by Val Kilmer
I still haven’t taken my children. Practice what you preach, Val. Dream the big dreams and then do them.
Real Genius
From the unblemished wilds of Africa to the smog-covered San Fernando Valley. Without quite realizing it, I was on a Hollywood fast track. My second starring role was in another comedy, Real Genius.
I handled the whole audition arrogantly, and I’m afraid that arrogance might have won the day. The character was wildly arrogant, with reason. He was the smartest person in the “smartest” school.
As soon as I arrived, the assistant to the assistant to the assistant said, “Where’s your headshot?”
“I don’t believe in them,” was my terse reply.
The assistant was so taken aback she didn’t quite know what to do. She whispered into the phone, and I went in to see director Martha Coolidge (who’d recently had a hit with Valley Girl, a Romeo-and-Juliet teen comedy with Nic Cage). Also in the room was a pre–spiky hairdo Brian Grazer—a Hollywood mogul in the making. I did all this in the character of the part I was looking to play—Chris Knight, a wise-guy science whiz who finds a way to disrupt the CIA’s demonic plan to exploit his talent. I also brought four proper French croissants, and proceeded to devour one. The buttery crumbs dripped down my shirt, and everyone just stared at me like, Is this guy for real?
I’m not sure Martha or Brian knew what to do with me. I was standoffish but also committed. Very soon after we shook hands, Brian said he had to go and stood up. I stood up immediately, too, and said something like, “But didn’t you say you were the… what was it? The… um, um… product man? What was it?”
“The producer,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s what you said.”
“Yes,” he said, “but you stay and talk to Martha, she’s the one you need to—”
“But you’re the money guy! You’re the one I want to spend time with. Wow! How DO YOU DO IT? Get people to fork over millions for this crap! You must be amazing! I will go where you go.”
I babbled on following him out and down the elevator and tried to get into a cab with him, but that’s when he finally drew the line. No crazy actor was going to get into his cab.
Somehow I was rewarded for all this silliness with the role. Also I remember demanding double the money I had any right to. I think that might have done the trick. I always think a forty-dollar hamburger must taste better than a Wendy’s.
A cast member remembers something I don’t: that after I’d been given the lead, I did the first read-through on my back, never giving eye contact to anyone, my focus completely on the script. It sounds like something a twenty-four-year-old young rocker like me would do. I have a vague memory of lying on the large plastic dining tables they fold out for events like this. Anything to establish the absolute weirdness of the guy was fine by me, so I probably did do it.
Rehearsals were tricky. As one of the few female directors working in Hollywood at that time, Martha had my admiration, but she didn’t see the humor the way I did. She identified with Chris Knight’s headmaster—a villain/buffoon—and not with Chris himself. By giving the headmaster too much respectability, she undercut his laugh lines. I did my best to impose my comedic choices. This caused friction, so much so that one evening I came home from the set to a message on my answering machine from a colleague who said he’d just been asked to audition for the part of Chris Knight in Real Genius. In other words, my part.
I ran over to see Brian Grazer the next morning. He was bouncing a golf ball off his wall in a rhythmically hypnotic pattern.
“Hey, man,” I said, “are you trying to fire me?”
Brian turned beet red.
“Martha says you’re scaring the cast members,” he responded. “You’re not giving them a chance to be funny.”
“The jokes aren’t funny, Brian. And it’s not funny when the headmaster is trying to be Hamlet. Come to rehearsal. Give me a little breathing room and I’ll spread my funny around. You have some very talented comedians in the cast, but comedians always try to be funny. I get that, but it’s not the comedy jokes the movie is about. It’s about how all these smart kids don’t know what my character is going to do next. That’s what I’m establishing. Martha just doesn’t get my humor. That doesn’t mean it’s not funny. Here, I’ll prove it to you. Why is a Groucho Marx mustache funnier painted on than a real one?”
Brian is very smart, and I could tell it bothered him to have to answer what everyone has to answer.
