“I related to it,” he told me in a retrospective interview in 2015. “These guys going to college, being put down, picked on … that was me.”
He told Wizan that he wanted to direct Revenge of the Nerds, but there was a problem.
The executive producers had seen Eddie Macon’s Run and hated it. They didn’t even want to take a meeting with Kanew, but Wizan forced them.
“So how’d it go?” Wizan asked, calling Kanew after the meeting.
“Okay, I guess,” said Kanew. “Meeting went on a long time.”
“Yeah, but you screwed up. You told them Risky Business was a better movie than Animal House.”
“Risky Business is a better movie than Animal House,” Kanew said.
“Yeah, maybe, but Animal House was a big hit … so, look, what kind of a movie do you want to make from this script?”
“Well,” Kanew said, “I want to make the very best movie I can.”
“Yeah,” said Wizan, pointedly, “and what kind of a movie are you going to make of this script?”
“Look, Joe, what are you trying to get me to say, here? ‘Animal House, sir!’?”
Wizan said, “That’d be good.”
“Here’s the thing,” said Kanew. “What made Risky Business a great movie is that it was real. It was funny, it was serious and it wasn’t a cartoon. The trouble with this Nerds thing is it could turn into a cartoon. And I don’t want to make a cartoon.”
“Jeff? What kind of a movie are you going to make out of Revenge of the Nerds?”
“Okay, Joe,” said Kanew. “Tell you what. How about I say I’ll make a movie I’d be ashamed to put my name on?”
“You got the job!”
* * *
By the time we all descended on Tucson, Arizona, Jeff had done his job well. Pre-production had gone easily and all the key positions on the crew were filled with talented and sympathetic people, including cinematographer King Baggot and casting director Susan Arnold. Kanew and Arnold had cast the nerds, Alpha Betas and all the other supporting roles flawlessly. Things were flowing. He had hired writers Jeff Buhai and Steve Zacharias to reshape the original script by Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores with generous input from the actors.
This process turned out to be unique in my experience. At the time, I had little to compare it to. On Risky Business we had a week or so before filming to do read-throughs, play a lot of poker and basically get everyone comfortable. Revenge of the Nerds was a different matter entirely. Kanew made it clear from the very beginning that he welcomed—expected even—the actors to be part of the process. This didn’t mean just showing up on the day with our lines learned. In many respects, it meant tearing the whole script up and starting over again.
Our work began with understanding who our characters were from the ground up. In the case of Tim Busfield, Brian Tochi and me, this proved a little more difficult because in the beginning there was so little of our characters in the script. We worked closely with Eddie Marks, our costume designer (he had a great vision about how the nerds would look), but to get deeper into who the characters were, beyond the cartoon depictions on the page, we had to make stuff up.
For a week, we sat around the pool, talking and going through the script, trying to find character motives and relationships where, in many cases, none existed. Periodically, one of us would be called into a room with the writers, producers and Kanew. Everyone would start throwing out thoughts, character traits, comic bits, discussing, sometimes arguing, gradually coming up with a kind of actual arc for these characters, which I never would’ve believed possible. The actor would leave, return to the pool and another actor would go in and the procedure would start again.
Tim Busfield recalled in 2016: “I remember us coagulating as a group. There are so many difficulties that can occur when you’re forming an ensemble and I remember at that time the ensemble just came together really quickly. There was no ‘NO’ on anything, there was no sense of, ‘Well, you can’t do that…’ Everybody just slouched into these characters that Kanew had cast. We didn’t have any idea what we’d be like together but he did. He chose us rhythmically right. It was just a really great professional environment in the rehearsal spaces in Tucson.”
I had started my character work by going through the script marking scenes in which Booger appeared and then, basically, asking that he be taken out. I was ruthless, and according to the notebook I kept at the time, I seemed determined to make this character as invisible as possible. My loathing at having to follow the classy Risky Business with this low-rent nonsense was such that I seemed to be trying to eliminate the character entirely.
