by Martin Sheen
But the most memorable happy accident we encountered occurred when we filmed the big rumble scene toward the end of the film, when the Greasers and the Socs call in their reinforcements to face off in a Tulsa park at night and agree to use only hand-to-hand combat, no knives or chains. This was the most physically taxing of all the scenes we shot. It was already early summer when we got to that scene but the Tulsa nights could be cold, and that one in particular was freezing. Most of us were out there in just T-shirts and jeans. Soon after the first punch was thrown for the cameras, the sky opened up and rain started pouring down on us. Some of the crew wanted to stop filming but a couple of the actors shouted to keep the cameras rolling. We were pumped up and really going for it in the rain and mud, wrestling on the ground, tossing one another across the screen. With all that chaos, a few real punches must have been thrown.
Francis liked the ambience of the rain and mud so much he decided to use it in the film. The only problem was that when we continued shooting that scene the next night, it wasn’t raining anymore. Rain towers had to be brought in to shower down on us and keep the shots consistent from night to night. Between takes we’d get wrapped in blankets and drink hot chocolate to stay warm. It was worth it. The result was a dark, moody fight scene that viewers remember decades later. It turned out brilliantly because Francis had been willing to adapt to what nature handed him that night.
After The Outsiders Francis was staying on in Tulsa to direct Rumble Fish, also based on an S. E. Hinton book. This story was about a teenage hood who aspires to be like his older brother, a former gang leader. Francis and Susie Hinton had written the screenplay on days off from The Outsiders, and he’d recruited Matt Dillon to stay on in Tulsa to play the lead role of Rusty James, as well as Diane Lane to play Rusty’s girlfriend Patty. Mickey Rourke was coming in to play the older brother, along with Dennis Hopper to play the father and Chris Penn and Laurence Fishburne had supporting roles. Francis asked me to stay on to play Steve, Rusty’s best friend.
As much as I would have liked being reunited with Hopper and Fishburne, during The Outsiders I’d taken constant teasing from the vehicle drivers when I told them what I was earning per week. “Really?” they’d laughed. “We’re making more than you are. We’re making more than all you guys.” The role Francis offered me in Rumble Fish came with a two-hundred-dollar per week raise, which put my salary just a bump over the Screen Actors Guild minimum but still under what the drivers earned. If I stayed for Rumble Fish I’d be doing the same thing I’d been doing for the past three months, without much opportunity for growth and barely a raise in pay. I don’t want to stay in Tulsa that much, I thought. I decided to go home. Francis hired Vincent Spano to play Steve and I headed back to Los Angeles, where I immediately reentered the audition fray.
So much of an actor’s life involves just trying to get a role, and so much of getting a role involves luck and opportunity rather than craft. In the beginning, I would go into auditions fully prepared and walk out shouting, “I nailed it! I nailed that one, man!” but wouldn’t know that a guy was already in line for the role and the producers were waiting for him to take it or pass. If he passed, there were five more guys they had in mind right behind him. Underneath those five guys were another ten guys who formed a sort of producer’s B-list for the film, and underneath them was everyone else who was auditioning. I was fortunate to eventually go from being the kid in the parking lot shouting, “I nailed it!” and not getting the role to being one of the ten guys on the B-list, to being one of the five guys on deck, to being the guy with the offer while the other guys waited for me to pass. But between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, I spent most of my time going from studio to studio, and from casting office to casting office, trying to get the next role. The movies I did then were reflective only of the parts I got as opposed to the hundreds I didn’t. I didn’t choose my films. They chose me.
Sometimes I could get audition sides in advance and then I’d run lines at home with my dad to prepare. But sometimes I’d have to pick them up that morning, study them in the car, and go in and read. It was always “Thank you very much,” and I’d go on to the next one. The audition turnover was so fast I’d start losing track of whom I was reading for. I’d walk into a room full of people and only then realize who I was there to meet. Sometimes not even then.
Once I was up for a TV movie at Universal called Nightmares, an anthology of four stories that ultimately got a feature film release. The audition was straightforward and simple, nothing extraordinary or unusual. After I read we all did our “Thank you very much” exchange and I left. Later that day, I got a call saying the director really liked my reading.
“Who was the director?” I asked.
“Joe Sargent.”
“No,” I said. “Joseph Sargent was in the room? You’re kidding me.”
Joe Sargent had done a movie I’d loved as a kid called The Taking of Pelham One Two Three about a hijacked New York City subway train, starring Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, and Walter Matthau. I must have seen it three or four times. At the audition, I’d missed the opportunity to tell Sargent how influenced I’d been by that film and what a fan I was of his work. But maybe it was for the better. I might have blown the audition if I’d known it was him. Instead I told him how much I’d liked The Taking of Pelham One Two Three after I got the job.
A few days before In the Custody of Strangers aired on television it screened at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in Beverly Hills. I’d stayed in touch with Mickey Rourke after his audition for The Outsiders and invited him to the screening. He came with his wife at the time, Debra. I felt tremendously honored that he would accept my invitation. During the screening I looked back at the audience and saw Mickey sitting in the crowd. In some ways, I was happier and more proud to have him there than to have my father sitting next to me. At twenty-nine, Mickey was more my contemporary, an actor of my generation who was just a couple of steps ahead of me and whose success felt within reach. He wrote me a fan letter after the screening that said, “Hey, man, I just wanted to tell you that I loved the movie and you’ve really got the stuff.”
