got all wet, and now their hair needs to be redone. Problem. While blow-drying the actresses’ hair they blow a fuse. The grips fix it, but now you’re down to four hours. Finally you start to shoot. Problem. The producer’s neighbor has dogs, and as soon as you start shooting they start barking, and now your producer—who was going to help you rehearse and stage the scene—is trying to get the neighbors to keep their dogs quiet. Problem. You are down to two hours to shoot a ten-page scene. Problem. You’re scrambling with the new shot list you drew up with the director of photography when you were driving here from the park but everything is different from what you imagined. Problem. You lose the light in one hour. You have one hour to shoot a ten-page scene, so you start cutting it on the spot. Problem. The scene doesn’t make sense, but you’ll fix it later. Problem. Everyone is screaming at you and you’re screaming back that you’re a director not a weatherman and there’s another problem. It occurs to you that you
never answered Illeana’s questions about the script, that day when she appeared to have deliberately knocked over your coffee in the coffee shop. Problem. You’re watching and she is playing the scene entirely wrong—in fact, is that an accent? It is all wrong. She is ruining your film with her goofball performance; why on earth did you cast her? Problem. There is no time even to discuss it with her; you are down to forty-five minutes to shoot, and you will fix it in the editing room. Problem. In the editing room your editor tells you that you don’t have enough coverage of Illeana and persuades you to cut around the scene and, better yet, reshoot it. Problem. There’s no money for a reshoot, and besides, you and Illeana no longer speak.

  The point of this imaginary story is that you need to answer every question you can in advance because things will come up that you hadn’t planned for—that you couldn’t have planned for—so you try to solve them before you end up in the middle of a mess of problems: No one is speaking to anyone else, the movie never comes out, and the director is no longer a fan. And that’s sad, because I need fans to keep downloading Pluto Nash from Netflix so they can keep asking me, “Hey! Did you know Pluto Nash was going to turn out like, you know, Pluto Nash when you were shooting it?” No. It starred Eddie Murphy. I have since added the “every other” theory to my movie roulette wheel. Every other movie Eddie Murphy does is a hit.

  Sometimes every slot on the movie roulette wheel is a problem: crazy actresses, crazy director, actresses don’t get along with director, director doesn’t get along with anyone—and in spite of the odds, the movie you thought would surely turn out to be a disaster (as one actress wrote in my journal, “like the TV version of Valley of the Dolls”) turns out to be a big hit.

  My favorite disaster movie I was a part of was the miniseries Bella Mafia, about three buxom broads and their Mafia mama who seek revenge on the men who killed their husbands.

  I always thought Alive was going to be the most challenging film I worked on. But I was wrong, as I told Bella Mafia’s seventy-six-year-old director. That’s when I knew I had lost it.

  “I worked on a mountain! We flew to the set by helicopter! Fourteen thousand feet in the air! In the snow! For Disney! And it was easier than shooting this scene!”

  In my defense, I said that only after the following exchange occurred over a bowl of nuts.

  OUTRAGED ELDERLY DIRECTOR WHO CAN’T HEAR: “What are you doing?”

  CONFUSED ACTRESS (ME): “I’m eating the nuts.” Holding out a nut in my hand to show him.

  DIRECTOR: “Are you going to eat that nut? Are you? Because if you eat that nut, I will not shoot the scene!”

  ACTRESS: “Fine. Take the nuts away.”

  (Actress hands the bowl of nuts to the art department.)

  (Art department is standing by with the bowl of nuts.)

  FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: “Losing the nuts!”

  DIRECTOR: “Hang on. You can’t shoot the scene without eating the nuts?”

  FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR (to the art department): “Holding the nuts!”

  ART DEPARTMENT: “I’m holding my nuts.”

  (By this time the entire crew is snickering.)

  INCREDULOUS DIRECTOR: “Are you saying you can’t do the scene without the nuts?”

  INCREDULOUS ACTRESS: “If you have nuts on the table, I’m going to eat the nuts. If you don’t want me to eat the nuts, take them away.”

  FIRST ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: “That’s a wrap on the nuts!”

  (More snickering from crew.)

  DIRECTOR: “I want the nuts in the scene!”

  (Art department comes back with the nuts.)

  DIRECTOR (to actress): “Can you do the scene with the nuts?”

  By this time there are tears in everybody’s eyes as they struggled to hold back laughter—except for me, because this was not remotely funny anymore. I tried one last fateful time to explain the nuts.

  ACTRESS: Picks up a nut from the bowl and says, with the very best of intentions, “David, she is nervous in the scene. She is meeting her mother-in-law, so as she is nervously waiting, she thinks about eating a nut!”

  FRUSTRATED, TIRED DIRECTOR: “Are you finished with the nut? When you’re finished with the nut we’ll start shooting!”

  FRUSTRATED, TIRED, ACTRESS: (Loses it, references Alive–she worked on a mountain, blah blah blah.) “No! David, no! I’m not done with the nut! What I’m saying is, you are nuts! You’re nuts! So, I don’t need any more nuts in the scene, because you are nuts! I am done with the nuts!”

