I'm Not Dead... Yet! (19 page)

For one scene, I had to run in spikes on a cement oval, painted black for the film. We used the oval as a school track. My metal spikes got caught in a drainage grate, the spikes slid on the concrete, and I popped a quad muscle off my hip. I was lame—a doctor came to the set and declared it would be more than a month before I could run again, let alone walk. To me, it was just another sports injury. Ice. I lived with ice wrapped around my left quad. I even went into ice whirlpools at night. I was running by the end of the week.

When we would shoot the track sequences we hired world-class caliber runners. But they didn’t understand the work ethic of film: we do it until we get it right. Then we do it again. We would run 60-second 440’s over and over. I had to set the example. I’d run faster during the take, and even faster after the take to get back to the starting position, ready to go again and again. I refused to leave an ounce of energy out of any take. The runners were gassed—they could barely keep up. This fueled my performance: I was no elite runner, but my ‘heart’ and work ethic had me trouncing them.

I had conditioned myself to run in the straight-up style of the great Billy Mills, and by the time we shot the Olympic sequence, got my one-mile time down to 4:32—which I knew would photograph honestly.

Almost all of the Olympic footage was shot at halftime during an Edmonton Eskimo football game with a crowd of 60,000 fans. The crew had to clear snow from the track to make it look like summer in Japan, and the runners had to be sprayed with glycerine to make us look sweaty in the freezing temperature. They couldn’t find a souped-up golf cart fast enough to film me. But I wouldn’t allow us to ‘pretend’ to be running fast—we would run fast. And because I was running 55-second 440’s during the sequence, the fans turned from jeering to cheering. They ‘got into’ Billy’s triumph, and that spirit is in those final moments of the Olympic race.

Of all the films I’ve made (except for
Modern Love
) I cannot help but cry at the end of
Running Brave—
because of the strength of character and silent beauty of the Native actor at the train station, when Billy triumphantly returns home. It’s a great acting lesson. Without a single word, his dignity sums up the film—and the admiration and respect all of us had for Billy Mills.

Every actor in Hollywood, f
rom age 15 to 30, was fighting for the part of Paul Newman’s son in
Harry and Son
.
We all thought this would be a very personal film about Mr. Newman’s relationship with his own son. (It wasn’t.)

The film had a cast of exceptional people: Morgan Freeman, Ossie Davis, Ellen Barkin, Judith Ivey, and of course, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, who also directed. Paul Newman was my hero; my
idol
. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to work with him.

Harry and Son
actually began for me about a month before production. My first hurdle was trying to get through the script. It was… unreadable. I usually gobble up scripts with thoughts, brainstorms, and ideas I can’t contain. In this case, I couldn’t read five pages in a row without going for a run.

I had to learn to surf for the role. Every day in January I’d put on a wet suit, go out to Ventura County and watch other surfers, and try to mimic their actions. I was doing well until the weekend prior to a huge storm. The swells were ten feet and all the surfers were out in the ocean fighting for space. I took a huge wall of water and began to paddle, picking up steam, placing my board in the perfect spot for the perfect wave. I began to ride the wave in when I was cut off by a pissed-off surfer and went down. The wave took my body and hurled it into the coral reef and rocks. I was almost knocked out. My surfboard was tethered to my ankle with rope and velcro, and as I turned around a bigger wave was about to crash into me—but even more troubling was the surfboard, coming at my torso horizontally with no time to move out of its way. I broke a rib on the right side of my chest and the wave pounded me into the reef and rocks again.

I barely remember crawling out of the ocean. As I lay in the rocky sand, staring up at the stormy skies, I realized how lucky I was to have survived my self-taught surfing lessons.

The day before principal photography began in Florida, I was out for a run, testing my ability to breathe without gasping for air or showing pain from a broken rib. The next thing I knew, my foot came down on a rock, my ankle flipped (like an ankle that had been sprained dozens of times) and I immediately knew I had a severe sprain. (Yup.) My ankle swelled to the size of a grotesque grapefruit and I thought, “Well, you did it again. How?! Why?!”

I went to Mr. Newman and told him he should look for a replacement. He stared at me and then said, “No. I want you to do this part. We’ll get you to the trainer of the Miami Dolphins.”

The Dolphins had just lost the Superbowl. Their trainer was examining my ankle in an empty training facility (almost like a ghost town), when Don Shula walked into the empty room, stopped and stared at me. He looked at me like a man... who, well: had just lost the Superbowl, and said in a very nasal, angry voice, “What’s he doing here?” The trainer explained and I was allowed to stay, only to hear him tell our first A.D., “Robby won’t be able to walk for two weeks.” ‘Ha!’ I thought. Heard that one before.

I began the old ‘foot in a bucket of ice’ routine, and showed up the next day without a sign of a limp. I’m referring to my ankle. My performance was another kind of limp.
I tried to fix every scene I was in with unbridled enthusiasm. Bad choice.

Karla and I lived on a houseboat during the filming. Pregnant with our first child, Karla had to deal with morning sickness and sea sickness. Our ‘house’ never stopped swaying with the tide. One day Paul asked what baby book we were reading and Karla said
Pregnancy and Childbirth
by Tracy Hotchner. Well, it just so happened that Ms. Hotchner was Paul’s best friend’s daughter. Joanne Woodward knitted on the set between takes. She knitted our baby-to-be a little sweater. These were movie stars, but they were the most down-to-earth people I had ever met.

Our movie did have off-screen adventures. Paul loved to race professionally on weekends during the shoot, but one Sunday he had one of those ‘Grand Prix’ places, where everyone races each other in miniature cars, shut down—just so the cast and crew could let off some steam and have fun. The racing got competitive. It came down to Karla, five months pregnant, racing Paul Newman nose to nose as they headed for the checkered flag. Karla kicked Paul’s butt. And that’s the way Paul would want me to tell the story, because he was a prankster, a lover of life, and an all-around great guy.

There were many practical jokes we played on one another. In the emotional scene where I had to kiss him as he ‘lay dead’, Paul spent fifteen minutes before the shot rubbing ice on his mouth, getting his lips cold—just to see if his practical joke would work on me.

When I think of the movie
Harry and Son
I don’t think of ‘film’—I think of experiences and people we were lucky to meet and become friends with.
Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and their family have changed the world for the better; they have set a standard that we should all try and achieve when it comes to harnessing your good fortune with altruism. Their charities will live on long past any of us. When I’m in the grocery store and I have a choice, I will always pick Newman’s Own over any competitor, knowing that the proceeds will truly help people.

I keep them close to my soul, as if Paul and Joanne are always laughing and knitting protection around my heart.

I could work my body into ‘Hollywood shape’
(without steroids, thank you).
I couldn’t breathe
but still felt I had to give the impression everything was perfect. The irony was so… Hollywood.

We had been married for less than a year when we wrapped
Harry and Son
in Florida, and came home to the long hot summer in the San Fernando Valley.

Karla was the darling of Epic Records since the release of
Is This a Cool World or What?
Gregg Geller, the head of the A&R department, was convinced John Boylon was the only one to produce Karla’s second album. She had been on hold for over a year waiting for a break in Boylan’s schedule. Karla, Danny Lawson, and I had written (and I engineered and played on) demos of five songs Boylon loved. Finally free, that summer he had her recording nonstop in the studio until a week before her due date. She felt great and sang even better, saying pregnancy’s natural muscle relaxing hormones actually helped her vocal chords.