Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  Yes, high on Better Off Dead’s long list of detractors was its young star himself. But more about that in its place. The first I heard about Better Off Dead was when I was huddled down in the main tent of our location village somewhere in the Canadian Yukon, shouting over a static-y radiophone, which was our only connection to the outside world during the filming of Clan of the Cave Bear. My agent was informing me that after my return to Los Angles in the autumn, I had a job awaiting me, playing a supporting role in a feature called Better Off Dead, which was written and directed by Savage Steve Holland.

  “This reception is terrible,” I shouted into the receiver. “It sounded like you said ‘Savage Steve Holland.’”

  “That’s right!” she chirped. “Don’t ask me, but that’s what he calls himself.”

  “Well, has he done anything?”

  “Just a short. Called Buster’s First Date or something. I never saw it. Leonard Maltin was in it,” she added optimistically.

  “Is it a horror film?” I yelled.

  “Buster’s First Date?”

  “No,” I shrieked, “Better Off Dead! Is it a horror film?”

  “No, not really,” she said. “More like a comedy. Kinda. I don’t know, it’s weird.”

  She was being evasive. “There’s animation. It’s not really my thing at all. But he’s really eager for you to do it. He insisted that your role be cast before anyone else’s. He says he wrote it for you. But I have to say the money’s not very good. And the billing is not so hot either.”

  “Well, wait,” I said. “If he wants me so much, maybe you could get better money.”

  “Mmmm, I don’t think so. Very little money.”

  “But he wants me,” I bellowed. “That should be good for at least better billing, don’t you think?”

  “Well,” she said, doubtfully, “I guess I can try. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  I remember this conversation so vividly for a couple of reasons. One, it was the last time this agent ever negotiated a deal for me. Neophyte though I was to Hollywood and its ways, I felt there was something wrong about me pleading with my representative to try to get better billing for a part that had been created for me. I signed with another agent on my return to town, who turned out to be the very one who had once referred to me as the new Michael J. Pollard. The fact that I considered this at least a lateral move gives you an idea of my sense of self-worth at the time.

  Another reason I recall the conversation is that it presaged the general reception Better Off Dead received from the public as a whole. It wasn’t just dismissal on artistic grounds. It was what seemed almost an obstinate inability of people to grasp what it was, or why it was unique; or to value it for what it represented, or to appreciate it for all its good qualities, which were legion. At the time, no one would have imagined that the film would be granted twenty-fifth- and thirtieth-anniversary screenings, that it would not only be embraced and celebrated by millions, but would actually influence a generation of other writers and directors and actors who were just children when it was released.

  Our crew had returned to Vancouver some days later and I found the script of Better Off Dead awaiting me. I read it on the set in my caveman makeup and wardrobe, baffled, delighted and laughing out loud. It was funny and odd and endearing and smart and everything my agent had not led me to expect. Nothing that happened during the filming or immediately following shook my belief that Better Off Dead would not only be a huge hit, but that it would be the start of a stellar feature film career for Savage Steve Holland and might even change the nature of film comedy as we knew it. It turned out, of course, none of those things happened.

  On its release even Buster’s First Date costar Leonard Maltin gave Better Off Dead only two and a half stars.

  For a film that touched as many people and that was so important to me professionally as Better Off Dead was, I have surprisingly few memories of it. My first day was the cast read-through of the script, which took place in Burbank and was attended, to the best of my recollection, by nearly everyone in the cast. John Cusack I liked instantly. He was funny, outgoing and politically astute, with a face that seemed to belong to a silent film comedian. David Ogden Stiers, then riding high as Major Winchester on the deathless series M*A*S*H, was there, genial, charming and avuncular. Kim Darby, quiet and haunted-looking, revealed none of the supreme goofiness she brought to Lane Meyer’s mother. Vincent Schiavelli, the odd, angular, pipe-smoking intellectual held forth on Italy at one end of the table, while Dan Schneider, as Ricky, Lane’s nightmarish neighbor, pink-cheeked and nearly cylindrical, cracked wise with the incomparable Laura Waterbury, who played Ricky’s mother. Amanda Wyss, so memorable as the doomed Tina in Nightmare on Elm Street, huddled with Diane Franklin, who was on her way to breaking the hearts of countless boys as Lane Meyer’s perfect girlfriend, Monique. Aaron Dozier, as Stalin, the evil jock with Robert Wagner’s voice, had yet to be cast.

