by Greg Sestero
After I came to grips with the fact that Tommy had been here and opened my mail, I discovered another strange thing: Nowhere in my monthly Bank of America statements was there any indication that Tommy had been cashing my $200 rent checks, which I’d been sending him for months. I got him on the phone immediately.
“I’m listening!”
“Tommy,” I said, “did you come to L.A. while I was gone?”
“I have meeting there. And I don’t want to upset you but . . . you are messy person. You have no plants, no nothing. No life.”
Messy? I hadn’t moved anything into or changed anything about Tommy’s place, having no idea how long I’d be living there. “Did you,” I asked him, “open my mail?”
“On accident. I open your check on accident.”
“On accident?”
“I’m sorry. My God, you’re so sensitive!” I could tell this seemed fun to him. “Check is big secret, I guess! By the way, welcome home to the USA to you.”
This was the first time I hung up on Tommy. I understand that he was curious to learn how much I got paid for Retro Puppet Master—he was probably also dying to know who my agent was—but opening my mail? And then not even trying to hide the fact that he had? That was worrisome. And why on earth was he even in L.A.? I was quite certain by now that any “meetings” he had were imaginary.
I could spend all day puzzling over Tommy’s machinations, but I had better things to do, such as call Iris and Chris and figure out what was next. When I called Iris she told me she’d seen Patch Adams and that I had, in fact, made the final cut. “Maybe,” she said, “you’ll get nominated for best supporting actor.” After that little zinger, she said something much more helpful: “Get ready. I’m going to open doors for you. It’s up to you to do something with it.”
True to her word, Iris began getting me meatier auditions. Working in Romania had given me a taste of what it was like to make a movie; I hoped it would be the start of something more. With that expectation came a lot of scary internal pressure. I was shocked to realize how much more pleasant it was to feel like an underdog.
My first month back in L.A. was January: pilot season, often the busiest time for young actors. As the auditions piled up, I recognized how easy I’d had it until now. Even if you’re lucky enough to land a great agent, as I had, getting called in was hard, getting called back was really hard, and getting cast was even harder than that. Then came the hardest part of all: being in something that people actually saw. I tried not to get discouraged. Some days I felt certain I was close to breaking through; other days I felt like I was one of literally millions of people throwing themselves up against the same cold, indifferent wall.
In the middle of all this, Tommy was leaving me at least two messages a day. His messages had always been pretty out there, but now they became somehow aggressively out there: “Hey, yo. I just saw this movie The Firm. You run exactly like the Tom Cruise, for your information.” Or: “ ‘Hey, lady! Shut up!’ What movie is this from? I challenge you.” Or: “I eat oranges in bed now. Feels so good. You should try it sometime with your French girl. Call me!”
My message machine was so ancient that it didn’t allow me to skip ahead through the Tommy-a-thons. I had to endure all his weird messages before finding out if I’d gotten any responses to my auditions. It was driving me crazy.
I was happy to learn that the Retro Puppet Master production team had cut together a ninety-second reel of some of my scenes from the film, which I could use as a demo; they’d even gone so far as to score the demo to classical music. It was much more elaborate than I’d expected and they gave me many more copies than I needed. I was extremely grateful. Because the footage had a period feel, however, Iris and I edited it to conclude with some of my headshots to show different looks. She didn’t want me to be typecast as a period-piece puffy-shirt guy with a French accent.
Tommy’s messages became more insistent: “It’s urgent, Greg. Urgent. Call me.” I knew perfectly well it wasn’t urgent. But I was living in Tommy’s apartment and felt I owed him a call.
“Hey, yo,” he said. “Since you are now the expert, how do you become member of the SAAAG?”
This was his urgent business? “You mean SAG?”
“Yeah! You know: S-A-G?”
I’d always found it amusing when Tommy tried to be condescending, but right now I wasn’t in the mood. “I know SAG, Tommy.”
“Yeah, I know your IQ is 190. So, come on, expert, tell me how do you get the SAG card?”