Among my notes for the writers? “Cut my first line,” I told them. “In the gym, taking roll-call, Dean Ulich calls out, ‘Dawson, Dudley?’ and then I say, ‘Call me Booger?’ Let’s cut that line.”
“But … why?” asked screenwriter Jeff Buhai. It was a fair question.
Here’s what I was thinking: If I didn’t self-identify as “Booger,” all the other characters would just call me Dudley for the rest of the film. I clearly wanted to avoid nonsense like the following exchange: As Dudley reclines on his cot in the gymnasium, Takashi, in the cot next to him, says, “’Scuse prease, why do they call you Booger?”
“I don’t know,” Booger replies, digging around with his forefinger in his nose. You see? If nobody called me Booger, then all the nose-picking scenes could disappear, too. There was an insane logic to this. It may have been a pride thing: What would my teachers at the Academy think about me playing a character who answered to the name “Booger”? Whatever my prospects as a real actor may have been, I wouldn’t be living up to them in a role like this. I was actually fighting to have a large chunk of my already microscopic role cut, because I didn’t want to pick my nose, belch and pop a pimple on screen. (They ceded that one). But it’s mind-boggling to me now that I actually tried to cut the line “Call me Booger.”
Steve and Jeff tried to reassure me of Booger’s value by explaining he was based on a real person they had known in college.
“Yeah?” I said, uncertainly. “So you’re saying he’s, like, a historical character?”
“Yeah!” the guys exclaimed.
“Like Winston Churchill?” I hazarded.
“Well, no,” conceded Steve. “He was just a guy we knew in college. His name wasn’t Booger, obviously, but everyone called him that.”
“Because,” Jeff interjected, “he would drive around in this pickup truck and under the front seat he kept this cardboard box. And inside the box he kept his collection of boogers!”
The room broke up. I was feeling a little queasy.
“A collection of boogers?” I said, when the laughter settled down. “Were these boogers his or other people’s?”
Steve looked at me like I was crazy.
“Well, his, obviously!!” he said. “Who’d collect other people’s boogers? Anyway, he’d just drive around in his truck picking his nose. He was, like, addicted to nose picking. Every time he’d pull one out, it went into the box.”
“Uh huh…”
“Whenever we met new people we’d say, ‘Hey, Booger, show ’em your collection.’ He always would.”
“Okay,” I said, wanting to get this whole episode behind me as quickly as possible, “but this is not something we’re doing in the movie, right? The box of boogers?”
No, no, everyone said. “Unless,” said Steve, “you want to work it in…?”
I assured him I was fine without it and we moved on with more attempts at deconstruction on my part.
I had waded into that script, red pen in hand, with a kind of suicidal abandon. Next, I wanted to cut the belching contest with Ogre (Don Gibb): one of the most famous scenes in the movie. Alan Arkin, one of the best actors on the planet, told me a couple of years later it was his favorite scene in the movie. But it wasn’t mine. I wanted it cut.
Thankfully, despite my best efforts, I lost most of these battles. And Booger, miraculousl
y and mercifully, came to life.
Contributing to Booger’s development, and a more productive part of my preparation, was my character biography.
This was something that was a basic part of our training at the Academy. Our instructors had a strong belief that actors should write their own personal biography of every character they played, no matter how small. In fact, the theory went, the smaller the role, the more important the biography was. For the actor, the biography would fill in all the background of your character that the playwright hadn’t thought worth putting in. The audience would never know, for example, that Rodey, a lineless part in Chekov’s Three Sisters that I had played at the Academy, was a young man struggling to conceal his progressive tuberculosis. Or that he had taken an axe handle to his violently abusive father for beating his mother in the barn back in St. Petersburg. The important thing, our teachers told us, was that we knew it. It would inform and deepen our performance, even if we had no lines at all.
