Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  It seemed like everything was perfect and nothing could possibly go wrong. Which is when you have to start looking over your shoulder, as Savage was shortly to find out.

  BAD MEDICINE AND ONE CRAZY SUMMER

  SPAIN AND CAPE COD, MA. 1985

  I came late to the One Crazy Summer shoot, and as a result missed the initial rupture between John Cusack and Savage, which I will address in its place.

  In the meantime, I had spent several months in Spain working on my fifth film, an oddity called Bad Medicine. Some films, like Revenge of the Nerds, turn out to be better than they have any right to be. Bad Medicine is an example of the opposite: a film that had everything going for it but managed to miss the mark by several parasangs. It wasn’t a bad film really. Just peculiar.

  It boasted a deep bench of character talent of the time: Alan Arkin, Julie Hagerty, Steve Guttenberg, Julie Kavner, Bill Macy, Joe Grifasi, Alan Corduner, Taylor Negron, Robert Romanus, Candi Milo and Gilbert Gottfried. Based on the book by Steven Horowitz and Neil Offen, it tells the story of a group of misfit medical students who, rejected by all the top medical colleges in the U.S., attend a cut-rate and frankly suspect medical school in Central America run by petty dictator Dr. Ramón Medera (Arkin). We were to shoot somewhere in Central America, but the ferocious war being sponsored by the CIA at the time made that impossible so we went to Spain instead.

  It had been one of the most exhilarating experiences yet, but ultimately enormously frustrating. On the one hand, we had a handful of some of the best farceurs in the business, working at the top of their game and doing it during a Spanish spring of unsurpassed beauty. During several weeks we were housed in one of Franco’s old posadas, in a tiny village near Lorca in the south of Spain, which featured nothing but a small café and-whorehouse across the street. For the whorehouse, these months early in 1985 became a kind of golden age. How it survived before we arrived, I can’t fathom, but while we were there it did booming business. It was a kind of club for the crew after hours, and even those who didn’t actually pay for sex paid for strong, wildly overpriced drinks and dancing with the women. The potent Moroccan hashish was plentiful and cheap and the countryside was beautiful.

  On the other hand, there was Harvey Miller.

  Harvey was such a character that, years later, he realized he was sitting on a gold mine and wrote a one-man play starring himself called A Cheap Date with Harvey Miller. At this point in 1985 he had come off running the television adaptations of The Odd Couple and Private Benjamin. He was a well-known comic writer and producer of the old school. He was also a “doctor”: someone brought in to punch-up pilots that needed the kind of hard jokes he was famous for. He once told me that he hated the series M*A*S*H because there were “not enough jokes.” He was acidly witty, avuncular, irascible, prone to prolonged sulks when he wasn’t getting his way and full of stories about his famous friends, who appeared to number in the thousands. He had a reputation for helping everybody. Actors, producers, other writers were all beneficiaries of his comic largess. He had thick glasses and long gray hair and looked like someone Woody Allen would play in somebody else’s movie. He was truly one of the funniest people I’ve ever worked for, but he was one of those writers who had a hard time interacting with humans outside of a writer’s room. Probably inside, too, for all I know.

  After a career of joke writing and bailing friends and associates out of script difficulties, often behind the scenes, Harvey decided it was time to call in his chips. Hence, Bad Medicine.

  During the course of filming, he became known by his partisans as “eccentric” and by everyone else as “impossible.” His partisans became fewer in number as time went on. I had been one of them at the start, but he finally wore me down.

  The examples are too many to list, but a few stood out. When we first arrived in Madrid, Harvey decided that there were too many men in the cast with dark hair. This struck me as kind of arbitrary, since we all had different faces, but Harvey stuck to his guns. Someone was going to have to dye his hair. Some, like Gottfried and Romanos, were supposed to appear Hispanic so they weren’t in the running. Arkin, who had not arrived yet, was going to be wearing a wig, which he hated, but getting a new one in a different color would be prohibitively expensive, so Harvey decided it was down to Guttenberg and me.

