—“Game of Shadows” (Thornton/Davis)
GOSSIP USED TO BE FOR WOMEN AT THE BEAUTY SHOP WHEN THEY’D talk about what the neighbor did. It was just something to do. Now gossip has become a multibillion-dollar business, and that’s kind of what’s changed entertainment for everyone.
As I alluded to earlier, I’ve had some pretty bitter divorces and other stuff over the years, and there were some people that said awful things about me in the papers. I accept that the press is so wrong most of the time, but unless it happens to you, you might have no idea how completely wrong a story can be. You give the press one little thing, and they blow it up into a mess. When I talked about my phobias, the story evolved into my being a vampire who lived in a dungeon, drank blood, bit women on the neck, and sucked their blood. None of it was true. I’ve always had a blood thing, so there’s a possibility that I might be reincarnated from a vampire, but I’m not one—certainly not in this lifetime.
Here’s an example of how the press took something and twisted it into a whole different thing. Angie and I gave each other a necklace with a little, clear locket. It wasn’t a vial of blood, as the legend has it. A vial is what you do chemistry experiments in. These weren’t test tubes, these were little lockets, but by the time the press was done with us, they had us both walking around with flower vases full of blood around our necks. That wasn’t the case at all, far from it. The truth is, Angie and I poked ourselves in the finger and rubbed it all over a glass locket. It was a drop of blood on a locket. From that, in the public eye, we became Bela Lugosi, Nosferatu, and the whole vampire mafia. The press always thought she had all these weird traits, and that I did too.
But I wasn’t agoraphobic or paranoid until I found out exactly how many people on the Internet don’t like me for whatever reason. Nowadays, you don’t need facts to be right, you just have to be the first person to get the first word in. So if somebody says you’re a prick publicly, people believe you’re a prick, it doesn’t even matter what you say after, and even if it’s proven later that the guy who said you’re a prick is actually the prick, you’re still a prick forever. There’s still going to be that thing in people’s heads, and that’s who you are for the rest of your life. Until the Internet, I never knew that shit.
Today, mostly what I do when I’m not working is play with my daughter, Bella, hang out with my sons, Willie and Harry, or go to the market with my girlfriend, Connie. When I’m not doing those things—or working, of course—I watch the History Channel or the Military Channel. I also like ESPN or Fox Sports, having grown up as an obsessed athlete and sports fan. But I really don’t get out of the house much. I have actually become kind of a shadow, because people can’t get me out of the bunker anymore. Not very often anyway. I wrote a song about it called “Game of Shadows.” But here’s the thing, the people who go, “Hey, man, I love you, can I get a picture?” are the same ones who get on the Internet and say things about me. They love you and they hate you. It’s always been like that, but this whole computer generation. ... And that’s why entertainment is being ruined. Now, this is not a slam on my fans. As an entertainer, I want to have a lot of fans, but the fact of the matter is, my fans will always be the same ones. I’m never gonna be the guy who makes a movie that will make $500 million. I’ve been in some of those, but so was somebody else. I was in Armageddon—that made a shitload of money, but it’s not because of me. It’s because of the people who made it, the way they made it, and the audience to which it was directed.
But art is being ruined because of what we finally did. This is how we’re moving through life. People blame it on the system. They blame the movie studio, the record label, the corporations. They say corporations are doing a lot of horrible shit to us, that they’re killing us and ruining the world. And they are, but not the way you may think. What corporations are, what studios are, are places that make money. They don’t give a fuck whether they have to kill you or blow you or come over and play Monopoly with you and your kids all night long. If it makes them money, they really don’t give a shit.
