by Erik Tarloff
He shook his head, almost like a child refusing to eat his spinach or something. Stubborn. He said, “It’s nice of you to say that, Dave, but I’m perfectly aware I’ve been awful so far, and today…I’m just lost. I don’t know how to play the scene. I don’t have a grasp on this character at all.”
And I said to him, “But you’ve been fantastic so far.” He just stared at me, wide-eyed. So I went on, “Is there anything about the scene you want to talk about? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me you need any guidance, you appear to have a handle on it, but if you have any questions…”
He shook his head. “It’s too late for anything like that. I’m drowning, and it’s too late for anyone to throw me a life preserver. Assuming there even is such a thing.”
I was just totally bewildered by this. I said, “But you’ve been doing first-rate work. Oscar-caliber, I’d go so far as to say. And I’m not just talking through my hat. I’ve been watching the dailies every evening. You haven’t. They’re dynamite. You’re phenomenal.”
And he gave me a look I’ll never forget. It seemed to combine pity and scorn. Maybe even contempt. I think he lost all respect for me in that moment and I never got it back. He said, “Fine. Okay. Thanks. See you on the set.” And with that he sighed rather loudly—it was a sigh intended to convey a message—and he got up and left the trailer.
So there was all this tension down on the floor while setting up and so on. I don’t know if the technicians were aware of it, but they probably were. They know more about what’s happening on a set than they’d ever let on. The other actors did for sure. They could sense something was amiss, if only because Chance was standing apart from everybody else, his back to cast and crew, pretty obviously…well, I was going to say “sulking,” but that might not be fair. He may just have been struggling.
Anyway, it was a long scene, very emotional, with many changes for Chance’s character to go through, and I could understand why he would find it challenging even under the best of circumstances. He had to start out affable, go to shock, then to rage, then deep hurt, then determination. Huge transformations separately, and a huge arc altogether, plus not a lot of space to effectuate it all. It was all there on the page—the script was very good—but really tough for an actor to make convincing. Constructing the latticework that could sustain those changes in such a short amount of time and in a believable way posed a serious stumbling block for any actor. With all his panic, Chance was definitely overreacting, but he was overreacting to a genuine difficulty.
They did one quick rehearsal, for lighting and blocking, and Chance didn’t even bother to act during that, just mumbled his lines in a rote fashion, no inflection, and moved where he needed to. It threw the other actors off a little, but they were game and went through the rehearsal without a murmur. Clearly worried, since he was behaving so strangely, but professional. And then, after the usual delays with the camera and sound and so on, my AD signaled everything was ready and said the camera was rolling and I called “Action!”
And what followed was perhaps the most extraordinary acting it’s ever been my privilege to witness. The scene played for almost five minutes, which is an eternity in film, and we could have shot it in pieces, of course, but we needed a master, and it was working so incredibly I sure as hell wasn’t going to yell “Cut.” And the camera kept rolling and they kept going. And Chance took us all on a roller-coaster ride. He was in tears about half-way through the scene; I thought the tears should be the big finish, but his instinct was better—of course it was better, the kid was a genius—and he somehow figured or intuited or just somehow knew, that fighting to control the tears, pulling himself together and regaining a measure of calm for the climax, was actually more honest, and ultimately more moving, than some over-the-top histrionic crescendo.
The scene ended. I called “Cut!” And there were a few seconds of dead silence, and then the entire set suddenly erupted in applause. Technicians, production staff, the three other actors in the scene. And me. I’d never seen anything like that happen before. And the applause just went on and on. Chance looked stunned. He sort of fell back into a chair—it was a kitchen set, so there were chairs around—and put his head in his hands. I went up to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “See?” I thought he’d be grateful, but instead he looked up at me and the little fucker just shrugged.
Well, we did some inserts afterward, of course, some OTS’s and close-ups. We were on that set until we broke for lunch, but the first take is the one we basically used. It was perfect. Chance never gave me the satisfaction of admitting things were going well—he apparently never forgave me for refusing to validate his sense of inadequacy—but we didn’t have any further crises from him after that, so I suppose that represented a sort of tacit concession.
Buddy Moore (actor)
My part in Lightning Bolt wasn’t huge, but it was considered a featured role because I had a couple of important scenes with Chance. Just him and me. I played his best friend. I wasn’t much more than a narrative convenience, to be honest…his character confides in me, I’m the guy he turns to, and as a result the audience knows what he’s thinking and what happened in the backstory. Sort of like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, only with less attitude to work with. [laughs] My part as written was probably the least interesting, the most by-the-numbers thing in the script. But I tried to give it a little oomph anyway. If you can do that with a part that’s mostly just serviceable, you’ve really added some value as an actor. So that was a challenge, and frankly, it turned out to be a pretty interesting one as well as a tough one. A test of one’s chops. So this wasn’t just a job for me. Not, by the way, that any journeyman actor would sneer at “just a job.” There’s no such thing. “Just a job” is the entire world to an actor trying to make his way.