  Steve Holland was twenty-four when he made Better Off Dead; the same age Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane, though the comparisons end there. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, he was giddy with excitement the day we all first got together. When I first saw him I couldn’t imagine he could be the director. The directors of films I had met and worked with at that point were fairly serious guys. Savage seemed like the funny, self-effacing son of a film director, one who spent most of his days at the beach and his evenings in a comedy club. No one on the set of Better Off Dead could keep up with his wit. The jokes flowed in an unstoppable stream. In retrospect I suppose this stemmed from his incredible nervousness and insecurity at having been given his first feature to write and direct, and being supported by producers and a studio who believed that he was the next hot thing. Not that I think Savage believed that for an instant. He was, and is, the most genuinely modest man I’ve ever met in Hollywood. He would tell you he has a lot to be modest about. I would disagree, for reasons I’ll go into later.

  For now, that day, he put everyone utterly at their ease. He was complimentary, generous and self-deprecating. (He still is.) His spirit was contagious. By the time we were finished everyone’s excitement matched his. Diane, Amanda and I jumped into John’s car, and he drove us to a restaurant near Universal Studios for dinner. The dinner I don’t recall, but the ride was memorable because for the first time in my film career, I was in Hollywood—really in Hollywood!—riding in Cusack’s rented convertible with three terribly attractive and charming young actors, everyone talking at once, the sun shining in the women’s hair. I didn’t talk much. I just took them, and everything around us, in. It’s a nice memory of a happy afternoon that promised only good things to come.

  Better Off Dead was the first film I shot in Los Angeles, which is probably why I have so few actual memories of making it. When you are on location, as I had been for all three of the films that preceded this, you are in an unfamiliar place with a lot of people who are also in an unfamiliar place and you’ve all been stuck together in a hotel there and are reliant upon each other for amusement, friendship and comfort. When you are shooting “in town,” you return to your regular life at the end of the day and, most importantly, sleep in your own bed with the person you’re supposed to be sleeping with.

  For this film, we were shooting at various locations in the San Fernando Valley, which is, at its best, uninspiring. We had no pre-shoot rehearsal process at all, which was a new experience for me. It gave the filming experience itself a sense of being on a tightrope at all times. Savage appeared to be eager for us to improve upon his script. I would come to realize that this was his method, if you could call it that: hire funny people, make sure that they had a sense of what the scene was about and then let them do whatever they felt like. For the glib among us, like Dan Schneider, John Cusack and me, this was an exhilarating way to work that usually resulted in something worthwhile and occasionally something even funnier than Savage had written. In the years since, Savage has done himself no favors by overstating the contributio
ns made by his cast. Some were significant, but much of his original script remained intact.

  But it was a bit of an unhinged process. I requested my skiing outfit with the top hat at the last minute as a tribute to George Harrison during the skiing sequences in Help! Somehow, a top hat was produced, though I know of only one person, Bobcat Goldthwait, who ever made the connection. Most of my dialogue with John at the top of the K-12 was improvised; as was the laughing jag Charles De Mar launches on during the school dance. Dan Schneider came up with the wonderful gag in which Ricky runs after Monique, loses his balloon and makes a feeble attempt to retrieve it.

  Some of these changes I find scribbled in my copy of the script, or in the notebook I kept during filming, which shows at least some of the ideas I came up with were conceived before filming. Some were incorporated, some not.

  In 2015, much of the cast gathered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco to do a live reading of the script as a thirtieth-anniversary celebration, with actor Jon Heder sitting in for John Cusack. I think the audience was surprised to realize how much dialogue that they fondly remember from the film was missing from the original script.

  It’s my belief that the loose, party-like environment he created for his cast and crew gave us the freedom to create, and if this sounds familiar, it’s because Jeff Kanew created a similar space for Revenge of the Nerds. But because we were in town, instead of Chicago or Tucson or British Columbia, there was less a sense of mice playing while the cats were taking meetings thousands of miles away. The shadow cast by the studio bosses—in this case, CBS Theatrical Films—lay a little more heavily on us. There was also less of a concern about creating an ensemble compared to the other films. Savage cast Better Off Dead perfectly, but it was seldom that there were more than two or three principals in any given scene at the same time.