“I don’t know Val, why?” he said with the slightest bit of condescension. I really liked him and didn’t like putting him on the spot like I had with Martha when I asked her the same question.
“I’m sorry, Brian, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. The answer is, ‘Who the hell knows why, it just is.’ Comedy isn’t intellectual. You laugh or you don’t. If you want, I’ll stop making the film better and get right down to the television laugh track it sounds like everyone is into.”
Brian relented. Martha relented. I was rehired before I was ever fired. I got to do that fantastic scene when we’re all swimming in a sea of popcorn. It was delicious. It was also the perfect metaphor for a popcorn movie. Martha let me make my own weird T-shirts, one of which carried the exhortation “Surf Nicaragua.” Decades later at Comic-Cons I see fans wearing Real Genius custom-made T-shirts that feature a gorilla I borrowed from the logo of my stepdad’s secret men’s club.
With actor Gabe Jarret in a publicity still for Real Genius. The “International Order for Gorillas” T-shirt was modeled after the logo of my stepdad’s secret men’s club.
Despite the fundamental disagreements between me and Martha, the movie made good money. After we wrapped, cast member and buddy of mine Jon Gries (who played Lazlo Hollyfeld, the brilliant recluse who lives in a closet) and I drove across the country, curious to see what the South was all about. Well, we learned that racism was sure still an issue. We were actors determined to understand characters who were not part of our own background, so we hung out with some serious rednecks. Those good ol’ boys didn’t play. They quickly discerned where we stood on all the issues. Their next step would be delivering upon us the punishment they knew we deserved. Before that happened, we were well on our way to my new home in New Mexico, our final destination, flying across the Mason-Dixon Line to friendlier territory.
I had decided to make a documentary about nuclear power, and New Mexico being the birthplace of the atom bomb I had no trouble meeting people who not only had strong opinions about the nuclear power subject but were actually part of its history. It is one of the more bizarre parts of the history of this quiet little state that it also went through a period where its tranquility-inspiring scenery was the home of the most violent action we destructive humans have come up with in our short time of being the boss of this perfect ball of life we call Earth. Because of the madness capable in our flinty souls, we felt justified in coming up with a piece of equipment that not only would wipe out the enemy, it would also as a necessary part of its omnipotent destructive power take down everything else at the same time. This bomb blows up in both directions. It blows back as fast as it blows forward. But the fear was so extant—love that word—that we just figured to hell with the consequences. Gee, I wish we had thought that through a bit more.
To be sure, my documentary was a side trip, but side trips have been as important to my life as the main voyages. Maybe more important. I had read a ton of books about nuclear proliferation and was painfully aware of the government’s cover-up. In fact, I was still going with Cher when she was making Mike Nichols’s Silkwood, a cautionary tale, you’ll remember, about a whistleblower (played by Meryl Streep) who works in a nuclear plant.
They were shooting in Texas and dear Cher brought me along for a number of dinners as she knew how much I loved Mike Nichols. I would soon outgrow him and directors who were early inspirations like Stanley Kubrick because I just found their enduring cynicism no longer part of what I
needed art to do for me, and have since preferred a David Lean kind of classiness. But back then, I could hardly speak around Mike. He was one of the few people I was concerned about what they thought of me, especially because I was going out with someone like Cher, who is as vivid as a Fourth of July fireworks display in New Orleans on the centennial.
At those dinners, I was prepared to discuss the issue at hand and knew, when it came to information about the lethality of nuclear, I could hold my own. Nichols was a sparkling conversationalist but decided to make me the star of one particular evening by proving Stanislavski’s axiom that the actor must be the most informed person in the room. So he asked me a lot of questions I wish I could have answered as well in a dramatic context in my little documentary. Cher was happy, and Mike was impressed. I didn’t get much advice about how to finish my documentary, though.
