“Yes, but don’t worry about it. We’ll send you sides.” Sides are extracted scenes. I waited for my sides all day on Saturday. Nothing. Maybe I was going to be filming establishing shots. Maybe I’d be sitting in the courthouse in silent contemplation. Maybe I shambled into the police headquarters and stared into the distance, trying to crack a case.
Sunday came. All day: nothing. Sunday night I was preparing to go to bed early to be ready for my 6:00 a.m. call, and the fax machine started buzzing. This was back in the days you had to take scissors and cut the pages as the roll of waxy paper unspooled. A scene with a huge block of dialogue rolled out. Then another scene—same thing. All my dialogue. All my words. I had to memorize all this in the few hours before I had to be on set. Sleep well!
I read the sides. “Hopkins comes down.” Who is Hopkins? Another cop? A snitch?? The show wasn’t on the air yet, and it was the nineties—before the days when they could just send me a link. I wouldn’t have time to memorize the lines or the benefit of understanding what I was saying. I slept with one eye open.
The next morning I woke up bedraggled. We shot the first scene, and a script supervisor read out the lines I “forgot.” I was constantly calling, “Line?” It was tough going right off the bat.
I was never comfortable. Never relaxed. No one can do good work if they’re not relaxed.
I told Jon Tenney, the star of the show: “I’m dying here. I can’t get my nose out of the sides.” I think we were shooting episode twelve, and I was supposed to go right to the last episode of their first season, from twelve to twenty-two. I said, “Jon, I can’t go on like this. Where is the script?”
Jon said: “We haven’t seen a script since episode four.”
I met series regulars and they introduced themselves to me. I said, “I don’t mean to be rude but I’m just trying to stick to learning your character’s name because that’s what I need to know right now.” That’s all I could handle.
I remember driving up to work one cold morning. I came to a stop at the guard shack, an impossibly little box barely big enough to fit a chair and a guy. The guy poked his head out of his window and checked my decal and waved me through. “Go ahead.” But I stayed there looking at him for a couple of beats. He was freezing, blowing on his hands to keep warm. I thought: I wish I were you. I’d rather be in there than have to go act in this other impossibly little box. I’d rather be a teenager earning $3.85 an hour.
Five days in, I was toast. Robin was worried about me. “You should quit,” she said. She’d never said anything like that before. She’d never seen me like this before. I called David Milch’s office and asked to speak to him but didn’t hear back. The next day I got a call from my agent’s office. Milch’s office wants to know what this is about. I told my agent what was happening.
The producers called me. “What’s wrong?” I explained to them I couldn’t do it anymore. I told them that I quit. “No, no, please. We have you planned to go all the way through the end of the year,” they said.
“No, I quit. I’m hating this experience. After this episode, I have to quit.” I wasn’t under contract beyond the one episode I was doing, so it wasn’t as if I was breaking an agreement.
“Bryan, it doesn’t show. You look great in the dailies. You’re not seeing what we’re seeing. Everyone calls for lines on this show. It looks great!”
“It can’t look great, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m only focused on words—not what they mean. Not the character. You’re forcing me to come to work unprepared. I’ve had a headache for a week. I’m not sleeping. I’m a nervous wreck. I can’t continue.”
This was one of just two times in my career when I was getting no joy from acting. It was painful.
The producers knew all the problems, and they commiserated. I suspect Milch was focused on NYPD Blue at the time, and so I think Brooklyn South suffered as a result. Whatever the reason, in spite of its promise, the show was a catastrophe. I knew it, and the producers knew it, but they needed to try to keep the show afloat. “Please stay,” they said.
“No, I’m not staying. There’s nothing you could pay me to do this again.”
Then one producer said the perfect thing. He said, “It would screw the show. The other actors. Please, may we write you into one more episode and then we’ll kill you off? Otherwise we’re left dangling.”
I relented. I said, “I’ll do it on one condition. Get me the script a week before we start.” Deal.
I was emphatic: “One week before we start.”
He said, “You’ll have it by Monday.”
I’d film two more episodes. At least I would hope to prepare for my last one. The penultimate episode was business as usual. My eyes were bloodshot. I couldn’t shake my headache. I couldn’t even remember simple things. I was going to crack. On the seventh or eighth day, I asked them to give me cue cards. They said, “We’ve never used cue cards before. I don’t think David will go for that.”
At this point, I didn’t care what David or anyone else thought. Give me the cue cards. Now instead of looking into the eyes of other actors I was giving a speech to a piece of poster board; I was reading dialogue—not acting. I was faking it. I had no choice.
Working in that kind of chaos? James Sikking, another actor on the show, described it well. He said, “Our wings were clipped.” Without time to prepare, we weren’t able to do much more than remember a single line—if we could even do that.
I finished that episode, and I asked the producer who made me the promise: “Do you have something for me? The script for the next episode?”
He didn’t. He didn’t keep his promise. He couldn’t keep his promise. I fault him for making a promise he knew he couldn’t keep. I fault myself for being so obtuse and gullible.
Despite the broken deal, I shot the next episode. My last. Fortunately, there wasn’t much dialogue. My character was in a locker room alone, and boom. No more locker room. No more Lt. Gordon Denton.
