Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (13 page)

There were days when I would’ve liked to have faced lower expectations and less pressure than learning at this particular level demanded. It’s much easier to expose yourself, to take chances, and to allow yourself to fall on your face when you are not being groomed for a Warner Bros. spring release. Crashing and burning in an elite private acting class would have been a very different experience, and part of me envied those who were schooled in that fashion. But that was not my path. Having a movie or two to “warm up” in small roles while I got my feet wet might have had an advantage or two, but let’s face it, it’s good to be a lead. But as I sat in the makeup chair before our first shot on our first day of shooting, I was completely unprepared for the intensity of what was to come.

Like all the Greasers, I have chosen a “uniform” for my character, one that will be different from the seven others and easily identifiable in the many group shots the movie will require. (This is an important lesson when working in ensemble casts. Be unique. Be noticed. But never do it in a way that is showy or attempts to pull focus in a dishonest way.) I’m in my black work boots (they are heavy, and will make my walk slow and plodding) and white T-shirt with an open flannel shirt over it. My collar is up. My hair is slicked back.

I am in awe of Emilio’s bold choice for his “look.” He will wear a Mickey Mouse T-shirt throughout the movie. Francis likes it so much that not only does he pay Disney exorbitant rights so Emil can wear the character on his shirt, he writes a scene where we all watch Mickey on TV. That’s how you make a mark. Make a strong choice for your character, and if it works, you never know where it will lead. (And indeed, Emilio’s relentless ad-libbing and ideas took a peripheral character and made him a focal point.)

My first shot in the movie has all of us together in the dirty yard where we practiced tai chi. Ponyboy has been beaten up by the rich kids and we rush to the alley to save him. As the Socs’ car pulls out, I elect to do a diving spin move over the hood that I remember from the credit sequence of
Starsky and Hutch
. I calculate that Francis has rarely, if ever, watched TV, so he won’t notice my blatant lift from my childhood heroes. I’m right.

“Hey, Rob, do that again,” he says.

Cruise and I chase the Socs out of the alley over and over. Maybe fifteen takes each time. I begin to notice something about Tom that I will subsequently come to know well about certain actors. Although they are always prepared and ready, the second the camera rolls they instinctively ramp up to a whole new level of intensity. Like bulls when they see the color red, they are in a very special zone.

After we rescue Ponyboy, we walk him back to the house, with all the others joining us in one long, uninterrupted shot, which is called a master. It is a lengthy scene, pages long, and all of us have lines to deliver while we walk along and over a raised bed, which the camera is gliding around on, called a dolly track. Sometimes it’s two feet off the ground, but you can’t look like you are stepping over anything, which is an art that we will all become quite good at.

As Matt Dillon’s character, Dallas, arrives on the scene, I observe another phenomenon—the power of charisma. Matt is not revved up; he is not blazing like a nova. He is relaxed and confident. He can just stand there and the camera loves him. I have watched actors on a set and they look just fine, then shifted my eyes to look at them on the monitor hooked up to the camera, and suddenly they look otherworldly,
amazing
. Matt is one of those guys.

Francis is really grinding us, but we love it. On
The Outsiders
we will shoot a minimum of twelve takes to get a scene, maybe more. Often we will do twenty or thirty. To keep us energized and in the mood (not that we need it), he plays Elvis Presley’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” from giant speakers before every take.

On any movie or TV show, you shoot a minimum of twelve hours a day. On movies it’s usually more like thirteen and on
The Outsiders
we would average fourteen hours. So at the end of day one, I’m tired but exhilarated. This is early in all our careers, so we share tiny dressing rooms and cram together into vans to be driven home. On the ride back, I’m introduced to a tradition I will come to embrace with tremendous gusto—the complimentary cooler full of beers. (If for some reason you might not realize that the era of AOL Time Warner is different from those old days of working for the Brothers Warner, consider that they had no issue with a fifteen-year-old drinking their beers on the clock!) Being teenagers, we hoard as many bottles as we can hide in our clothes, after drinking as many as we can in the van. Later, we start the tradition of the Greasers’ “Caps” drinking game back at the hotel. Like with all else on my first movie, I am learning how after hours are done in the big leagues. Work hard on the set, and then play hard at the hotel.