Silkwood came out to great acclaim. Meryl, Cher, and Mike were all nominated for Oscars. The nuclear issue was galvanized. And I was dead set on making my own film about the crisis. It was called Journey to Victory because I wanted to assume optimism. I wanted to address both the hawks and the doves. Rather than alienate, I wanted to convince. Over a long period of time I interviewed everyone from five-year-old kids to eighty-five-year-old scientists. I shot in Washington, DC; New York; Germany; the USSR; and New Mexico. Whatever money I earned went into the film. But alas, the complexities of my life and career overwhelmed my determination to complete the project. I’ve had several such massive projects in my life, noble causes all. Sometimes they fly, sometimes they float, sometimes they sink. But no matter whether they are completed, they sustain me. I am not a practical man. I’ve never sought to be. It’s not in my nature. Magical realism has an iffy relationship to practicality. It’s not easily monetized. So my documentary on the dangers of nuclear is still unfinished. That doesn’t make me happy. I’m still moved to open the can and complete the film. But if I don’t do it now, it’ll be for the same reason I didn’t do it then: other projects emerge that, for one reason or another, cannot be delayed.
I do not know why the simple answer to my puzzle of how to make an entertaining film about the nuclear dilemma such as I understood it as a young man really required me to be in it. Somehow this thought never occurred to me back then—that it was my story of coming to an understanding about the most crucial issue of our time. At the time I just couldn’t see what is now so obvious. The story is about me, not nuclear energy. But I just couldn’t accept that I had to be on camera. I should have done one or the other, flown around the world learning from the people responsible for the nuclear dilemma or stayed in New Mexico and made a small film about our little state’s strange central part in the development of all this violence.
The story is quite fascinating and weird. The heart of it is when our government realized that in order to build a bomb that could destroy all other bombs and life forms, they needed a secret place with plenty of room. Well, when Oppenheimer—the man the government put in charge of the project—was asked the question, he immediately suggested where he’d spent a few years in school where they send you away… I am blanking on what it’s called… Hilarious. Anyway, when the Lindbergh baby was front-page news, wealthy families like the Oppenheimers chose to send their kids away where they would be safe from kidnappers. And New Mexico had such a summer camp–type school, just around the corner from where I ended up in Pecos, about a half hour east of Santa Fe, behind the gorgeous mountain range called Sangre de Cristo, the blood of Christ mountains, called so because of its hypnotically vibrant red clay that is beautiful and subtle all on its own, mixed in with the green of the majestic ponderosa pines and smaller pinyon pines that cover the landscape in rugged ragged display.
When the sun hits this red clay in the late afternoon the mountain just explodes into color that simply sings. Purple and blue and all ranges of red come in and out of powerful shades that make it sometimes impossible to drive around. More than once in the times I had the privilege to call New Mexico home, I would have to just pull over and take in the beauty, so overwhelmed as I was, just to be alive before the swirling colors and mixtures of nature demanding their place among the most beautiful settings on earth. They all have that mysterious final element which cannot be articulated, just what we end up calling magic. Something about the combination of elements in this place makes one giddy. A kind of childlike laughter wants to bubble up and flood out of you. Have you seen Will Ferrell’s genius turn as a human raised by elves in Santa’s North pole home where all the toys are made for Christmas? Well, that’s the kind of happiness some of the images in New Mexico spark in me, and I think I can lay onto others. I have seen that picture welling up inside of Sam Shepard, although his macho quiet calm would never allow him to express himself so wildly in behavior, though perhaps in a theatrical setting and in the characters in his plays, often set in places very familiar to the New Mexican. A motel with no one in it. A bar with no one in it. A home with mainly a dark history as its sole occupant. You know, fun stuff you imagine is happening outside your window as you fly by on Route 66. Yes, there is a real Route 66. There was even a part of that old original highway on my ranch, which is now called Highway 25 in parts. But Route 66 is right there, right next to it, filled with Wild West history and connective tissue of the modern world which it seems will never rest until we’ve mowed it all down, the Great Plains soon little more than a series of golf courses, millions of golf courses. No matter how drought-ridden a place like New Mexico can be, let there be golf! What a poor substitute for real nature.
