A friend of mine was working for one of these catering companies that do big parties for rich folks. I needed a job, so this guy asked if I could come work for a Christmas Eve party in Bel Air. I had worked in restaurants, but I only washed dishes, made pizzas, and stocked the salad bar. I tended bar at Shakey’s, but all they had was beer and wine, so I didn’t even know how to make a fucking drink. “I can’t be a waiter,” I said.
He said, “Look, do you have a tuxedo?” I said, “Do I have a tuxedo? No, I don’t have a fucking tuxedo.” So he gave me a tuxedo. He was like six-four, and I had to pin the sleeves and the pants up on this thing, but I drove over to Stone Canyon Road to be a waiter for a rich person’s party on Christmas Eve.
I get there and they put me in charge of passing around little fish-head hors d’oeuvres and shit. Doesn’t take me long to notice that Debbie Reynolds is over there, Dan Aykroyd and his wife, Donna Dixon, are over there, Dudley Moore is playing the piano, and there’s Sammy Cahn, the old songwriter, talking to some little old short dude with a German accent. I didn’t know who the dude was, but he was in good company.
Turns out it’s Stanley Donen’s party. Stanley Donen directed Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, all big MGM musicals. I finally got to eat at Dan Tana’s one night with a guy who wanted Tom and me to write a screenplay, and I thought, Wow, I hit the big time! because I ate at Dan Tana’s, and here I am passing out fucking hors d’oeuvres at Stanley Donen’s house.
While I was passing out the fish heads, I went over by this fireplace thing and started talking to the little old German cat. He and some guy were talking about the old days, saying stuff like, “Yeah, I’ll never forget, I was with Jimmy Durante …” when the German guy says to me, “So you wanna be an actor?” I wasn’t clued in yet to how actors are waiters and I thought he had ESP, so I said, “Yeah, I do, I do want to be an actor, how did you know that?” And he goes, “Well, all you guys want to be actors. Here’s the thing. You’re never gonna make it.” And I go, “Well, jeez, thanks a lot, thanks a lot.” He says, “You know, you’re too handsome to be a character actor and too ugly to be a movie star.” I say, “Well, what can I do then?” And he says, “Well, can you write?” And I say, “Yeah, actually, I got a few screenplays.” He says, “Actors are a dime a dozen in this place. They need good writers. So write your own stuff and create your own characters.”
Then the boss guy comes over and chews my ass out for talking to one of the guests, and the little German guy tells him to go somewhere else. “I’m talking to this guy,” he says. The boss guy walks away, and the German guy goes, “Look, writing is a real honest profession in a lot of ways. Some writers are full of it, but the great thing about them, even when they’re writing stuff that is a bunch of shit, is they’re interesting.” Then he goes, “You got a life that’s been interesting?”
“Yeah, it’s been interesting so far.”
“Well, write about it. Write about your interesting life, and maybe one of these days somebody else might think it’s interesting too, and if you still want to be an actor, maybe you can be in whatever it is. If somebody buys it anyway.”
This cat is really funny and really nice to me. I don’t feel like a waiter with this guy. So I go back up to refill my little tray of fried fish heads, and one of these actor types who’s working at the bar says, “What’d he say to you?” And I say, “Who?” and he says, “Billy Wilder.” I say, “Billy Wilder?” And he says, “That little guy you were talking to over there, that’s Billy Wilder.” And I go, “The guy who directed Jack Lemmon and those cats?” He’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Well, if I had known that I would’ve probably left and not said anything to him.” Once again, my ignorance gives way for me to not just pack it up. I’m not including everything Mr. Wilder said, but it changed my life in so many ways.
After that I started writing Karl and doing a one-man show at the theater where I did all my own characters, wrote all my own shit. I was later discovered out of the theater by casting director Fred Roos, who I owe and admire forever.
YEARS LATER, AFTER I’D DONE SLING BLADE AND BECOME AN OVERNIGHT deal or whatever, I got a call from Billy Wilder saying he wanted me to have lunch with him in his office, right down here on Beverly Drive. I had just been nominated for two Academy Awards for the movie, and now Billy Wilder wanted to have lunch with me. So he gets me down to his office, and he orders sandwiches from Nate and Al’s Deli, and he and I have sandwiches. From Nate and Al’s. In Billy Wilder’s office.
