PERPETUAL MOTION
First of all, The Hard Way had been a trial. With a greater emphasis on pure action, and more spectacular stunts, than anything I'd ever done, I had taken a physical beating on this picture, the best efforts of Charlie notwithstanding. My co-star, James Woods, is a genius, an amazing actor, but to hold your half of the screen with someone of that intensity requires an energy, concentration, and vigilance that wore me out. Add in a tight schedule, a hyperkinetic character, and several reshoots of key scenes due to personnel hirings and firings, and I was left even more ragged than usual. I needed rest. A long rest.
Were I to sign on, assuming that their goal of an October start date was plausible, Doc Hollywood would be my fifth film in less than three years, during which I also taped the seventy-two episodes of Family Ties, including the series’ emotionally draining last season and finale. A large part of this work had been on-location—film-speak for out-of-town (“town” in this case being either New York or Los Angeles). It was all but certain that a movie set in the South would be filmed, at least in part, on location.
Filming on location is not unusual, or even entirely unappealing. Many in the business consider the opportunity for travel a perk; a break from the structure of their established routines, the demands of their families, communities, schedules, and responsibilities. Many liken it to war—not in the sense of battle or danger, but in that they are thrown together with a group of people, many of them strangers, who have been charged with a single mission: get in, get it done on time, under budget, and get out. Oh yeah—and do your best work. The pressure, isolation, and narrow scope of our lives while at “movie camp” is known to promote prolonged and legendary drinking binges. Time not spent on the set is spent either in a bar or in a coma.
Life can get pretty crazy on a long shoot. Casualties of War, the 1988 Vietnam war epic I made with Sean Penn and Brian De Palma in Phuket, Thailand, was rife with some of the most outrageous examples of location fever I've ever witnessed. The stifling tropical heat, the culture shock, and the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm endemic to any film set was a potent combination. Waiting in this context meant waiting for Brian to finish cooking up one of his signature microchoreographed steadi-cam shots. Eager to do our scenes and be done for the day, we'd become restless and start pounding down the local beer. The stuff was rumored to be laced with formaldehyde, but we couldn't read the labels and the locals weren't talking. That's not quite true: they were talking incessantly, but we couldn't understand what they were saying. Formaldehyde, turpentine, Drāno, whatever . . . we'd swill it down and then—the big kick—drive out to the local snake farm and goad each other into drinking shots of a popular Thai cure-all: equal parts Thai whiskey and cobra blood.
Some members of the C.O.W. crew, many of whom were Aussies, had hired local prostitutes as companions for their entire stay in-country. One guy set up housekeeping with two women; an oddly civilized arrangement, they would accompany him into Phuket village to do his marketing. When finally asked, “Why two?” he answered, straight-faced, as if it was obvious: “So they can keep each other company while I read the paper in the morning.” He obviously wanted to approximate the routines of his ordinary home life but kick it up a notch by including the fulfillment of his sexual fantasy. Location can be nuts.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
My fantasy—at least it was beginning to seem like a fantasy—was not so much to escape a domestic routine as to establish one. I spent most of our brief engagement on location in Thailand.
Tracy made the marathon transpacific journey for an extended set visit. T never mentioned anything about having second thoughts, but she's a smart, observant woman and I can't imagine she wasn't horrified by the emaciated wreck of a fiancé she found in the jungle—her own personal Heart of Darkness featuring her future husband as Col. Kurtz. I'd contracted some nasty strain of exotic stomach rot; she nursed me through it, and as a reward had to battle it herself for the rest of her time in Southeast Asia.
