Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  I got the word today that I will be here pretty much for the duration of the filming. I’m going to insist that I be allowed to go back to New York to meet with Forman. I’ve been assured that won’t be a problem.

  Note: Milos Forman pops up in the story again at this point. Before I had left New York to do Risky Business I had read for the role of Mozart in Forman’s upcoming film version of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus. I had read for Shaffer before for the Broadway production and had not gotten the part. I considered the film even a longer shot. But I had been told that Forman had liked the audition and wanted to read me himself, in his apartment on Central Park South. I did get back for it and it was a thrill. Just the two of us, back and forth, him reading all the other parts. An unforgettable experience. Later I was brought in to screen-test with Christine Ebersole and others. Tom Hulce, of course, was eventually cast in the role.

  We shot some of the Porsche interiors tonight—the start of the chase scene. Joel and Lana’s singles first, with Rey (Villalobos) and me squeezed in the back and (camera operators) Peter and George riding outside the car wearing crash helmets. Then, just as dawn broke, the front seat was pulled and replaced with George and the camera. Paul Brickman donned Tom’s jacket and sat in the driver’s seat, holding the script and reading Tom’s and Rebecca’s lines. So for my close-ups in the scene, the two other actors were back in the honey-wagon.

  As it happens, because of the daylight and the Porsche’s rapidly deteriorating shocks, the whole thing will probably have to be re-shot anyway. The tension on the set is terrific. Brickman and Villalobos talk between clenched teeth.

  August 12

  My first day off in a week of night shoots. I’m pooped and lethargic. Can’t get anything done at all. Just slept till three, ate in my room and watched television. Was still so wound up, didn’t get to sleep until four. Last night shot more Porsche chase scenes and the bank vault scene in Ravinia. That leaves one last shot for me. Unfortunately, it’s an exterior (outside the Drake) and the current schedule is to shoot on the stage for the next 9 days. They are apparently trying to catch up a bit, since the stage shoots seem to move faster than the locations. But from what I’ve seen, the new crew is just as slow inside as they are out. With Sova, the set-ups may have taken five hours, but once they were set, they were set. Now they take five hours and then adjust for another hour. Sometimes, dare I say it, their lassitude seems almost deliberate. This may just be paranoia setting in. Kind of like the feeling that Rey Villalobos hates us.

  August 13

  Spent my last day on the set today (as it turned out, it was not). We shot Joel’s side of the phone conversation about Jackie. Tom wanted me to be there to read my lines for him, a fact that seemed to irritate Jon Avnet quite a bit. (“An actor talks into a phone! Easiest thing in the world! What if we told Tom that Curtis is dead and can’t do the scene…”). I wore a headset and dashed around in front or behind the Steadicam. It helped Tom a lot as he seemed to be having some trouble and he was so gracious and appreciative afterward, I couldn’t believe it.

  August 26

  Today they shot the first sex scenes. They threw everyone off the set, save George (Kohut, camera operator) and Paul. I spoke to Rebecca at lunch and she said she wasn’t uncomfortable about it at all. The thing is, someone had set up a ladder on the outside of the set and from that vantage point, we could watch the action quite clearly. Bronson and Shera took advantage of this and watched the whole thing, for the better part of two hours. Jerry Grandy caught them though and threw them out, much to Bronson’s shame. Shera, bless her, didn’t give a shit.

  August 27

  Paul Brickman has invited Bronson, Shera and me to his house for drinks tonight. We’ll be leaving soon and the evening will be fraught with interest. Bronson is afraid that Tom and Rebecca found out about his and Shera’s surveillance mission of the set yesterday because T and R have been even ruder to Bronson today than they usually are.

  And on that note, the journal ends. No description of my last day on set, whether there was a party or how I bid farewell to my coworkers. Whatever day it was that I finished shooting, I was on the plane the following day back to New York and into the long, long period of waiting.

