The Importance of Being Ernie: (23 page)

Read The Importance of Being Ernie: Online

Authors: Barry Livingston

Tags: #General, #Fiction

BOOK: The Importance of Being Ernie:
2.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
CHAPTER 42
 
Unwanted, Again
 
Just when I thought my career was out of the woods, another dark forest loomed in front of me. Film and TV work disappeared, again. This was a discouraging development, enough to drive a normal person insane, but I had seen a few ebbs and flows in my life by now. I didn’t like being out of work, but I could handle it.
Luckily, I had a support group to help keep me positive. I could commiserate with my pals, other talented artists like Steve Railsback, Robert Hummer, Alex Rocco, and my screenwriter pal, Brent Maddock, who would soon write the sci-fi film classic,
Tremors.
I also had my brother Stan who was fighting the exact same career windmills as me.
Most important, I had Karen. She was completely unimpressed by the glitz associated with actors. The highs and lows of my career were secondary to being a good husband and person. Thanks to her unconditional love, I began to separate my self-worth as a person from my worth as an actor in Hollywood. I still cared deeply about my career, but I also saw that I had another life to live besides acting. The trick was to get
both
things, home life and career, to flourish at the same time. I’d have to come up with another new plan to conquer Everest.
A wise, obviously unemployed actor once said, “The real job of an actor is the time spent looking for work, not the time spent acting.” I took that dictum to heart, sending out flyers to industry people to notify them of my plays, writing thank-you letters to anyone who’d give me an audition, and scouring the trade papers to keep tabs on upcoming projects, particularly if they were being developed by producers and directors I had worked for previously. Nothing much came out of this effort, but it did fill my days with purpose.
One of my other favorite activities was to drop in on former employers, directors like Richard Donner or Randal Kleiser, hoping to jog their memory and let them know that I was still alive. This was important, especially since I’d heard rumors that some fans thought I’d died in Vietnam!
Of course, meeting face to face with the industry elite meant getting past the surly guards who manned the gates at every studio. Once again, the walled compounds of Paramount, Universal, and 20th Century-Fox seemed like the impenetrable “forts” of my childhood. I had to be sneaky to gain access.
Warner Bros. in Burbank was my favorite studio for unsanctioned visits. I discovered an unlocked doorway at the outer wall near the main entrance. I’d loiter at the curb out by the street, waiting for three or four cars to line up at the gate. When the guards were busy checking identities, I’d casually slip through the doorway like a cat burglar. This system worked perfectly for months. Then, one day, a guard spotted me.
“Hey, you! Come here!” a uniformed man yelled.
I couldn’t bear the thought of being ejected by the goon. Running away seemed pretty humiliating, too, so I dashed through my secret entrance.
Once I was inside, I ran to a ladder attached to a building and climbed like a monkey on speed. Seconds later, three guards blasted through the door. My only option was to freeze, about halfway up the ladder. Thank God, they didn’t look up.
The goon squad dashed down the studio corridor, assuming they were hot on my trail. I continued my climb and hid on the roof for forty-five minutes. The whole time, I kept visualizing another news flash:
“Unemployed Ex–Child Actor Caught Stalking the Stars at Warner Bros.!”
Once I got past the imagined shame, the charade was pretty exciting, and I climbed off the rooftop and continued on my trek around the lot. The guards must not have gotten a good look at my face because I crossed their paths a couple of times. I acted like I was some studio bigwig contemplating a deal and marched past them. As long as you looked like you belonged, nobody bothered you.
The next time I visited the Warner Bros. lot (officially invited for a job audition) I noticed that my secret passage had a padlock on it. Bummer. I wasn’t deterred from my mission of prowling the studio, though. You never knew whom you’d bump into. One day, I had an unexpected encounter with Steven Spielberg.
I had just auditioned for a role in
The Waltons
(didn’t get it) and bumped into a man named William Fraker. He had been a camera assistant many years ago when I was working on
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
In the intervening decades, he had moved up in the world and was now Steven Spielberg’s cinematographer on
1941,
the director’s highly anticipated follow-up to
Jaws.
Fraker grabbed me by the arm and said I must come meet Steven. I didn’t protest.
To my amazement, Spielberg practically leaped out of his director’s chair to shake my hand.
My Three Sons
was one of his favorite shows as a kid, and Ernie Douglas was a character he strongly related to.
The next thing I know, Spielberg’s got me by the arm, dragging me over to meet Amy Irving (his future first wife) and John Belushi (he couldn’t have cared less). Spielberg then instructed me to stand with him next to the camera so I could watch the action. We parted ways with a friendly handshake. This was a very good day; perhaps the start of what could be a fruitful relationship. Things always seem to change, though.
Fast-forward five years, not long after
E.T.,
Spielberg’s next phenomenal success. I was at Warner Bros. once again, and I met a friend who was working on the director’s next film,
Twilight Zone: The Movie.
My buddy called a higher-up on the film and got permission for me to enter the set, which was strictly off limits to visitors. The studio was guarding the secrets of the script, and Spielberg. Since I had seen him last, he had graduated from “boy wonder” to “film-making genius” and was the most valuable commodity in Hollywood.
I entered the cavernous stage and stood on the sidelines, watching Spielberg set up a shot. At last he glanced over at me, and I waved to him. I was expecting a replay of our first meeting: Steven welcoming me with a bear hug, ushering me around the set to meet the stars.
Instead, the director gave me an odd, puzzled stare, like he was thinking: Who the hell is that and how did he get in here? I watched him work for a few more minutes and realized he wasn’t coming over to say
hi.
Since Spielberg is a bona fide filmmaking genius, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume I was interrupting his concentration on his work. One way or the other, it felt like I was getting the cold shoulder, so I decided to leave before I was asked to do so.
CHAPTER 43
 
