Jason Priestley

by Jason Priestley

  My last day of work was oddly anticlimactic. No one gave me a cake or going-away party on my last day of Beverly Hills 90210. On the fourth episode of season nine, I shot my last scene with Daniel Cosgrove, a new addition to the show playing the role of Matt Durning—my replacement, basically. We were the first scene up in the morning, so I was in and out. I said my good-byes right then and there, then everybody else moved along to the next scene. For them it was just another day at work.

  I walked to my dressing room for the last time, grabbed a box of stuff, went out to my car, and drove off the lot. I was a bit sad to be leaving this group of people with whom I’d spent the last nine years of my life. But it was time for other adventures. I was going on the road with my racing buddies, and then on tour with a rock band!

  Vancouver

  V6A 4H6

  By this time, I had closed the doors of my race team, Triple Caution Racing. Andy Pilgrim went to drive for GM, and I was fortunate to get picked up by a team out of Toronto called Multimatic Motorsports. I drove for the next two years with a partner named Scott Maxwell, another very talented driver, one of the best in North America. He taught me a lot. We raced not only Mustangs but did a lot of damper development work for other teams. We were also running a GTS1 Mustang program. That was a tube-frame 780-horsepower race car. We got a third-place finish at Laguna Seca in the 1997 season in that car against all the big European GTS1 teams. The two of us did very well together.

  I’d met a guy named Greg Moore at a charity softball tournament in Indianapolis a couple of years before. He was a very young driver, barely out of his teens, from my hometown of Vancouver. After meeting in the dugout, we were fast, forever friends. He loved 90210 and every now and again I’d thrown in a word, or gesture, directed specifically at him, which absolutely delighted him. Freed from my day job, Greg and I, along with some other guys on the Indy car circuit, did some traveling, saw the world, and had some unforgettable times. Racing was my world, I couldn’t ask for better friends than these guys, and I loved every minute of it.

  When summer rolled around in 1998, I went on tour with the Barenaked Ladies for a couple of months. My original impulse was to shoot a documentary about this incredibly popular band from Canada, the hottest thing ever up north, but coming to the States and playing to six or seven people in a bar someplace. The dichotomy interested me, as did the whole idea of breaking through in America. I wanted to juxtapose them playing in front of huge stadium crowds in Toronto, then five people in a bar in Phoenix. That, I thought, would make for a funny movie.

  Things did not turn out as planned, however; by the time I was out on the road with the band they were extremely popular; they had the number one song in America! It was quite an adventure and I wound up with more footage than I knew what to do with. I parked myself in an editing suite in Vancouver and started cutting.

  Franklin

  37064

  An offer came along for the role of a very bad guy in a movie called Eye of the Beholder. It was director Stephan Elliott’s follow-up to Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, though this was a much darker project. The film starred Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd. It only required a quick one-week shoot on my part, and the movie was filming in Montreal, a place I love. Stef was a crazy Australian genius and I was anxious to work with him.

  Working with Stef and Ashley (whom I was very quickly calling by her last name only, Judd) was a pleasure. In the film I played an evil guy who came in, beat up Judd, shot her up with heroin, and pretty much messed everybody up. This was a role as polar opposite from Brandon as I could find, and I relished playing a villain.

  Ashley and I were passing the time one day on the set, idly talking about her love life. She was single at the time and bemoaning it. She knew I raced cars and mentioned a driver she’d seen in an interview on TV. She thought he was really cute, a Scottish guy named Dario Franchitti. I said, “I know Dario!”

  “No way!”

  Of course I knew him, through Greg and everybody else. “You’ll see, Judd,” I promised her. “I know him.”

  A few months later I had business in Los Angeles and while I was there threw a party at a restaurant on the West Side called the Buffalo Club. I happened to know that both Greg and Dario were in town and invited them . . . along with Judd. She met Dario at the party and that was it. They were a wonderful match, both supersweet people. Both excelled in extremely high-profile professions but were very private people at heart. Dario spent much of his off time in his native Scotland; Ashley didn’t live in L.A., preferring her homes in Kentucky and Tennessee. Growing up in a famous family as she had, she felt so much of her life was already out there for the world to see. She guarded her personal life carefully. I was happy to see two friends so happy together.

  Sometime later I found myself in Nashville on Indy Racing League business. I was very taken with this southern city, and the surrounding green countryside was absolutely gorgeous. I gave Judd a call to see if she wanted to meet for dinner, and she insisted that I come stay at her house instead of a hotel. It was at her beautiful home that I was introduced to one of the great pleasures of the South. Judd had a well on her country property that produced the purest, most delicious water. The bar in her living room had a water line that drew directly from the well straight to a jet in her wet bar.

  “Try this,” she said, and mixed me a drink of bourbon and water.

  Now, I’d done my share of drinking—vodka, scotch, rye—but I wasn’t familiar with really good bourbon. To me, Maker’s Mark was as fancy as it got! I had never known anything like this magic elixir. Blanton’s is a small batch, single-barrel bourbon. Phenomenal! Ashley had her own supply, straight from the maker, with her own personalized label. That was quite impressive.