I sighed. “You need to have either three vouchers as an extra, a certain amount of hours, or be a principal in a commercial.”
“Principal commercial? Why don’t you help me? Be specific!”
“Tommy, it’s pretty clear. I just said it. You need to be a principal in a commercial—like a speaking role or something.”
I could tell he was writing all this down and felt my heart crack a little. When he was done writing, Tommy said, “Okay, then. Thank you. So how is big star? How is the Puppet Master coming?”
“It’s cool. I did some voice-over stuff for postproduction today. And they cut a little reel for me.”
“Reel?” Tommy said. “Like the demo reel?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to see right away,” he said excitedly. “Mail to me, I pay for it.”
Tommy seemed more psyched about my demo reel than I was. So I sent him a copy.
A few days later he called again to say, “I’m watching your reel now. I watch it twelve times so far.”
I was, I admit, somewhat concerned for him. I was equally concerned for me. I tried to laugh this excessiveness off. “Tommy, it’s a padded beginner’s reel.”
“No, no. Don’t put yourself down. It’s very good. I love beginning part, with all the candles. Very powerful!”
There was a scene in Retro where I walk up a flight of stairs lined with white candles. It was far and away the cheesiest moment in the reel. That Tommy was so affected by it made me even more worried about its inclusion. Tommy had some criticisms, though: “Why you tilting on the staircase? Why you have this stupid French accent? That doesn’t sell in America, you know. Forget this stupid French. Also your hair is donut again. But overall you did excellent job. The pictures at the end are great. Who take your pictures? Which photographer? Or is it big secret?”
As I was hanging up, I heard, on Tommy’s end of the line, the sound of the music used at the beginning of my reel start up again. I had a worrying mental picture of Tommy sitting up all night watching it.
A few weeks later Tommy surprised me with an announcement that he was coming to L.A. the next day for yet another “important meeting.” He also said he had something big to show me. I had no idea what to expect. When he arrived, I was having a phone meeting with Michael Landon Jr. We were talking about the possibility of my playing him in an ABC movie based on his life. I’d already been in once to read for the part and had a good feeling after hearing Michael’s comments. Our phone meeting was also going well. Then Tommy arrived.
He stood mugging in the doorway while I tried to conduct my phone business. When I didn’t pay any attention to his grand arrival, Tommy started to preen and say, “Somebody is cranky today!” He ignored my shoo-away hand signals and went on to say, loudly, that, while parking, he bashed into the car in front of him and he didn’t know what to do. I could tell that Michael Landon Jr. was wondering who the lunatic was talking in the background on my end of the line. I quickly hand-signaled silence to Tommy and went into the bedroom and closed the door.
When I opened the door, Tommy was beside himself with giddiness. “Look at me,” he said, gesturing down at his baggy waterbed-salesman suit. “I feel like businessman big shark today.”
“How was your meeting?” I asked him, concentrating on not being agitated.
Tommy held up a binder of papers. “I have exciting news,” he said, handing them over to me. “I have joined the SAG!”
I looked at t
hese papers and concluded that, indeed, Tommy was now a dues-paid SAG member. “Congratulations,” I said, stunned.
Tommy began striking a conquering-hero pose. “You know what? I say, ‘If this guy can do it, I do it, too.’ You challenge me. Remember, I’m not your competition. Don’t be jealous.”
I knew how important this was to Tommy. For him getting into SAG was as significant as landing a part in a Clint Eastwood film. It meant he was respectable and no longer spinning his wheels. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, in the grand scheme of things, becoming a member of SAG was the easy part, so instead I said, “How’d you do it, anyway?”
“I wasn’t going to show you,” Tommy said, walking over to the television, “but why not?” He had with him a VHS tape, which he pushed into his ancient VCR. I had to wipe the dust from the television screen just to see the picture.