  Paul had had a lot of support from David Geffen in the making and shooting of Risky Business. He had gotten some notes from Warner Bros. about how he needed to include more sex. They were particularly adamant that the party scene needed a lot more sex. Here was this long sequence, packed with hookers and horny high school boys, and not a single bare breast was revealed. Brickman ignored them. Just like he ignored the executive at Geffen’s company who insisted that Paul fire Joe Pantoliano, whose performance as Guido the Killer Pimp is one of the standouts in the film. In general, though, by the time the movie was wrapped, everyone was feeling that they had accomplished what they’d set out to do. There was still cutting and scoring to do, but Paul felt pleased and vindicated.

  “You can call off your dogs,” Paul joked to studio executives after a highly successful test screening.

  They intended to do no such thing. Brickman was completely blindsided by the request, which quickly became a demand, that he scrap the end of the film and reshoot scenes that would make it less of a “downer.” Make it more upbeat. More “teen movie.” The original ending—subsequently issued as an extra on the Blu-ray DVD release—was darker, but truer to Brickman’s concept from the beginning: Greed has consequences. People can be hurt.

  “Warner’s never really knew what to make of it, through the whole process,” Brickman told me. “I don’t think anyone could have understood what I was trying to do. I wouldn’t, if I were sitting there. How could they intuit off the page what I had in mind? Then they saw the finished film and they still didn’t get it. And their marketing campaign looked like they were trying to sell Porky’s! That was another fight, one fight after the next. They had a cartoon character of Tom, winking, in bed with girls in bikinis all around him and money raining down. That was the poster the studio wanted to use. That was my big fight. I was, like, throwing posters across the room. Not to mention the ending. Geffen was going to fire me if I didn’t reshoot the ending. They were talking to some television director about doing it. I had refused to do it, but finally, in order to protect 90 percent I had to sacrifice 10 percent. Which was really hard for me.”

  Paul brought Tom and Rebecca back after months of bitter dispute and reshot the ending. He completed the mix for Tangerine Dream’s haunting score, delivered the finished film and didn’t watch it again for thirty years. The battle over the ending didn’t end with the release of the film. Warner’s and Geffen canceled the cast and crew screening out of sheer vindictiveness and there was no premiere. To this day, Geffen has refused to release a director’s cut DVD.

  Meanwhile, as the Risky Business post-production wars raged on, Bronson and I were wandering around New York, jobless but undaunted, taking turns convincing each other that we were on the verge of great things. A letter I received from him during that period sums it up as only a real nerd could, and Bronnie was nothing if not a real nerd:

  “You know,” he wrote, “how Tolkien refers (in his ages-long chronology of Middle Earth) to the period of his trilogy as the “great years”? Well, I think we’re on the brink of one of our great years. Now I know how incredibly pious people feel, preparing themselves for the Kingdom—because I can only keep my sanity by preparing myself for the opening of Risky Business, by keeping myself pure and so on.… But then again it might open and disappear again without anything happening, and I’ll transfer my Godot to some other event. I’m not particular.”

  Then one day Superman 3 opened and we heard that there was a trailer for Risky Business showing before the movie and—we were both in the trailer! We were both thrilled at the prospect of seeing ourselves, even briefly, on the big screen, but we also didn’t feel we should pay to see Superman 3 when we were just going to stay in the theater long enough to see our trailer. I sugge
sted Bronson call the manager of the theater and explain our situation and see if we could get a couple of passes.

  This magical man arranged for passes for us and Bronson and I finally saw ourselves on the big screen.

  Bronson, who was raised right, wrote a thank-you note to the manager, a copy of which I have before me. There’s no way I could not include it.

  July 1st, 1983

  To The Manager

  Dear Sir,

  Sorry I don’t know your name, I forgot to ask when I spoke to you a few days ago. But thank you very much for leaving the two passes to see the preview for “Risky Business.” My friend Curtis gave me the idea to call you. It was our first film. We made it last summer and we’ve been waiting around for another job ever since. He’s the one with the gravelly voice and the long black hair that you see at the beginning of the preview, and I’m the one with the big nose and the big bald forehead that you see in the middle, opening the door for the ladies. They used real playboy bunnies to play those girls. They walked around in lingerie the whole time we were shooting and sat behind a big velvet curtain and took coke. I never saw them in street clothes.

