By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  At a certain point, I started to feel a little better. My interest in Tisha had been completely obliterated by my desire to get back with Michelle, but while I was home, I reconnected with a girl that I’d had a dalliance with in high school, and being with her—being with someone besides Michelle—wasn’t as jarring as I’d thought it was going to be. That helped me. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that I was so concerned with being with someone new. If only I knew then that there would come a time when I’d want to be with somebody new every hour.

  One day my mom walked in and said, “Pack, because you’re going back to New York tomorrow.” And I did it. I went back to Cobble Hill. Of course, I was still trying desperately to get Michelle back, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  And yet out of this horrible depression came renewed vigor and ambition. At this point I was twenty-four, and I knew my odds of making it as an actor were still slim. But I was also getting a sense of my own abilities, and I felt in a lot of ways that I’d just tapped into those abilities. I was cast in a one-act Arthur Miller play alongside people who a year before I’d thought were very good. Now I was working with them and thinking, “I need to be working with better people.” The director was a Broadway big shot who told me, “You’re working at a higher level than your co-actors, and you need to know that. You need to carry this play. That’s the only way it will work.” When that play was over, I was moved up to the master acting class at Ensemble.

  Not long after that, I was sitting in the waiting room of Phoenix Artists, waiting for a meeting with an agent, and I started talking to a charming, sweet aspiring actress who was also there. She got called in before me, and when I came out of my own meeting an hour later, she was there waiting for me. Her name was Edie Falco.

  Edie and I decided to go to a Mexican restaurant on Sixteenth Street and Eighth Avenue called Mary Ann’s. I liked her right away; she also seemed so worldly. I was still hurting from my breakup with Michelle, but Edie gave me the hope that it was still possible to fall for someone else. We started dating and I took an enormous amount of solace with her; she was very kind to me.

  Our sensibilities were fairly similar. I’d say we were both openly miserable but in a sort of bemused way. We liked each other but not enough to take care of the other person’s misery—we both knew we had enough misery of our own to worry about.

  By then I was living with a friend, Tom Benson, whom I’d met working for Great Performances. I hadn’t been able to make the rent on the apartment Michelle had found for me in Brooklyn—it cost seven hundred dollars a month—and I’d started to become almost irrationally worried that I was going to be evicted. Someone at work had put the fear of God into me by telling me that if you get evicted from an apartment in New York, you can never get another apartment for the rest of your life. So I’d started asking around at work, trying to see if anyone was looking for a roommate. Tom told me he had a rent-controlled two-bedroom, third-floor walk-up in the West Village for $219 that he’d inherited from an ex who had left New York. It was on Thirteenth Street and Seventh Avenue, and the minute I saw it I knew I wouldn’t leave that place until I could afford to live wherever I wanted. It was a brownstone with high ceilings, in a great part of town, and cost almost nothing.

  Edie was living in Brooklyn’s Park Slope section with some roommates, but she started staying with me in my room at Tom’s place, and we basically began plotting to try to get him to move out so the two of us could have it for ourselves. She irritated him already and we knew it, so we’d attempt to come up with other ways to bother him. He was a writer, and he liked peace and quiet, so at one point I left the TV on in my room for nine days straight, thinking it would slowly drive him crazy. It did, but when he eventually exploded, instead of leaving he said, “I strongly suggest that you two move into Edie’s old place in Park Slope.” We didn’t, though; we all just stayed where we were.

