There and Back Again (9 page)

“No, I wouldn't put it that way,” I replied.

He seemed to think this was coming out of the blue. Months earlier he had said, “You know, movies like
Rudy
don't come around every day.”

Now, I took a deep breath. I'd be the first to admit that I have a bit of a temper, and I knew the potential was there for me to say something I'd regret, so I bit my tongue. Here's what I was thinking:
Nothing is coming around for me! I'm watching the things you're doing, and some of it doesn't make sense. You guys call me to ask if I mind whether you bring in Chris O'Donnell? Come on! I compete with him! Not only that, but I know the studios like him better than me. Remember when I had to cut my rate in order to beat him out for the job on
Rudy
? You promised me the part of Robin in
Batman,
and now I read in the trades that it's Chris O'Donnell's job? What do I do, sit around forever?
That's what I was thinking, not what I said. What I said was, “Look, I like you; I respect you; I will never forget that you made
Rudy
happen for me, but this is something I have to do.”

And that was that. I left CAA and, like a grown-up taking control of his own life and career, went to the esteemed William Morris Agency where, well, where nothing really changed. The joke was on me.

Actually, that's not entirely true. My mom's agent, Marc Schwartz, did a lot for me. He essentially helped put me through college by negotiating three different deals for television pilots, each involving less than two weeks of work but enough money to get my wife and me through several semesters of school, and to allow us to pay the mortgage on our house. If the shows went over (which they didn't), I'd become a millionaire. So the television division of the William Morris Agency at least saw my potential and tried to do something with it. The film division, however, did not.

Again, I have to acknowledge some culpability in the sputtering of my career. I was concentrating on my studies and thus allowed the professional side of my life to slip, to the point where, the week that I graduated from UCLA, I was nearly broke. Not because we'd been irresponsible or lazy. We had reinvested all the money I'd earned from
Encino Man, Rudy,
and other smaller projects into our education and my production company.

By the way, around this time I made Christine a partner in Lava Entertainment. To this day she remains the vice president and chief financial officer. Oh, and treasurer, too. Technically, she can vote me off the board, I think. The point is, she's also my business partner in Lava Entertainment ventures. I'm proud that her name is next to mine on the Academy Award nomination certificates we received for producing
Kangaroo Court
together. But the fact remains that around the time we graduated, we were just about broke. We weren't living lavishly, but neither were we too careful about money. We traveled a lot to visit Christine's family in Indiana or my mother in Idaho during breaks, and the result was a bank account that was dangerously, frighteningly close to depletion, with no obvious work on the horizon.

I don't mind admitting that I was scared. Although I was realizing my lifelong dream of graduating from UCLA, I felt like my acting career was running on vapors. I was engaged in playing what seemed to me like a suicidal game of chicken with my William Morris agents (if you tell them exactly how desperate you are, they may undersell you or slot you into a subpar situation). The delicate poker game with potential employers requires all of your (and your agents') acumen. Luckily for me, the education and Hollywood gods conspired to rescue us. I had started thinking about turning off the fax line, cancelling the subscription to the newspaper, those kinds of things. Then, out of the blue came a substantial offer to star in a film called
Harrison Bergeron
, based on Kurt Vonnegut's collection of short stories,
Welcome to the Monkey House,
and suddenly everything was okay. Another actor had fallen out at the last moment, and big-agency politics suddenly worked to my advantage the way I had always hoped it would.

Such is the Hollywood roller coaster.

Throughout the mid-1990s, I worked steadily if unspectacularly. Admittedly, I was not on the radar of most studio executives, and my name rarely, if ever, came up at news meetings of major entertainment publications. But it would be wrong to say that I had failed. My short film,
Kangaroo Court
, the story of a Los Angeles police officer who is captured and “tried” by members of a violent street gang (the late Gregory Hines starred as an attorney who defends the officer), was nominated for an Oscar in 1994. Not that anyone cared. I remember at the Academy Awards luncheon, the press didn't want to talk to me. They seemed kind of bored when I stood at the podium to discuss
Kangaroo Court
, as if they were just killing time between appearances by the real stars. Finally, out of politeness, someone asked a question.

