Statistician
Toward the end of Breaking Bad, I was deluged with scripts, and I had to devise a way to sift through, a system to evaluate them. In order of importance I weighed: story, script, role, director, and cast.
Here’s what the system looks like:
EVALUATION GRADE
STORY
TEXT
ROLE
DIRECTOR
CAST/MISC
TIME (+ OR − 1 POINT)
A
6
5
4
3
2
B
5
4
3
2
1
C
4
3
2
1
0
D
2
1
1
0
0
F
0
0
0
0
0
21: Perfect score.
18–20: Must do.
15–17: Seriously consider.
13–14: On the bubble.
Below 13: Pass.
Here’s how several projects scored: Argo: 19. Trumbo: 17. All the Way: 20. The Infiltrator: 15. Why Him?: 14. Godzilla: 15. Wakefield: 16.
The baseline is always the story. Good storytelling is timeless. It’s the essential human art form. Civilians might look at a script and see a monologue of several pages and be scared by it. I could never memorize that. An actor reads it differently. Actors feast on challenging language. We are nourished by words. Role and director are important, of course, but story is essential. If the story isn’t compelling and the writing isn’t well constructed, it doesn’t matter how great the character is. A legendary director like Ridley Scott is helming a project? But the story is eh? Might be a no. Although that combination would be rare. Great storytellers know great scripts.
The criterion of cast/misc is a catchall. How supportive is the studio? Do I have a history with anyone attached? Is there someone involved with whom I’ve always wanted to work? So many things can and do come into play.
One criterion not on the scale, however, is money. I figure my agents are incentivized to make the best deal they can, so whatever they’re happy with, so am I. Money is simply not a key factor in choosing projects. I never want to make a creative decision based on financial need. I keep my lifestyle within my means so I don’t have to do that.
Of course, every now and then, an offer comes up that’s too good to refuse. Like the Super Bowl in 2015.
I was asked to shoot an Esurance commercial that would have a one-time airing during the game and then never be played again on television. A woman comes in to see her pharmacist and instead she encounters Walter White behind the counter. It was funny, and it paid a lot. A ridiculous amount. I thought I would be a fool not to take it. Accepting a commercial like that makes it possible for me to do super-low-budget passion projects.
I’ve been dead broke, and I’ve been rich, and rich is better. But now that money is less of an issue for me, I’m mostly about the quality of the work and the experience.
Once, Warren Buffett visited the Breaking Bad set to tape a sketch that would be played at his annual gathering of stockholders. The financial guru played a version of Heisenberg opposite Aaron Paul and me. A funny bit. On a break, I asked the same question that everyone asks Warren: What’s your secret? Oh, it’s no secret, he said in his affable homespun way. Just make more right decisions than wrong ones and you’ll be fine.
The Cranston Assessment of Project Scale—CAPS, if you like—embodies that principle. I’m going to make mistakes. But the idea is to give myself the best chance to make more good decisions in the face of an overwhelming number of choices.
Nephew
I heard from my aunt Sunday most often by snail mail. Postmark: Woodland Hills. A nice community close to my childhood home in Canoga Park. She and my father’s brother Eddie had no children, no pets, no great friends. Aunt Sunday’s adventures were vicarious ones she took on her La-Z-Boy recliner. Every time I was mentioned in TV Guide—“Agent #3,” “Obnoxious Dinner Guest”—she got out her scissors. An inveterate clipper, she sent me every clipping, carefully folded into an envelope. I appreciated the thought. Which didn’t stop me from throwing the clippings in the trash. I can’t bear clutter.
I didn’t see much of Sunday, nor of Uncle Eddie. My brother ran into Eddie at the Motion Picture Hospital when my mom was in intensive care. But Eddie wasn’t there to visit Mom. If he hadn’t bumped into Kyle, I don’t think Eddie would have known or thought to ask after his former sister-in-law. That was 2006.
