The Time of My Life (12 page)

Red Dawn
was a controversial movie right from the start. Five minutes into the film, Soviet and Cuban paratroopers float down to a small Colorado town and open fire with machine guns, launching World War III with an invasion on American soil. In the early 1980s, when we made
Red Dawn
, the Cold War was raging and fears of a Soviet attack ran high across America. But nobody would touch it as a movie plot— except Milius, who was just the man for the job.

Milius was a wild man and a military freak. He had a collection of firearms and an encyclopedic knowledge of arms and armaments, and he even kept a loaded gun on his desk at the 20th Century Fox offices. Milius wrote
Apocalypse Now
and cowrote
Dirty Harry,
and he loved war games. He consulted
military experts while cowriting
Red Dawn
, even reportedly asking former secretary of state Alexander Haig for help. Milius wanted
Red Dawn
to be as realistic as possible, so he started with training his cast as if we were really a band of scared teenage soldiers, rather than actors on a movie set.

I played Jed Eckert, the leader of a group of high school students who manage to escape to nearby wooded mountains after the Soviet invasion. The movie follows our group— dubbed the Wolverines, after the local high school mascot—as we survive a freezing winter, foraging for food and skirmishing with Russian soldiers who track us down. To prepare us for our roles, Milius arranged for real mercenaries to train us in military tactics, after which we’d take part in real war games with a National Guard unit before filming.

The mercenaries taught us all about military maneuvers and survival techniques. We fired weapons, learned how to camouflage ourselves, and undertook stealth maneuvers through the woods. It was dirty, tiring, and physically demanding—and I loved every minute of it. When our training culminated in a giant game of Capture the Flag, with the ragtag Wolverines going up against the National Guard troops, I wanted more than just to show off what we’d learned. I wanted to capture that flag and win.

Our objective was to start from the cover of a forested mountainside, cross an open valley, and take the flag planted on the other side of the valley. We had three days to do it, with hundreds of trained National Guardsmen trying to stop us.

From the moment we set up camp on that mountainside, I became Jed Eckert. Right away, this game became a matter of life and death—I almost felt like my life really did depend on
capturing that flag. And I treated the other Wolverines that way, too, yelling and pushing them to their absolute limits in the game. Charlie Sheen and Tommy Howell loved it—they were as gung ho as I was. But Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey seemed taken aback at my intensity. In fact, it’s probably safe to say Jennifer couldn’t stand me once I started barking orders at everyone.

Getting across the open valley was going to be tricky, and I doubt the seasoned National Guard troops expected much from us. But we had a plan. With the help of some crew members, we dug a network of shallow trenches and camouflaged them as best we could. Once they were covered with plywood and dirt and sod, you could even step on them in some spots without realizing anyone was underneath. In fact, during our assault across the valley, which took place at night, one National Guardsman almost stepped right on my face—and he never even knew I was there.

When we captured the flag after our all-night valley crossing, the National Guard troops were stunned—and pissed off. Milius, on the other hand, was elated and couldn’t wait to start shooting. He had his real Wolverines. We had bonded out there in the trenches, and we had transformed into a pack of high school mujahideen, just like he wanted.

The hard part was that once I became Jed Eckert, I didn’t ever want to step out of character. I really became this mercenary warrior, this almost-savage kid-turned-military-leader. When Lisa came out to the set, she couldn’t reach me—I was afraid to just be Patrick again, fearing that if I dropped the character,
I wouldn’t be able to get him back. It was frustrating for Lisa, and yet I couldn’t stop. This was a huge role for me—my first real leading role in a big Hollywood film—and I had to nail it.

The film’s setting added to the realism. We shot in the area around Las Vegas, New Mexico, which had its own rough-and-tumble reputation. A hundred years ago, Las Vegas was the last point on the Santa Fe Trail to get supplies, get drunk, and get laid before heading into the Rockies to die in your wagon train. It has always been a real tough-guy kind of town, and it wasn’t the most welcoming place for random Anglos who ambled in.