  Edie and I were a funny couple; we both basically believed that we deserved to be big stars and were getting a raw deal because we weren’t yet. I have no idea where that sense of entitlement came from, but we assumed we were talented and thought it was a damn shame that the world was slow to catch on to this. She was hilariously focused on us succeeding as actors. We’d be at dinner with people, talking about something or other, and then she’d suddenly interrupt and say, “Hey, Tom, have you come up with any ideas for how we can get jobs as actors where we’re actually getting paid? I’m tired of us having to pay to act; I think it should be the other way around.” At that point, we were doing these showcases where we’d rent out a space for nine hundred dollars, say, and put on plays and try to get agents to come see them and sign us. We’d make up a bunch of invites and drop them off with at least fifty different agencies in town; then maybe eight of them would show up, and they wouldn’t even be the agent but the assistant’s assistant’s assistant. Then we’d put on our showcase and have everyone in the audience fill out cards—one for each of the actors in it—that showed what they thought of us. The cards were supposed to have two options for them to check: either “call the agency” or “send a picture.” But I made the cards so I added a third option—“drop dead.” That actually got me more attention than anything else at the showcase: some of the agents who were there laughed when they saw the cards and said, “Who thought of adding ‘drop dead’?” Someone would tell them, “Tom Sizemore did,” and the agent would turn to me and say, “Hey, that’s pretty funny.” Whatever it took to get noticed.

  When Edie and I went out, I think everyone thought we were crazy. We’d get all dressed up—she’d put on a dress and a hat and we’d talk about how that was probably how Rosanna Arquette would dress; so it was good to dress like that because Rosanna Arquette was a big star at the time. Then we’d go into restaurants and Edie would say to the waiter, “Do you have any idea who you’re waiting on?” The waiter would look at me, look at her, then shrug and say no. Edie would pretend to be aghast. She’d go, “Are you insane? Did you just get out of a monastery?” It was a joke but at the same time we were kind of serious. And I did think she was incredibly talented—the most talented actress I’d ever seen. I saw her in a play that she did with some students from the State University of New York at Purchase, and she was magnificent. Essentially, what Edie and I had in common more than anything was a sort of gallows humor. Some mornings, we’d have to Ro Sham Bo to decide who was going to get out of bed and get the coffee, because we both felt too discouraged.

  Edie and I were together for a few years and she introduced me to a lot in that time. She grew up in Northport, Long Island, but had been coming into the city since she was a kid, so she knew Manhattan up and down and showed it to me. She took me to the theater a lot—I remember we saw Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation together. We also drank quite a lot together. But Edie was smart and started hauling herself over to an AA meeting in Greenwich Village. She saw the writing on the wall. Her problem was never drugs—it was alcohol. But the truth is, she fucked a lot better when she drank. She was such a lady, but when she drank, she was like, “Come here and fuck me.”

  I did all sorts of odd jobs besides waiting tables. I tried telemarketing. I even worked as a bouncer at a strip club. But things started to happen for me, careerwise, faster than they did for Edie. I’d met a casting director named Risa Bramon through the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and she really liked me. Risa had been one of Curt Dempster’s first students at Ensemble and eventually she became the casting director for the theater. She did a wonderful job—that woman had an eye for talent—and because of that, she got hired as the casting director on the Madonna film Desperately Seeking Susan. That was her big break, and she didn’t look back; as a result, she ended up essentially being responsible for bringing all of the great New York actors to Hollywood—Alec Baldwin, John Turturro, Ethan Hawke, Anthony LaPaglia, and Edie among them. Before Desperately Seeking Susan, a lot of movies weren’t reading actors out of New York, and Risa helped to change that.

&
nbsp; Risa brought me in to read for the role of a thief in Blue Steel, and not only did I get the part but my scene was with the star of the movie, Jamie Lee Curtis. The project also introduced me to the director Kathryn Bigelow, whom I would work with again in Point Break and Strange Days; she later won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker. Kathryn liked me from the get-go and called up Oliver Stone, who was producing Blue Steel, to tell him he should cast me in Born on the Fourth of July. I had already read for that film because Risa had brought me in, but Oliver hadn’t made a decision yet. But Kathryn’s call was all it took: “Tell Sizemore he’s cast,” he told her.

  At the time, Oliver Stone was the biggest, most powerful director in the world. He’d won Oscars for Platoon and Wall Street. And I was being paid $150,000 and getting to fly to the Philippines to work with him. At that point, I had never been out of the country. When I found out I could go out there early to adjust to the time, the climate, and the set, I got on that plane as quickly as I could.