Three years later, I’d wrapped a season of Breaking Bad and was back in Los Angeles. It was late at night and the phone rang. “Your dad,” Robin said.
My dad still had stars in his eyes, but they were different stars. Not acting stars. Producing stars. I remember he produced a variety show. The New Sounds of Country! He had six or seven country music acts. They were pretty good. One fresh face popped and he sold that show into syndication. And many years ago, he came up with a precursor to the Country Music Awards. His version didn’t stick, but the CMAs did. He was ahead of his time. Over the years, he sold one or two things, but it wasn’t enough. He was constantly behind. Money was a daily struggle.
I hated that whenever he called I assumed he needed something. I always braced myself for the inevitable question: “Hey, buddy, do you think you can loan me a few grand?”
“I’m here in Woodland Hills,” he said, his voice shaking. I knew right away it wasn’t about money. He told me it had been a few months since he’d heard from Sunday and Eddie. For weeks he’d been calling. Nothing. They had a Winnebago and used to travel a lot, so it wasn’t unusual for them to be gone for stretches.
He went over to their place to check on them and the yard was overrun with weeds. He knocked and knocked. Nothing. He got spooked and called the police. He had a bad feeling.
The police found two bodies inside, one male, one female. Approximately my dad’s age, in their eighties. The lady was next to her walker in the living room. The man was in the bedroom. The description fit. Eddie and Sunday were dead.
The police told my father, “We have to call the coroner and do an autopsy because of the rather . . . odd circumstances and the length of the time they were dead.”
My dad said fine. And he said he didn’t want to see the bodies. The police told him to go to a coffee shop and come back in an hour. He called me from the coffee shop.
The next day I picked my dad up and we drove to Woodland Hills. The bodies had been removed and the evidence gathered. My dad had somehow forgotten that he owned a set of keys, and he gave them to me and said he’d wait outside while I got the lay of the land. For a pugilist who saw plenty of blood in the ring, my dad was squeamish.
I unlocked the door and tried to push it open but it barely moved. Drifts of mail on the floor were blocking it. I shoved the door open enough to slide in. And right away there was the smell. Oh the smell. Not only rancid and putrid but chemical and toxic and sickly sweet like rotten fruit. A cocktail of decay. I held my breath as best I could. The room was pitch black. My eyes adjusted: stacks and stacks and stacks of stuff—stuff from QVC, stuff from yard sales, stuff from Christmases gone by. Clothing, furniture, newspapers neatly wrapped in twine, piled almost to the ceiling. I knew from infrequent visits years ago that there was a sliding glass door at the other end of the living room. I had to get there and open it and let in some air and light. But how? It was an obstacle course of garbage. I passed by a walker and a large rectangular cutout of the carpet and padding where Sunday had been found.
I hoped she hadn’t suffered, but I saw the stain on the plywood subfloor and I knew from my limited police studies that she probably had. A body doesn’t secrete fluid (other than urine) if it’s only dead a few days. Full-body decay: she had
been there a while.
I saw two beat-up La-Z-Boys with doilies on the arms. I saw a half-finished crossword puzzle on a soiled chair. I saw a nightstand in between the chairs, with an electric clock radio, blinking. Across from the chairs were three TVs stacked on top of each other. The broken sets on the bottom propped up the working one. I saw a gooseneck lamp on the nightstand and I went over to turn it on. A tangle of extension cords all led to one dusty, overloaded power strip.
With a little more light I managed to make my way to the glass doors. Boxes fell. I pulled the drapes. They hadn’t been touched in years. They were brittle. Eons of dust and dirt showered down on me. But no light came through the glass; a wall of cardboard covered it. I ripped the cardboard off.
I was sweating now. My pulse raced. I needed air. I tried to open the glass door, but a wood dowel was in the track. I got the dowel out. The latch was jammed from years of disuse. I found a brass lamp and used it as a hammer. Slowly the latch slid. Now there was a screen door, caked with dirt, and as I tried to force it open, the dirt cascaded onto me and stuck to my sweat. I felt buried alive. I was wiping my eyes, panicking.