  Harvey said to us, “There’s too much dark brown hair in this picture. People aren’t going to be able to tell anyone apart. I think one of you guys need to dye your hair.”

  Guttenberg, who was after all one of the stars of the film, just laughed good-naturedly like Harvey had made a joke, and walked away.

  “Okay,” said Harvey to me. “You.”

  “But…” I started whining.

  “Nah, it’ll look great!” he assured me. “Hey, and guess what?” Almost like he knew my soft spot, he leaned in and said, “Guess who our hairdresser is?”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “He’s the guy who cut John Lennon’s hair for How I Won the War!”

  “Really?” I squeaked. John Lennon’s haircut in Richard Lester’s anti-war comedy had been international news at a time when actual international news just couldn’t compete with things like John Lennon’s haircut. And here was my opportunity to actually talk to the man who had cut it! The man personally responsible for the most famous shearing since Samson! I could get the inside scoop! Details! Gossip! Who knew what?

  “Swear to God,” said Harvey. “You should talk to him about it. He’ll come to your room tonight and dye your hair. Ask him. Trust me. He’s got some great stories!”

  Sure enough, that night the hairdresser, a Spanish man, probably in his fifties, showed up in my room to make me light-haired. When I started talking to him, I realized he didn’t speak a word of English. I was making valiant but fumbling attempts at Spanish but was at that time unequal to the task of doing anything but order things in restaurants. As he was working his magic on my hair, I was able to determine that he had, in fact, been the hairdresser who had cut Lennon’s hair, but beyond this we could not go. I knew, of course, that Harvey spoke not a word of Spanish so his dangling of unheard Beatle stories was just something to shut me up long enough to get my hair dyed.

  The next morning, I went to the mirror and shrieked. My hair had gone from dark brown to something similar to the color of the bottom of a Revere Ware saucepan. “Copper” doesn’t begin to describe this color. I was mortified. I couldn’t imagine what Harvey would do when he saw it.

  I stormed up to him on the set later that day.

  “Harvey?” I revealed the disaster.

  He stared at me blankly for a moment. Then:

  “What?”

  “My hair!?”

  “Oh! They did it?” He squinted at it for a moment; then nodded. “Looks good.”

  “Harvey,” I yelled. “I look like a lit match.”

  “Hey,” he said, “at least it’s not dark brown anymore.”

  More awkward was when Harvey shot an extensive sequence with Alan Arkin that went awry. In the dailies Harvey saw some massive problem that was significant enough that the whole sequence was going to have to be shot again. To make matters worse, it was something that Harvey should’ve seen, and hadn’t. Now he was going to have to tell Arkin that he’d have to re-do the sequence because of his mistake. What to say?

  Then, he came up with the perfect solution.

  Harvey went to Arkin in his trailer and told him they were going to have to reshoot. Alan, unsurprisingly, asked why. Harvey had his answer all ready.

  “It’s Arlene and Alex,” he said, shaking his head, referring to the film’s executives in Los Angeles. “I don’t know what the problem is, but they had this big issue with your performance…”

  “What?” snapped Arkin.

  “I’m really sorry, Alan,” Harvey replied, with a sincere regret that became him nicely. “I thought you were great but they’re just not having it. I defended you, but it looks like there’s nothing to do but shoot t
he whole thing over again.”

  Of course, Harvey had forgotten that Arlene Sellers and Alex Winitsky were close friends of Alan’s. So Alan immediately called them in L.A. to ask what the problem was with his performance …

  What exactly Harvey was told in subsequent phone calls—first from Alan and then from Arlene and Alex—is shrouded in mystery, but for the next couple of days Alan Arkin boycotted the movie and Harvey Miller wandered around, speechless, hollow-eyed, jumping when people spoke to him and generally looking like someone who hadn’t known it was loaded.