*   *   *

It takes an army to make a movie. Camera crews, lighting crews, wardrobe crews, makeup crews, hair crews, painters, builders (called grips), a crew to provide the props, a crew to provide the furnishings (the art department), electricians, special-effects people, stunt performers, stand-ins, the accountant, scheduling and finance (called the unit production manager), catering and someone to provide snacks and drinks (called craft service), and the team of walkie-talkie-armed Gestapo that police the second-by-second momentum of shooting: the assistant director staff. But no one, and I mean no one, has more juice and is more loved and feared than the Teamsters. They come as advertised—they can make or break any production. You simply do not fuck with them. But in his typical fashion, Francis has other ideas.

I’m crammed into my tiny trailer with Emilio, Cruise, and Howell when we hear Francis screaming at his longtime producer, Gray Frederickson.

“Get rid of them! I want them gone!”

“Um, Francis, we can’t fire the Teamsters,” responds Gray, evenly.

“Yes we can! I want them gone. Today!” yells Coppola, livid.

“What’s the deal?” I whisper to the guys.

“I think it’s about the budget,” says Emil, who knows these things.

“Francis, if the Teamsters go, so do the cars, trucks, and trailers,” argues Gray.

“I don’t give a fuck!”

“But if the trailers go, the actors have nowhere to change clothes or keep warm or out of the rain.”

“So what!”

“Well, they are all Screen Actors Guild members and they are contractually provided with shelter.”

“Well, fuck them, too! I’ll make this movie with University of Tulsa film students,” yells Francis.

Oh boy. Last week we were worried about getting injured and being sent home. But this new scenario has us all
really
freaked. I look at Tommy Howell, who is wide-eyed. I remember the
Apocalypse Now
documentary where Francis is as least as concerned with continuing to shoot as he is with Martin Sheen’s heart attack. I think to myself, this is one tough industry.

Eventually the director and producer move off and we can no longer hear them. At lunchtime the Teamsters (and our trailers and ourselves) are still in place. By wrap at the end of the day, it’s like it never happened. Francis is back to his jovial, opera-listening mode, but I’ve seen how hairy it can get and how quickly it can happen. I’m beginning to see that show business at this level is full of emotion, threats, and warlike conflict, usually followed by smiles and hugs. If you weren’t crazy for wanting to get into movies in the first place, you could quickly become so once you got there.

CHAPTER
11

Back at the hotel I punch Tom Cruise in the face. I hit him squarely in the nose, and
hard
. I see his eyes water and blink, so I know he’s stunned and in pain. He goes into a rage and begins to pummel me mercilessly in the chest and ribs. It’s getting way out of hand, and finally Emilio and Tommy Howell step in and stop the fight.

We’ve taken to these nightly sparring sessions in the sixth-floor hallway as a way to kill time, blow off steam, and prepare for the upcoming “rumble” sequence in the movie. We wear headgear and mouthpieces; the gloves are pro-grade (all equipment provided by Emilio and Tom, the masters of fitness). Most of the time it’s pretty friendly, but every once in a while …

“Hey, man, you okay?” asks Cruise, coming back to reality.

“I’m good. Sorry about the face shot,” I say.

“Well, now you know what’ll happen if you do it again!” he says, grinning his grin.

We high-five and begin to help the others pack up the equipment. Soon we are planning the next session of our “R and R,” the nightly flyby of the lobby to check out any potential girl activity.

Since I first observed Matt Dillon’s master technique, I have been wondering how I might fare on my own. I have been dating Melissa Gilbert back in L.A., but her mom thinks I’m after her for her fame and won’t let her visit me. I’m also beginning to feel the unique effects of shooting on location—a euphoric and toxic mix of excitement, boredom, anonymity, recognizability, and loneliness. After a few weeks of walking by frenzied, available girls who look exactly like the cute girls at Samohi who always ignored me, I’m ready to have some fun.

And so begins a time-honored tradition of entertainers on the road—sometimes you chase girls, sometimes they chase you (literally), sometimes it’s just to flirt, and sometimes it’s more than that. But it’s always fun and both principals in the equation seem to get exactly what they want out of it. We are all teenage boys, so you can imagine how enthusiastically we take to this pastime. Only Swayze, who is married, seems content to watch from the sidelines with a wry smile.

For most of us Greasers it’s a perfect setup. My situation is complicated somewhat by my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend and there are times when I feel bad about that. But I begin to learn another great lesson: nothing quiets the inner voice you want to ignore better than a couple of beers. And between the open cooler on the van ride home each day and Francis’s food-and-wine festivals at the end of each week, I’m getting a lot of practice at quieting my conscience.