Back to the Dinner Theater
 
A year after
Masters
had flopped, film and TV job offers were still nonexistent, so I headed back to the wonderful world of dinner theater, this time in Kansas City. This trip was extra special, though, because Stan came out of acting retirement to join me on the road.
The first play we performed together was
See How They Run
at Tiffany’s Attic in K.C. On the surface, Tiffany’s theater looked quite impressive with massive chandeliers, red-flocked walls, and comfy leather booths on four tiers. Peek behind the curtain, though, and it had a serious problem: roaches.
Anytime food was prepared and served in mass quantities, the little buggers could come running. One night, right in the middle of the play, I heard troubled voices whispering in the front row. I kept my focus on Stan, trying to stay in the scene, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a man slapping the stage with his shoe. The audience roared as a roach, big as a Cadillac, ran back and forth trying to avoid the shoe’s crushing blow.
Judging by the crowd’s response, it seemed as if they were used to such spectacles, perhaps even looking forward to them. A collective
Ahhhh!
rang out once the bug was finally flattened. The focus then returned to the actors, and we continued on with the play. Talk about being upstaged.
Another night, the theater’s roof leaked during a tremendous Midwestern rainstorm, and steady streams of water dripped down onto the stage. The audience wasn’t getting wet, so the management decided the show must go on. Only the actors were getting drenched.
As the play progressed, so did the storm outside. One of the waterfalls pouring down from the ceiling was landing on a bed onstage, a focal point of the play, a farce called
Little White Lies.
Throughout the action, babies kept showing up on my doorstep and I would hide them in the bed. Every time I’d stuff a new baby (dolls, in reality) into the rain-soaked bed, the audience exploded with snickering laughter.
In the play’s final moment, I was supposed to climb into the sack with the babies. Up to that point, I refrained from ad libbing about the rain on strict orders from the stage manager. He was afraid that if I acknowledged the theater’s leaky roof, the audience might want refunds.
The second I crawled into the soaking bed, the crowd laughed again. They had watched the downpour all evening and knew how wet it was. I couldn’t resist a final ad lib and yelled, “Ohmi-god! These babies pissed everywhere!” The audience went wild. Our rain-soaked efforts were rewarded with a standing ovation that night.
CHAPTER 44
 
