I Blame Dennis Hopper

by Illeana Douglas

  In 1995, I was being fitted for a wig for Grace of My Heart when out of the blue the wigmaker showed me a plaster bust he had once made of Peter Sellers. “We made all his hairpieces for Being There!” I said, “That’s weird because I actually saw Peter Sellers wearing that hairpiece.” After I told him who my grandfather was he gave me the bust! It’s in my house, and people always ask me, “Why do you have Peter Sellers’s death masque?” I have to convince them that it was a gift, but somewhere inside of me I feel it’s Peter Sellers having a laugh at my expense.

  In 1998, I was at a thrift shop in Los Angeles looking at a vintage Gucci wallet when the owner said, “Oh, you like that wallet. You have good taste. It belonged to Peter Sellers.” Of course it became my lucky wallet, something I have to have on every set to ensure good comedy.

  When I was first looking to rent a house in the Malibu Colony in 1999, I thought I had found a beauty. It was a blue-and-white gingerbread Victorian with little turrets and diamond-shaped eaves in the bedrooms. I asked the owner if anyone famous had ever lived there, and he said, “Not really … There was some crazy director, never paid his rent on time, Hal somebody.”

  “Hal Ashby?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Yeah. Hal Ashby. He actually died in this house. He had cancer, and he believed in pyramid power or some crazy thing like that. He used to sit under the eaves of the loft of one of the bedrooms. He thought the pyramid energy would cure him.” I realized that this must have been the same house where Peter Sellers once talked to Hal Ashby about casting my grandfather.

  It felt as if I had been mysteriously led there. On the spot I said, “I’ll take it.”

  At night, I used to go way up on this ladder and sit under the eaves of the house. I would listen to the ocean and try to feel pyramid power like Hal Ashby. It made me feel as if somehow I was communicating with him.

  Over the years, in one way or another, I met practically everyone ever associated with Being There. Every time I’d meet someone new who had worked on the film, I’d hear a story I had never heard before. Whenever these things happened, I would shrug it off as coincidence until one day in 2001. I was in New York after a big life change. I was feeling a little down, and I decided to go see a psychic. Men go to prostitutes for comfort. Women go to psychics! Anyway, I get there and it turns out she’s not a psychic. She’s a medium. She contacts the dead. Oh. OK. What the hell, I’ve paid my money. I ask her to try to contact my grandfather. So she’s contacting my grandfather and during the session she starts to tell me that there’s a man with my grandfather and that he’s riding a unicycle! I was so taken aback that I asked, “Is it Peter Sellers?”

  She said, “Yes.” Then she said that he was showing her a pink photo of a man drawing a tic-tac-toe board. She was describing the People magazine cover of him that had once been on my bedroom wall! Now, you can believe in these things or not, but how could she have known that? She started to impart a lot of information to me. That he—Peter Sellers—and my grandfather were together, that Peter Sellers was my guardian angel! Who was I to argue that Peter Sellers was my guardian angel? The Fate magazine cover I also had on my bedroom wall had boasted the headline SPIRITS GUIDE PETER SELLERS’ SUCCESS! Then the medium said, “He wants you to know that he’s holding an umbrella over you, and he wants you to know that he always has that umbrella over you.” In the last shot of Being There, Chance the Gardener is walking on water holding a large black umbrella. I’m listening to this, taking it in stride, then all of a sudden she says, “Oh. He wants to watch the movie Being There with you.” Okay. This may sound like the craziest thing, but I was not about to turn down the chance to watch the movie Being There with a commentary from “the other side” by Peter Sellers. I hadn’t seen the movie in years. It was still very difficult for me to see that movie. But I booked another appointment with the medium. We made popcorn, and then we—me, the medium, Peter Sellers, my grandfather, and I can’t verify who else from the spirit world might have been in the audience—all watched Being There. The medium would listen to Peter and laugh, and then tell me what he had said to her. It was great to see the movie again and also to hear what appeared to be Peter Sellers’s genuinely funny and insightful commentary. It was like being with an interpreter at the UN.

