Our professional bond of this now shared investment manifested itself into a brotherhood. We became a community that worked together, so it was only natural for us to play together as well. Or maybe I’m giving us too much credit or reason, because we didn’t need to love each other to want to get high together. It was just a perk.
Movie locations in the 1980s were notoriously rife with sex, drugs and overindulgence in general, and Revenge of the Nerds was no different. Tim Busfield told me, “We were still part of the old school, that golden era, that ‘Animal House’ period. You know, even Paul Newman would be drinking a case of beer a day; the spirit was just conducive to that, it was no big deal. You partied and everybody turned the other way.”
It was, in fact, the most gleefully debauched set I’ve ever been on. It actually seems incredible that any work got done at all. From the moment wrap was called, everyone would descend on Scordato’s, Greasy Tony’s or one of our other watering holes. Then, after an hour or four, in an overheated swarm, back we went to the hotel: a mob of horny, inebriated animals trying to fit as much misbehavior in as possible before set call the next morning.
As Tim recalled: “We were in our twenties and we liked to party. When we were finished with work, we got to it. Somehow we were going to make our way to one of about three hotel rooms. Even before we started shooting we’d established where the pot room was, where the coke room was…”
In 2015, I asked Brian Tochi, a veteran of many similar unhinged productions during that decade, where he thought Nerds stood in the rankings of movie set excess.
“Actually,” he said, “pretty near the top.”
For the men on that crew, Tucson that summer was like Tahiti had been for the crew of the H.M.S. Bounty, with regular shuttles of eager young women from the University of Arizona going to and from the camera crew’s rooms. An apparently endless flow of weed and cocaine arrived daily, care of one of the well-connected fraternities on campus. (There was a delicious irony in the fact that a fraternal organization that would never have accepted any of us as members was happy to supply us with drugs.) Whether it was the heat, the unstable chemistry of so many young men and women in heady proximity for so long, or whether a residual whiff of the lawless Old West still pervaded the place, the memory of that summer in Tucson remains suffused with danger, yearning and nostalgia. It does for me anyway.
If there was an epicenter of the madness, at least in those early days, it was in actor John Goodman’s room. Though sober now for many years, in those days he was the Lord of Misrule. Even in his days as a young actor in New York, his reputation as a man of appetites preceded him. He arrived in Tucson like a modern-day buck of the Regency, exuding an aura of intemperance and raffish bonhomie. His consumption of alcohol, while remaining upright and articulate, had to be seen to be believed. By the time the rest of us were ready to indulge John had already started, often accompanied by Treat Williams (who was also staying at our the hotel while shooting an action picture called Flashpoint with Kris Kristofferson). Treat had no one to party with on his film—or at least no one who could keep up with him—so he usually wound up with us. But we were all pikers compared to Goodman. No one ever saw him go to bed.
One morning, when I had an early call and John, thankfully, didn’t, I emerged into the courtyard of the hotel to find Goodman’s furniture in the swimming pool. The details of that particular blowout remain shrouded in gaudy speculation and rumor but there was one memorable gathering I attended that became the stuff of legend.
A group of the usual suspects were gathered in John’s room: Williams, Busfield, Tochi, Larry B. and me. There were also various other young fellows present, locals, who were unknown to me but thanks to whose largess, joints were being passed and there was even a bit of “rocket fuel” for anyone who fancied some. Goodman, who was about three-quarters of the way through a bottle of vodka, looked on the rest of us junior imbibers with a sleepy benignity. One of our nameless visitors had availed himself of a guitar and was wailing on it, tunelessly but with terrific enthusiasm, trying to get everyone to join him in a sing along to the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. His friend, meanwhile, got his blow and razor out, but was looking around helplessly. The room was a complete shambles and there was no clean surface to cut lines.
Laughing, he said, “Jesus, what do we cut it on?”
“I’ll get you something to cut it on,” rumbled Goodman.