  In 2016, I arranged to meet Savage for dinner at Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood to talk about Better Off Dead and its sequel, One Crazy Summer. It turned out to be a propitious location. His first meeting with Better Off Dead producer Michael Jaffe had been at that very restaurant.

  “I must have had two hundred meetings with various ‘producers’ about making Better Off Dead,” said Savage, “and they all had their plans on how to make the movie. You know, it was ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna make this movie,’ only it never goes anywhere. Just all the bullshit artists everyone hears about in Hollywood. Finally, I arrange to meet Michael Jaffe at Musso and Frank to talk about it. He picked Musso’s ’cause he could smoke cigars in here at the time. I remember calling my mom back in Connecticut telling her I was going to this meeting, but this was it. If this didn’t work out, I was going back to Connecticut. I couldn’t do this anymore. I was just done.

  “Michael’s company was CBS Theatrical Films and they had just done Grandview, U.S.A. It was a regular movie, not a teen movie or anything, but it had cost twenty-five million dollars, which was a lot of money back then, and it was not successful. So Michael was trying to find something that would be the next Fast Times, or Revenge of the Nerds or something, and he brought me this crappy script, just some teen shit. He wanted me to direct it because he had read Better Off Dead and it made him laugh. So, I’m saying, ‘So what d’you want me to direct this for?’ and I start talking about doing Better Off Dead instead. I had been planning this for two years. I had brought the storyboards with me and I pulled out everything right then and showed him, ‘This is how I’m shooting this, here are the jokes; if you like it, let’s do this.’

  “He said, well, let me think about it. I figured that was it and then he calls me the next day and says, ‘Let’s talk about making Better Off Dead.’ It was kind of like a miracle. And then it’s, ‘Here’s a parking space! Here’s an office!’ Unbelievable.

  “Then I met Caro Jones, the casting lady. And I didn’t realize I could ask for people. She said, ‘Who do you want to see in the room?’ I thought she was going to tell me. I didn’t think I had a choice.

  “It turned out I really had to fight for John [Cusack]. Up till then, he was mainly known for nerd parts, you know. He’d already done The Sure Thing but it hadn’t been released yet. Henry Winkler, who produced it, had seen a short of mine, My 11-Year-Old Birthday Party, at a film festival and he had given me an office at Paramount for a while. Such a nice man. That’s where I wrote Better Off Dead. He really liked my stuff. He didn’t buy it, but he was guiding me. And it was he who introduced me to John Cusack. He helped arrange for a special screening of The Sure Thing to convince Michael and the CBS Films people that John could be a romantic lead.

  “And then I said to the casting director, ‘Well, for Charles De Mar, can I get anybody I want?’

  “‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can ask…’”

  Savage had seen Risky Business and the movie had an enormous impact on him, as it had on Jeff Kanew before him. Fortunately for me, he also saw something else: “We could talk about John Cusack all night,” Savage said, “but the most important thing to me, even before getting John, was getting you. When I saw you as Miles [in Risky Business], that was a game-changer,” he told me. “I mean when you have a second banana, a supporting character, steal the movie from the star—and not even by saying that much, but just saying the most important things—it just guided that movie. When I saw it in Westwood, my mind was blown. Then at some point, I saw Revenge of the Nerds and it’s the same guy! And I thought if I had that guy in my movie, that’s all I would ever need!” Savage shook his head and smiled. “I mean, that’s so me!

  “I mean, seriously, I figured people must be paying you a million dollars, or something but I said, ‘I want Mr. Armstrong!’

  “And they said, ‘Well, we can’t find him.’

  “‘What do you mean you can’t find him?’

  “‘Well, he’s up in the mountains in Canada, or something. We can’t reach him.’”

  Savage laughed. “I said, ‘I don’t care. Get a snowmobile. Get a moose. Just find him, you know?’ Once they told me I could maybe have you in my movie, I was saying we can’t stop until we get an answer of some kind!

