by Martin Sheen
Today, any kid can make a video on a flip camera or a Mac, but homespun filmmaking in the seventies was very labor intensive, very hands-on, an incredible training ground. I had to learn how to operate technical equipment and I made mistakes and learned from them.
At the time, I was the only kid I knew with access to a movie camera. Then in 1977 my parents upgraded to an instant-movie system called Polavision, Polaroid’s precursor to VHS. It was a handheld camera with a removable cartridge that popped out to be played in a special Polavision deck that looked like a portable TV with a screen but no dials. The system was very neat and self-contained, but limited. The tapes worked only in this camera and deck and there was no option for post-production editing unless you broke open the cartridge and pulled out the film. You had to edit in the camera as you shot, which meant no second takes, so you had to be very specific about what you wanted the first time. The beauty of this was it forced a discipline on us as filmmakers, but at the time we were just a bunch of stupid kids, fooling around and having fun. We didn’t realize the value of what we were doing until much later, when those of us who became actors and directors realized we’d spent our teenage years attending a hardscrabble film program of our own design.
At some point I found an old cassette recorder at a garage sale, which gave me an idea. “Okay,” I told Charlie. “Let’s shoot with the silent camera we have, I’ll record on this cassette deck, and then we’ll figure out how to marry the picture and the sound together.”
For this one, we decided on a story about a couple who moved into a possessed house, based on The Exorcist, of course. The only catch was we’d need to shoot it at night. My parents, God love them, signed off on having a bunch of kids take over the house one weekend from 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Their bedroom was on one side of the house, and we commandeered the kids’ rooms at the other side for our sets and rotated jobs as needed. Whoever wasn’t on camera was directing or art directing or being the sound guy with a mic taped to a broomstick held over the actor’s head.
After two nights of keeping the folks awake we’d shot only about half of the film. I told everyone, “I’ll work on this half and figure out how to put the sound and picture together and then we’ll shoot the rest.” But I hadn’t realized the film and sound were taping at different speeds, and even after hours of trying I couldn’t figure out how to get them aligned. We never finished that film. Instead, I moved on to a series of skateboarding and surfing movies that featured the local kids on their boards and I put the images to music.
In 1978 we attempted a bigger production with the Penn brothers, Sean and Chris, from around the corner. Their father Leo was a director and their mother Eileen was an actress, so like us they were familiar with minute-to-minute operations on a set. Sean was an intense, focused, creative kid two years older than I who used to drive me to high school in Santa Monica before I got my license. His younger brother Chris was working on his own Vietnam opus based on Apocalypse Now and was eager to be included in our films and willing to do whatever was needed. He always had his hands on M-80 and M-100 firecrackers, so he became our explosives expert. The empty field next to my parents’ house became our Trinity Site, where we’d stick M-80s under a paint can or other objects and then film the explosions. When we watched our footage at the end of the day we’d sometimes see Chris’s hand coming in to light the fuse. Hmm, we’d think. Oh, well. Maybe no one will pay attention to that.
For this film we chose not to work with a script. We started with a concept and just added on as ideas came to us. Sean played a disturbed neighbor who coveted our German shepherd puppy and was willing to employ any means necessary to steal him, including killing his own mother. Eileen Penn played herself as an off-camera voice. On screen all you saw was Sean sticking a gun into the Penn’s kitchen and then, blam. From there he came over to our house and killed Charlie, and then it turned into a revenge movie where I went after Sean and blew him away in the middle of the street.
By that time I had an editing bay set up in my bedroom, which meant we could do multiple takes of each scene and choose the best ones. I’d sit at my desk with splice tape stuck to my fingers, and when I finished editing I’d call everyone over and put a reel on for feedback—or at least the kind of uniquely undiscriminating feedback teenage guys supply.
“What do you think of this?”
“It’s good, man.”
“Yeah, excellent, man.”
“All right.”
My mother watched it not long ago and said, “My God, it’s amazing any of you ever had a career.” It was terrible.
Making my own films meant creating opportunities for myself to act and direct, both of which had gotten harder to come by in high school. Because Malibu didn’t yet have its own high school all the Malibu kids were bused to Santa Monica High, an hour-long ride each way. Malibu kids were mostly outdoors types, athletes and surfers, while the kids from Santa Monica were artsy and edgy and already had their own relationships going from the Santa Monica junior highs. My first year at SaMoHi, I ran track and played soccer, and my friends were my teammates and kids I knew from Malibu. The drama club was a separate clique, and when I joined it in my junior year, a pecking order was already in place. Two of the juniors in the club, Brent Hinkley and Lee Arenberg, were so talented and charismatic they were automatically cast in all the leading roles.
Lee was the big man on campus that year, a natural and constant performer who did our daily morning announcements over the school PA. With his oversized aviator glasses and mop of wild brown curls he was an eccentric class clown.
Lee had no problem calling attention to himself, where as the son of an actor who was often in the spotlight I always tried to deflect attention away from myself. As opposite as Lee and I were, when I saw him reading plays in his free time I earmarked him as a potential friend. I was thinking about auditioning for TV and film jobs, and I approached Lee one day in the school library.