He leapt up onto his bed and grabbed hold of the painting hanging above it with both hands. It was one of those dreadful things you see in all hotels, of stallions splashing through a river, or something. John yanked at the picture. It didn’t budge. John pulled harder. It was just a lousy, cheaply framed piece of crap, but clearly the Hilton management thought highly of it. It was clamped to the wall with hoops of steel.
“Um, John…” I said. “I think that’s bolted to the wall.”
“Fuck that shit,” John snapped. Face reddening, muscles bulging, John pulled at the picture and pulled and pulled, emitting a growl that became a howl of frustration. I realize now I was getting my first glimpse of Walter Sobchak.
Suddenly, with an explosion, the painting burst loose from the wall in a shower of plaster dust and cement. Goodman flew backward off the bed onto the floor, the painting still clenched in his hands. He crashed on his back, cursing, but scrambled back on his feet and triumphantly tossed the picture face up on his bed.
“Now you’ve got something to cut it on!” he boomed.
We learned later that two of our mysterious party guests, whom everyone thought were friends of someone else, turned out to be criminals, who had robbed a party store down the street from the hotel that very evening. Armed and pursued by police, they had taken refuge in John Goodman’s hotel room, where they were the life of the party until the moment they decided the coast was clear, and vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived.
Some of our after-work bacchanals did occasionally produce something worthwhile. Well, one did, anyway. That was the night Ted McGinley came in from the cold.
From the beginning that summer, there had been slight but noticeable divisions when it came to after-hours shenanigans. As a general rule of thumb, the nerds tended to party together, though Robert seldom if ever made an appearance. We also had Julie Montgomery and Goodman. The Alpha Betas seemed to party together too, though their formation was a little looser. Ted (Stan Gable), Don Gibb (Ogre) and Matt Salinger were the core of that group, which also included Michelle Meyrink, who acted nerd but partied Alpha Beta. As with Julie and me, Michelle and Matt spent a lot of time together apart from the group and Don often would disappear for days on motorcycles with some of the tougher locals, doing God knows what for entertainment.
But Ted McGinley, the King of the Alpha Betas on-screen, secretly yearned to get to know the nerds a little better off-camera. It should be said that Ted was the straightest of straight arrows: conservative (politically and personally), charming and a very good actor. Ted started the shoot by handing out homemade buttons with his face on them, as if he were running for student body president. It was a brilliant little piece of character work because you could imagine Stan Gable doing exactly the same thing.
But it was understood that there was no sex or drugs for Ted on this set. Until the night he appeared unexpectedly at John Goodman’s door looking for company. We almost never saw Ted after sunset and he was hailed enthusiastically. John’s tape deck blasted as we sat around drinking beer and, finally, started passing around a large joint.
But as it reached Ted, not unexpectedly, he declined.
“Ah, no thanks,” he murmured, politely passing it to the next person.
“You don’t smoke?” asked Busfield, probably as unsurprised as anyone.
“Nope,” said Ted, virtuously. “Not even cigarettes. Have a beer, though!”
“But wait,” Tim went on. “Seriously, you’ve never smoked? Ever?”
“Naw,” said Ted, “I just don’t thi
nk it’s for me. Drugs are just … not my thing, you know?”
“How do you know if you don’t try,” I encouraged him, and soon the whole room was earnestly encouraging him to try a hit. Just one hit …
Finally, the peer pressure overwhelmed him and he took a hit off his first joint. We all felt like proud parents. He then sat there, staring at the joint. We all stared at him, expectantly.
After a moment, puzzled, he said, “Umm. Is that it? What’s supposed to happen?”
“You don’t feel anything?” Tim asked.
He shook his head. “Nope, nothing,” Ted said. “Maybe it just doesn’t affect me.”
“Try another one,” Tim urged. Ted tried another hit.
“Still nothing?” I asked
“Nothing,” Ted said, firmly. “I dunno, maybe it’s defective or something.”