The tape began and there was Tommy, in colorful quasi-Shakespearean garb, standing on a staircase and holding a candelabra filled with lit candles while classical music played in the background. His opening line: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It was a commercial for Street Fashions that he’d written, filmed, and produced himself. Almost every visual and thematic aspect of this commercial had been swiped from my demo reel. I was speechless. Tommy had bought himself SAG membership!
Tommy channeling the Bard in his demo-reel Street Fashions commercial.
The commercial was hilarious in all sorts of ways, beginning with his citation of “To be or not to be,” which Tommy regarded as one of Shakespeare’s insta-profundities, not realizing that the line is about whether or not to commit suicide. Kill yourself or not at Street Fashions!
When it ended I wondered if Tommy’s commercial had sent the SAG people deep into their application’s fine-print jungle, searching for something, anything, to prevent this Shakespearean denim peddler from joining their ranks. Then Tommy rewound the tape and played it again.
When the commercial ended for the second time, I cast about for the right words. But I didn’t have to worry: Tommy rewound the thing and played it again. When it was over, he looked at me, smiling, wanting to know what I thought.
While I knew what I thought, I still had no idea what to say. I had to give him credit for one thing, though: He did exactly as I’d suggested. He’d earned his SAG membership. “That was really . . . well done,” I said. “Great job.”
Then we watched it again!
“So,” Tommy said, after the fourth play-through. “Do you like candles?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Very creative.”
“But is it great? How is my voice? What age do you think? Be specific. How it compare to yours?” He said all this so innocently. Did Tommy even know what he was doing?
“It’s great,” I said, my voice soft and cold. I had to get out of that apartment. I was worried we’d have to watch his commercial twelve more times. I suggested we get away from the VCR and go somewhere, anywhere else. Tommy, after changing clothes, suggested we celebrate his SAG triumph by heading up to the Observatory at Griffith Park. He’d always wanted to see the place where the knife fight from Rebel Without a Cause was filmed.
I got lost on the way to the Observatory. “Babyface,” Tommy said, shaking his head, “never change.” Part of the reason I got lost was that I was constantly checking my cell phone to see if my agent had called with any good news, which Tommy noticed. “Greg,” he said. “These people don’t care about you. All these advisors you have. They will not do shit for you. You give them too much credit.” Then Tommy said: “So who is your agent anyhow? Do they need new people?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt they’d do shit for you, either.”
Tommy laughed, and I laughed, and at that moment it actually felt fun hanging out with him again.
Once we reached the Observatory, Tommy went to work in staging a Tommy-and-Greg reenactment of Rebel’s knife fight in the exact place where it had been shot in 1955. He even found a guy to take our picture. After one snap the guy tried to give Tommy his camera back, but Tommy wanted more pictures. “I need more. Now, tell me: Does it look like real fight?” He started giving the poor man all this complicated direction.
Reenacting the Rebel Without a Cause knife fight, Griffith Observatory, 1999.
Tommy finally let his conscripted cameraman get back to his hike. We stood there at the base of the Observatory, looking out over the microchip grids of Greater Los Angeles. “You know what?” Tommy said. “Maybe I move to Los Angeles.”
These were the words I’d been fearing the most. Was that his hint that I needed to move out? Had my start in Los Angeles roused Tommy’s competitive side? Had Tommy allowed me to stay in his L.A. apartment in the hope I could pave the way to his becoming an actor? Was I just his L.A. crash-test dummy? A.C.T., SAG, his demo reel: I was starting to see a clear pattern.
If he moved to L.A., I had to move out. I obviously couldn’t live with Tommy, but my savings weren’t enough to pay for a decent apartment on my own. I’d have to get more than a part-time job. But being an unemployed actor was a job—a full-time job at that.
Tommy didn’t mention moving to L.A. again, and later that day he went back to San Francisco.
• • •
I didn’t end up playing Michael Landon Jr. The casting director in charge of the Landon movie did, however, bring me back in to read for something called Lord of the Rings, where I learned I was too tall to play something called a Hobbit. (Needless to say, I wasn’t a big fantasy fiction reader as a kid.)