  One morning we were all on the bus about to head out to the distant pueblo where we were shooting many of our exteriors. We were waiting for our makeup artist, who was unaccountably late. Finally, she came out of the posada with her assistant. The makeup artist was in tears, clinging to her friend and talking in Spanish a mile a minute. Meanwhile, the assistant was explaining the situation in Spanish to the first A.D. As she spoke, with the makeup artist sobbing next to her, the bus got very quiet, except for Harvey yelling, “What?! What is it?! What’s going on?!” Finally, the A.D. turned to Harvey with a very serious expression.

  “Harvey,” he said, “her sister is a flight attendant on the Spanish national airline. One of the planes crashed this morning and she thinks perhaps her sister was on it.”

  “Oh my God,” yelled Harvey. “Was any of our film on it?”

  By our return to Madrid following weeks in the south, Harvey had antagonized everyone on the film. People were taking turns pulling one another back from physically assaulting him. Julie Hagerty came to my room one night after a particularly brutal day on the set to find me practically in tears, writing a hate note to Harvey. She actually had to take it away from me by force and tear it up to keep me from marching to his room—it was about one in the morning—and delivering it to him personally.

  Finally, things had become so toxic between Harvey and the crew that serious measures had to be taken. Harvey’s producer Jeff Ganz told him if he didn’t take the whole crew out for a really expensive dinner at one of the really nice restaurants in Madrid, he, Jeff, wouldn’t answer for the consequences. Harvey whined and argued and complained but he finally gave in.

  They booked a private dining room at a four-star restaurant and then the invitations went out to all the crew people that Harvey had brutalized one way or another over the last couple of months. Some had to be talked into attending, but this, they were told, was Harvey’s olive branch to everyone. They all arrived to find Harvey awaiting them. The wine started flowing immediately. The dishes came, one course after another. Gradually, everyone started loosening up. Even Harvey was becoming, for him, the life of the party, which for Harvey meant not talking much and bolting his food like he didn’t know where his next meal was coming from.

  When it came to sheer rapidity of mastication and swallowing, no one could keep up with him. Then he sat, waiting for the next course, barely containing his impatience, tapping his fingers restlessly at the end of the table and muttering to himself. Then he got up and started pacing back and forth. Everyone was having such a good time no one even noticed when Harvey slipped quietly out of the restaurant and into the night.

  Ever the mensch, he had paid for his dinner on the way out, leaving the producers to foot the bill for everyone else.

  * * *

  Needless to say, by the time I had returned to the States from Bad Medicine I was eagerly anticipating the laughter, joy and youthful high spirits of a Savage Steve Holland set.

  I had only spoken with Savage once, over the phone, in the months that had passed since we wrapped Better Off Dead. He was excited but sounded stressed. At that point everything was still looking up, but he was under enormous pressure from the studio to have the script for My Summer Vacation—now re-titled One Crazy Summer—ready for a summer shoot even before his first movie was ready to be released. He was feeling rushed and panicked but really looking forward to spending the summer making a movie on his beloved Cape Cod with his friends.

  He talked at some length about Ack Ack Raymond, the character he had written for me. He wanted to do something a little different from the roles I’d been playing so far, so he was casting me against type as a young, sweet innocent; the only son, and disappointment, of a military father (played wonderfully by SCTV’s Joe Flaherty), who named him for gunfire. Never was a child more inappropriately named.

  Ack Ack was to be dressed in an odd combination of military fatigues and T-shirts emblazoned with characters from the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He was kind of awkward, pained at the fact that his father disapproved of him. He gives a sensitive little monologue over a discarded doll he finds on the beach. And his best friend was a crab.

  In one of Savage’s signature touches, he included a B story in which Ack Ack befriends a hermit crab. He has conversations with the crab, goes for long walks on a beach at sunset with the crab. The crab (I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the crab’s name) was a real crab but was kitted out with some kind of auto-animatronic system that allowed him (or her—I’ve forgotten the crab’s gender, too) to move around for his (or her) scenes.