New Roles
 
The most incredible, life-changing events occurred during the dinner theater era. It was the birth of my two children. Spencer was born in 1989 and Hailey came along three years later. I gladly threw myself into my most important role to date: playing Mr. Mom.
While Karen was bringing home the bacon working as a physical therapist, I was in charge of packing lunches, taking the kids to school, picking them up, and playing with them in the afternoon. If we weren’t at the zoo or museums, we’d be home making up imaginary games.
Being an actor, I loved to play Cheetah the Chimp to Spencer’s Tarzan or give a voice to Ken while Hailey pretended to be Barbie. In a traditional marriage, dads work all day at the office and miss their children’s wonder years. Not me. I had a blast. It meant revisiting all the things I loved doing as a kid with my own children.
Being a father had an unexpected impact on my career, too. It made me want to work even harder to hot-wire my inert career. Call it pride or ego, but I wanted them to be proud of their dad. At the very least, I wanted them to see me fighting for something.
I intensified my campaign to reintroduce myself to casting directors and producers with a barrage of letters inviting them to see me in my stage productions:
Grease
(produced by Fran Drescher),
The Last Good Word, Very Cherry and Extra Clean
at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, and the American premiere of
Cause Célèbre
at the Ahmanson Theatre.
I also took a screenwriting class at UCLA in the evening, hoping to sell a script that would have an acting role for me in it. It worked for Sylvester Stallone in
Rocky
when nobody else would hire him.
The script that came out of my class was titled
Blessing in Disguise.
To my amazement, it won an award in a university competition, the Diane Thomas Screenwriting Awards. Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito, and Steven Spielberg sponsored the contest, so it elicited a huge number of script submissions.
DeVito was the presenter at the awards ceremony. When my name was called, it created quite a buzz among the reporters who recognized me from
MTS.
They were eager for any angle to hype this low-key ceremony. Camera crews from
Entertainment Tonight
swarmed me the minute I stepped off the podium with my award.
Once things settled down, DeVito sidled up next to me and covertly whispered, “Congratulations on the award but ... who the hell are you anyway?” He confessed to not being a fan of the show.
Suddenly, I possessed an award-winning script; I thought the industry would snap it up. Didn’t happen. The script was universally rejected because the subject matter involved a Hollywood bugaboo: old people. The story focused on three senior citizens living at a retirement villa who start a detective agency, using the old folks home and their geezer qualities as their cover. It was
CSI
meets
The Golden Girls;
not the best idea ever conceived but certainly as good as
My Mother the Car.
Between taking care of the kids and acting in plays, I cranked out scripts with the help of my Remington electric typewriter and gallons of Wite-Out. I didn’t sell anything (until years later), but it kept me busy. If writing, acting, and child rearing weren’t enough, I decided to try out another title: director.
A playwright friend named Michael Farkash had written a play titled
Meat Dreams.
I found it to be perverse, sexy, and original. Perfect. Plans were made to stage the piece on the off nights (Monday through Wednesday) at a theater in Century City. This was the fiefdom of a man I’ll call Ivan Cohen, the most unscrupulous theater producer in Los Angeles, a fact I wish I’d known before signing the contract.
At first glance, Ivan the Terrible (a nickname we gave him) struck you as a typical old-school hippie: owner of a rusty VW bus, tattered blue jeans, and a long gray, bushy beard. His Grateful Dead T-shirts and love beads suggested that he was a love child, full of peace and understanding.
I soon learned that Ivan was petty, loutish, and flat-out dishonest. He probably worked for Dow Chemicals in the 1960s and hated “flower children.” Whatever. Ivan told me that
Meat Dreams
would have a budget of one hundred bucks and, oh yeah, we’d have to provide our own toilet paper. Now that’s
cheap,
I remember thinking. Our first production meeting ended with my producer saying, “You’re sure you really want to direct this piece of shit?” Not exactly a confidence-building pep talk.
Rehearsals commenced, and we worked in the garage of my house, mainly because Ivan wouldn’t let us use his theater. Apparently, he needed every spare minute to polish up his long-running hit,
Bleacher Bums.
It was playing on weekends at the theater, and a gala re-opening of
Bums
was in the works. We’d have to rehearse our little “piece of shit” elsewhere.
As fate would have it,
Meat Dreams
premiered in the same week that Ivan’s
Bleacher Bums
re-opened. The
Los Angeles Times
printed the reviews of the two plays, side-by-side.
Bums
was savaged by the critics while
Meat Dreams
got a rave review written by the esteemed theater critic Robert Koehler. Ah! Sweet revenge!
On the strength of more good reviews,
Meat Dreams
became a cultish hit and drew large audiences. People barely go to the theater in Los Angeles under the best of circumstances, let alone on a Monday or Tuesday. Smelling money, Ivan decided to move our show to his other, larger theater, so we could perform on the weekends. It was great that more people would see our hard work, but the move also had a big downside: we’d be closer to Ivan’s office and his intrusive reach.
Tensions were already high as we switched venues. For months at the Century City Playhouse, we’d coped with Ivan’s faulty sound and lighting equipment, his negligence in paying the actors, and of course, the TP issue. As long as the integrity of our show wasn’t horribly compromised onstage, we coexisted. Now that we were under Ivan’s close supervision, my worst fears came true and our relationship exploded.