  And to this day this is my all-time favorite quote from any director I have ever worked for:

  DIRECTOR: “Fine. You do it wrong and I’ll shoot it, and we’ll all go home early!”

  Applause from cast and crew. Probably the funniest scene I was ever a part of not caught on film.

  According to my Bella Mafia costar Jennifer Tilly, there is more to the story. We finally finished shooting the scene, and David, our director, came over to me and said very sweetly, “I was going to have a lovely close-up of you but you took so long with the nuts we ran out of time.” And … scene!

  The affection I have for the cast, the director, and anyone involved in Bella Mafia holds no bounds, because I’ve dined out for years retelling Bella Mafia stories.

  I have never laughed and cried so much on the same set. We were shooting a farce. We just didn’t know it. I made lifelong friends and learned that my jokes and stories could be the glue that kept things together. Jennifer called us the Five Bitches of Bella Mafia, but to me Bella Mafia was more like the Roulette Wheel of Insanity. Anywhere you land there’s going to be a funny story, so let’s spin the wheel, and see where it lands.

  THE SCRIPT

  Bella Mafia. What does that even mean? Directly translated it means beautiful Mafia. Pretty Mafia? I think we might have some disagreement about whether the Mafia is pretty. Maybe it refers to how a network executive back then sold me on the project, absolutely assuring me that it would be a hit because of the key ingredients: “Tits and guns!”

  THE WRITER: LYNDA LA PLANTE

  This might be all her fault. She was British, and she was friends with Vanessa Redgrave—also British. Wait a minute. That was it. That was the bait that had got all of us. We all wanted to work with Vanessa Redgrave. They kept saying, “You know we have Vanessa Redgrave. She’s committed.” That should have been a sign.

  VANESSA REDGRAVE

  Oh, my god. To work with Academy Award–winning actress Vanessa Redgrave. I had seen every film she was ever in. Julia, for which she won an Academy Award, was a film I particularly loved—as well as the television movie Playing for Time. She was a genius. Is a genius! Every moment she plays on film, you can’t take your eyes off her. When I was in acting school, I saw her in Orpheus Descending on Broadway. Life-changing. This was going to be the most thrilling experience of my life. And it was. On the first day, we were shooting a scene, cleaning up after a murder or something, all wearing black slips and displaying lots of inappropriate cleavage. Tits and guns! I was on the floor, scrubbing blood with a brush and crying, when Vanessa whacked me in the face with a bloody towel. I whacked her right back—real Actors Studio stuff. I was so into it. She laughed afterward, saying, “Marvelous! Come back to my room for tequila.”

  Vanessa took me under her wing, and I thought, This movie is going to be amazing. I’m going to learn so much. The second day we were shooting a scene, and she started to have a discussion with the director over some piece of business involving luggage tags. Simple enough, right? Now, I had no idea that they had had a “history.” “No, No, No,” she said. “I completely disagree, and so does Illeana. Don’t you, Illeana?” I was going to have to decide on the second day whose side I was on. Of course I was going to agree with Vanessa. Who didn’t want to have tequila every day? The director never forgave me. I was on his bad, not-hearing-well side for the rest of the production. We were shooting a funeral scene, and Vanessa was wearing a veil. She thought, as true Sicilian widows wou
ld, that we should all be wearing veils, but the other actresses didn’t want to. Vanessa assessed the situation and said, “But Illeana, you’re going to wear a veil, right?” Of course, I nodded.

  I went to wardrobe and came back with my veil, and the director announced to the entire set, “Now you’re holding up the entire production because you wanted a veil!”

  Another time we were shooting a dinner scene, and Vanessa insisted the wrong cheese was on the table.

  “It would be provolone. Isn’t that right, Illeana?”

  I nodded, of course. I mean, she was right. We were supposed to be this Mafia family in Palermo eating American cheese? Vanessa said, “I’ll be in my trailer, and when you have the right cheese let us know.” I followed her like a little pet. Get it right, props! I will never forget the look on the props director’s face. His face said, Where the hell am I going to get provolone in Burbank? He found some, God bless him, and we shot it, and it’s in the movie. The props fellow wrote in my autograph book, “It was wonderful working with you. I only wish the um … working conditions could have been a tad less tense. Anyhow. We made it through!”

  Underneath the inscription there is a Polaroid of my receiving oxygen on set. I started having fainting spells during shooting.

  The pizza strata:

  After work, most of the cast, including Vanessa, would come to my house and eat potluck and watch movies and laugh about the day’s proceedings. One night I screened the now camp classic film Valley of the Dolls. Sort of gallows humor—although I am a huge fan of this absurd soap opera by an unlikely director, Mark Robson. It was on one of those movie nights that I introduced Vanessa to pizza strata—which is dreadful but easy to make. It’s kind of a trashy, low-rent, one-dish pizza made of buttered bread, tomato sauce, cheese, and salami. To my great surprise, Vanessa, who had lived in Italy and was with an Italian, loved pizza strata. Later, on set, Vanessa would come up to me with that melodic voice and say, “Illeana, when are you going to make me some more of that marvelous pizza strata?” One of the many things I admired about Vanessa was that despite the friction on set, she never gave up trying to make a scene better. I really admired that. And I learned to ask questions because of her. A lot of questions.