  I may have changed Judd’s life by introducing her to Dario, but she absolutely returned the favor by introducing me to Blanton’s.

  Toronto

  M9C 5K5

  In November of 1998, a producer friend named Peter Simpson called me to talk about a movie he was putting together called The Highwayman. I told him I couldn’t even consider it; I was right in the middle of cutting my film. “Ah, you need a break. It’ll be good for you to get away for a month. Come to Toronto, shoot this movie for me. At least take a look at the script.”

  The project was a crime drama about a bank robber named Breakfast and his partner, Panda. Panda was a wild, crazy sociopathic criminal. As I read, I thought to myself: Coulson! What a brilliant idea! I called Peter and said, “We should bring Bernie Coulson in to play this guy! I’ve known him my whole life, it’ll be perfect! We’ll have a blast!”

  Peter didn’t exactly jump on this suggestion; in fact, he sounded strangely reluctant. Looking back, I think it’s because, living in Toronto, he knew more about Bernie’s situation than I did. We had all been young and wild in the ’80s and early ’90s. L.A. life was full of temptations. Plenty of people I knew skated right on the edge in terms of partying. Drugs were all around, all the time. Some people did too much, some didn’t. Some people could turn the party off, some couldn’t. It was dangerous, all of it, though it hadn’t seemed so at the time. We were cool, it was fine, everything was under control, of course.

  I hadn’t personally seen Bernie for quite some time. The last I’d heard, his agent and a couple of friends had pretty much grabbed him, forced him onto a plane to Vancouver, and called his mother, saying, “We’re sending this guy home to you for a break. We can’t deal with him anymore.” But that was years ago; I was sure he had pulled it together by now.

  Peter tracked Bernie down, made a deal, and soon enough we were reunited on set. I was so happy to see him again. As filming wore on, we had a great time, just like old times. Of course, we were still young guys and we liked to have fun and party after work, but nothing that got too out of control.

  While I was shooting The Highwayman with Bernie, I got a phone call notifying me that my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, had suddenly died. David was only
ten years older than me. He’d had a massive heart attack and was dead before he hit the floor. Because we were so close in age, we were unusually close for an uncle and nephew while I was growing up. In fact, just before The Highwayman, he’d spent a week with me in Los Angeles just hanging out.

  He was a very fit guy, an avid runner, and only forty years old. This was a horrible shock. Fortunately, being in Canada, I was able to attend his funeral. Back on the set, I was not quite in the same partying mood. But work was going fine, and I certainly didn’t see anything in Bernie’s behavior to alarm me at all until one morning when I got a call from our driver.

  The usual routine was that the driver picked Bernie up at his hotel, then came to pick me up, then dropped both of us off at the set. One day, in the middle of the week, I was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee at six A.M., waiting for the driver. He didn’t show up. The phone eventually rang, and it was Pete. “I’m at the hotel and Bernie’s not here. What do you want me to do?”

  “What do you mean, he’s not there?”

  “I’ve been looking everywhere. I finally had someone from housekeeping check his room. He is not on the premises.”

  “All right,” I said. “Come and get me, then we’ll go find him together.”

  The weather was bitterly cold, and the winds were brutal that winter. There was no reason to be outside unless you had to be. Still, we figured we might find Bernie on Lower Yonge Street, the drug-buying area of town. Sure enough, we drove around for just a few minutes and then saw him, buying crack from a dealer on the sidewalk, standing there in plain sight, not hiding.

  Pete pulled up next to the two guys. I jumped out of the car and grabbed my friend. I snatched the bag out of his hand and threw it to the ground and then shoved Bernie into the backseat. It was like a kidnapping.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Bernie said in an injured tone as we drove away.

  “Bernie, what are you doing? It’s six thirty in the morning, man, and we are supposed to be at work right now! What. The. Hell?”

  I was not pleased, but I was mainly more surprised than anything else. We’d been having such a great time. There was no one like Bernie when it came to having fun. By the time we got to the set that morning he had me laughing about the whole thing. I was convinced it was just one more crazy, over-the-top Bernie escapade. This guy and I had been through so much together. “Blood Brothers,” right?

  But then it happened a couple more times during the six-week shoot. This was where Bernie was in his life. He apparently could not even get through a month or so drug-free. My feelings changed from surprise to annoyance to real anger as the problems on the film mounted. Finally, I just wanted the shoot to end. Bernie did finish the job, barely, and then returned to his regular life in Vancouver.

  A few weeks later my phone rang. Bernie was at a Western Union office in the seediest part of downtown Vancouver. He needed cash, or some guys were going to break his legs because he owed them some money. Or something like that; I barely listened. I broke into his story.

  “How much money, Bernie?”

  “Five hundred dollars. I have to have it today, Jason, right away!”

  “Here’s the deal, Bernie. I’m going to wire you five hundred dollars right now. And in return I want you to lose my phone number.”

  As promised, I sent the money, and Bernie lost my number. That was fifteen years ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since.