  I flew to the Philippines on January 12, 1989, and had twelve days before I had to shoot anything. I think I was the first one there besides Tom Cruise. Billy Baldwin arrived later; Daniel and Stephen Baldwin were in the movie, too. I knew the Baldwins from New York; Alec and I had the same agent starting out, and I’d even been out to their family’s place in Massapequa. I remember being blown away by how damn attractive they all were.

  I had some time before I had to work, but I wasn’t really interested in hanging out; I was focused on preparing for the movie. We were all in this huge hotel that Ferdinand Marcos had built for his daughter’s wedding, in this incredibly poor province. It was beyond third world, aside from that hotel, the kind of place where people used feces—both their own and from animals—as material to build their houses. I took all this in, but again, I was just focused on how this was my shot and I had to do a good job there. While for me movie sets later became places to go on location and party, at this point I was still very much a straight arrow. While I’d smoked pot and drank a little bit, I hadn’t done any narcotics yet and what’s more, this was a very serious set. I never saw any members of the cast or crew party; I don’t think I ever even saw anyone hungover.

  I liked to run every morning along the South China Sea. After one such run, very early in the day, I was sitting in the cafeteria writing in my journal. A guy walked up to me and said, “Hey, man, mind if I join you?” I looked up, but I was so exhausted and out of it that I could only really see that there was some guy standing there. I said, “Actually, I would prefer it if you didn’t. I’m just sort of focused on what I’m writing.” And he went, “Okay, man. I get that. I like that. You’re just being yourself, doing your own thing.” His voice was funny and distinctive, and I suddenly realized it was Willem Dafoe, who was coming off big roles in Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Mississippi Burning. He was huge. I went, “Oh, man—I’m so sorry. Sit down, please.” And he just sort of stood there smiling and said, “No, I get it, you’re rude. That’s your thing. I can respect someone doing their thing. You want me to go back to my room?” I kept apologizing, and he said something along the lines of “What if I wasn’t Willem Dafoe but just another schmo?” He was being facetious and giving me shit but in a funny, unique way. I said, “If you make fun of me anymore, I’m going to throw this bowl of rice at you.” I guess Kathryn Bigelow, who had directed him in The Loveless, had told him to look out for me on the set and showed him my picture, so that’s why he’d come up to me. Finally he sat down and said, “No wonder Kathryn likes you; she loves rude people.” We became fast friends.

  Still, I spent most of the time before I had to shoot anything working on a scene where I would be sitting on the top of a hill in a wheelchair—my character was quadriplegic—yell, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and then go flying down and smash into a bunch of wheelchairs at the bottom. I knew that Oliver wouldn’t want to have to use a stunt-man and then cut away, so I wanted to figure out a few things—like how I was going to go flying out of a wheelchair while defying my natural human instinct to protect myself by trying to break my fall with my hands. What I came up with was that I’d have to make my hands inaccessible. So I asked this other actor to tie my hands together and then to tie them to my waist with rope. The guy thought I was completely nuts, but I knew I had to get my hands in a place where I simply wouldn’t be able to move them. The other part I had to figure out was how I was going to turn my body around in midair so I’d take the blow on my shoulder while having my body remain flaccid. I knew that, as a quadriplegic, all I could move was my nose, so it was complicated as hell figuring all of this out.