For years, guys like me have been whining and bitching about the corporations and the studios and the labels, and, well, here’s where it went wrong. It went wrong when the corporations figured out that they could make the people think they run things by preying on on their weaknesses. To make them think they have a voice. When I was growing up, we had the slogan “Power to the people.” Well, this ain’t what we meant. This is just not what we meant. We were talking about fighting the government. We didn’t mean let every asshole on earth dictate what we do as artists or how we live our lives. We meant, let’s not let the system and the government work us, let’s not let people get killed in a useless war over oil, money, territory, power, religion, whatever they’re fighting over. That’s what we meant. We didn’t mean let Norman from Des Moines, Iowa, get on CNN and Twitter and tell the world what he thinks about the oil spill. We didn’t mean that.
This Twittering shit has really got to stop. Once in a blue moon I’ll watch the news just because I always kind of have faith—faith that somehow I’ll turn on the news just to find out that yes, there’s going to be a tornado in Georgia, or no, there won’t be. That’s all I want to know. But I put the news on and find out that there’s been a congressman, a Congressman Weiner, who sent a picture of his wiener to somebody. Instead of just reporting on it, the newscaster asks the viewers what they think about it. And then you get someone telling you, on the crawl, what they think about Weiner. “I think he’s terrible. I can’t believe he showed his wiener.” Are you high? That’s what this society has become? Show me a politician who hasn’t slept with some assistant and I’ll show you a eunuch.
When we said “Power to the people,” we didn’t mean “Let’s listen to somebody in a pair of stretch pants in the middle of the country and see what they have to say on their blog.” We didn’t mean “I’m going to make a movie that’s about some horrible shit I went through in my life and we’re going to let the audience tell me how to end the thing.”
People don’t understand that this system we currently live in has made the people think they are the system. And I guess they are now. We’ve given people too much power. We’ve given the people these crazy ideas—iPhones, iChat, I do this, I do that, my thing, my this, my that—and created these gadgets to make everyone think they are important. And it’s killing our society. All of a sudden, everyone from the most intelligent human in the world to the funniest guy to the most talented guy all the way to a blithering idiot are equal because they all have a goddamn Facebook. I spent twenty-five years trying to get out of the woods and I finally did, and then I spent another twenty-five years trying to not see these people who tortured me my whole life again, and you think I want a Facebook so they can find me? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t get it. I don’t understand the whole concept of it, but I do know this: people who feel that they’re not important enough love it. And they’re being hoodwinked. Anytime you want you can punch in a few buttons and watch people hurt themselves, fall down, and puke, and celebrities eat a cheeseburger on the patio and pass out, or whatever it is. And the Facebook people all get to write each other—they’ve got this secret society.
I really didn’t know how many people hated me until I saw the Internet. Before, we were blind to whoever hated us. If I made a movie and put it out there, I’d see some reviews that were lukewarm or bad or great, but they were done by critics, and for me it was okay, because that’s what they were. They’ve studied movies, they love movies, sometimes I agreed with these critics, sometimes I disagreed, but they had some goddamn right to do it. Once you let any son-of-a-bitch in the world become a critic, all of a sudden there are people all over the place saying, “Why is this motherfucker making another movie, fuck him and his crazy ex-wife and his crazy blood-drinking horseshit ways. I wish this son-of-a-bitch would die.” Wow. I had no idea I had affected somebody that way. I mean, at the end of the day—you know what it is, and you do
n’t want to hear it, it’s somebody who thinks they deserve to be in their own version of my position. But they don’t know what my position is to start with. My position may be a lot less lofty than they think it is. I came from a horrible situation. I grew up in poverty, got my ass beat, moved out here to California to realize my dreams, only to go and live in poverty some more. I went through a lot of stuff and paid dues forever.