That meant a lot to me, not just that he’d liked my performance, but that he’d taken the time to write. Wow, I thought. I just got Mickey’s seal of approval. I don’t need anybody else’s.
Soon after, I auditioned for a movie at Universal with casting director Michael Chinich. He had a roster of big films to his name, like Dog Day Afternoon, Animal House, and Coal Miner’s Daughter. This one was about a boy with a rare disease that caused deformities in his head and face. It was called Mask, and the role of Rocky looked like an incredible part in an equally compelling film.
After my audition Chinich offered to walk me out of the office. In the hallway, he broke the news. “You’re not going to get this movie,” he told me.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, then thanks.”
“But I do want you to drive over to Venice,” he continued. “Vickie Thomas is casting this little movie called Repo Man. Here’s the address. I think you’ve got a real shot at getting that one.”
I took his advice and drove straight there. That audition landed me the role of Otto in Repo Man, a film about a young punk who loses his job in a supermarket and quickly lands in the car repossession business, where he gets entangled in a repo deal involving a 1964 Chevy Malibu driven by a crazed scientist with an alien life form hidden in its trunk. It was a silly script by any standard and it wasn’t a blockbuster by any stretch, but over time it became a cult favorite and I’ve always been grateful to Michael Chinich for sending me to the audition. Even now, people still stop me on the street to talk about Otto. In fact, I can usually tell if a stranger who walks up to me is going to say that Repo Man is his favorite movie before he even opens his mouth. Fans of that movie all share a similar vibe.
By the time Repo Man finished filming I’d strapped my bed to the roof of my truck for the last time, moved out of my parents’ house for
good, and started making the audition rounds again. John Hughes, a young writer-director from Illinois who’d recently done a film called Sixteen Candles with Molly Ringwald, was casting for another film set during the high school years, this one about five kids from different social groups randomly thrown together in a weekend detention class.
The week I auditioned for John Hughes I must have had twenty other auditions for commercials and TV shows and films. I’d become accustomed to the phone ringing with bad news or not ringing at all. The process was giving me a good education in what my dad had gone through all those years when he was trying to get his career off the ground and raising a family at the same time.
I couldn’t imagine working this hard and facing so many disappointments with the additional pressure of a family to support. But soon enough, I would learn that, too.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EMILIO
1983–1987
Carey and I met in 1983, when she was modeling through Wilhelmina Models and I was still very much a struggling actor. She was sharing an apartment in Brentwood with a bunch of girls I knew from high school, six or seven of them living together and working as waitresses at night while trying to break through as actresses and singers during the day. Carey was dazzling, beautiful and smart, with a college degree in business. I liked her for many reasons, not the least being that she said she wasn’t impressed by my family or my work. We dated steadily and had a relatively happy relationship for about a year.
Then Carey told me she was pregnant, and that she’d decided to have the baby.
A child? I was twenty-one, and the news felt like the end of my life as I knew it. I was just getting started as an actor, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Carey. At the same time, I knew that if my parents had made a different decision about marriage and parenthood I might not have been raised by both of them, or might not have been born at all.
When my parents learned about the pregnancy my father started counseling me about “doing the right thing,” meaning sticking out the relationship and raising the child with Carey, but I was terribly conflicted about committing to a long-term union with her. There was no easy solution, and a baby was very much on the way.
Soon after Carey’s announcement, I auditioned for the John Hughes film about five high school students stuck in a Saturday detention session. In their nine hours together they discover they have more in common than the school’s strict social categories allow them to believe. The film would be called The Breakfast Club, and I read for the part of John Bender, the hardened delinquent from an abusive home who provokes the other students and raises hell all day long, but when John Hughes couldn’t find the right actor to play Andrew, the athlete, he asked me to take that role instead. Nicolas Cage and John Cusack auditioned for Bender but the role went to a relative newcomer named Judd Nelson, a twenty-four-year-old actor from Maine. Also cast were Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald, who’d both appeared in Sixteen Candles, as the class brain and the popular, spoiled prom queen. Ally Sheedy, who’d recently starred in WarGames with Matthew Broderick, landed the part of the school outcast.
Accepting the role of Andrew meant spending January through May of 1984 in Des Plaines, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where Hughes had taken over the former Maine North High School. The whole shoot would take place at the school for a budget of $1 million. Spending four months in the Midwest would mean leaving Carey during most of her pregnancy, and when I accepted the role it understandably put us on bad terms. She felt I was giving more attention to my career than I was to her and the baby and she was right, but my years of pounding the pavement and trying to get work as an actor were finally starting to pay off. The 1980s were a good time to be a young actor, and I needed to work to take care of Carey and a child, following the model I’d observed from my father throughout my whole childhood.