  This was essential, because crabs aren’t known as great walkers, and when it came to technical things like hitting their marks, they are hopeless. Plus, because it was an actual crab, we had to keep it in a tank until we were rolling and then resubmerge it immediately at the end of the scene. This meant me rehearsing and even doing my close-ups with a patently fake plastic crab who gave me nothing. In all fairness, the real crab didn’t give me that much more than the plastic one, but in the years since I’ve worked with people like Gary Busey and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who gave me even less.

  The crab scenes were all shot and eventually cut from the film, as the whole boy/crab thing was deemed just too weird, even for a Savage Steve Holland movie. The crab, as far as I know, never did another picture.

  Many of the actors, producers and much of the crew of Better Off Dead were returning for One Crazy Summer, and it looked as if it was to be a lovely summer on Cape Cod. Which leads me to the cast and crew screening of Better Off Dead, which was to be held just a couple of days before my arrival.

  And this was where everything started to go south.

  There couldn’t have been a more enthusiastic audience crowded into the theater for the screening. It was the Saturday before principal photography began the following Monday on Cape Cod. Under the circumstances, this was kind of like everyone watching home movies. All the cast was there, including John Cusack and Demi Moore, who had driven down together from Chicago to get acquainted. Also present, for his first film and on Cusack’s recommendation, was his friend Jeremy Piven.

  “We thought the screening would be fun,” Savage told me. “It was kind of unusual that so many of the cast and crew were actually together for the second movie. So we started the screening on that Saturday night and I would say it was at the most fifteen minutes into the movie—maybe even ten minutes into the movie—John got up and left. I thought he’d gone to the bathroom or something but then … he never came back.

  “And I got really paranoid about it. I mean, he hadn’t even seen the movie yet, so how could he not like it? It was just weird. I didn’t see him all day Sunday. Then on Monday I got word that he was really upset. Then when he showed up on the set, I asked him what was wrong.

  “‘I just want you to know,’ John told me, ‘that I don’t trust you. You’re the worst director I’ve ever worked with. I will never listen to anything you have to say to me ever again.’ This was on the set, just outside the house we were using for your [Ack Ack’s] house.

  “I was crushed, but we had to keep going. I mean this was day one—hour one—of shooting this eight-million-dollar movie. There are Warner executives on the set. The last thing I need is to have them getting the sense that there’s a problem on the first day.

  “So I told John, ‘Well, okay. Don’t worry. Um, you can do whatever you want to do, I just need to have you here, tal
king to Joel about … whatever.’ Joel [Murray] was a good sport about it. You know, I still had to direct. It was just super awkward. My leading man doesn’t trust me, won’t talk to me, I’m supposed to be directing him and he won’t even look me in the eye and there are grown-ups on the set watching this, you know? It was scary.

  “What I learned as the movie went on, you and Joel and Bobcat were still outstandingly funny and I think John eventually kind of wanted to get back in on that. He came up and tried, a little bit. But it was a bad way to start.”

  By the time I arrived a few days later, everything had settled into a hot, restless stew of uncertainty and resentment. I almost didn’t recognize Savage when I saw him the first time. Far from the cheerful, positive, wisecracking ball of energy I was accustomed to, he had the bowed head and slightly glassy-eyed appearance of a whipped dog.

  “John hates me,” were the first three words out of him that morning.

  Bewildered, I responded, “John who?”

  “Cusack,” Savage said flatly. I laughed.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He doesn’t hate you!”

  The story came stuttering out. It seemed incredible that someone as easy-going and generous as Cusack would’ve had such a violent reaction to Better Off Dead. Of course, I hadn’t seen the film yet, so I couldn’t help but wonder whether John was right. There is also an old saw in the movie business: the more fun you have on the set, the less fun the finished film turns out to be, and we’d had a lot of fun on Better Off Dead. I reassured Savage to the best of my ability and waited until I could talk to Cusack and hear it all straight from him.