So, according to my journal during that first week of rehearsal, this was my take on the psychology of Dudley Dawson:
Dudley Dawson comes from a good, middle-class home. But from the sixth grade has been persecuted because of his height and the fact that he looked like a girl. The hurt and anger have built up through high school till he has taken refuge in cynicism, sloppy dress and obnoxious behavior. The sexual slurs come from the fact that he is frustrated and beautiful girls are never attracted to him. He’s horny but never shows or admits it. He’s quick, well-read and educated but he doesn’t show that either, because to be bookish is to be nerd-like and he doesn’t consider himself a nerd, though books have been his other refuge.
He is with the nerds because they never question him or make demands of him. They accept him. Never do they tell him to clean his room or bathe or comb his hair. His sloppy dress, manners and unshaven face are attempts to show he is male. He maintains his fuck-all attitude till the end. But as the nerds are attacked, he cares deeply. Much of his attitude can be dropped then.
At the time, this thoughtful reflection on the personal history and motivations of a misogynistic nose-picker pleased me, I think. As grounding for a portrayal that will follow me to the grave, it would be hard to improve upon it. What I didn’t realize until I rediscovered the journal some thirty years later was that this was not Booger’s biography, but Curtis’s autobiography. I didn’t know it as I was doing it, but Booger—my creation, this nerd monster who didn’t even know he was a nerd—was I.
* * *
One of the things that made this film special was that Nerds was a sincerely collaborative process. Once we realized we were all participants responsible for its creation, everything changed. From that point onward, any reluctance we may have felt about offering suggestions vanished like breath off a razor. All of the Takashi/Booger scenes were built upon a poker-playing improv, done just minutes before the first take and Larry B. Scott’s nerd rap at the talent show was partially written and choreographed by him. Busfield became a constant font of comic inventive suggestions, for both his character and everyone else’s. Edwards’s and Michelle Meyrink’s gorgeous scene at the Tri Lamb party when they realize they share the same eyeglass prescription, Booger’s odd encounter with the man in the mail slot (actually producer Peter Macgregor-Scott) and even the final speeches of Lewis and Gilbert at the pep rally were either created entirely by the actors or improved beyond measure from the scripted versions.
The core and emotional center of the film were the characters played by Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards, as Lewis and Gilbert. Anthony was a relative newcomer to the business but Robert had over a decade’s worth of moviemaking behind him. This proved to be something of a double-edged sword.
Robert Carradine carried the weight of the Carradine dynasty on his shoulders and, in some ways, still does to this day. His father, John Carradine, had been a legendary film actor going back decades to the early days of talkies. He was a classically trained stage actor who brought much of the power and charisma of the stage onto the silver screen. By the forties, John Carradine had become best known for his work in Universal’s second horror film cycle, playing Dracula several times in the studio’s programmers, but he still made his mark in A pictures like Captains Courageous (Bobby’s favorite) and Grapes of Wrath (mine). He had continued to work in horror films, of sadly diminishing quality, into the fifties and sixties, while touring his Shakespeare one-man show, which was his true love. Even into the seventies he was still working, memorably in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask).
Bobby had two older brothers who had followed John into the family business, David and Keith. Robert was the baby, but by 1969 he had made his film debut as one of the title characters in The Cowboys, starring John Wayne. As David’s and Keith’s careers started to take off in the seventies and eighties, so did Bobby’s, but in supporting roles: memorably in Coming Home, The Big Red One and, with his brothers, in The Long Riders.
Still, as I told him in a conversation in 2016, he was a part of the Carradine dynasty.
“Yeah,” Bobby replied, quietly. “Whether I liked it or not.”
* * *
“In 1980,” Bobby told me, “I had three or four motorcycles, half a dozen guitars. I was in two of the four American entries at the Cannes Film Festival that year. I was on the cover of Italian Vogue. I was hotter than shit. I was Bobby Carradine. One of the Princes of Hollywood, as far as I was concerned. So I got the script of Revenge of the Nerds and just the title was a turnoff: ‘I’m not a fucking nerd! I hate nerds!’ But my agent said, ‘Look, it is a major studio movie. You should go.’ So I met Jeff Kanew. He wanted me to read for it but I refused. The meeting was very stilted, I couldn’t wait to get out of there and he couldn’t wait to get me out of there.