  Thank you again, and if I can ever return the favor, let me know.

  Yours truly,

  Bronson Pinchot

  When the movie finally opened the following summer, Bronson and I went to see the very first screening—a 1:00 p.m. matinee at a Times Square theater where people were screaming back at the screen and a guy walked up and down the aisle with a flashlight to dissuade the old guys from whacking off during the movie.

  Shortly before the film’s opening Tom and Rebecca came through New York and invited Bronson and me to dinner with them at their suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. I recall it as a strangely formal occasion; we dined on starched white tablecloths and talked about the vagaries of show business, and there was certainly no drunken striptease at 2:00 a.m. to top it off. The Sherry-Netherland felt a long way from the Lincolnwood Hyatt, that’s for sure. That was the last time I saw or spoke to Tom. The next time I saw Rebecca, we were seated together at Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s wedding, when Risky Business seemed like something that had happened a lifetime ago.

  The gap between filming Risky Business and my next film job seemed to stretch out before me like a trackless desert. But by the time it opened in the summer of 1983, I had been back at work onstage. There had been an extraordinary production of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre; and in town I’d done Romulus Linney’s El Hermano at Curt Dempster’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. Then I returned to Roadside Attractions, now moved to downtown Detroit from Ann Arbor and renamed the Attic Theatre, to do Amlin Gray’s great two-hander How I Got That Story. This production happened to coincide with the release of Risky Business that August. It was like a dream: returning to my hometown to appear at a theater I had cofounded, while my first film was opening.

  But by the winter of 1983–84, the theater work had dried up and I seemed to be stuck in limbo. I had some film auditions after Risky Business opened but none of them panned out. Just when it began to feel like Risky Business really had been a fluke, another picture finally came along and it turned out to have been worth the wait. It was Revenge of the Nerds.

  REVENGE OF THE NERDS

  TUCSON, 1984

  But before I talk about Revenge of the Nerds, I’d like to say a few words about the man who made all this possible. He’s the one to whom I owe most of my career in film. This is the Man, the Founder of the Feast. The nerd everyone loves but no one wants to shake hands with. I’m talking about Dudley “Booger” Dawson.

  Now, Booger looms large in my legend so I want to get something clear before we go any further:

  I hated him on sight.

  Actually, that’s not true, because the first time I read the script for Revenge of the Nerds, I understood that I was reading for the role of Gilbert Lowe, the lovely lead role eventually played with great sensitivity and humor by Anthony Edwards. So, strictly speaking, I paid scant attention to the insignificant, unattractive role of Booger, except to think how lucky I was that I’d never be associated with a character like that.

  The truth is the role of Booger was so small that there was nothing to audition with, which is why Susan Arnold, the casting director, had me read the altogether meatier role of Gilbert.

  Even so, when the script for Nerds arrived I was unimpressed. Revenge of the Nerds would never have been my first choice as a follow-up to Risky Business. Which goes to show how an experience like Risky Business can change a person. I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do that movie because movies “weren’t theater” and now I was complaining about Revenge of the Nerds because it wasn’t a worthy follow-up!

  My friend Bronson Pinchot also auditioned for Revenge of the Nerds. At the time we first read for it, we talked regularly about the film, particularly about how unenthusiastic we both were about doing it at all.

  Then came the callbacks and Bronson was told he was out of the running.

  I could barely contain my outrage. “How can they not call you back? What’s the matter with these people?! Well, you know what? You are well out of it! It’s a stupid movie anyway!” I yelled.

  Then I got my call.

  It was during this phone call from my agent that I discovered that I was not being considered for Gilbert. The two leads had already been cast: Robert Carradine as Lewis and Anthony Edwards as Gilbert. “That,” said my agent, “is the bad news. The good news is they really love you and they really want you in the picture!”

  “Okay,” I said, warily.