*   *   *

You really know you’ve arrived in the movies when you are given your own stuntman. These are the guys (or in our case, boys) who will take the blows and make you look like a stud. Even looking at your stuntman is a cool experience; he is dressed in your clothes, has the same haircut and style, and is your same weight and height. In essence, he is your tough, fearless doppelgänger.

Buddy Joe Hooker was (and is) the most legendary stuntman ever. A hit movie was made about him called
Hooper
, starring Burt Reynolds. He is the stunt coordinator on
The Outsiders
and will help Francis design all the car sequences, knifings, fights, and, of course, the big rumble between the Socs and the Greasers. He’s dressed head to toe in white (including his cowboy hat) and is smoking a tiny cigar as he stands in the muddy vacant lot that will be the set for the big brawl.

“Hey, Lowe, come meet your guy,” he says, gesturing to an exact replica of myself as Sodapop Curtis.

“This is Reid Rondell. He’s one of my best,” says Buddy Joe, who knows his stuff.

Reid and I shake hands. Soon we are talking like old friends. He’s a lot like me, the same age, and has been doing his thing since he was a little boy. He gives me my moves for the fight sequence, shows me how to throw a movie punch that looks great on film but doesn’t “land,” and he shows me how to get “hit” by one as well. We work in our own corner of the field. All around us, the other Greasers are doing the same thing with their stuntmen. The most dangerous thing you can ask is for two actors to “fight” each other (as Cruise and I know), so each Greaser will fight his stuntman dressed as a Soc, which means I will fight Reid.

“Let’s kick ass! Let’s make our fight the best one in the entire rumble!” says Reid.

We try to come up with cool elements for our beatdown. We also scout what the other Greasers are up to, to see where we stand. It’s just like the audition process all over again—lots of camaraderie, but very competitive.

The rumble scene is a few days off and the company has switched to filming all the night shoots in the movie. This means breakfast at four o’clock in the afternoon, shooting at sunset, lunch around one in the morning, and finishing at sunrise. The first few days are magical: the crazy hours, the giant lights and exotic equipment, the buzz of adrenaline that comes from pulling an all-nighter, all in the company of your band of brothers. Then reality sets in. Your body begins to revolt. You are too wired to sleep at sunrise, can’t sleep enough during the daylight hours to get the rest you need, and are always hungry at the wrong times. You start to feel like a vampire—you miss all of everyday life while you try to recuperate in your manufactured, light-sealed room/cave. As anyone who has pulled the graveyard shift will tell you, it becomes a serious grind.

It’s around three thirty in the morning and Francis has asked that an entire section of the front of the house be removed for a shot he wants. As the grips continue this major piece of engineering, we try to kill time and stay awake. At one point I find myself alone with Francis, sitting in the living room. Coppola has been an enigma throughout the filming. He’s always pleasant and clearly wants the best for me and everyone else on his crew, but he is also aloof and can play favorites (which as an adult I understand was his prerogative, but as a teenager I did not). Like everyone else, I do whatever I can to please him, make him proud, and to be in his good graces. Now, since it’s just the two of us, I try to make conversation.

“Francis, I’m sure you hear this a lot, but
Godfather
was on in the hotel and we all watched it for the hundredth time. What an unbelievable movie.”

“You know, Rob, to me
The Godfather
is like that lamp,” he says, pointing. “It exists. It’s right there. People have opinions about it,” he continues mildly. “The real
Godfather
, for me, is the experience I had making it.”

It would be many years and many projects before I fully understood what he meant. If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams, and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations. And so, you are left outside of the phenomenon. Just as Paul McCartney can never experience the Beatles, Francis Ford Coppola can never experience
The Godfather
. It becomes a lamp.

*   *   *

Coppola’s reputation as an innovator is well earned. For large chunks of the filming of
The Outsiders
, he watches from a monitor, covered in a blanket, or sometimes from blocks away in a specially designed Airstream trailer nicknamed “The Silverfish.” Since movies were first made, directors have been close by on set, sometimes right in your face, next to the camera, observing. Not Francis. He is a pioneer of video hookups and on-set monitors, and there are days when we rarely see him on set as the cameras roll. Back then, it was surprising. Today, it is commonplace—all directors have their heads buried behind monitors and no one actually watches your performance “live.”

Tonight, standing in the unseasonably cold spring rainstorm, part of me wishes I was able to sip an espresso in my own Silverfish. But mostly I’m just trying to stay warm by the huge bonfire that has been built as part of the scenery for the rumble sequence. Like with all great movie productions, on
The Outsiders
the artistic is also the practical. The fire is really only there so the actors don’t try to leave the set to get warm in the shitty little trailer huts parked blocks away.