  For instance, during the Shirley MacLaine masturbation scene Peter apparently told the medium that the filming of this scene had been difficult for him, because he was such a ladies’ man and he and Shirley MacLaine had chemistry. “That was real acting, because it would be impossible for me to ever turn a lady down,” the medium said, passing along what Peter had told her.

  It was all a little crazy, but all in good fun, right? A couple of days later I was back at my house in Connecticut. I went down to the basement to get something, and there, leaning against the wall, was a unicycle. Its seat was gleaming white with silver sparkles. I did not own, or ever think of owning, a unicycle. I ran upstairs and said to my brother, “There’s a unicycle in the basement! Where did it come from?” And he said, “I found it at the dump. Someone just left it there. I think I’m going to learn how to ride it.” I looked up to heaven—or wherever Mr. Sellers was—and started to laugh. Message received, P. S.

  To this day, whenever I see a unicycle, I know Peter Sellers is sending me a message, reminding me with that knowing smile, “Always ride a unicycle. Because it’s difficult, and not everyone can do it.”

  “Life is a state of mind.” That’s the last line from the movie Being There. You can believe that or you can not believe it. I choose to believe in chance encounters.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Me Doing Dreyfuss Doing Tracy

  The Goodbye Girl meets Duddy Kravitz. Me imitating Richard Dreyfuss in acting school. The play was Uncommon Woman and Others. The actor—me—was shameless.

  Lately, when I am working on a movie, I ask the young actors around me the same question. Do you know who Spencer Tracy is? The answer, sadly, is that no, they do not know who Spencer Tracy is. Acting is a craft. One actor watches another actor and admires and copies his technique, and so on and so on. This is how our art form continues and is passed on. If we don’t know who Spencer Tracy is then we cannot fully appreciate Richard Dreyfuss or, dare I say, Illeana Douglas.

  The 1970s were the decade when watching movies helped form and change me into the actor I would later become. I went from wanting to see a movie, any movie, to seeking out my favorite actors and watching their performances in the movies they made. What’s funny is that most of the movies I liked and wanted to see again and again had one common denominator: They all starred Richard Dreyfuss. And in many ways—some I am only still beginning to understand—my appreciation of him has led me to appreciate the deeply personal connections and identifications that can lead any of us to become a movie-lover.

  I could run my own Richard Dreyfuss film festival; I’ve seen his entire body of work. I’ve watched as his performances became less driving and comedic and more thoughtful and introspective. I’ve consciously emulated him, and I’ve worked opposite him, doing my best not to emulate him. I’ve written about him; I have interviewed him. I wore him down until he was basically forced finally to participate in a friendship with me so that I wouldn’t seem like a stalker. Luckily for me, Richard has accepted my obsession with great humor, because it’s rooted in my admiration of him as an actor. He was the first actor I studied, and tried to be like, like a painter copying a master until he has a technique of his own. I recently discovered that Richard and I have that in common.

  I was getting ready for an interview I was going to be doing with Richard for Turner Classic Movies, but by that point I had interviewed him so many times I was actually running out of questions. “Richard … what’s the name of the shark in Jaws?” (His name was Bruce, by the way.) We started talking about acting and our respective training. We decided that the theme of this particular conversation—which would be our fifth—should address how the styles of movie acting have changed over the yea
rs, from Paul Muni to Marlon Brando. Richard said to me, “Nobody knows that I was pretending to be Spencer Tracy.”

  And I laughed and said, “Wait, I was pretending to be you, so I was doing you, and you were doing Tracy? I was doing Dreyfuss doing Tracy!” That’s why we need to know who Spencer Tracy is. So you can watch Richard Dreyfuss and have some context about an actor who influenced him. And then you can watch me and have some context about an actor who influenced me and even saved my ass at times.

  I was in my first acting school—the one I did not get asked back to—and I was cast in the play Uncommon Women and Others, playing a very brazen and confident law student. I had no idea what I was doing and I thought, Screw it, I’m just going to be Richard Dreyfuss. I’m going to throw out everything I’m doing, because it’s not working, and I’m going to play this part pretending to be Richard Dreyfuss. I started doing his cadence, his walk. I even dressed like him. We got to the dress rehearsal, and the director said, “I’m not sure what you were doing, but it’s really working. Keep it up.”