At last I busted down the screen door and stepped into the backyard. Close to passing out, I found a hose and poured water on my head and drank and drank and drank. It had taken me half an hour to hack through this hoarder’s maze—it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet across.
I went around to the front and got my dad and told him what to expect. He was aghast. He hadn’t known. No one had. I imagine no other person—except for maybe a pizza deliveryman—had peeked into the house in the last twenty years. We saw Eddie and Sunday on some holidays. They’d always say, “We’ll meet you there.” We’ll meet you there. We never thought twice about it.
My dad didn’t want to go in, but we needed to know: Was there a will? Was there a safe deposit box? I’d described how hard it was to squeeze through the door, and my dad suggested we try getting in through the garage. It was so full of junk that they could just wedge their car in. I flashed on my mom’s garage full of old furniture and dusty, cracked dinnerware, and boxes of other people’s discarded clothes. We shimmied alongside the car and went in.
My dad retched. I told him to keep going. I wasn’t doing this alone. In the kitchen, the fridge was filled with mostly condiments. The stove was dust-covered and stacked with papers and knickknacks. The oven was a storage locker for still more junk.
Empty bottles of champagne were strewn about. The microwave was caked with food.
I opened up the freezer. Towers of frozen dinners.
In the second bedroom, another cutout on the floor. Half a man’s length, probably about four feet long. Eddie. Oh, poor Eddie.
Boxes and boxes covered their bed. They must have slept in the La-Z-Boys out in the living room. I went to the window and I saw a glow of light through the pull-down shade. I pulled the shade down and let it roll up. There must have been fifty flies crawling on the windowpane, trying to get out. I knew how they felt.
Covering our mouths, my dad and I grabbed whatever papers we could easily find and loaded them up to examine later, elsewhere. They weren’t ultimately the papers we needed, so we would have to return. Meanwhile, the autopsy results came back. Eddie and Sunday both had alcohol in their systems. Prescription drugs. But nothing illicit. No foul play. Eddie died of blunt force. We were told he was found with one trouser leg on, one off. He was trying to put on his pants and fell and hit his head. Sunday, we guessed, was trying to get to him with her walker. She fell and broke her hip. Probably lay there for three or four days before she died.
We finally found a will. Handwritten. We were all mentioned, as was a guy named Dale with a Texas number. I called. “Who are you, Dale?”
“I’m her son,” he said.
Her son?
It turned out Sunday had a son from a previous relationship. Who knew? Certainly not my dad or any friend or relative. Sunday was a devout Catholic. There must have been a scandal seventy years ago when she’d been a teenager. She must have given the child up for adoption.
Dale said: “How do I know you’re being fair about this?”
“Excuse me?”
Dale continued: “How do I know you’re dividing the assets up fairly?”
“You’re welcome to take over,” I said. “I invite you to take over.”
He didn’t, but to safeguard his interest, he called the county. They then took over the estate and sold everything that was worth something, including the house, taking 5 percent as a fee. Before we learned the county would take over, we did a search to make sure we’d found all the important papers. We found a box labeled Empty Arrowhead Water Jugs. We opened it to find four empty Arrowhead water jugs. Taped, closed, stored. Madness.
My sister Amy found a paper bag neatly wrapped in twine. Attached to the twine was a label that read: Two Bras Too Small. Amy pulled the neat bow off and opened it up. Two bras Sunday must have outgrown. Truth in advertising.
Robin found a box labeled: Eddie’s Old Underwear. Inside? Sure enough.
Another bag was labeled: Keys to the Old Cars. None of the keys fit the car in the garage or the abandoned vehicles parked on the dead grass in the backyard. So. They kept keys to cars they hadn’t owned in years.