This was especially true of the town’s bars, which were the kind of places where the men carried knives and half of them got pulled out on any given night. Tommy, Charlie, and I would roll into bars just about every evening, sometimes staying until the sun came up.

One night, Charlie, Tommy, Brad Savage, and I went to a bar to play some pool—Charlie was a great player, and he was giving us some tips. I never knew what started it, but suddenly all hell broke loose and every guy in the bar was flailing around, punching, slashing with a knife, or breaking a bar stool over someone’s head. Blood and beer were flying everywhere, and I looked at my guys and thought, “I gotta get them out of here!” Tommy and Brad were just kids, about eighteen years old, and I was Jed, their leader, responsible for getting them safely away from danger.

I grabbed a pool cue and broke it in half, then started swinging it around wildly, like a weapon. I just started whaling on whoever was in the way, trying to make an opening for us. Charlie, Tommy, and Brad pushed in behind me, shoving and punching all the way, and we finally got to the front door,
where I threw down the bloody pool cue and we took off. The Wolverines had escaped the enemy again!

The funny thing was, Lisa and I ended up buying a ranch in that same area years later. And when we brought up those bar fights with a few locals, they remembered them. Apparently these were some of the biggest brawls in the history of Las Vegas, New Mexico. And they’ll probably never be topped now, because the town’s seediest bars have all gradually disappeared in the years since
Red Dawn.
It’s now a quaint, friendly historical town with a colorful past.

Despite the movie’s dead-serious theme—or maybe because of it—the pranks we played on the set were epic.
Red Dawn
was a violent war movie, with hundreds of explosions from bombs, machine guns, missiles, and grenades, so the crew had every kind of explosive imaginable. And unlike some directors, Milius was as wild as the rest of us, so I aimed pranks at him as much as at anyone.

One time, I rigged the toilet in his trailer with charges— M60s, which are like one-eighth-size sticks of dynamite. I packed them into a steel tube to direct the force, so they wouldn’t blow shrapnel everywhere, and taped them under his toilet. When Milius went in to do his business, I detonated them—and the explosion sent him running out the door in a panic. He’d barely gotten the words “Swayze, you son of a—” out of his mouth when I set off a second round of explosives, blowing two garbage cans sky-high and scaring the shit out of him.

Another time, I hid a bottle-rocket launcher in his room. I packed a few dozen little bottle rockets into a rack I’d made and rigged it to go off when Milius tried to open his door in the morning. Sure enough, when he pushed the door open
the next morning, dozens of tiny rockets flew at him, driving him back into his room. Day to day, he never knew what might be coming at him—and he loved it.

Milius loved explosives, and he’d gone to amazing lengths to make sure everything on
Red Dawn
was authentic. I still get chills when I think about the scene where the paratroopers float out of the sky, landing on the field next to the high school and then opening fire with machine guns. All the helicopters, tanks, airplanes, and missile launchers were absolutely true to the era, which lent an air of authenticity to the whole film. Watching it today, you can still feel the fear that was so rampant throughout the Cold War.

The realism was also aided by the fact that we really did camp out during what became the coldest winter in years, with temperatures plunging at times to thirty below. My fingers became frostbitten from all the hours spent in the elements, and to this day they throb painfully whenever it’s cold. We really became those characters—scanning the skies for helicopters, rationing our food, riding horses across the mountains. And we even had to perform our own heroics when a freak accident nearly led to disaster one afternoon.

The actors playing the Wolverines were riding in a van, which was towing a horse trailer behind it. The mountain road was steep, icy, and treacherous, with a sheer dropoff to one side. As we towed the horse trailer up the road, it began sliding on the ice, right toward the edge of the cliff. The trailer slid to a wobbly stop just on the edge of this massive drop. If it went a yard or two farther, it would go down—and pull the van and us right over with it.

Everybody in the van was completely freaked out, but Tommy Howell and I jumped into action. “Get in the doorway!”
I yelled. “Don’t get out of the van, because that’ll send the trailer over. But get in the doorway so you can jump if it starts to go anyway!”