He passed the joint on and, disappointed, the rest of us went back to our various conversations. After a few moments, we heard a throaty giggle coming from deep in the interior of Ted McGinley. We all stared. The giggle got louder and finally Ted broke into a full, loud laugh. It got even louder as he doubled over in hysterics. After a moment he tipped forward helplessly on Goodman’s floor, by now screaming with laughter.
It must’ve gone on for ten minutes. Every time he seemed to recover, he would take one look at us and go off again. By the end, we were all weeping with laughter.
Ted’s first tentative experiment with weed was something none of us ever forgot, but Tim Busfield brilliantly made practical use of it. A few days later when we were shooting the Tri Lamb / Omega Mu party scene—during which Booger produces his wonder-joints—Tim improvised a scene where Poindexter is given his first taste of weed by his Mu date. Compressed into those few seconds of film is Tim’s spot-on imitation of Ted McGinley, for the first and probably only time, high on marijuana. Brian Tochi and I used it, too, during an improvised scene where Booger gets Takashi high while they’re fixing up the nerd house.
With our Arizona local fraternity suppliers appearing like elves with magic pies, bearing illicit substances of all descriptions (mushrooms were also on the menu for those of us who fancied long, Don Juan–like strolls in the desert in search of higher truths), it never occurred to us where our task masters—the people farther up the Hollywood food chain—were getting theirs.
It turned out, they were getting theirs shipped in cut-out telephone books straight from Los Angeles. This convenient and ultimately foolhardy arrangement came close to shutting Revenge of the Nerds down right and proper.
All movie sets have police present for security purposes. Most of these guys welcome the down time, free food and a chance to flirt with the actresses and women on the crew. The more laid-back actually become friends of some of us and at the conclusion of filming, everyone parts with expressions of mutual regret. If crews later return to that city for another film, and find their pet cop still in residence, the reunion is almost touching, like Odysseus on his return home being greeted by his dog.
This was not one of those cases.
Our cop was not friendly. He didn’t chat, didn’t flirt, didn’t talk shop with the drivers and stunt guys. You got the feeling that he thought these people from Hollywood were all a bunch of Sodomites, and probably left-leaning Sodomites at that. His skin was tanned a high-desert brown and so tough you could make a pair of leather chaps out of it. He seldom spoke, smiled mysteriously and wore mirrored shades, just like The Man With No Eyes in Cool Hand Luke. He didn’t enjoy down time, and he did something about it.
This cop suspected that there may have been some drug use by certain individuals on set. One day after everyone had left, he had the dressing rooms tested and found drug residue in virtually all of them. The trick was finding out where the drugs came from, and who was receiving and distributing. But this cop was going to do it right. He lay low, smiled secretly and waited.
We had reached a point in the schedule where we had switched to night shoots. At some point, I had been called for work but had been released from the set temporarily. I went back to my dressing room and, after a while, dozed off.
When I awoke, hours later, it was 3:00 a.m. I sat up, muzzy-headed and confused. It had been hours since I’d worked. What the hell? For a moment I thought they’d wrapped and forgotten I was there. There was a sort of hushed stillness as I left the honey-wagon, but over in the shadows, next to the production van, I saw one of our production assistants. He was standing still and ramrod straight, staring with a kind of rictus-like expression into the middle distance.
“Hey, what’s happening?” I said, in a slightly aggrieved tone. “Am I released?”
He didn’t respond. It was as if I had not spoken. I gave him a moment and then, irritably, walked away, leaving him there looking like a cigar store Indian, staring. It was only later that I heard what had happened.
Our cop on his rounds that night had wandered a little off the beaten track, up a slight incline behind the production trailer. From this vantage point, he was able to easily look inside and see someone cutting and dividing the most recent shipment from the West Coast. To alert his pals on the force, secure the set and take possession of the evidence was, for him, the work of an instant.
And I had slept through the whole thing.