It doesn’t feel good to have people talking about you. They think you got so much money. I’m not a rich movie star myself. Some people are, some people aren’t. I make really good money, and I appreciate every bit of it, and I appreciate the fact that I get to do what I love. I love movies and I love music, and I always want to do those things. Mainly I love it, though, between “Action” and “Cut”—when you’re actually doing it. I think a lot of actors would tell you that, and as a musician, when I’m recording or playing live for people, that’s when I like it. A lot of the other stuff that goes with it, the gossip, the nasty criticism—we’re all still little kids inside, and when people say bad things about you, it cuts you to the bone. Nobody likes to put up with that stuff, and they say you got to, that it’s all part of your job. You’re a public figure. But is it really a part of your job? To be cut to shreds all the time? When all you’re doing is what you love and you’re trying to do it for people? Like I said, I don’t make a lot of money in movie-business terms. In music, I don’t make any. In fact, I go broke doing it, but I love it.
Believe me, once you get out here and you get in this and you have some kids and some ex-wives, the problems are the same, and you end up suddenly being in debt, and you may have to do a movie that you don’t particularly want to because you need the money. If you only knew how it works inside, and you knew the people and some of the horrible shit we deal with and what it does. On top of that, to be a performer, you have to have some kind of ego to start with, and let me tell you, they can cut it to shreds instantly. So we certainly don’t need the fans helping out, because we get plenty of that out here within the business. It’s been a real long hard road, and I’ve been doing it for thirty years.
And I do appreciate the fans. I have a lot of fans. Not as many as I wish I did, but I’ve got quite a few for not being one of the top five guys. It really gets to you when you work really hard to do something. See, I didn’t get handed this. My dad wasn’t a movie producer. I spent a life of poverty and living from hand to mouth to get this stuff going. It’s been a great thing for me, but people don’t understand how taxing it is and how your life becomes this open book, and not even the truth. It’s whatever anybody says.
At the end of the day, I can still say I’ve done some movies and some records that I’m very proud of, and I know we did them the way we wanted to and they came out with the original vision intact. That’s all you can hope for. These days, if we get to make a movie that ends up the way we thought it would or hoped it would, then I’m happy with it no matter what anybody else thinks about it. We really do love the fans that we have and try to ignore all the negative stuff as much as we can, but making the actual movie, too, can be very hard.
This summer we made Jayne Mansfield’s Car, and I have to tell you, it was 105 degrees and I was in charge of some pretty big classic actors who I had to deal with every day. I had to make sure that everybody was happy and be in the movie myself. It’s a big responsibility. I got real sick down there. I didn’t know if I would make it through the movie. It’s that weight. People who haven’t done it say, with sarcasm, “Oh, getting to be a movie star and being on a movie set is hard.” Well, you have to come do it or you’ll never know. I know what it’s like to be a carpenter because I’ve been one. I’ve worked at a sawmill, I’ve worked at a screen-door factory, I’ve worked at a machine shop, I’ve hauled hay, I grew up doing all that stuff. I do know what that’s like and how hard it is. But being a filmmaker is hard too. You take on this responsibility to get up at five in the morning and work for eighteen to nineteen hours a day for up to five months and know that you have to be good.
Now, not everybody has that particular talent. You can get better (or even a little worse) at it with experience and depending on who you listen to, but I think you’re either born to be an actor or you’re not. It’s like being a professional athlete. Those guys that can toss a basketball through a hoop, or hit a 98-mile-per-hour fastball the way they do, with that sort of skill, and especially those guys who play football and are risking their lives—why don’t they deserve the money? I do think agents have ruined sports in a lot of ways and that advertising companies have caused resentment among people—there are definitely times when I instinctively say, “They’re going to pay that guy how much money?” But “professional athlete” is a very short career, and a lot of the people that actually make it don’t have the opportunity to continue on as announcers or get big endorsement deals afterward. So they get what they can while they can. Of course, as an actor, you can be doing your thing until you’re eighty because you’re not actually playing football. But think about how often careers go downhill. So there may be a very small window in your career as a big actor where you could make some money. It could be ten years. It could be two years. But the point is, you have a talent to act and you love it, so you go out there and do it for as long as you can. And of course, as an entertainer, you want it to be good and you want people to like it. You want devoted fans, and you want to keep a great business and a great culture alive. I try to make good movies. Maybe I don’t all the time, but I’m not trying to make a shitty movie or write a shitty book or make shitty music just so I can fuck people. I love it and I want you to love it too. That pressure alone is emotionally draining. A lot of times we do very physical movies, and then it becomes physically draining as well. Sure, I’ve been mad at my profession sometimes. I’ve said I didn’t like it because I was envious that I wasn’t really getting to do what some other people were getting to do. We’ve all had that at some point, where your job becomes hard on your inside and consequently hard on your relationships. Now imagine a job as precarious as acting, directing, and writing.