  Ucluelet

  VOR 3AO

  I met a businessman through some Canadian friends who was developing a piece of property on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I headed out there one day with a bunch of other people to check out what he was building. He was constructing ten cabins right on the waterfront in a tiny fishing village called Ucluelet, just south of Long Beach, a popular tourist destination. The location was amazing, offering access to a private beach. My old friend Terry David Mulligan and I bought one of the cabins on the spot. We owned our cabin, but when we weren’t using it, the cabin went back into the rental pool in a standard kind of operation.

  The plans were for a resort, with ten cabins and twenty other lofts overlooking a boardwalk next to the water. Each cabin was completely self-contained with several bedrooms and bathrooms on two levels, full kitchens, washers, dryers, and so on, where families could come stay for a week or two in the summer. It was a charming, quaint little development. When I was a kid, my parents used to take us to vacation on the west coast of the island, back when you could camp out on Long Beach. It was much more remote then; there are rules and regulations prohibiting camping there now, but I’d always loved that area and remembered those days. This group of guys appeared to be a solid group to do business with. All the cabins got snapped up, as did the lofts.

  There was a man in charge of the entire development. He was also in charge of the finances, making sure all investors got their money at the end of each month, that the taxes were paid, and so on. All the details of running the resort fell to him. A year into our project, it became painfully clear that he was not operating the resort the way it should have been. Too many customers were leaving, not having had a good experience, and certainly were not coming back. There were numerous complaints. The group of homeowners, myself included, had to remove him from the operation. We brought in another man to hopefully turn things around.

  However, many of the original investors had gotten cold feet. They just wanted to walk away from a bad investment and move on. They simply stopped paying for their cabins and let the bank foreclose on their mortgages. I saw a good opportunity here. I approached my father and told him that I had a chance to pick up a bunch of the cabins at a greatly reduced rate and eventually start operating the place myself. By myself, I really meant my father, as I couldn’t possibly manage this project remotely. Fortunately, he agreed, and as more and more properties at the development came up for sale through foreclosure and tax liens, we snapped them up. Eventually, I owned twenty units.

  Things looked very grim our first couple of years, and I couldn’t blame most of the original investors for cutting and running. But today, fifteen years later, Terrace Beach Resort is a thriving business. We’ve had families come to vacation there year after year after year. It’s been an excellent education in the hotel business, but it’s also been a great opportunity to work closely with my father. He oversees everything there, and, trust me, with the weather on the west coast of Vancouver Island, there’s plenty of upkeep to keep him busy.

  Santa Monica

  91411

  While I was still in Vancouver, I had been contacted by Marcy Poole, who ran the Movie of the Week department over at FOX, about directing the first in what they hoped would be a series of movies for them. They wanted to take old film noir titles from the 20th Century FOX archives, update the stories, and remake them as Movies of the Week.

  This was the perfect job for me. I was a huge fan of film noir and to have an opportunity like this just handed to me was such a gift.

  Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was a remake of the classic 1942 film Moontide, starring Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, and Claude Rains. Nick Lea, from FOX’s hit show The X Files, starred as the main protagonist. FOX was looking to promote him at the time. He played the main character of Dustin, a Hollywood producer who wakes up on the beach one morning, near the body of a dead girl, but remembers nothing and is soon being blackmailed. I was able to cast my good friend Holt McCallany as Minnow, the antagonist. I took a small role as his best friend.

  Directing that movie was a challenge but it was also a lot of fun. I had twenty-four days to shoot this Movie of the Week, and a real budget—something like four and half million dollars. Those days with plenty of time and money are gone. The locations were gorgeous, including the Sunset Strip and posh beach houses, and the sound track was amazing. The film itself turned out very well, and then, just like that, FOX decided to get out of the Movie of the Week business. There was never another in the series, or another Movie of the Week. It was
the end of an era.

  Via Marghera

  Rome

  00185

  I finally finished editing Barenaked in America and returned to L.A., but I felt restless and antsy and uncomfortable there. I wasn’t sure what I wanted next, but somehow I no longer loved L.A. as I had from the day I arrived as a teenager. Something was off. Looking back, I see it was me. I hadn’t been quite myself for a while. I was especially restless now that I had finished my huge labor of love—the documentary. I dyed my hair a bright chicken-fat yellow. Not for a role, just for a change. Not my best look.

  When May rolled around, it was time for the American Music Awards again. I was asked to present an award and headed out to Monaco with my racing buddy Scott Maxwell. Pamela Anderson hosted the show that year, and after it ended, it was time for the official postshow banquet, which was hosted every year for the participants by Prince Albert.

  Then Scott and I moved on to the main reason for our trip. We headed to London for the inaugural Gumball 3000, a three-thousand-mile illegal road race crisscrossing Europe, founded by a filthy rich British entrepreneur/race car driver, Maximillion Cooper. There were about fifty of us drivers participating. I was in a (borrowed) Lotus Esprit V8. Billy Zane, with whom I’d shared a memorable scene in Tombstone, drove an Aston Martin. We took off from London and drove to Dover to get ourselves and our cars on the ferry to Calais. We rode across the English Channel, then got in our cars and raced to Le Mans. We swung through Paris and stayed in castles at every stop, having an absolute blast.