Far more unnerving—hell, it was terrifying—was the weirdness she encountered upon her return to “civilization”: waiting for her at home was a series of graphic and vitriolic letters, individually stamped and posted by a single troubled individual, threatening death to Tracy unless she called off the wedding. I remember the phone call. It must have been three or four A.M. Phuket time when I picked up the phone and heard Tracy weeping, spilling out the surreal details. I felt helpless and angry to be thousands of miles away from this woman who, simply by falling in love with me, had apparently placed herself in jeopardy. We decided to hire Gavin De Becker, a widely recognized expert in matters of threat assessment and personal security, to investigate the source of the letters and assign agents to ensure Tracy's safety in my absence. Some months later it was discovered by Gavin and the LAPD that the person responsible for what eventually amounted to more than 5,000 death threats was a lonely, disturbed young woman. After months in jail awaiting trial (at which Tracy and I both had to testify), she was convicted of making “terroristic threats” and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment.
July 16, 1988: I'd been back from Southeast Asia a little over a week when we were married in a quiet ceremony at a small country inn in Vermont—or at least that had been the idea. In many ways it was the experience we had hoped for, an intimate celebration. Before our friends and family we affirmed our commitment to spend our lives together. But it was something else too, a kind of ground-breaking. My own bubble, the one that had sheltered me through the last seven years of public life, now had to be expanded, renovated into a duplex.
We had invited just seventy-odd guests, close friends and family only. As a precaution we hired Gavin's firm to provide security. This proved to be a wise move: dozens of tabloid reporters and paparazzi attempted to crash the party, deploying helicopters and even undercover spies disguised as llamas in order to blend in with the innkeeper's pet livestock. Locals and waitstaff were bribed and pumped for information, and a surreal siege began. It became a drama of spy vs. spy—and thanks to Gavin, our spies won. The paparazzi were unable to capture even a single photograph of the bride and groom, and the wedding went on exactly as we'd hoped, except maybe for the whir of helicopters overhead.
The honeymoon also had its share of gatecrashers. We island-hopped through the Caribbean, but at each step, we would find ourselves being tailed. Wherever we went, we'd look out our window to find boats anchored just offshore, bearing photographers with 500mm lenses aimed at our honeymoon suite. Finally we made our way to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Tracy's family had vacationed during her childhood summers. Resigned to the fact that we were going to have to deal with these interlopers, we figured we might as well face them on our own home turf.
The rush that was my life then meant Tracy and I had no real opportunity to digest the strange twists and turns on the way to the altar, or the extended road comedy that had been our honeymoon. Family Ties started up again in August, Back to the Future II in the fall of that year (forcing me to moonlight again), segueing right into Part III, which wouldn't wrap until January 1990.
My bride, the one and only love of my life, was wondering what in the hell she'd gotten herself into. Pregnant one month after the wedding, Tracy found herself with a husband who, when he wasn't away on the job, was little more than a narcoleptic Lamaze partner. I did, however, negotiate time off to coincide with Sam's birth. A clause inserted into my deal—labor plus three weeks—had to be a first for a movie contract. But as soon as the three weeks were over, it was back to work again, leaving T nursing a baby and, no doubt, a few resentments.
Another issue for Tracy—one she rarely broached but that I wish I'd been sensitive enough to acknowledge more often—was this: inside of a year, a beautiful, exquisitely talented twenty-something actress, career ascendant, had become a virtual single mother. Schlepping to and from the set, Sam in arms, was not only unfair and exhausting, but it underscored the notion that I was still free to work—that
my creative identity was intact, while Tracy's was in limbo. Offers and opportunities were coming in for her; most, but not all, she had to turn down. In fact, as I was in New York shooting The Hard Way, Tracy was in San Francisco starring in a film-for-television. Sam, now fourteen months old, was with her, and I missed them both terribly.We had a home in Manhattan, so I was not the one on location this time, she was. I was happy that she was working again. Still, here we were, thousands of miles apart once again.
Our marriage, and more important, our love and friendship, were surviving under the pressures, but the situation was not exactly the stuff of dreams. We were living a scattered, bi-coastal life—with sojourns to Vermont, where we'd bought a farm, in the naïve hope of living a more tranquil life there someday. We desperately longed to settle somewhere, sometime soon. But we'd both begun to wonder: was a normal life even possible?