  The only way I could get it right, I knew, was to practice. But it was so hot there that I couldn’t do it until the sun went down. So on ten of those twelve days before shooting, I’d be up there at sunset screaming, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and flying down the hill on my wheelchair and crashing into the others. I got pretty banged up fairly quickly. Apparently Oliver was coming home from the set at one point and saw me doing this on the makeshift hill that had been built. For about ten minutes he watched me come down and smash into chairs and push the wheelchair back up the hill and do it again. I probably did it some six times without having a clue that he was watching. But apparently, after watching for a while, he turned to his first assistant director, Joe Reidy, and asked, “Who is that?” And Joe said, “His name’s Tom Sizemore.” Oliver asked how long I did this for, and Joe said he didn’t know but could find out. So he sent one of his guys over to me to ask. So some guy came running up to me and said, “Sizemore, how long do you do that for? Joe wants to know.” I had no idea who Joe was or why he wanted to know; I just shrugged, looked at the sun, which was almost completely gone at that point, and said, “I don’t know—till it’s completely dark. About an hour and a half, I guess.” Apparently that impressed Oliver; he liked that I wasn’t afraid. I guess it also impressed Joe—we ended up becoming friends later. Joe’s an amazing guy. He’s been the first AD not only to Oliver but also to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. The first AD really runs the show on a movie set—he’s the one who has to say to the director, “We’re done, we’re moving on,” and have the director listen. When the director’s someone like Oliver or Marty, that’s not always easy, but they always listened to Joe.

  Finally it was my first day of working, and I knew I had to hit it out of the park. So I went for it. When I was done, Joe came up to me and told me that Oliver wanted to see me. I went back to see Oliver and he said, “That was good, so we don’t even have to do a safety—unless you want to. Oh, hey, you want to watch the playback?” He was very casual—as if we knew each other and hung out all the time. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what the hell “playback” or “safety” even meant; I didn’t even know what a craft service table was at that point. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Um, I’ll watch playback,” I said and he played back my scene on the monitor he had right there.

  I had never seen myself on-screen at that point, and I hated it. My face looked huge on the monitor and really fucked-up. My pores seemed enormous and I had scraggly hair because I’d been told to grow my hair out, but all I could focus on were these huge pores on my nose. I must have had a horrified look on my face—I probably looked like I’d just smelled shit or something—because Oliver asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t want to tell him I was horrified, so I just mumbled something about how it was just strange because I’d never seen myself act before. And then I sort of shuffled away, saying, “So, great, I’m not going to do a safety. Thanks.”

  I was still really in my head, and just because Oliver thought I did well didn’t mean I believed it. In fact, as I was walking away, I started thinking about how in the scene I actually looked like I knew what was going to happen next. It’s a scene where a guy was threatening to kill me, and I didn’t really think I sold it; in fact I thought I looked like someone who knew he wasn’t going to get killed. As I was dwelling on this,
I turned to someone on the set and asked, “Hey, what’s a safety?” And the crew guy said, “That’s when they shoot it again. Run back if you want one, kid.” So I ran back to Stone and said, “I’ve thought about it and I do want a safety.” So we did it again, and that’s when I really thought I nailed it. Oliver ultimately agreed that the second take was better.

  For the next couple of days after that we just shot innocuous stuff. Then, on my fourth day of work, we did the scene where I go careening down the hill on my wheelchair. I had gotten very good at flying through the air and taking the blow on my shoulder but giving the illusion that I was going headfirst into the ground. It went well. Then my character gets into this fight with another vet, who was played by Andrew Lauer. I had decided before we shot that I was going to spit on him even though it wasn’t in the script. Andrew ended up spitting back, and we got into this full-on spitting war, which is how Oliver got the idea to have Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe get into a spitting war later in the movie. Because of that, and I think because he could tell just how passionate I was, Oliver wrote me two more scenes. I ended up staying for twenty-seven days even though I was originally just supposed to be there for two weeks. And while I was there I found out that I was cast in Lock Up, a Sylvester Stallone movie I had screen-tested for in Los Angeles on my way to the Philippines. It felt like my whole life was changing overnight.

  But first I had to get home, which actually proved difficult because I had to fly to Manila and then stay overnight in Manila before heading back to New York. The revolution had just started there, and I was staying in Manila with Willem, who was flying out to Poland the next day to do a movie called Triumph of the Will. Suddenly bombs started going off in the sky, and I became convinced our hotel was going to be overrun. I was terrified and kept running over to Willem’s hotel room and waking him up. But nothing happened to us, and I was able to get on a plane back to New York the next day as planned.