Same with the vicious, cold driving rainstorm all of us Greasers are standing in. Some directors would wait out the bad weather before shooting such a lengthy—three to four days—and important sequence. But Francis won’t wait, and in fact, he uses what nature gives him to dramatic effect. He asks the great director of photography Steve Burum (whom I will work with again on
St. Elmo’s Fire
) to light the rain in the most unusually stunning way possible.

As usual, I’m huddled with Tom Howell and the rest of the Greasers. We don’t really mind being soaked in the mind-numbing cold because we know how great it will look on-screen. What none of us realizes is that if it doesn’t continue to rain for the next few nights of shooting, rain will be created to match this storm, with fire hoses spraying even colder water up into the air.

It rains until lunchtime on the first night and then stops. Out come the fire hoses, which instantly give you an ice cream headache.

Reid Rondell and I go through our choreographed fight moves. Swayze is doing some sort of ballet dancer warm-ups that look very challenging. Cruise is tugging at a front tooth that he will later have removed by a local dentist to bolster the authenticity of his fight’s aftermath. Under a tarp, Matt Dillon’s boom box plays Tommy Howell’s favorite mix tape—Adam Ant’s “Stand and Deliver,” Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” and Oingo Boingo’s “Only a Lad.” When I hear those songs today, I still feel wet, cold, and extremely pumped.

On the last night we shoot my part of the fight. Reid and I slug it out and in the end it goes pretty well. I feel particularly good about making it look like I took his punch in the face. What I didn’t know then was that you are better off “selling” a punch you throw than a punch hitting you. And so, if you watch the rumble sequence today, two things stand out: the rain comes out of nowhere and Sodapop kinda gets his ass kicked. Ah well, live and learn.

As the weeks of shooting roll on, I settle into a groove. All of the actors have bonded deeply (think of your new friends in your first semester away at college) and we show up for each other on set even if we aren’t needed. We play elaborate drinking games nightly (I am the undisputed champion of Caps) and share reconnaissance about the local girls (Tommy Howell being the undisputed king of local outreach by a mile). He and I share an adjoining room and never close the door, an indication of how close we are becoming. The script calls for Ponyboy and Soda to have a bond that is deeper than brotherhood. And after weeks of pressure, fun, hard work, and long hours, that relationship is now real.

Tonight, the music coming from Howell’s room is so loud it’s keeping me awake.

“Shut the hell up! We have a seven a.m. call time,” I yell.

“No, man! I’m going method in the scene! I’m supposed to have been up all night, so I’m going to
be
up all night,” says the fifteen-year-old Marlon Brando.

“Good luck with that,” I say, plugging my ears and eventually falling asleep.

At 7:00 a.m. my alarm goes off and I go into Tommy’s room.

“Still awake! Didn’t sleep at all. I’m
so
ready,” he says.

“I need my coffee,” I yawn, as we pack for the set.

We shoot the scene. It’s postrumble, all of us up all night, nursing our wounds. It’s long and complicated and takes all day. Finally, around 5:00 p.m., we get to my close-up. (Anytime you are in a large ensemble, your close-up is a very important shot. Good actors are excellent not only in their own close-ups, but also, almost more important, off camera while others are shooting theirs.) As he does during every shot on
The Outsiders
, Francis blasts “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.”

“Action, Rob!” comes his voice from the big speakers (he’s in the Silverfish today).

I start the scene. Somewhere in the middle, Ponyboy has a line that’s a cue for me. It doesn’t come.

Wow, that’s a dramatic pause Tommy’s taking, I think, as I wait for his line. The camera continues to roll. My back is to Tommy. I don’t want to turn around and look at him, and I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. I look over at Swayze, who is staring at Howell. Then I hear it. Snoring. Tommy is literally passed out, sleeping right in the middle of my close-up! So much for the Method.

*   *   *

The big emotional-breakdown scene between Sodapop and his brothers got me this role. Now, in the last few days of shooting, it’s time to do it for real.

As on any movie, at the end, everyone is on edge. The actors are contemplating what they have (or haven’t) been able to accomplish, the director is clawing to shoot as much as possible before time runs out; the crew is exhausted and being driven into the ground. But I’m feeling pretty good. I’ve watched the other actors take center stage and excel. Now it’s my turn. I’ve done this scene with giant pressure in New York and L.A. I’ve been to this emotional well before and I know there is water.