The word spread quickly, though, and panic set in, sending at least one actress running into the nearby woods to bury her mirror and anything else that might have fingerprints or DNA on it. An amazing number of people on the set were on edge for weeks. It’s hard to imagine how much contraband was dumped into toilets that night. Two lower-level members of the crew disappeared, and one of them was told that if he kept his mouth shut and took the fall, there would be a plum job awaiting him in Los Angeles when he got out. And today that man is a producer in Hollywood.
There’s a lesson there, but I can’t put my finger on it.
* * *
It had gotten around that Julie and I, who had bonded pretty much from the start, had become intimate, or, as Larry B. Scott put it, “We couldn’t believe that book-reading motherfucker got that shit!” We thought the rumors were funny, because at first we were actually listening to music in her room, while occasionally sampling some of Arizona’s finest locally produced intoxicants. Later, when people started suggesting that we weren’t sleeping with each other but were getting high, we quickly assured them that they were right the first time and we were just sleeping together. It’s hard to say what bothered me the most about this situation: that I was getting wrecked or that I was having an affair, or that I was lying about everything. There was undoubtedly a curious alternative reality that existed on film sets then and probably still does today: that unspoken rule that the old sailors had, that once they passed Portugal, all the rules went by the board. Why Portugal? Why Tucson, for that matter? I had always believed myself above these things but that was the summer I realized how human I was. Julie and I started as friends, and wherever our relationship took us we stayed friends. There were times when things got a little near the knuckle, but not with us.
Throughout the shoot, Bobby had remained the good-natured, laconic, totally-in-charge scion of a legendary Hollywood acting dynasty. Nothing seemed to faze him and once he became comfortable in Lewis’s skin, his work was faultless. But gradually, cracks in the veneer were starting to show. It could have been the extended presence of both his girlfriend (who memorably introduced herself to me by saying, “Hi. I’m Bobby’s girl”), and Ever, his adorable young daughter from a previous relationship. While everyone else on the set appeared to be partying all night and getting regular sex with strings of coeds, Bobby, the star of the picture, was being the doting father and boyfriend. Like many of his peers in Hollywood, Bobby felt an ingrained sense of entitlement when it came to women. In this case, for example, if Lewis got to have sex with the most desirable girl on campus, it stood to reason that Bobby should have the same freedom with the most gorgeous woman on the picture, and that was Julie Montgomery. It was Ho
llywood’s version of droit de seigneur.
We had reached the point in the schedule where we were to shoot the infamous “moon bounce” scene, in which Lewis, disguised in Stan Gable’s Darth Vader suit, follows a troubled Betty into the fun house and goes down on her. Julie had told me she was feeling anxious about the scene and asked if I would come to the set for support. But as I made my way toward the fun house set, I was stopped by a visibly uncomfortable A.D.
“Sorry, Curtis,” he said. “They’re asking that you not come to the set.”
“Not come to the set? Why?”
“Umm, dunno.”
I felt a brief stab of paranoid irritation. “Well, can you find out?”
The A.D. muttered into his walkie and after a moment said, “Not sure. Something to do with Bobby.”
Julie and I had unwittingly fed the fire that night. She had showed up on the set wearing my Risky Business crew jacket, with the neatly embossed “Curtis” on the front, which she had borrowed from me to wear over her costume because she was cold. When Bobby saw it, he went nuts, instantly ordering that I be banished from the set whenever he was doing scenes with Julie. In a furious aside with director Jeff Kanew, Bobby added he never wanted to see that jacket again, because, as Jeff told me later, “It was fucking with his process.”
* * *
Despite everything, by the time we finished filming that spring we felt like we’d accomplished something. But 20th Century Fox, now under a new regime far less accommodating to movies like Revenge of the Nerds, begged to disagree and did everything it could to bury the picture. Ultimately, it became a case of life imitating art, as the jocks at the studio tried to destroy the little underdog nerd movie and failed completely. It made money. Quite a lot of money. They instituted a studio-wide embargo against any sequels at 20th Century Fox, which was lifted under a different administration three years later. The first sequel to be green-lighted at that point was Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise.
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