I have never understood the profound fear that forces us to trample every mystery in the wild until there is nothing left but that which is man-made, nothing to make our heart pump out of its chest. I am afraid it is not too far from now when we will wake up and it has all gone away. At least I got to raise my children on some little bit of its wild wild wind, some sunsets creating unspeakable magic onto the Sangre de Cristos, the frozen warmth of the last run down to the Santa Fe ski lodge, the strange blue like a solid mist before the sudden snap of black that comes in winter when the sun has disappeared and hunger is about to completely envelop you until you hit Maria’s and devour a combo platter as big as a spare tire. And then you wish you didn’t have to be the driver, as you’ve no energy for anything but sleep or maybe to push the buttons on a remote and watch a Christmas comedy you’ve seen twenty times. But it isn’t Christmas and a movie like Elf just isn’t as special in July, so you let it fly and fall asleep dreaming of childhood gingerbread houses and drinks sprinkled with cinnamon and other old country treats you just can’t duplicate from store-bought stuff, even as good as Whole Foods has managed to produce.
Father & Son
A strange thing happened on my way to stardom, no matter how minor that stardom might have been. My father, Eugene Kilmer, reentered the picture. The truth is that my father never left the picture. In trading Chatsworth for THE Juilliard School, I made my great escape. Although I came back to LA to be with Cher and make movies, I kept a place in New York. I needed distance between me and Dad, and I have always loved the City that Never Sleeps for all its swirling greasy grandeur. I thought I had escaped my father, but I hadn’t. Geographical distance is one thing. Emotional distance is another. I think of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s classic “I Put a Spell on You.” Maybe all fathers put spells on all sons. They are and will always remain Our First Man. And I suppose, being well aware of the Oedipal myth that demands a son must powerfully negate his father to become his own man, I felt the negation was fully realized. I was my own man, an actor, an independent spirit.
But I wasn’t my own man. I was Eugene’s son, and as such, when he called I responded. He called at an especially critical time in his life. His fantasies of becoming one of California’s prime landowners had not been realized. He had made foolish moves—I suspect the loss of his youngest son was responsible—and his finances were eroding. He needed loans. And to secure those loans he asked me, who was final
ly landing roles that paid well, to cosign his notes and deals. I did so. I nearly wrote, “I did so willingly,” but I’m not at all sure how willing I really was. I was under that inexplicable fatherly spell. Why not help the old man? Besides, for all his bluster, I had inherited his energy and ambition. I’m not sure I thought twice about it. Documents were put before me. I was given a pen. I signed. Before I knew it those notes and deals had gone down the toilet, Dad had millions of dollars in liabilities, and I was on the hook for all of it. It took a decade to pay it off. My father and I were proud men. We never wanted to burn our creditors. That pride led us both into financial turmoil. Was it his fault? Or was it my fault? A little of both.
Either way, the Oedipal drama turned epic. For the most part, the drama was silent. We didn’t say much to each other. When I had my voice, I couldn’t bring myself to tell my father what was in my heart. Now that I don’t have my voice, I am ready to say what remained unsaid. I was resentful. I was dutiful. I was cowed. I wanted to say, “Dad, these are your problems. You solve them.”
So I took on the debt, and wrote a check for $1.2 million, an act that proved my inability to disengage myself from my father’s unrelenting drive. In the material world, my primary drive is artistic. It isn’t that I don’t like or want money. I like it just fine and I want it. I love buying stuff. I love giving away stuff. But I didn’t become an actor and writer with the idea of making a fortune. I did it because it was my nature to do so. I never even made the choice. And though I did make the choice to cosign Dad’s deals, I really didn’t anticipate the burden. On the simplest level, I was just trying to be a good son. But being a good son, at least with a father as complicated as Eugene Kilmer, would never be simple. His declining years as a speculator coincided with my ascending years as an artist. More and more, he was his own version of King Lear on the heath, riddled with shame, guilt, and confusion. Since Wesley’s death, his sense of self had eroded. That made me sad. He was a mountain of a man, but no longer.