So, only three months off between The Hard Way and Doc Hollywood? No way. Well, at least New York was a fun city for a young director on a studio expense account, I said to myself, because otherwise Caton-Jones was wasting his time. I wasn't doing Doc Hollywood. I was absolutely sure of that. . . .
Or was I?
Immensely charming, the sort of artist-as-human-train-wreck I seem drawn toward, Michael Caton-Jones was on his third Molson when I realized the son of a bitch was actually selling me on this project. His pitch put a completely fresh spin on the story. My Green Acres concerns vanished; half an hour in a motor home on Avenue B and Michael had convinced me that this movie could represent something important to me—that it had personal significance. Young doctor, trained as a plastic surgeon, sets out across country in his Porsche Roadster, leaving the Washington, D.C., combat zone E.R. of his residency. He's Los Angeles–bound, boob jobs, butt tucks, and big money in his future. He cracks up the car in Grady, South Carolina, and the natives, in dire need of a local doctor, conspire to trap him there. A gentle life, the girl of his dreams, and the realization that the brass ring may not be worth reaching for convince him to stay.
My own knuckles white from hanging on to that goddamned brass ring, it sounded good to me.
SOUTHBOUND
Cut to an explosion of sugar-glass—followed by a glittery spray of shards from the nucleus of which emerged Charlie, completing at ferocious speed the exterior half-arc of his brief but turbulent flight through the window. From out on the street, it looked as though he was being propelled by the force of the shattering window, rather than propelled through it. Charlie hit the pavement hard, executing a perfect shoulder roll, with his head tucked, more to avoid the lens than injury. Coming suddenly to a stop, he lay facedown, motionless. As soon as the director yelled cut, Charlie lifted his head and with a modest grin, indicated that he'd lived to be pummeled another day.
After a quick repositioning of the camera angle, I got into place, was sprinkled with pieces of broken sugar glass, and, on hearing “Action,” did my roll-in. “Cut-print . . . one more please.” As I reset for take two, I glanced up to see Michael Caton-Jones and Charlie Croughwell excitedly plotting the best way to crash Doc Hollywood's Porsche. They both knew I was in, and so did I.
So what had happened to my resolve to take an extended break? To the litany of reasons why my time would be better spent in the bosom of my family, to my understanding that so much time spent on location was taking a toll on me? All this had dissolved in an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity.
Actors don't become actors because they're brimming with self-confidence. Ross Jones, my junior high drama teacher, would, at a certain point in every school production, address the cast: “Remember,” he'd say, “we are all here because we're not all there.” An actor's burning ambition, when you think about it, is to spend as much time as possible pretending to be somebody else. For those of us lucky (or unstable) enough to become professional performers, the uncertainty about who we really are only increases. For many actors, this self-doubt is like a worm eating away at you and growing, incongruously, in direct proportion to your level of success. No matter how great the acceptance, adulation, and accumulation of wealth, gnawing at you always is the deep-seated belief that you're a fake, a phony. Even if you can bullshit your way through whatever job you're working on now, you'd better prepare for the likelihood that you're never going to get another one.
In the face of all evidence to the contrary, this is exactly how I felt about my own career in 1990. Throughout the eighties I had worked incessantly, and the rewards had been enormous. Achieving that level of acceptance, getting to the top of the mountain, so to speak, had been arduous, but there were so many new highs on the way up that it felt more like celebration than sweat. Staying there, however, maintaining that foothold, was an ordeal.
A large part of my success was a result of the two “franchises” I had stumbled into—the twin phenomena of Family Ties and the Back to the Future series. They offered me financial security and the guarantee I could reprise the roles of both Alex Keaton and Marty McFly more or less indefinitely.
This left me free to experiment and accept riskier roles for less money. So when Light of Day; Bright Lights, Big City; or Casualties of War failed to perform at the box office, it was hardly the end of the world. I'd go back to my television series in the fall, and at some point be able to climb back into the DeLorean. But by the summer of 1990, all that had changed. The TV series had wrapped for good, the Back to the Future sequels had been released and were already on their way to video. My cockiness had morphed into caution. I just didn't feel comfortable finishing any job without a contract for another in hand. Without the safety net of Family Ties and Back to the Future, the stakes were greater now than they'd ever been.