While everyone crowded into the van’s doorway, Tommy and I jumped out to deal with the horses. There was a gap between the road and the horse trailer’s door, so we’d have to get the horses to jump across the gap to safety. The problem was, the horses were going crazy with fear. We gingerly made our way out to the trailer, unlatched the gate, and guided the horses one by one to the road, urging them to jump across the gap. Somehow, we managed to get them all to safety—and once the horses were out of the trailer, it was light enough for the van to pull it back up to the road. Tommy and I were as elated as if we’d single-handedly repelled a Soviet air attack, and we high-fived each other while the other actors breathed sighs of relief.

I loved playing Jed Eckert, and I enjoyed every minute of being the leader of our ragtag band, even if it was a little intense for others. As I mentioned, Jennifer Grey was probably the least impressed of all—she really chafed when I ordered her around, and rolled her eyes when I stayed in character between takes. But there was a moment at the end of the film when Jennifer seemed to warm to me. It was when we shot her character’s death scene.

Jennifer’s character, Toni, has been mortally wounded following a Soviet aerial attack, but Jed doesn’t want to let her die. In that scene, I scoop her up onto the back of my horse and flee the attack, but it’s too late for her. Toni and Jed end up taking refuge under a piñon tree, and she asks Jed to finish her off with a pistol. But he can’t.

It’s a very tender scene, and as I stroked Jennifer’s hair, it
was a genuinely emotional moment. This was the first time she and I had a meaningful scene together, and I think it endeared me to her after all the friction we had. The funny thing is, most of that scene ended up being cut. But even in the shorter version that made it into the film, it was clear to anyone watching that Jennifer and I had chemistry together.

Red Dawn
came out in the summer of 1984, just as Lisa and I were starring together in a very different kind of performance. In fact,
Without a Word
was just about as far as you could get from the freezing Cold War drama of
Red Dawn
. It was an intimate, deeply emotional reflection on dancing, dreams, and what happens when those dreams die.

It had all started months earlier, when Lisa and I danced in a special performance for our acting class. We were studying with Milton Katselas, a legendary acting coach in LA. We had waited years to get into his class, but it was well worth it. Milton pushed us further, and made us dig deeper, than ever before.

We weren’t the only dancers in Milton’s class—in fact, it wasn’t unusual for former ballet dancers to turn to acting once they left the profession full-time. But one thing we noticed was that all these former dancers felt like we did, that nothing really filled the void left by dancing. Lisa and I became close to one in particular, an amazingly talented former Paul Taylor Company dancer named Nicholas Gunn. We’d hang out together after class, sitting at diners and talking about the passion and pain of dancing, and how we’d drop everything in a heartbeat for the chance to do it all again.

These were little more than idle conversations until we were invited to dance for a special scene in acting class. There was a
cellist in the class who was also studying acting, and he wanted to explore different forms of expression through music. He asked Nicholas, Lisa and me, and another dancer and actress named Shanna Reed to perform dance pieces while he played, with the class watching.

For our part, Lisa and I prepared a pas de deux. And the feeling I got while being onstage, dancing ballet once again, was far more intense than I had expected. I felt my heart swell in my chest as Lisa and I moved together, with the gentle moan of the cello guiding us. It had been so long since I had danced in front of others, and so long since I’d felt that amazing soaring in my spirit. It was beautiful, and painful, and in the end, devastating. No matter how much success I had begun to have in the acting world, nothing compared to the sheer exhilaration of dancing.

When the performance ended, Lisa and I went backstage and I just broke down sobbing. I was overwhelmed with feelings—all the feelings I’d buried when I had to leave Eliot Feld. I had forced myself to cope after leaving Eliot Feld, because I had to. My dream had been shattered, but I couldn’t let that shatter my life. What I now realized, weeping backstage at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, was that I had a lot of emotional unfinished business related to leaving the ballet.

Lisa and Nicholas felt the same way I did, so we resolved to do something about it. It was time to explore all those feelings, to truly give them voice. And Milton Katselas offered a vehicle for us to do it. He had started a program called Camelot Productions, which offered free space for people who wanted to develop new plays. We could write about all these pent-up emotions, create a combination drama and dance work, and produce it at Camelot.