“Hi, I’m Emilio,” I said. “I know you’re that actor guy. I’m just starting to go out for jobs and I really want to work on cold readings. It’d be cool if we could run lines together.”
He looked surprised. Later I learned that he knew who I was and was flattered that one of the cool kids at school would approach him. Cool? I’d never thought of myself that way.
“Sure,” he said.
From there, one of my closest high school friendships was born. Lee and I would get together at lunchtime to read plays and sometimes we reserved the little study rooms in the school library. That spring I went to my track coach and told him I’d be leaving the team midseason. “Summer’s coming up,” I explained. “A lot will be happening. I need to start getting my feet wet and going out on auditions.”
“Oh, so you’re going to be an actor now?” he teased.
Coach Paul Kerry was a former world-class athlete from USC. He’d always been supportive of me and his reaction was disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. Almost everyone at school gave me a hard time about the choice. I played soccer, I ran track, I got good grades, and they saw me heading down a different path. I already thought of myself as an aspiring actor, but I had to wait a while for everyone else’s images of me to catch up with my own.
Pursuing acting seriously meant beating the pavement in the hopes of landing my first role. But the first, necessary step in that direction was to find an agent, someone who could get me the auditions. Even before that, I needed head shots.
Our family friend Tim Perior was a commercial photographer and a screenwriter, a very worldly, very funny, very artistic cat who’d spent some time with us in Rome in 1976. I asked him to take my pictures. The first batch I printed had the name “Emilio Sheen” at the bottom. Agents and managers who’d expressed an interest in me had encouraged me to use Sheen because it would make their jobs easier if they could introduce me as Martin’s son. Also, there were enough hurdles as it was to break into acting. I figured that maybe a non-Hispanic, already-known surname would g
ive me an edge.
Emilio Sheen. I looked at it sitting there alone in the bottom right corner of the photo.
It had seemed like a good idea, but on paper, it looked terrible. My Latin first name bumped up against my father’s chosen name Sheen in an obvious, dissonant way.
Trying to be supportive, my mom suggested, “Why don’t you just change both names?”
I shook my head no. “I’m going to go with it for now,” I said.
I looked at the photo again. Emilio Sheen. Who was he? Doing my own gut check, I thought, This doesn’t feel right.
I showed the head shot to my father. I could see his eyes dropping down to read the name along the bottom. He stared at it for an extra beat.
“You really ought to reconsider this,” he said. He’d changed his name to the great sadness of his own father, and once he’d started making a living as Martin Sheen he couldn’t go back.
“One of the biggest disappointments I have is that I don’t own the name I use,” he said. “It belongs to a fantasy. It’s not me. Think about what’s happening in the country now. So many Hispanics are starting to rise up. Wonderful things are happening in that community. You can be part of that movement.” Then he said, actor to actor and father to son, “Don’t do it. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
I had to ask myself: Did my father really believe changing my name was unnecessary? Or did he want me to keep the family name to make up for a choice he’d regretted? Was this about helping me claim my identity or about trying to undo his own mistake?
If I’d liked the way Emilio Sheen looked I might have pushed back to an extreme and said, “The hell with it, I’m going with Sheen.” But instinctively, I knew it was the wrong choice. I knew my father was right. Emilio Sheen wasn’t me.
Against the better judgment of people in the industry, I said, “Okay, we’re going back to Estevez.” The agents and managers did the equivalent of throwing up their hands and rolling their eyes. “Okay, if that’s what you want to do, fine,” they said. “But it’s just going to make everyone’s job more difficult.”
I understood their frustration. Keeping my name meant I’d have to rely on my own merit to get jobs. The work would have to speak for itself. And that was fine with me. If I was going to make it as an actor, I wanted to get there because I had talent and worked hard, not because I had the right connections. In many ways Hollywood was and still is an insider’s game of handshakes and favors and personal connections, but that wasn’t how I’d been raised to operate. If I felt entitled to anything at all, it was to get the same chance as any other actor trying to break in.
At the same time, I inevitably had access to agents and managers just by virtue of having grown up as an actor’s son. That much would get me in the door, but once I stepped in I’d be on my own. Like every other aspiring actor, to get an agent I needed to have either film experience or prepared monologues I could perform. In effect, I had to audition. I chose a passage from William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and a classic monologue from act 2 scene 2 of Hamlet when the Players first arrive: “You are welcome, Masters, welcome, all!” At the time I didn’t realize it was the same monologue my father had used, in 1960, when he first auditioned for Joseph Papp.
I was terrified to walk into an office, stand in front of a desk, and launch into a monologue on the spot, knowing how much was riding on my performance. But if this was a hoop I had to jump through to get an agent, I was willing to do it. “I’m a young actor,” I would say when I walked in the door. “This is my background. I’m using my real name. I’d like to audition for you now.”