  “I think you were the first person actually signed to Better Off Dead. And having you—in my usual I-can-use-his-genius-to-my-advantage way—suddenly I was so confident in my movie. Then I could say, ‘I love Diane Franklin, let’s get her.’ Or ‘I loved Amanda Wyss in Nightmare on Elm Street, let’s get her.’ It was a game-changer, getting you in my movie.”

  Like Booger, Charles De Mar was based on a real person, whose name actually was Charles De Mar. Savage told me: “Charles De Mar was a guy I grew up with. Really funny, very confident; a goofball. I really liked him. So I was going to make the character someone like that, but then when I saw Risky Business, I thought someone like Miles, in high school, giving advice to everybody, but he’s totally clueless, would be really funny. So he was inspired by you, but then when I actually got you to play him, that was a dream.”

  Part of Savage’s dream that didn’t come true was the idea of shooting the film in Connecticut—where he had grown up—and then shooting the skiing scenes in Vermont, where he used to go to ski as a boy. Not surprisingly, Michael Jaffe and the company nixed that idea due to the expense. Instead, the ski scenes were shot in Utah, at the Snowbird Ski Resort. We were all flown up for five days or so and for the first time I actually began to feel, unequivocally, that I had really chosen the right career. This was the life. Housed in the swank ski lodge at Snowbird with excellent company, good food and copious drinks, easy shooting days: as far as I was concerned this part of Better Off Dead could’ve gone on indefinitely.

  It was only when we were shooting the scenes at the top of the K-12 that I felt I was really earning my money. The cold was brutal and the wind sometimes threatened to sweep us off the mountain. Now and then, it would clear enough to actually shoot something. Only a skeleton crew was taken up—just Savage, Cusack and me with the script supervisor, producer and enough people to operate the camera and sound. By the end it’s
obvious in the film that John’s and my faces were so cold we could barely get our lines out. Savage, buried under masses of winter gear and wrapped under scarves with just a slit for his eyes, would stand just off camera, shouting out unintelligible ideas for new lines.

  Savage: Mrurrhefe?

  Curtis and John: Whaaat??

  Savage: Mruffhefe, afeemmanf, doynfan sarrrnalhois! Hueapirkj mabcveips, tjwosrjf, he bdue nfe?

  Curtis and John: WHAAAAAT???

  Savage: (Pointing at me) Gurrfuz!!?

  Curtis: WHAT?

  Savage (trying to act out his direction as shouts into the wind): Horurrruph alhepffhed jriessss fhot!! Lanedvue, mfhepaken yoshs oktmq! Urba? AAAG.… AFEN!!

  And so the long day wore on.

  * * *

  The wrap party for Better Off Dead took place on the last day of filming at Snowbird and it was one of those booze-ups that mark epochs. Everyone felt euphoric, as if we’d been a part of something that was, if not important, at least a comedy that would be noticed. Warner Bros. noticed and picked up Better Off Dead. They started doing test screenings and could barely contain their glee—the movie was testing phenomenally well. So well that the studio, in an almost profligate gesture of confidence, sent the young director out on a college tour to screen the film and do a Q and A. These screenings, as well, were markedly successful. Savage had been signed to one of the top agencies in Hollywood and the word was out: there was a new kid in town. He was something new: an unprecedented mix of John Hughes and Luis Buñuel. Better Off Dead was turning out to be what CBS Films and Warner’s had fervently hoped it would be—the next Fast Times at Ridgemont High. John Cusack, also widely regarded as the next big thing in young leading men, was signed to do Savage’s next film, a quasi-sequel to Better Off Dead called My Summer Vacation, scheduled to shoot the following summer at various locations on Cape Cod. The success of Better Off Dead was so confidently anticipated that rumors were already circulating that the upcoming film was only the second in a possible trilogy. Savage started rounding up actors from the first film to join him on the Cape, including Diane Franklin (whose cameo was later cut), Laura Waterbury, Taylor Negron and me, as well as newcomers: the subversive comic Bobcat Goldthwait; Joel Murray, the youngest brother of Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray, but new to film himself; Tom Villard, late of the hit television show Bosom Buddies; and Demi Moore, then the smoldering “bad girl” doyenne of John Hughes’s stable of “brat pack” actors.