Lance
My dad never gave up. He was always writing another screenplay, another novel, dreaming up another business venture. His dreams kept him alive. To achieve a dream would be great, but what was important was to have a dream. That’s where hope came from.
It’s more important to have a dream than to achieve a dream. That theme was at the heart of a movie I wrote and directed in 1998. Last Chance. I intended the movie as a kind of love letter, a gift, to Robin. I wrote a character I could imagine her sinking into and exploring. I loved the idea of collaborating with her, creating something together. I knew she could give a poignant, riveting performance, and she did.
Robin’s character was a woman who felt powerless and without choice in her life. She’d been buffeted by disappointment, so she’d lost hope. She was married to my character, Lance, a high school football star whose best days were behind him, who never made good on his potential, an underemployed, immature man-child. Perfect role for me. They lived in a remote section of the California desert, the fringe of the fringe, and my character always leaned on his small town’s lack of opportunity to justify his inability to succeed or move forward. My mom, in part, inspired that facet of my character. She was one of those people always looking outward to find comfort and joy, and excuses, rather than looking within. Mom would point at this boyfriend or that happenstance to explain why her life had ended up in such tatters. Someone or something was always to blame for her disappointments.
Robin’s character was a waitress at the Last Chance Café. She worked hard and bore the burdens of waning possibilities with a quiet grace. She didn’t see much hope for change, but she was pragmatic: “I don’t know what daydreaming does. It doesn’t help you get your work done. Daydreaming gives you false hope.”
But things changed for her when a truck driver’s rig broke down and he had to stay at the motel where she worked. He told her, “I don’t believe hope can be false—you either have it or you don’t.” That simple message shifted her perspective. And
a shift in perspective can change a life. Hope can create possibility. Options are always available to us if we stand back and look at things differently.
I believed in this movie and worked hard to get it off the ground. The shoot got pushed back several times. We had some great actors lined up and then a few had to drop out because bigger jobs came along. We were set to do the shoot in the spring, and then I got a job, a commercial, a big payday, so we moved the dates again. April is tolerable in the desert. July is a bitch. But we couldn’t delay it any longer, so at the height of summer we headed to Pioneertown, an Old West motion picture set built in the 1940s on remote, sun-scarred, desolate land in Yucca Valley, California. All the actors stayed at the one motel there, and Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace catered our meals. The motel and the bar also became our main sets.
We were on the tightest shoestring budget: $300,000. That might sound like a lot of money to some, but it’s crazy low to get a movie made if you’re shooting on thirty-five-millimeter film. We bought short ends (partial rolls of unexposed film), leftovers from big-budget movies. We’d load those in the camera when we knew the scene was short. We economized in every way we could.
Robin insisted on staying apart from me because she thought it would be good for her character. Plus, given that I was acting and directing and producing, my hours were insane.
Robin’s room was immaculate. Doilies. Tea. That’s what her character was: orderly.
My room was the opposite. I was grinding, up at all hours of the night, sleeping here and there, completely immersed. I was joyful in chaos. And my personal dishevelment happened to be perfect for the character.
It turned out to be perfect for something else, too.
Patrick Crump
I didn’t even have time to shave when I got back from the desert. The clock was ticking. I had a couple of weeks to edit Last Chance before I ran out of money. Unshowered, unkempt, I began working around the clock.
Three days in, I got a call from my agent: “I know you just got back. I know you’ve got a time crunch editing the film. But there’s an audition for The X-Files. A good part for you.”
Robin and I had rolled the dice and put in $150,000 for Last Chance. We’d raised the rest from friends and family. I had a five-year-old daughter. I was broke. Of course I was interested.
My agent told me the character was a backwoods anti-Semitic loser. I looked in the mirror. Greasy hair. Badass Fu Manchu mustache. Red-rimmed eyes. I think I can handle that, I said.
I auditioned and got the job. The episode was called “Drive.” I played Patrick Crump. The story was this. Besides being a despicable hick, he had a piercing, constant headache, and the only way to ease his pain was to drive west at a minimum of eighty miles an hour. If he didn’t keep driving west, his head was going to explode.
Crump’s wife had already succumbed to that horrible fate at the beginning of the episode. Mulder (the dryly hilarious David Duchovny) gets into the car with me (I don’t remember how that worked without my head exploding) and drives toward the setting sun. Unfortunately for Crump they start in western Nevada, and you know what happens if you keep driving west across America: you eventually run out of real estate. RIP Patrick Crump.
Crump couldn’t have been worse company for Mulder. He is racist, abrasive, loathsome. Most writers on television at the time would have sanitized Crump, made him sweet and sympathetic, allowing the audience to root for the series star to rescue the nice man from death. But the writer of this episode imbued Crump with negative characteristics that forced Mulder into a moral quandary: Is this man worth saving simply because he’s a human being? That question put an emotional and intellectual dilemma right in the heart of the drama, and forced the audience to ask, What would I have done?
That was my first taste of the subtlety and brilliance of Vince Gilligan, who wrote that episode.