“What are you going to do next?”

“Finish college,” I said, pointing out that I had enrolled at UCLA. They all started chuckling. Later, Dan Petrie Jr. explained their reaction: “Sean, this is not how the big successful directors got their careers going. You don't get nominated for an Oscar, then go to college.”

Ed Zwick, Dan pointed out, did a short film for the American Film Institute; he then created the television show
Thirtysomething;
and then made
Glory
as his first full-length theatrical release. If there's a map for building a filmmaking career, that's it. But as much as I admired Ed Zwick, I didn't have his kind of confidence, his mastery of the language. Every time I met a college graduate in Hollywood, I was stung by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority, as if they had something on me, something that prevented me from competing with them. For that reason alone, I needed to get a degree. A dispassionate observer might find that hard to fathom, for there are in Hollywood today any number of people who eschewed college for one reason or another. Experience is perhaps the most important form of education to them. But not to me. Keith Addis, one of my former managers, once said to me, “I'm leery of working with you because I don't like working with anyone who hasn't been to college.” It seemed at the time to be a rather arrogant, condescending remark, but I have to say, as soon as I got my degree, I called Keith and thanked him. For a while, whenever I got distracted, Keith and my father (another vigorous proponent of higher education) were like twin demons in the back of my mind, reminding me of the importance of what I was trying to do.

And it wasn't as if I retired from the movie business while I went to school. I finally started directing professionally. I got the opportunity to do some episodic television and took smaller parts in a number of movies, some of them memorable, some not so memorable. Among the former was Ed Zwick's
Courage Under Fire
, during the filming of which, as I've mentioned, I devoted considerable time to studying for my classes. As usual in my life, I was trying to get sixty seconds out of every minute, as Rudyard Kipling writes in his classic poem “If.”

I've worked with a number of world-class filmmakers (Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner, Peter Jackson, among them), and Ed Zwick is up there with the best visionaries. If Kevin Costner was an emblem of everything I wanted to achieve when I met him at the premiere of
Dances with Wolves
, then Ed Zwick became my model both as a pure director and a director/producer, and in some ways I felt like I was following in his substantial footsteps. For example, in college, he had studied English and history, just as I had. He did his short film at AFI; I did my own short film and got nominated for an Oscar. I looked at Ed and thought,
There's the template. There's my path.
Granted, he's probably a little bit smarter than I am, a little bit sharper (okay, maybe a lot smarter—he went to Harvard), and probably more honestly passionate about drama than I am. If you cut our minds open and laid them out on a table, his would look better than mine; but I wanted to do as much with mine as I possibly could. The point is, Ed was a beacon to me, and I wanted to bask in the glow of his talent.

The word “prescient” comes to mind when I reflect on Ed's choice of material. For example,
The Siege
is a picture that looked at issues related to domestic terrorism years before September 11. He is unafraid to use his talent and considerable skill to explore serious issues facing even the most sacred institutions in our society. Unwittingly, Ed Zwick's influence in my life taught me a very important lesson.

A little background … I auditioned for the part that Zwick eventually offered to Matt Damon in
Courage Under Fire
. While I was extremely disappointed that he chose Matt over me, I could certainly understand his choice. Once I saw the finished film, I really understood. I remember when I lost a part in Rob Reiner's movie
Stand by Me
to River Phoenix, how crushed I was initially, and then how utterly inspired I was by River's stunning performance in the picture. It became clear to me that River was ready to perform with a vastly more intense emotionality and basic level of toughness and sophistication than I had at that point in my life; I would only have been pretending. Similarly, Matt Damon was more capable of capturing the nuances required by the role he played. I could have made a good stab at it, but Matt just nailed it. I remember at the premiere that I was worried for him that after so dramatically altering his weight for the part, he might fall victim to the same problems I had endured. While he appreciated my gentle warning, he was totally unconcerned and has proven over the years that his commitment and discipline are unimpeachable. For all this and more, Matt has my admiration.