I’m sitting there having a turkey sandwich—with Billy Wilder—and he says, “So, I read this interview you did where it talked about how I had given you advice and how I was so nice to you when you were a waiter. This thing, it really moved me.” That’s why he called me down there. He had seen this interview with me saying this about him. Then he goes, “I don’t remember a fucking bit about that, but it’s a great story, and I’m glad I was able to give you some helpful advice.” And he reminds me again, “I don’t remember you from Adam, of course.” And I say, “Yeah, that’s okay.”
Then he says, “I’ve got a book I want to sign for you,” and he pulls a copy of the Sling Blade book of the screenplay out of his bookshelf. He signs it to me, “To Billy Bob, from a big fan—Billy Wilder.” That was pretty wild.
Two directors were very nice to me. He was one, and then there was Stanley Kramer. The house I live in now was actually Stanley Kramer’s house in the late fifties, early sixties, when he made It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and all those movies. Kramer took me under his wing, and to this day I’m good friends with his daughters and his widow. Stanley was a great man. Mr. Wilder was a great man. They both gave me hope and the benefit of their wisdom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
October 3, 1988
Who knows what makes a heart race too fast
And who knows what makes it stop
Somehow I still feel it was a mistake
Surely it wasn’t just your heartbreak
And maybe the sky was just running out of hope
And maybe the heavens opened up and dropped down a rope
And you grabbed it
My brother
My brother
My brother
—“Fast Hearts” (Thornton/Mitchell)
TOM AND I WROTE A LOT OF STUFF THAT NEVER GOT MADE. WE SOLD our first screenplay to David Geffen in 1985 or 1986. Then we made a three-picture deal with Disney, with Touchstone. I was getting bits and pieces here and there, making a little money as an actor doing Matlock and some other TV work. I was never one to say that movie acting is better than TV acting. The only difference is that you have to move so fast in TV you don’t have much time to work on anything. You can take all day to do ten lines in a movie. I hate it when people say, “Oh, he’s a TV actor.” There’s some good stuff on TV. James Garner in The Rockford Files, he was terrific. Nowadays, Curb Your Enthusiasm makes me laugh, it’s hysterical to me. J. B. Smoove as Leon, Larry David’s roommate on the show, he’s funny as shit. Jeff Garlin, all those guys. Larry David is one of the guys on my list that I want to meet. Maybe I’ll regret it, you never know. You don’t know until you meet somebody.
I know the Farrelly brothers pretty well, and they were shooting in Atlanta when we were making Jayne Mansfield’s Car. They invited me over to their set one day when I was off. They said that Larry David had just left, because he’s in the movie they were shooting. I just sat around on the set that day, so disappointed that I didn’t get to meet him. You know, you can’t ever stop being a fan. That’s the most important thing for an artist. Never stop being a fan. It doesn’t matter how big you get, you got to always be a fan. Once your ego takes over and you start hating other artists, that’s when you’ll die inside. Like somebody. It doesn’t matter who it is—it could be someone or something from forty years ago—but being a fan keeps you alive as an artist. It inspires you. Even though I’m in the entertainment business, I’m still a big fan. I lov
e movies and music.
In 1987 I worked on a series called The Outsiders based on S. E. Hinton’s book and the movie that was on Fox when Fox was a very new network. The show lasted a year, but it was the first time I made steady money as an actor. I was living with my buddy Coby and his wife, Katja, over in Glendale, I was seeing a bunch of girls, and I hadn’t been this relaxed and had this much fun since I worked for the Arkansas Highway Department.