The fifth agency I approached, Dade/Rosen, was based out of a tiny office above a Jaguar dealership on Sunset Boulevard. They weren’t one of the big players in town, but they were willing to meet me. I walked up a little flight of stairs and entered the reception area. When I was called back to the agent’s office it was the same routine I’d been through at four other agencies: handshakes and hellos, “Let’s see what you’ve got,” one monologue followed by the other, and then “We’ll get back to you.” The classic neutral response. I walked out the door every time not knowing if a call would come or not.
This time, it did, in the form of Sharon Black on behalf of Mike Rosen. “Let’s get some pictures and résumés together, and we’ll start sending you out,” Sharon said.
A few weeks later, she called back with details for an audition. It was for the British director Alan Parker, who’d recently been nominated for a Best Director Oscar for Midnight Express. Now he was casting for a film about students at a performing arts high school in New York. The script followed eight students over the course of their four high school years, with the. working title Hot Lunch. I was asked to read for the role of Montgomery Mac-Neil, a quiet, sensitive drama student who reveals he’s gay during sophomore year. I picked up the lines from my agent, and Lee helped me run them to prepare.
The audition fell in the middle of a weekday. I didn’t have a car at school, but Lee had his mother’s Volvo that day so the two of us ditched lunch to get me over to the MGM studio in Culver City in time.
I popped a Miles Davis tape into the cassette deck as we cruised along the 10 freeway. I was nervous, but excited. Alan Parker was known as a very serious, very important director, and I was a huge fan of Midnight Express. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, but more than anything, I wanted to feel that I’d done the best job I could. My father kept a framed quote from James Dean on display in our living room: “Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I’m done.” I was hoping for both that day, too.
Lee drove through the white colonnades at the entrance to MGM. In those days you could take your car right onto the lot and up to the studio door. He waited outside the entrance while I walked in alone.
“Right this way,” the casting director said, motioning me into a separate room.
A man in rolled-up shirtsleeves with brown hair hanging in his eyes was sitting on a chair. I tried not to let my nervousness show. The only other seat in the room was on a couch directly across from him. I sat down.
“Hello,” he said, in a melodious English accent. “I’m Alan Parker.” Then he picked up a video camera and lifted it to his eye.
“And . . . go!” he said, without even a word of small talk.
This is so odd, I thought. The lens couldn’t have been more than two feet from my face.
“Okay . . .” I said, and delivered the lines I’d prepared. When I was done, Parker switched off the video camera and placed it back in his lap.
I waited.
“Thank you very much,” he said.
I’d just had my first professional audition. And I’d be back to school before the end of lunch.
Lee was waiting in the car outside. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said as I slid back into the passenger seat. “But I got all the lines right.”
Parker auditioned more than three thousand young actors and high school students for his film. The role of Montgomery went to Paul McCrane, a soft-spoken eighteen-year-old redhead from Pennsylvania who nailed it on camera. When the film was released in May of 1980, it had a new title: Fame.
Every morning in creative writing class, Mrs. Shackleton greeted us the same way: “How is your consciousness today?”
A petite woman with short curly hair and penetrating eyes, she would stand in front of the class and let her words hang in the air. It wasn’t a question in search of an answer—more of an invitation to reflect.
The first time she posed the question, the room filled with embarrassed giggles. Mrs. Shackleton just stood there, taking it in. It was as if she’d anticipated this reaction and wasn’t bothered by it. The next day she asked us again. This time there were fewer giggles. The third day, even fewer. By the end of that first week, we were all engaged.
I’m not sure a teacher could get away with this in the more cynical world w
e live in today. Today’s parents would probably call the school in an outrage, demanding, “What the hell is this about? I sent my kid to school, not to a therapy session.” But at sixteen, I thought it was a fascinating, progressive, and very bold question to lay on a room full of high school students. How was my consciousness today? No one had ever asked me that question in quite that way, so I’d never before stopped to ask myself.
In Mrs. Shackleton’s class, I began to flourish as a writer. Her exercises challenged us to express ourselves in print and also to think in new ways. She would ask us to write an essay about what we valued most, or what we’d learned outside of school. One assignment asked us to imagine a utopian classroom. She was interested in our ideas and that was really all a class of sixteen-year-olds needed to inspire them to create.
At the end of the school year, one of our last assignments was to write letters to our unborn children from the points of view of the parents we expected to become. I produced five notebook pages in my careful school penmanship. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much of who I am today was already in place at sixteen, and also by the insight and maturity, as well as the self-criticism that I don’t remember having back then.
Emilio Estevez Per. 3 6/2/79
Letter from a Parent
Dear Son,
I’m writing to you direct from Paris, France, where I’m finishing up my new feature film that I told you so much about. I guess that’s all I’ve ever done is tell you about ME, and I’ve often neglected your feelings and interests on life. I have shunned the questions you have asked me, only to avoid my own embarrassment. No amount of apologies or “I’m sorrys” will ever replace my shallowness towards you. This is the main reason why I am writing to you now. I really want you to know that I love you.