So, I'd like for it to be clear that as an actor—for example, in a picture such as
Memphis Belle
—I am proud to perform in movies that depict the United States and possibly other armed services honestly and in a way that feels historically accurate (one of my favorite films is the German classic
Das Boot
).
Courage Under Fire
promised something even more interesting than simply honoring the valiant service of brave men and women. In choosing to make
Courage Under Fire
, Ed raised the uncomfortable issue that the proffering of medals is, by its very nature, a political process. The director leveraged his power in Hollywood to make a film that did not initially receive approval from the United States Army. I had a unique vantage point from which to gain insight into the process, because I was then serving—and continue to serve—faithfully, proudly, and honorably as a civilian aide to the secretary of the army. During preproduction, I was waiting and trying to help work through the necessary bureaucracy in the eager hope that the army would agree to be involved in the making of the picture. Absolutely nothing can replace the realism and power of an M1A1 tank, to say nothing of a brigade-level array of them.

But the army had certain stipulations, and Ed would not adjust the script. I was in an interesting position, because Ed offered me a small part in the picture. I was going to play the part of a tank gunner who accidentally commits the atrocity of killing a “friendly”—someone on his own side. Despite my frustration at not getting the part I wanted, I was grateful that Ed saw a way to use me. I thought the part had merit because it showed the reality of the horror that a brave, heroic patriot can suffer during the heat of battle, as well as afterward. I remember being in an odd position at the National Training Center in the California desert. One week I was the guest of General William Wallace, the commanding general on the base, and the following week I was the guest of Colonel Terry Tucker, who commanded the opposition force against the troops who went to the desert to train. On one trip I was a distinguished guest with a protocol ranking; on the next trip I was an actor in the entourage of Denzel Washington getting critical time to prepare for my role.

During the National Conference of the Civilian Aides that year, I approached the head of the public affairs office to inquire about the status of the film company's request for the army's support. I distinctly recall feeling that I might be forced to make a choice between acting in the picture and continuing to serve as a civilian aide. At the time, if forced, I would have chosen the movie. In my heart, I believed a few things: First, I am an actor, and acting is my craft, my profession, and my passion. Second, I thought, whatever the army's objections might be, the movie ultimately showed the army in an extremely positive if not perfect light. As it turned out, the army chose not to support the film, and the director was forced to go elsewhere for realistic props. He eventually got Australian Sheridan tanks and dressed them up to look like American and Russian/Iraqi equipment. The lesson I learned is that the military's primary objective is to fight and win wars when called on to do so, and that artists have a separate charge: to tell stories they can believe in regardless of how those in power may feel about them.

*   *   *

This next little story deals with the politics of celebrity, and I want to tread cautiously and sensitively. We filmed
Courage Under Fire
in the late fall or early winter around the time that American forces had been deployed to Kosovo. A friend and colleague of mine was running the Armed Forces Radio Network in Europe. He asked me to record some holiday greetings that could be played for the soldiers, many of whom would have absolutely no form of entertainment during the holidays far from home. I wanted to honor the request that had been made of me and, in so doing, I asked others to help. Of course, my mom was the first to volunteer, and her greeting was heartbreakingly sincere and beautiful.

Knowing that the army had turned Ed down, I probably should have wondered how well the director would treat my request. To Ed Zwick's absolute credit, he allowed me to approach his stars. I think it was unfair for me to even ask him or them for this kind of permission. Life is a lot about timing, and I made my request impulsively, which was wrong. Unfortunately and unintentionally, I put Ed in an awkward position. He would either have to disappoint me by turning me down or run the risk of having Meg Ryan, his leading lady, upset by being distracted from her work with a political request. I sensed Ed's displeasure, but he didn't try to stop me, and I never felt an iota of reprisal from him. To the contrary, he has always been gracious and supportive any time I have seen him since.