IF I COULD GO BACK TO ANY TIME IN MY LIFE AND RELIVE IT, IT WOULD be when I was making The Alamo, Bad Santa, or when I worked for the Arkansas Highway Department back in 1979, right before I came back to California. I worked for the highway department for about a year and a half, driving dump trucks, shoveling asphalt, and salting the roads when it snowed or iced over. I was one of the guys that took the tractor and the bush hog and mowed the median and the banks. I drove a patch truck and patched holes in the road. A good friend of mine named Broderick Collins was my roommate during this time. He also worked at the highway department. It was just a good time when there was no responsibility. We didn’t have a lot of money, but it was ours.
My mom had gotten remarried and moved off to Louisville, Kentucky, so we lived in the house that I grew up in, just me and Broderick. We’d get up at five-thirty in the morning and go to work at the highway department. When we got out at night, Broderick and I would get in his Firebird—which was like the one Burt Reynolds had in Smokey and the Bandit—put our good clothes on, and go to Hot Springs to just tear shit up. I had a couple of girlfriends over there. We’d work our asses off for the highway department all day and then fuck around all night.
I WAS HAPPIER THAN I HAD EVER BEEN FROM 1987 THROUGH OCTOBER 3, 1988, the day my brother Jimmy died. He was thirty years old. He had a virus at the time, but he would never go to the doctor and it got in his heart. They think he probably had rheumatic fever when he was a kid and they never caught it.
I was devastated. Me and my brother were real close. He was a genius. Jimmy was two and a half years younger than me, but he was kind of like the big brother because he was a lot more responsible. We grew up listening to Captain Beefheart and the Mothers of Invention together, and he was a brilliant songwriter in his own right. There are these people who there are only one of, and there was only one of my brother. I really admired him.
There are parts of my sense of humor and my vibe that died with him because, though he was a lot smarter and a lot more talented than I am, he was the only person on the planet who understood certain things the way I did.
Jimmy was dark and moody. He was always to himself and quiet. We used to get in fights all the time. I was stronger than him, but I used to let him get the best of me in fights because I didn’t want to hurt him. One time I held him down in the backyard—it was about a half-hour before my dad got home—and I had to keep holding him down because he wouldn’t quit. I had to tell him, “If I let you up, do you promise you’ll quit fighting me?” And he said, “No! Fuck you! If you let me up, I’ll kill you, you cocksucker!” That’s the way he was. He had a really bad temper. Jimmy would spit and yell and scream, hit you in the mouth, you’d be bleeding on him. He swung his fist like a windmill. He was a tough kid. A real talented kid. Great musician and songwriter. And he was real different. Jimmy was moody and very intense, sometimes aggressively nuts. He went to chef’s school and became a pastry chef—he was a great cook. He turned me on to certain people in the eighties that I didn’t know much about, like the BoDeans and Jason and the Scorchers. He was a very bright kid. He grew up to be a long-haired hippie like me. We were very close.
Jimmy died when he was thirty. I went crazy. I had a lot of the “why him, not me” thing. I think a lot of people have that, and I’ve never been completely happy since. Jimmy died before he could really show what he was, but we’ve recorded a couple of his songs, and I plan on doing some more. I still think I ought to call him and tell him when something happens and forget that he’s been dead since 1988.
“THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON
(AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)
Part VIII
The phone rang. It was Mary Cross, mine and Billy Bob’s agent. Billy happened to be at my grungy apartment, and as I listened to Mary I looked suddenly at Billy and gave him a thumbs-up. She had great news! We had sold our first script!
Billy and I, naturally, were euphoric. I lived in East Hollywood in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood on New Hampshire Avenue, and Billy and I walked around the corner to a Korean grocery and liquor store on Vermont. We bought a bottle of cheap scotch. We passed the scotch back and forth, drinking straight from the bottle, till it was empty. I woke up the next morning with the happiest hangover I’ve ever had.
It was February 1987, nearly six years after Billy and I had come out from Arkansas to make it in Hollywood. The script we’d sold, “Hands of Another,” was a thriller about a homicide detective and an actor. We wrote it with the help of a real homicide detective who was working for the LAPD. We got $25,000 for an option and a rewrite. The most I’d ever earned in a year before that was $8,000, so this seemed like a fortune. I quit my part-time temp job—I’d been catching a bus downtown (since my car’s radiator was shot and I couldn’t drive it for more than ten minutes without it overheating) for the last fourteen months to work in the Population Research Section of the Regional Planning Department of the County of Los Angeles (yes, it was as tedious as it sounds)—and I moved to a new apartment, in Hollywood, north of Franklin, on the prettily named Primrose Avenue.