I made the mistake of writing down the number of auditions I’d been on since returning from Romania. Fifty. Of those fifty auditions, I got called back in for around twelve or thirteen; I was told this was a pretty good percentage. In other words, I was doing great at being an unemployed actor. I was desperately trying not to look desperate when I went in to read, which didn’t help when most of the parts I was reading for were Dawson’s Creek rip-offs, which I was wrong for. Iris and Chris were telling me to hang in there, that she was getting a good response, but she didn’t seem to be returning my calls as quickly as she used to. Pilot season was about results—and callbacks weren’t results. “I want to hear about the collisions,” Iris would say, “and not the near misses.”
To improve my odds, I signed on with a manager whom some of Iris’s clients, including one of her biggest, worked with. Getting a manager doesn’t mean losing an agent. A manager takes a more hands-on approach. A manager coaches you, gives you stern career advice, and sometimes even drives you to auditions, especially if you’re a young actor with a crappy car. From what I’d heard, my new manager was renowned for being a terrific audition coach. Thus I was a little disappointed when her initial advice amounted to some superstitious gunk about arranging my desk in a certain way while learning my lines. To her credit, though, she almost immediately got me an audition for Scream 3, a part in a workshop version of Hamlet at the NoHo Arts Center, and a screen test for a sports movie in Palo Alto.
Over the next few months, Tommy was always updating me on his activities, which sounded to me like he was preparing a full-on actor’s assault of Los Angeles. He was taking voice classes at A.C.T., doing a scene-study thing with Jean Shelton, learning Shakespeare at some place I’d never heard of, and getting headshots taken by at least four different photographers. Whenever we talked now he’d say he had to go; he wanted to keep his line open in case anyone called about his “available” acting services. He’d say this, mind you, when he called me.
One day I found in my mail a huge dump of Tommy headshots—at least fifty different versions. They were all professionally done, obviously expensive, and rather scary. He must have dropped thousands of dollars on these headshots. Soon enough he called, wanting my opinion. My own grim prospects had begun to erode my spirit, and I found myself saying things to him on the phone I wasn’t sure I even believed. “Acting’s not just about taking classes,” I said. “It’s about luck, first and foremost. Then
it’s about marketing yourself, fitting the parts, and having contacts. It’s just a business.”
Tommy resisted all this. “I don’t want to hear about the luck! What about my headshots?”
I held one up and looked at it. In the shot, Tommy was unsmiling, duck lipped, and wearing an unbuttoned shirt. His hair was pinned in back, making him look like an old woman with no makeup and a bad dye job. “Okay. I’m looking at one right now. Can I be honest?”
“Of course! I want you to be honest.”
“You’re showing a . . . repellent side of yourself in these photos. This isn’t the Tommy I know. You look scary when you’re trying to look all suave or something.” I picked up another one that resembled Dracula doing a fashion shoot for Jean Paul Gaultier’s less talented cousin. The only casting directors who’d be willing to call Tommy in on the basis of this headshot were the ones curious about what it was like to be murdered. I asked Tommy, “Have you ever thought of smiling in any of these photos?”
“Are you kidding me? I need to be dramatic!”
“Tommy, you have a really funny, likable quality. You hide it pretty well sometimes but you’re, like, obliterating it in these headshots.”
Tommy didn’t want to hear any of this. “Okay,” he said, “you give your five cents. Now my turn. So look: I’m different than you are. You have certain charm, great feature, you know, than me. But I can be very powerful. I am unique. Maybe I’m too unique.” Tommy had gotten pretty worked up, putting all this out there. “And now let me tell you something else, boy. People don’t want to give me chance. You have to understand this. So you know what? I do myself, you watch. I send my headshot to this big agency, these fuckers, the CAA. And I ask them, I write letter to them. We see if they respond.”
“You sent a letter to CAA?”
“Of course I sent it! What do you think? You think I afraid of these people?”
I started to laugh.
“Yeah,” Tommy said, “you can laugh the rest of your life.”