Besides, I was thrilled to be working with Chance. He was only a year or two older than me, but I thought of him as a senior colleague. And one I pretty much idolized. I’d seen him in Hills and Plains, of course, and that performance knocked me out. It seemed to define acting for a guy my age. For our entire generation. And here he was, the star of this picture, and I had these two two-handers with him, and it was like a dream come true.
But…well, I don’t know. The scenes played well, I think it’s fair to say. A couple of reviewers even went out of their way to mention them. But Chance…it’s still painful for me to recall this. He just wasn’t very nice to me. My first day on the picture, between takes, or maybe when they were setting up, I can’t remember exactly, but he was sitting in the canvas chair with his name on it, sitting off to the side, alone, studying his script. He seemed absorbed, as he often did on that picture. He wasn’t real sociable during the entire shoot. But anyway, I saw him there and I gathered up my courage—you probably can understand how doing something like this isn’t always the easiest thing in the world, but I figured, if not now, when?—and approached him and asked if I could talk to him for a couple of minutes. He shrugged. It wasn’t too welcoming, but I took it as a yes, so I grabbed a canvas chair that didn’t have anybody’s name on it and pulled it over and sat down next to him. And I let him know how much I admired him, and he just nodded. No thank you or anything. And I started asking him about how to approach the scene we were about to shoot—and honestly, I had a good handle on it already, I was just curious to hear his thoughts and thought it was a question that might engage him—and I said, “See, I used to think I was a pretty good actor, but you’re miles better than me, so I was wondering how you see this scene.”
And he just stared at me—almost glared at me, really—and finally said, “Listen, Buddy, I’m not gonna be your acting coach.” At least he remembered my name. Unless he was using “buddy” the way you might say “pal” or “mac.” Anyhow, he said, “If you need help with your acting, take a class. I’ve got my own work to do.” Unbelievably unfriendly. Not the way colleagues should treat each other. Especially when they’re abou
t to play a scene together.
The only thing I can say in mitigation, and I’m not really sure it mitigates anything, is that he was pretty shitty to everybody during the shoot. Other actors, crew, director, even the craft services people. So at least I didn’t have to take it personally. Although you can’t help taking something like that personally. When you approach someone and they snub you, it feels like a personal rejection.
And look, maybe he was going through an especially stressful time. But it’s also possible he was a full-time dick. I gather other people in other situations had much nicer experiences with him than I did, so it’s possible he was just going through a bad patch while we were filming that picture. But I was in such awe of his talent—and still am of course, maybe even more so nowadays—that it felt like a slap in the face. And I really, really wish I had something better to say about him than this.
Briel Charpentier
He was not fun to be around when he was filming Lightning Bolt. He was…his mood was always dark. I don’t know what that was about. It was a good movie. He was wonderful in it. Whatever was bothering him, it had to be internal. The work he was doing does not explain it.
The night after that scene I told you about, the one that worried him so much, I made dinner for him. I made something he could have almost right away when he returned home. A nice chicken ragout, which was a favorite of his, and which I cooked in advance. All I had to do was heat it up and prepare some noodles and we were ready to sit down. And he was barely speaking. He washed up and sat down and poured us both a glass of wine. All wordlessly. And he was so tense, so closed off, I was a bit scared to say anything.
But after a while, the silence was too hard to tolerate, and waiting for him to say something wasn’t doing the job. So I finally asked him how the day had gone, and he said, “Fine.” And that was it. Not another word, you know. And his tone was so…curt? His tone was so curt I didn’t ask him anything else. We ate dinner silently. Then I cleared the table and went back to my own apartment. I don’t recall his even thanking me for dinner. I definitely did not feel welcome in his house that night.
No, we weren’t breaking up. I wasn’t leaving for good, I just was escaping an uncomfortable situation. We saw each other a couple of nights later, and continued to see each other for…well, with a few breaks of varying length, for the rest of his life. It was just…I do not know what was happening with him at that time, but he was always in a very bad mood. For the months they were making Lightning Bolt, I frequently kept my distance.
David Osborne
Dore Schary loved the picture, but some of the other execs weren’t so sure. It was a tough time for studios, they were terrified about television, they thought we might be living through a period marking the end of movies altogether. The general consensus was that message pictures and dramas might be a bad bet, big musicals were what they did best at MGM, serious drama might in the future be consigned to Playhouse 90 and Studio One and those shows. There was plenty of serious drama on television in those days, and lots of good writers working in the medium. But Schary thought there was still room for serious pictures, and he was an in-house champion of Lightning Bolt throughout the project. I’ll always appreciate his support.