“Hands of Another,” alas, never got made. A Michael J. Fox movie with a similar plotline came along and blew us out of the water. But besides providing Billy and me with our first success, “Hands of Another” also led directly to our next project. Since we’d sold one cop script, we decided it would be smart to write another cop script, and with the help of our homicide detective friend, we immediately did so.
We called it “Color Me Bad.” It was about a naive small-town chief of police in Arkansas who has a showdown with some vicious killers from L.A. Our agent Mary loved it, and within days of her sending it out Billy and I got another electrifying phone call: Tri-Star had flipped for “Color Me Bad” and wanted to buy it!
Well, Billy and I were in high cotton now. We’d sold two spec scripts in a row. We were finally beginning to tear Hollywood apart, just like we’d planned it. I flew back to Arkansas in triumph. It was only the second time I’d been home since Billy and I had left years ago. It was the middle of the summer, and I had a pleasant time playing tennis and working on my tan. The day before I was to go back to L.A., my mother convened a kind of family reunion to celebrate my success. She was one of nine children, so there were lots of people there. Cousins congratulated me, aunts kissed me, uncles slapped me on the back. And then the phone rang.
It was Billy, calling from California. His voice sounded terrible, and I asked him what was wrong. He said Mary Cross had just called. It seemed that our script had come to the attention of the president of Tri-Star; he’d read it, hadn’t liked it, and had called the deal off.
I took my mother aside and told her what had happened. She was as shocked as I was. She asked me not to tell anyone because if I did it would ruin the reunion. So I and all my cousins and aunts and uncles continued to celebrate my nonexistent success.
The bad news cast a pall over the short remainder of my visit. It turned out that was the last time I was ever to see my mother. She dropped dead while taking a walk a few months later.
The initial flurry of excitement over “Color Me Bad” quickly died away, and now it was just another script floating around Hollywood looking for a home. One major producer said he’d take it on if, in the role of the white police chief, we agreed to cast Danny Glover. When we gently pointed out that Danny Glover was black, he said, what difference did that make? Well, since a central part of the story was the police chief having to confront his own racism, it made a difference to us, so we moved on. Then a major independent
company said they’d make “Hurricane” (as we were now calling it) if we agreed to partner up with a certain hot young director. When we met with the director, he was such a flaming asshole that the whole project fell apart within an hour. And so it went for the next three years, till we met a producer named Ben Myron. We optioned the script to Ben for a dollar at a Hank Williams Jr. concert, then Ben and his partner, Jesse Beaton, took it to RCA Columbia, a video company that at the time was funding a lot of low-budget indie movies (including Sex, Lies, and Videotape). Larry Estes, head of the company, liked the script. It was shot in the fall of 1990 in L.A. and Arkansas under yet another title, “One False Move.”
It starred Bill Paxton as a naive small-town Arkansas chief of police who has a deadly showdown with some hard-boiled criminals from L.A. Billy played one of the bad guys. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a distributor for it. It sat on the shelf for a year and seemed to be headed straight to video. It was a rotten time. Billy and I hadn’t had a writing job in a long while, and I was totally broke. My car was in hock to the Writers Guild Credit Union, and I was having to borrow money from a girl I’d recently met to pay the rent. And then the luck happened.
Movie critics Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel saw One False Move at separate film festivals in early 1992. Both went bananas over it and made it their personal campaign to see that the movie was released in theaters. It came out in May to rave reviews. It took us four years to get an agent, six years to sell a script, ten years to get a movie made, but Billy and I suddenly became a hot writing team, and Billy’s acting career began to flourish. In their end-of-the-year show, Ebert named One False Move the second-best movie of the year while Siskel had it number one. Billy and I owe a big debt to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down guys.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 13