“But they wanted me to come back. I figured, fuck it, I’ll go for it. I had long hair at the time, so I went to a barbershop in North Hollywood and got a regular boy’s haircut. Then I go to an eyeglass place and I’m looking around at all these frames on the shelves, it was insane, they were all, like, fifteen-hundred-dollar frames. The guy comes up to me and asks what I’d like.
“‘Well, not this,’” I told him. I said I was trying out for a movie and the part I was doing was—and I kind of looked around and lowered my voice—‘a nerd.’
“‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I got just what you’re looking for.’ He goes into the back and brings out a shoebox, blew the dust off the top, literally, reaches into the box and takes out the glasses I wore in the movie.
“So, I go to meet Jeff. And I’m kind of regaling him with stories about my father, it’s going great. Then they want me to read and I really didn’t want to read. The reading was subpar. But I got the part anyway, because I looked like that. I looked like Lewis.”
But with all his apparent confidence and swagger, one thing Robert Carradine had never done was open a film. Now he was going to and he wasn’t sure he could carry it off. Bobby Carradine was suffering from a serious bout of insecurity.
“I was sweating bullets,” Bobby told me. “I knew the whole thing was resting on my shoulders. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t want Eddie Desey.”
Eddie Desey was the classic nerd character actor of the day, and indeed had been Jeff Kanew’s first choice for the part of Lewis. Bobby’s inability to read for the part had worried Kanew, but the studio had been insisting on Carradine. Knowing under the circumstances he needed to pick his fights, Kanew agreed.
But during the first couple days of shooting, wracked with an almost crippling self-doubt, Bobby had convinced himself he was going to be fired and be replaced by Eddie Desey. He exiled himself from viewing the dailies.
Unlike the dailies screenings for Risky Business, everyone was welcome at these viewings and everyone jumped at the opportunity, except Bobby. After the second night’s dailies, Jeff Kanew had left the screening room at the motel and was headed back to his room, when Carradine ju
mped out of the bushes.
“Jesus Christ!” Jeff exclaimed. “Bobby, what’s the matter with you, man, you scared the shit out of me!”
Bobby was trembling. “Am I okay?” he asked. “Am I doing okay?”
“Of course,” Jeff reassured him and not for the first time.
“They’re not going to fire me?” Bobby said.
Jeff almost laughed. “They’re not going to fire you. You’re doing great. Just come to the dailies, believe me, you’ll feel a lot better.”
Kanew’s constant reassurance and a few days of Bobby watching his dailies solved the problem. He had owned this role from the first frame. He had only to believe it.
Gradually, the film took shape and as it did, everyone’s confidence rose. The atmosphere in dailies felt almost celebratory. All of us began to look at Revenge of the Nerds a little differently. We had come to Tucson prepared to do a stupid sex comedy. Well, it might still be a stupid sex comedy, but now it was our stupid sex comedy. Revenge of the Nerds wound up becoming a testament to what happens when the hard work, talent and determination of actors, writers, producers, director and crew are brought to bear on a project that, on the face of it, didn’t really seem worth the bother. Everyone involved with this picture just seemed determined to make it a better film than it had any right to be. Somehow, it became worthy.
The first day of filming, technically a “pre-production” day, was the first sequence in the film—the introduction of Lewis and Gilbert and the car ride with Lewis’s father (James Cromwell) to Adams College. That continued into the second day, but the third day of shooting, January 31, 1984, was the first day with the whole cast, as the nerds were thrown out of their freshman dorms. For the next six weeks, we worked on a film that would wind up being a kind of Urtext of modern nerd culture. It would’ve been inconceivable to imagine that, for at least Robert and me, this would be a life-altering event.
Revenge of the Nerd Page 14