We had one of those test screenings in Glendale, that was the first. They’re presented to the audience as an opportunity, they can view a new movie for free before anyone else has had a chance to see it, and then they fill out cards about their reactions afterward. Very tense occasions. I always hated those things; I think most of us in the creative community did. They could be very misleading and they mostly existed to give the suits back-up for the prejudices they’d started with. And sometimes we’d be forced to re-cut the picture or even shoot new scenes based on audience reaction, and that was infuriating. You live with a project for over a year, you think about it and ponder it and refine your ideas, you work with writers and actors, you shoot it in various ways and spend weeks in the cutting room getting it as close to the way you want it as possible, and then some bozos off the street with popcorn on their breath see it for the first time after having already watched some other picture and they give you their two cents’ worth and the studio execs all panic and take their reactions as being meaningful in some way. I mean, fuck them. But what could we do? That’s how the business operated.
So we entered this Glendale theater after the lights were already down—theater management had reserved the back two rows for our contingent—and filed in quietly. No popcorn for us! It was me, some of the studio brass, the writer—invited to attend as a courtesy, nobody gives a shit about the writer—some of the promotional people, and most of the actors, including a very reluctant Chance Hardwick. God how he didn’t want to be there! I told him he had to come, he had no choice in the matter. He accepted it, but he wasn’t happy. And as I’ve indicated, when Chance wasn’t happy you weren’t in any doubt about it.
Well, here’s the thing. As soon as Chance’s name came up on the screen in the opening credits, a bunch of girls in the audience started screaming. I’m not joking now. A fairly sizable number of girls. A quarter of the house? Wouldn’t surprise me. And later, after we left—I was a little suspicious—I asked the studio PR guy about it and he swore to me it hadn’t been his doing, he said they’d passed the word that a Chance Hardwick picture was going to be screened to help ensure people would show up, but that was all. No deliberate busing in of teenaged girls or anything like that. The screaming had happened spontaneously. The girls might have come as a group, he didn’t have any information in that regard, but he’d had nothing to do with it.
It was like what’d been happening with Elvis Presley. But Christ, they were screaming at Chance’s name. By itself! And after that there was screaming intermittently throughout the picture, whenever Chance was onscreen doing something especially romantic or soulful, or when we gave him a close-up. The execs and I kept exchanging glances during the film. This was obviously a big deal. I tried to catch Chance’s eye—he was sitting to my immediate right—because I thought he might be amused or surprised. I thought we could share a moment of sorts. But he had his head down, buried in his hands. It was clearly a nightmare for him, the whole experience. He slipped out of the theater before the movie was over. Probably as much to avoid being recognized by the screamers as anything else. I don’t think he disliked the movie—he later told me he thought I’d done a good job—I just think he was spooked.
When we looked at the cards later that night in Dore’s office, we were thrilled. I mean, of course there were a lot of “Chance Hardwick is a dreamboat!” kind of comments. There was even one, and I’m not making this up, that said “I want to suck Chance Hardwick’s hard wick.” Can you believe it? From, presumably, one of the teenagers! Call me naïve, but that was shocking to me. I had no idea girls so young could be so sexually blunt, or even so knowledgeable. Oral sex was something we didn’t talk about in those days. It was a closely held secret. But anyway, after all that screaming, we weren’t surprised to get fan-type comments about Chance. But in addition, and just as importantly, there were serious evaluations of the picture from people who seemed to be grown-ups, and those were positive as well. Very. It was the first time the studio, not counting Dore now, but lots of the others in the executive building, they realized they might have a huge hit on their hands. And potentially a mega-star under contract. And of course they all pretended they’d known it all along.
Dore asked me to stay behind after the others had left. He clapped me on the back and said, “Great work, Dave. Irving would have been proud of this picture. It’s going to make us a mint.”
FROM THE HERALD TRIBUNE REVIEW
OF LIGHTNING BOLT:
“…Chance Hardwick doesn’t merely fulfill his much-heralded potential, he lays claim to having become the best American actor to achieve prominence since war’s end. There are moments in Lightning Bolt where the line between performance and naked human em
otion ceases to exist. When Hardwick’s character becomes aware that the woman he has always regarded as his sister is in fact his mother and that the man who has played a mentoring role in his life is in fact his father, the viewer doesn’t merely witness the character’s shock and pain and jolt of sudden illumination but experiences it physically and emotionally. This is screen acting on the highest artistic level.”
Briel Charpentier
Chance seemed to relax somewhat after Lightning Bolt was finished. His agent, Irma, was looking at scripts for his next picture, and the studio was eager to get him into another film as soon as possible, but some of the pressure was now off. The pressure from doubting himself, and also the pressure of expectations. Because of course Lightning Bolt was a very big success, both in the sense of prestige and also financially, so that took some of those worries away. He no longer had reason to doubt himself.
Those worries were immediately replaced by others, to be sure. He was now a very big movie star. He had some trouble accepting that, you know. So did I, for my own reasons. I found it amusing that this sweet boy I’d come to like so much was suddenly one of the most famous people in the world. I don’t think my head was turned; I was merely surprised that this odd thing had happened. I was a simple girl from Paris. I never thought I’d even know a Hollywood movie actor, let alone…you know…have an intimate relationship with a star. It was confusing!