The day I left to film The Breakfast Club, Carey and my parents took me to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, where I boarded the Southwest Chief train to Chicago. I could have flown but I wanted to ease into the Midwest, and the past few weeks with Carey had been so dramatic and so intense I needed some time to myself. I said good-bye to the three of them at the station in Los Angeles in January, knowing I wouldn’t be back until May.
The two-day Amtrak journey to Chicago took me through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri and into Illinois, where the Breakfast Club cast assembled in Des Plaines about three weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Just as with The Outsiders, the actors arrived early to rehearse scenes, bond with one another as actors, create a shared history for our characters, discuss our roles with the director, and do wardrobe, hair, and makeup tests. Back then our contracts would include rehearsal time for either half our regular rates or for free, depending on the film’s production budget. Often today, if a director tries to get actors to show up in advance of the first day of production they’ll roll their eyes, but in the 1980s we never questioned the practice.
The day we arrived at Maine North High School, which doubled as Shermer High for the film, we were led onto the main set. The art department had transformed the school’s large gymnasium into an exact replica of a two-floor high school library. The majority of our scenes would be shot in that room, and we rehearsed there sometimes for ten hours a day. John Hughes gave us wide latitude with our characters and encouraged us to improvise during rehearsals to make the parts our own.
One day, he told Judd and me that he’d written the first draft of the script in a single weekend. “How many drafts did you write?” we asked.
“A couple of them. Why?”
“Can we read the others?” we asked. The earlier drafts he showed us had such good material we asked him to put some of it back into the shooting script. John was always willing to discuss our ideas and often made the changes we suggested.
Though we were playing high school seniors, Judd, Ally, and I were already in our twenties. Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, who went by Michael, were real-life high school students. Both of them turned sixteen during filming and had to attend classes on set for a few hours each day during the school week. The film was shot mostly in sequence, and with one main set, the same five characters in nearly every scene, and very little action other than conversation, filming often felt more like performing a play than shooting a movie. Outside the school building the Illinois winter was bitter, but inside we were insulated both from the weather and from Hollywood, and the double remove helped us travel deeply into our characters and stay there, without the pressures or the distractions of home.
I returned to Los Angeles in the middle of May, just after my twenty-second birthday, to a girlfriend who was eight months pregnant and parents who were now adjusting to the idea of a second grandchild. While I’d been gone, Charlie’s high school girlfriend had also become pregnant, and so at the age of forty-three my parents were facing grandparenthood twice over, with neither of their sons moving toward marriage. Still, even though my father had been pressuring me to marry Carey, I never felt any judgment from either of my parents about her pregnancy. My mother had been born out of wedlock and never knew her biological father, and I knew both my parents would embrace the baby after he or she arrived.
A month later, on the twenty-first of June, a Thursday, I got a call about a screen test. Joel Schumacher was casting a film about a tight-knit group of seven friends in Washington, D.C., making their way through their first few postcollege years. The film’s title was St. Elmo’s Fire and I was asked to test for the role of Kirby Keger, a law student by day and waiter by night who becomes obsessed with an emergency-room doctor and goes to great lengths to earn her affection. The casting director wanted me to come in the next day.
“I’d like to, but my girlfriend’s pregnant and she could go any minute,” I said. Carey and I were barely on speaking terms at that point, but I was trying not to schedule anything unless it was absolutely critical.
“We
ll, that’s when we’re doing the screen test, and that’s when we need you to be there.”
This was how the system worked. You either made yourself available when the casting director and director needed you, or you didn’t get the job. So I went in the following day.
Carey went into labor in the middle of my screen test. When our son, Taylor Levi Estevez, was born a few hours later, my parents were there to cut his umbilical cord. I was still at the audition when he arrived.
As awed and as grateful as I was to hold Taylor for the first time, I knew by that point that Carey and I could not live together. Still, there was now a child to consider and I was committed to supporting him, even as work took me in and out of town, more out than in. The month after Taylor was born, I left for Minnesota for three months to film That Was Then, This Is Now, a script I’d adapted from the S. E. Hinton novel of the same name. I came home for three weeks and then left for Washington, D.C., to film St. Elmo’s Fire. Throughout that time I was also writing Men at Work, about two garbage collectors who get involved in a murder cover-up, and Wisdom, a road story about two lovers on the run. In retrospect, I was looking for as many distractions for myself as possible, to keep from having to focus on the difficulties at home.
In Washington, D.C., the production of St. Elmo’s Fire reunited me with Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, in roles that couldn’t be more different from the social outcast and the delinquent they’d played in The Breakfast Club. This time Judd had been cast as an aspiring politician who crosses the aisle from Democrat to Republican to further his career. Ally played his live-in architect girlfriend who keeps putting off his offer of marriage. The core cast also included Rob Lowe, who’d gone on after The Outsiders to star in Class, The Hotel New Hampshire, and Oxford Blues; Andrew McCarthy, who’d costarred with Rob in Class; Mare Winningham, who’d been doing television work for almost ten years; and an actress named Demi Moore, who had been a regular on the soap opera General Hospital for two years. On-set romances are usually as ephemeral as they are predictable, but this one was neither. By the time St. Elmo’s Fire finished filming that fall, Demi and I were a couple.