Neither of Ivan’s theaters had air-conditioning. It’s a luxury that few small theaters can afford, and the audiences who attend such venues understand this fact. They’ll accept a modest amount of discomfort in exchange for challenging theater. For some reason, Ivan decided to address the temperature problems on our second opening night. He installed six ancient, rattling, oscillating fans in the room where the play was being performed. The fans didn’t do a damn thing to cool the room and created a clacking, rattling racket.
Gene Butler, the lead actor in our show, alerted me to the problem about ten minutes before the audience was admitted. I walked into the theater and was stunned by the noise. It sounded like a squadron of Sopwith Camel airplanes from World War I had started up their propeller engines and were preparing to take off.
Ask any stage veteran, and they’ll tell you that a theater space should be as quiet as a church because silence can be as compelling as the author’s words. In Ivan’s theater, our words and silences were going to be buried under a wheezing, whirring din. This crossed the line in terms of protecting the play’s integrity, and I wasn’t about to let that happen.
I hunted for Ivan and found him in his office, counting the money from the evening’s admissions. I made a passionate plea for him to turn off the fans and pointed out that it wasn’t even that hot.
He barely looked up from his pile of dough and grumbled, “I got a good deal on the fans at a swap meet. We’ll be using them from now on.”
Ivan owned the theater and had the right to change things as he saw fit. Fair enough. What really got under my skin was his instantaneous dismissal of my concerns. I’d tolerated his bullshit for months, and I’d finally reached my overload point. Sewer workers call this “blowback time,” when a holding tank can’t take any more pressure and the shit literally comes flying out the open pipes. Ivan was about to get blasted.
“Either the fans are turned off or the performance is canceled,” I snarled. This got his attention.
“Nobody cancels a performance in my theater, except me!” he bellowed.
“It’s
our
play and we
will
cancel the performance if the fans stay on. All of that clacking and whirring white noise is going to ruin the show! What’s the fucking point?”
“The point is that the audience has already paid for the show!” he said, pointing to the piles of cash on his messy desk.
“Then you’ll have to give it back!” I yelled, and dashed out of his office.
I marched into the theater and stood before the chattering audience, waving my hands to get their attention. I said, “Due to technical difficulties, tonight’s show is canceled. I’m very, very sorry.”
Ivan burst into the room and began screaming, “The show isn’t canceled! This show is not canceled!”
I yelled over his voice, “Tonight’s performance
is
canceled, and you should see Ivan for a refund.” Hearing that, Ivan’s eyes bugged out of his head like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. I rushed outside rather than continue the debate in front of the confused spectators.
I paced outside the theater’s door, trembling, trying to regain my composure. I heard Ivan’s panicked voice still yelling, “The show is not canceled. It is not canceled! Nobody move! I’ll be right back!”
Ivan burst through the theater’s door, and we went nose to nose, like a couple of WWF wrestlers.
“Give the audience their money, Ivan!” I said.
“I won’t give it back!”
“Turn off the fans then!”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“Turn off the
fans
!”
“
I’ll call the union on you!
” he threatened.
“This is my theater! You can’t tell me what to do!”
I repeated,
“Turn off the
fans
! Turn off the
fans
! Turn off the goddam
fans
, Ivannnnn!”
Every time the word
fans
exploded from my mouth, I leaped into the air like an enraged chimp, levitating on adrenaline and anger.
Ivan abruptly fell silent, and his neck puffed up from the venomous words being choked back. I wasn’t sure what was coming next. Either he was going to punch me in the nose or I was going to rip his smelly Grateful Dead T-shirt off his back. He turned away and stomped back inside the theater.
I stood there wondering, What the hell is this lunatic doing now?
Moments later, Ivan blasted back out the theater door and hissed, “I’m leaving one small fan on. Just
one
!”
The thought crossed my mind to go “all or nothing.” I was still damned steamed. Before firing back, though, I glanced over at Gene Butler and the other actors in the show. They were huddled together in costume, torn between supporting me and wanting to perform that night. I also thought of the audience who had schlepped down to Ivan’s theater, only to have their evening ruined by our amateur theatrics. A compromise seemed the only sensible thing to do. I acquiesced to Ivan’s one rattling fan.
The play went on that night, and the performance was one of the best. Ivan disappeared for the next few days, resurfacing when our next good reviews hit the press. He offered up a conciliatory handshake, and I accepted it. My mouth dropped, though, when he asked me to direct another play for him. This was an offer that only a masochist could embrace. I declined.
It may sound strange, but I’ve come to believe that my confrontation with Ivan marked a cosmic turning point in my life. Cosmic? I know, stay with me. When I was protesting the fans, in essence yelling
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
I was finally taking a bold stand and bellowing my righteous indignation. My rage against
windmills,
or fans, finally got the attention of the gods, and my luck changed dramatically.

Other books

Evicted by Matthew Desmond
In the Time of Greenbloom by Gabriel Fielding
Dear Darling by Elle McKenzie
If You Ever Tell by Carlene Thompson
TornByLove by Marilyn Lee
Bitter Angels by C. L. Anderson
I Belong to You by Lisa Renee Jones