Vince felt that in order to prevent the audience from completely turning its back on the story, Crump had to retain some shred of humanity despite his odiousness. He wanted to find an actor who could both play a villain and elicit the audience’s sympathy when he died. Someone you could, somehow, someway, both love and hate. For whatever reason, he thought that was me.
I enjoyed it. A lot. But my mind was foremost on my film, and the X-Files paycheck allowed me to keep the lights on while I finished it.
Vince and I were friendly and expressed our mutual appreciation. But as far as I knew then, that was the last time I’d ever see him. I did the job and moved on.
Auditioner
Many more TV pilots are shot than aired. And even those shows that make it to air stand a high likelihood of getting canceled early. I believe around 65 percent are axed. It’s as speculative a business as opening a restaurant. Maybe more so. If you get a job on a new show, you hope the show catches fire, but you never bank on it.
In the nineties I got a job on the Louie Show with Louie Anderson, Paul Feig, and Laura Innes. We got half a dozen shows done before CBS canceled us. Diane English was our producer; she’d created Murphy Brown, and she’d never missed a taping in the show’s eleven-year run. She was absent from the Louie Show for half of the six episodes. She and Louie did not get along.
As funny and caring as Louie was, he was troubled, and he wasn’t ready to lead a show back then. It was difficult for him, and by virtue of that, it was also difficult for the rest of us. We never got through a scene without stopping. Whether it was rehearsal or taping night, we never got through anything without stopping. Not once. No rhythm, no cohesion—we were destined for the chopping block.
Another show was shooting next to us on the same studio lot; their star dressing room was next to Louie’s. Tradition had it that while the audience filed in, the cast would assemble in the star’s dressing room and quickly run lines to stay sharp and energized for the show. The other show was on the same schedule as us, so when we were doing our “speed through,” so were they. We were halting and tentative with our material—all the while we’d hear their uproarious laughter. We wondered what was so freakin’ funny. We were so upset about our own situation that we took to jealously putting the other down. “Who’s going to want to see a show about aliens coming to earth?”
The answer turned out to be: a whole lot of people. 3rd Rock from the Sun went on to become a big fat hit. We did not. I knew we were dead in the water when I read on the front page of the Los Angeles Times entertainment section that Louie Anderson didn’t like his new show.
I eventually guest-starred on 3rd Rock, and told their cast how much we used to hate them at the Louie Show, all the vitriol we spewed toward them. We had a good laugh. I was happy to finally be able to find the humor in that experience. I hadn’t found much joy in the Louie Show while it was happening.
• • •
That’s how it was for a long time. I’d shoot a pilot, and maybe if I was lucky, do a couple of episodes, and then the show would fizzle. Or I’d audition and come so close I could feel it. And I’d lose the part to some other actor.
The process of auditioning for TV pilots is a petri dish for self-doubt. When you test for a pilot at a network, you wait and you wait for them to call your name. When they finally do, it’s common to walk into a room and find twenty people in really nice business attire staring blankly at you. A few hellos, and it’s show time. Act your ass off on command. Typically, they consider a minimum of three actors for each role, but it can be up to eight. It’s nerve-racking, and it’s over before you know it. Out you go to wait for the next guy to step to the plate, then the next. When everyone has been in once, you’re usually asked in again for round two of the same scene or scenes, but only after sitting in the waiting room, dissecting your audition, thinking about all the things you’d change if you had the chance to do it again. Or maybe you’re pleased with the work. But your competition is there, too. By the water fountain. And he seems pleased with his work! You sit, trying not to seem nervous. You even smile at your competitors as if to w
ish them good luck. What you’re really hoping is that they break down and confess: I screwed up. I was awful.
But no one says a thing. We’re actors. Looking confident under pressure is our stock-in-trade. You look unbothered. Cool, even. Inside, you’re wondering: Am I any good? You’re staring at the door. They’re discussing your fate behind that door. It could be five minutes, it could be half an hour before the door swings open and the casting director appears and offers a boilerplate: Thank you. Everyone was very good. You’re all free to go.
And just like that, it’s done.
You collect your things and go home, your mind racing. Did they find their guy? Did they think we were all terrible? Will they have to cast a wider net to find the actor they want?
Ah, fuck it. You may never know. You could get that call from your agent saying, Congratulations! You got it! Or, more often than not . . . nothing.
That’s the life. That’s why talent alone doesn’t cut it. If you want to be a successful actor, mental toughness is essential. Lay your whole self-worth on getting the role, on the illusion of validation, before long you’re left angry, resentful, and jealous. You’re doomed.
From the time I got back from my motorcycle trip in 1978, I knew I wanted to make my living as an actor. Rejection is part of that living. It comes with it, like rain on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You can sugarcoat it. You can use a euphemism if you wish. But the bottom line is that sometimes they are simply not going to want you. And if they do want you, they may fire you. We’re going in a different direction. Or they say with what seems like sincerity “Let’s keep talking,” and then never call you back. Or they tell your agent, in a polite way, that you sucked. Or that you’re great. “Wow! Fantastic! Really. He’s perfect for this. We’ll be in touch.” And then . . . crickets. There are a lot of crickets in this business.
A Life in Parts Page 16