  And I did!

  The next night, the director was even more impressed. “Illeana, you were just terrific! I just love what you are doing! What are you doing?”

  “Um, Jaws?”

  It may have started with Jaws (1975). I never could have guessed that summer that when my mother dropped me off at the movie theater with my friends to watch Jaws (I think for me it was at least five times that summer), we would become part of the generation that created repeat movie viewing and the summer blockbuster. Um … OK … Mr. Spielberg might have had something to do with it, but we helped. There was an innocent authenticity about the success of Jaws that was not driven simply by marketing. It was good, old-fashioned word of mouth about the shared experience of a movie that had affected us. Affected us? Wait. That sounds like a grown-up talking, and this was not a movie that I watched with grown-ups. Do you know what 600 kids all screaming sounds like? I probably got early hearing loss from being so freaked out at Jaws. My mom picked us up afterward on the sidewalk and all we talked about was seeing Jaws, again and again, and again. My mom made a lot of trips to the movie theater that summer. We became an army. One buzzed kid after another looking for that same adrenaline rush that Jaws gave us. And the second or third time you saw it, you felt superior, because you knew when everyone was going to scream. Something else took a hold of me in the dark, and it wasn’t just that irksome shark. It was the more irksome Richard Dreyfuss, whose energetic performance leaped off the screen then as now, because I never tire of seeing him. Studying him. It’s a performance that I blatantly ripped off. Of course, now that I know I was doing Dreyfuss doing Tracy, I don’t feel as bad.

  In Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss plays a marine biologist, Matt Hooper, who warns that “a great white shark” is still lurking in the water off an island called Amity, near Nantucket. One of the things that I first noticed about his performance is that you can actually watch him think on-screen. In fact, he’s one of the best on-screen thinkers I’ve ever seen. An example of this occurs in the scene in which Hooper gets in the faces of Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) and the mayor (Murray Hamilton) at the dock after they have strung up a tiger shark. Brody thinks they’ve caught the murdering great white, and Hooper is trying to convince them that it’s the wrong shark. First of all, Hooper just appears. I mean he’s a complete stranger, and he starts ranting and lecturing them in front of the entire town without a hair of doubt that he’s right. He’s listening to their explanation, and I love watching his eyes as he is taking in information from the other characters. He’s getting ready to explode. He can barely wait for Brody to finish his sentence. You can see his thoughts scrolling across his forehead like ticker tape. They read: I know I’m right, and as soon as you finish talking, I will convince you that I’m right. It’s so much fun to watch him verbally assault someone with facts, with knowledge. Hooper was never afraid to be smart even if he came off as a smart-ass. The camera stays on Dreyfuss, which I love, because Dreyfuss looks physically exhausted by the end of his telling them off and pointing out how stupid they are. He’s like a deflated balloon. Then, later that night, Hooper goes to Brody’s house to apologize. What I love about this entire sequence is that after browbeating and humiliating Brody, Hooper thinks nothing of visiting Brody that very same night and bringing over a bottle of wine and quietly continuing to plead his case. Brilliant. I don’t know who was more aggressive: Hooper or the shark! Was he annoying, as he was sometimes described in reviews? Maybe. But more important, was he right?

  The second time I saw Richard Dreyfuss in a movie was American Graffiti (1973) at the Middletown Drive-In. The movie had just been rereleased and was the bottom of a bill that included The Gumball Rally and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

  I was in the backseat watching the movie with someone older and cooler than I in the front seat. Her name was Susan. I knew my place. My place was to be her funny, compliant friend. If she needed a Coke, I would gladly run and get her a Coke. If she was sad about a recent breakup and needed me to make her laugh, I would make a joke. And I was not embarrassed. There were other kids on rungs farther down the social ladder from me who would have dreamed of getting a Coke for Susan. She was the most popular girl in school, for God’s sake, and she liked me. But I knew my place.