If the new project meant time away from my family, that had to be weighed against the reality that I now had a family. That hoary old phrase “the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed” suddenly had meaning for me. This wasn't a time for resting on my laurels or sitting on my ass. This was a time to get while the getting was good.
Who knows, maybe I sensed it wouldn't last forever, that the other shoe was about to drop. Could it be possible that I had somehow intuited that my career clock was ticking?
Unlikely. This keep-your-head-down-and-keep-moving mentality had always been, as far back as I could remember, a major part of my personality, my modus operandi. Even as a kid, I lacked the faith required to be still. Maybe it was because I was undersized or because my dreams were oversized, but I'd always relied on my ability to elude, evade, and anticipate any obstacle or potential bully. It is one of the great ironies of my life that only when it became virtually impossible for me to keep my body from moving would I find the peace, security, and spiritual strength to stand in one place. I couldn't be still until I could—literally—no longer keep still.
THE PINKIE REBELLION
Gainesville, Florida—November 13, 1990
Fifteen minutes into that first morning of the custody battle for my pinkie, the tiny tremor simply would not stop. Maybe if I ignored it for a while . . . I went into the bathroom, pulled open the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet, found a bottle of Tylenol, and dry-swallowed two. Standing in front of the larger vanity mirror, I held up my left hand, as if by studying its reflection I might gain a little objectivity. No such luck. Now there were two twitching pinkies. But wait, the medicine cabinet's mirrored door was ajar, creating a reflection within a reflection, ad infinitum; now there weren't just two—there were too many to count. It was a chorus line of dancing pinkies—it was the freakin’ Pinkettes.
The pills weren't going down. I padded out to the kitchen, pulled a ginger ale from the refrigerator, and wandered into the sitting room. Hair in revolt, eyes at half mast, I stood buck naked in the center of the pseudo-luxurious Presidential Suite doing everything short of talking to my hand like Señor Wences. Hell, forget Señor Wences, I was about five pounds of fingernail short of an end-stage Howard Hughes.
I continued wandering from room to room, as if a sol
ution might appear around the next corner, all the while trying a variety of strategies to impose my dominion over this digit. I pinched and pulled it. I pinned it to the nightstand with the Gideon's Bible. I folded it into a fist and held it flat against my chest, and always the result was the same. It would submit to whatever hold I applied, but four or five seconds after I let up, away it would go again. Frustrated to the point of wanting to amputate, I was convinced that would only mean having to watch the little bugger skitter across the carpet like an extra from a Roger Corman movie.
“For Christ's sake, Mike,” I tried to tell myself. “It's just your freaking finger.” But that was just the point: it wasn't mine, it was somebody else's. My pinkie was possessed.
Perspective was key, though, and since I'd clearly lost mine, it was time to avail myself of someone else's. I called Brigette, my assistant. Brig did a fantastic job running my office, but out on location, on nonindustry soil, she was a godsend. Her job, as she saw it, was to make my job as easy as possible. To that end, she'd keep track of my schedule, anticipate my needs and concerns, act as point person with the production company, and generally run interference with the whole outside world. In short, her mission was to protect and polish the bubble.
Trying my best not to sound panicky, I casually mentioned that I might be having a minor physiological reaction to something. I described what was happening to my finger. She scared the hell out of me by suggesting that it sounded to her like a neurological problem, and did I want to speak to her brother, who happened to be a brain surgeon up in Boston? “No, that's okay. I really don't think it's that big a deal,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as her. “I'll just give Tracy a call.”
Before hanging up, Brig reminded me I was on a “will notify,” which meant my call time had yet to be determined—I'd probably be needed on set later in the afternoon.
Lucky Man Page 2