All of this felt like the end point toward which all clutter leads. The end point to which all disordered thinking and living lead. And it struck me how sad their lives were at the end, how dark and chaotic, how devoid of reason. I spent weeks and weeks trying to put those images from my mind.
And just when my own life seemed so good, so full of light.
In a way Sunday and Eddie had not only caused their deaths—they’d staged them. But why? I’d spent my life puzzling over human motivations, and I had trouble cracking this mystery. What is it that makes a person want to keep and curate garbage? Is it some kind of security blanket? Some hedge against time and loss? Some notion that the past might be resurrected—through things? That those old cars might be driven again?
My brother said: “It was mental illness.”
Dad said: “Nah. It’s just nuts.”
Stepson
My dad never had time to analyze the present. And the past was the past. He was all about the future. Full steam ahead.
He was a dreamer. You could say he hoarded dreams. But they all revolved around the same goal. He was going to be a star. Nothing short of stardom would do.
Of all the side roads and jaunts and harebrained ideas, of all the distractions and detours, he probably had the most success with his magazine, Star’s Homes. He would find the addresses of stars and take photos of their houses and publish them for tourists. “Here’s Jimmy Stewart’s home! There’s Lucille Ball’s mansion! Hey look it’s Robin Williams’s place!” He’d list his own name and home in the magazine. Joe Cranston! Hollywood producer. Well, would ya look at that! “Joe! You have a place on the beach in Malibu?”
Sly grin. Why sure.
My dad lived in a condo in Studio City. He felt a blurb about his imaginary beachfront mansion somehow gave him credibility—and he also thought it was hilarious. Behind the laughter was the hard fact that he’d never have a Malibu address.
When I was just getting my career going, I worked for him. The business was mostly mail-order then. I went to the PO box in Hollywood and got the checks and cash. I stuffed the magazine in envelopes and mailed the envelopes to subscribers. And then the business evolved. Dad made his money at point-of-purchase, at all the places they sell Hollywood memorabilia, like the world-famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater. The shops would take the magazine on consignment. They got a piece, he got a piece.
At the end of the magazine’s run, he still had the big names of yesteryear, but very few relevant stars of today. He needed to update his list, get more current stars, and that was beyond him. I was one of the few current actors pictured in Star’s Homes.
“Would you look at that, Bryan,” he’d say. “You made the cut.”
He was trying, in his way, to help me. It wasn’t so different from the way my aunt Sunday clipped my name from the weeklies. My dad was proud. He was trying to show it.
But I always felt there was a hidden agenda. He was continually trying to get me to promote and produce his screenplays. He’d hold up a script. Do you think you can get this to Tom Hanks?
At twenty-five, as soon as I was steadily employed on Loving, I started loaning him money. Small, manageable sums to start. Then we graduated to larger amounts. I covered his utilities and his rent on occasion. And then I paid the funeral expenses for his mother when she died.
I’m sure Eddie loaned my dad money and never saw it again. Uncle Eddie wasn’t rich, but he had a job; he worked as a gaffer in Hollywood for thirty years and made investments. He might have ended up a hoarder in the end, but he didn’t squander what he’d earned.
Dad came to me fairly regularly. A few times every year. It felt like a role reversal, like he was my son, asking his dad for a loan. I didn’t cherish the feeling, but I couldn’t spend my time being angry. He didn’t much like it, either, but he was often desperate; he was often the recipient of pink-hued caution bills from the gas company or departments of water and power. He was always on the verge of losing service.
I came to accept that he relied on me financially, but that I couldn’t rely on him emotionally.
One day, he asked to see me. Something very pressing. I sighed, knowing that the “in-person” request always meant a big check.
Sure enough, he asked to borrow $30,000.
“Thirty grand?” I said. “Wow. Why do you need $30,000?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“We’re not going to play this game, Dad.”
He hesitated. “Cindy is sick,” he said. “But you can’t tell her I told you.”
A Life in Parts Page 23