  In American Graffiti Richard Dreyfuss plays Curt, who is kind of a backseat friend to Ron Howard. Curt’s a little younger, not cool enough to sit in the front seat. One night while driving around, Curt spots what he calls his “dream girl,” played by Suzanne Somers, who mouths “I love you” to him from a passing white convertible. No one else in the car sees this but him, and Curt wants to go look for her. His pals think he’s nuts and start to make fun of him. He has no power to look for her himself because he’s stuck in the backseat. Curt is short, chubby, and not the best-looking guy in the crowd, but I’ll never forget his face as he internalizes his buddies’ mocking. He takes it, and he just smiles to himself, because he knows that he will see her again. And he knows something else. He knows he is going somewhere the other guys in the car are not. It’s that same brilliant on-screen thinking that I saw in Jaws. Watching American Graffiti that first time, I felt like I was reading thoughts that were so private that even I shouldn’t be seeing them. He feels superior to the guys in the front seat, so he’ll just be patient, because they are wrong. Curt’s unwavering belief in himself touched me deeply. At the end of the movie, as he boards the plane to leave the small town—and leave his buddies behind—he does see his dream girl again. I always thought that in that movie Richard Dreyfuss paved the way for a new type of comic romantic lead. The funny, smart, schlubby guy who gets the girl despite all the odds. Who proves that even the not-best-looking guys deserve their dream girls. And even though I was not Curt, and not Richard Dreyfuss, for the first time, I saw myself in a movie, which is one of the greatest gifts a movie can give us. To see ourselves in those forty-foot images.

  I, too, was a backseat friend. I was always younger than my friends, a borderline outcast, not considered very pretty, but I got by, sitting in the backseat, supporting anything the girls who sat in the front seat said. I was funny and could make smart-aleck comments for their amusement. I was a real sensitive kid with pent-up, sensitive thoughts that were often out of place with my surroundings. Sometimes we would be riding around, and I would look out the window and see something beautiful, such as a full moon, or something sad, such as the town drunk sleeping in the snow, or I’d hear a sad song that reminded me of a boy I liked, but I knew I could never share things like that. I would be laughed out of the car. Watching American Graffiti, I realized that I was a phony. I wasn’t going to do anything about it. I wasn’t going to change anything, but it made me self-aware.

  When you’re a kid, you look for the character in the movie you can relate to, and Richard Dreyfuss always seemed like a big kid to me. A big kid with a difference: He was the one who had a keen sense of right and wrong, of morality and injustice.
He seemed like a friend you could hide behind while he questioned authority—and he questioned authority a lot. It was Richard Dreyfuss who once made a professor apologize for having criticized Marlon Brando’s performance in Julius Caesar. Years later, when I asked Richard if this was true or just a rumor, he said with some lingering indignation, “That is correct!” He was confident, even a little cocky, but his confidence seemed to come from having accepted who he was. I didn’t know who I was, but I knew I wanted to be like him. Outspoken. Confident. He knew where he was going.

  There’s another milestone I owe to Richard Dreyfuss. It’s the ’70s cult classic I was never supposed to see but did anyway. It’s an obscure film called Inserts (1975). I didn’t know anything about Inserts except that it starred Richard Dreyfuss, so I asked my grandmother to take me to see it. We bought our tickets, got our popcorn, and the screen comes up and it’s rated X! My Italian grandmother, who was very old-fashioned, was horrified. “Hey, what the hell is this?” she said in her thick accent. “What kinda of a movie you taking me to?”

  She grabbed me by the arm and was dragging me up the aisle, but I begged her to let me stay, insisting it must be a comedy. After all, it had Richard Dreyfuss in it. We stayed. For the record, Inserts is not a comedy.

  Inserts is about a washed-up film director, a former boy wonder, forced to make pornographic films. So thanks to Richard Dreyfuss, I saw my first X-rated film. Profoundly disturbing little movie by the way. My grandmother never forgave me.

  I didn’t really understand the film, but I saw the difference in his performance from Jaws and American Graffiti. It may sound like I’m kidding, but I’m not. What I understood for the first time was that the person you see on-screen is not that person, but an actor creating a character. I developed an understanding of the craft of acting from watching Inserts, because I couldn’t believe that this lively funny actor whom I wanted to emulate could also do something as dark and gut-wrenching on-screen.