A lot of the reasons actors get paid money is because big companies that make big movies have a lot of money. I have, at certain times, made big money too, but not anymore, given the fact that most movies now are about naked teenage vampires or models with gladiator suits on or video-game movies. So for guys like me who are in their fifties and older—and even guys who are in their forties—it’s hard to get a movie financed, and we don’t make the same money as we used to, even as little as five years ago. It’s especially difficult for women because they want to throw them out the door after thirty sometimes.
These days, if you want to make a real movie, they pay you nothing for it. Actors work for scale all the time. I’ve done it many times. The independent films I’ve done, I don’t take money up front for them. I get it on the back end, meaning, I take a chance right along with everyone else. If it’s successful, you make some money. If it fails, you don’t get any. Most of the movies I’m known for were like that. Of the movies I have been paid big money for, some of them made money, some of them didn’t, but as I said, I wasn’t supposed to carry most of them myself.
But I don’t really know anybody out there who, if somebody offered them a certain amount of money for doing anything—fixing toilets, doing a movie, whatever—would say, “Oh no, I don’t want to do that, I’m so Zen about everything, I don’t care about money.” Sure, there are people like that in the world, but they live on the top of a mountain someplace. People certainly line up to win the lottery, and that doesn’t take any talent, that takes luck.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Ballad of the Alamo
BECAUSE OF TOO MUCH ACCESS, WE NOW HAVE NO HEROES. WE’LL never have heroes again like Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Stewart, and Marlon Brando. When we saw Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, or Ava Gardner, the only time we saw them was on the screen. Not scratching th
eir ass walking down the street on YouTube. I’m not saying there will never be somebody who’s hugely famous again. There will be plenty of those motherfuckers. I’m saying we won’t have magical heroes.
I mean great people who have done truly great things. And I don’t just mean actors and musicians, either. One of the things in my career of which I’m most proud is playing Davy Crockett, because all those guys at the Alamo were heroes to me. From now on, I can know I played Davy Crockett in The Alamo and that will be in cinematic history, you know? John Wayne played him too, but I was told by the historians that we made the most historically accurate movie that’s been made about the Alamo—not only in the performances but in John Lee Hancock’s treatment of the script.
Some people don’t want to hear it that Davy Crockett was executed, but that was in the diary of a Mexican lieutenant who was there, and that’s as close as we can get to the truth, so that’s in the movie. For some reason, people say, “No, Davy Crockett died like in the painting, where he’s swinging his rifle and he was the last man standing. He was overrun and killed.” I mean, really, what’s the difference? When you’re shooting those kind of black-powder rifles, those muskets, you got one shot, so if you didn’t get reloaded in time, it’s completely conceivable that he was just overrun, but when you think about it, if Crockett and his guys were captured, that means they were the last ones standing. So Davy Crockett fought to the end and they captured him, and I’m sure as big a name as Davy Crockett had, Santa Anna in particular wanted to be eye-to-eye with him before he killed him. In the Mexican lieutenant’s diary, it says that Davy Crockett died with dignity. So that’s the way we portrayed it.
John Lee Hancock made a great movie. Jason Patric, Patrick Wilson, Dennis Quaid, and everybody involved, from the production staff to the extras, felt the same way. On top of that, we were based in Austin, Texas, which is my second home. I know everybody in Austin.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 19