  “They want to offer you a different role! I’ll tell them you’re interested and they’ll come back with the offer!”

  “But what’s the role?”

  There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation.

  “You’d definitely be playing another nerd,” my agent said reassuringly. “They told me it is definitely a nerd. Just not that particular nerd.”

  I sat there for a moment, reflecting. As she said, the good news was I had a job. But now that I came to think about it, which of the other nerds could they possibly be talking about? Obviously it’s not Lamar. It couldn’t be Takashi. I’m too old for Wormser. That leaves Poindexter … or Booger.

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal. If they offer me Poindexter, I’ll do it. But if they offer me Booger, forget it.”

  “Really? You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I snapped. “Forget it! It’s a terrible part! There is nothing there! NOTHING!! I mean, you’ve read this script!!” (I was still new enough to the business to think agents actually read scripts.) “All the guy does is pick his nose and belch. No! I won’t do it! Poindexter yes, Booger NO!”

  No sooner had the agent rung off than I was back on the phone to Bronson. Now it was his turn to be outraged. He had just lost a part. I had lost a part and it was now possible that I was going to be offered something disgusting as a consolation prize.

  “Curtie,” Bronson screamed, “it’s inhuman! It’s humiliating!! They can’t offer you that!! You’re a cultured individual!!”

  “Bronnie,” I said, and my voice was even and strangely calm, “if they offer me that part, I’m going to say no.”

  “Really?” gasped Bronson. It would never have occurred to him to turn down anything. Actually, it hadn’t occurred to me until now.

  “I’m not kidding! Not after Risky Business, not this!! I don’t care what my agent says. I don’t care what anybody says! They can’t offer me enough money to embarrass myself this way. I’m a classically trained actor! I’m not going to pick my nose in front of millions of people. It’s NO!”

  Moments later, my agent called back.

  “Well, they offered you Booger. What should I tell them?”

  “Okay. I’ll take it.”

  Actors.

  For those who love Revenge of the Nerds and take for granted the impact it had on popular culture today, it’s
important to remember how close this film came to never being made at all.

  In the early 1980s, 20th Century Fox—the studio producing the film—was in virtual shambles. It was not the first time that a combination of gross mismanagement, oversized egos and a general sense of complacency (after spending years living off Star Wars fat) had led to a studio’s near-implosion and it wouldn’t be the last.

  But in 1984, all hell was breaking loose and Revenge of the Nerds, a modestly budgeted little teen sex comedy, was caught in the crossfire.

  After hemorrhaging profits, the studio was acquired by mega-investors Marvin Davis and Marc Rich. The studio president, Sherry Lansing, under whose administration Nerds had been green-lit, bolted soon after. Having suffered a string of flops, 20th was in need of a hit … and the new regime was pretty certain Nerds wasn’t it. Assigned a budget of $8 million, it was clear they weren’t expecting much. As the studio’s new head of production, Joe Wizan was in charge of upcoming productions and was working with Nerds executive producers Ted Field, Peter Samuelson and David Obst to find a director. And Wizan knew just the right guy.

  Enter Jeff Kanew.

  Kanew had been involved in the movie business since the sixties, when he had begun his career shooting soft porn and low-budget features. He had gradually moved into cutting trailers and became highly successful at it: trailers for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, Jeremiah Johnson and many others were cut by him. Eventually he moved into editing, which included cutting Robert Redford’s Academy Award–winning film Ordinary People.

  Kanew had directed two features with Joe Wizan producing: Unnatural Enemies and Eddie Macon’s Run. Both films were serious dramas, and neither well received. Kanew was feeling that his directing days were over when Wizan contacted him with news. Wizan was now in a position to throw something Jeff’s way. He offered him three scripts to choose from: Bachelor Party, Gimme an “F” (which took place at cheerleader camp) and Revenge of the Nerds.

  Any of these films would be a step down after Ordinary People—especially a movie about nerds. But a step up from porn—or so he thought. He was surprised to find that as silly as it was, there was something in the script that spoke to him.