Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  Only that didn’t happen all at once. After his initial outburst, John seemed reluctant to discuss his feelings about Better Off Dead, at least with me. This was strange because we had really bonded during the movie. Perhaps he was concerned about throwing me off my game by denigrating the talent of the person we were working for. Maybe he just didn’t care. I still discussed it with Savage from time to time, and still wondered whether this was all just insecurity on his part.

  But it wasn’t. John’s attitude was undeniable once we were on the set. He was simply not among those present.

  “There was a conversation,” Savage recalled. “There was a discussion with Michael Jaffe about whether we were just going to have to find somebody else. If he wasn’t going to play ball here, I mean, he’s in a funny movie but he’s totally mad, he’s actually playing it mad. I’ll never forget, it was the first scene we shot with you that it really stood out that John was just not in the moment. He just showed up for work and I’m saying, ‘Okay, John, you stand here. Do what you want, but we just have to get through this scene.’ It’s the scene where he looks the most pissed off, as if he just doesn’t want to be there. And that was when Jaffee said, ‘We may have to talk to Warner Bros. about replacing him. We may have to just start over with someone else. This is bad.’ And that’s when I fucking panicked. Somehow, we pushed through it but there was a while there I thought they were going to stop the movie.”

  Then one day, something seemingly inconsequential occurred that brought everything out in the open for me.

  We were watching Savage direct a scene in which Squid (Kristen Goelz), a silent, curious little girl with apparently supernatural powers, is seen walking down the street with her mangy-looking dog, Bosco, and her Ron and Nancy Reagan lunchbox. John and I both despised Reagan and his politics, and we found the idea of this demon-like child carrying a Ron and Nancy lunchbox incredibly funny. Afterward, we told Savage what a great satiric touch it was.

  To our astonishment, Savage admitted it really wasn’t satirical at all; more of a tribute, really. He liked Ronald Reagan.

  Savage? A Reagan supporter?

  I was shocked. Of course, I had no right to be. He had never talked politics with either one of us. I guess we just assumed he hated Reagan as much as we did, which is ridiculous in retrospect. In Hollywood, Republicans of our generation existed. The fact that we didn’t personally know any of them wasn’t Savage’s fault. The fact that we had spent many weeks in close proximity to a Republican and hadn’t been turned to stone or something was a lesson, at that point, we were incapable of learning.

  I had been raised not to discuss other people’s politics and religions, so I was able to swallow my instinctive revulsion and just say, “Oh, okay, that’s cool,” or something equally inoffensive. But for John, this was absolutely the last straw.

  “You are kidding. You are kidding me,” he said in an even, cold voice. He may even have removed his sunglasses to get a better look at this changeling. It seemed, as far as John was concerned, that if he was being forced to act in a stupid comedy with a man for whom he had no respect as a director, he could deal with it. But when that man reveals himself to be a supporter of someone he regarded as the worst president ever, that was simply too much.

  He stormed off, leaving me to talk to Savage about the weather.

  From that time on, John made no bones about his unhappiness. In Wodehouse’s immortal phrase, he may not have been disgruntled, but he was very far from being gruntled. While we remained friendly, I found myself spending more time with other cast members, like Bobcat Goldthwait and Demi Moore.

  Bobcat had only just moved to L.A. He was new enough that he had to take a bus to his audition for One Crazy Summer. For Savage, that kind of determination might have been enough to cast him right there, but his audition was weirdly brilliant on top of it. Bobcat invited Savage to see his act that night; he went and that clinched it. He had already cast Tom Villard in the film as one of the group of local oddballs. But he had to have Bobcat in his film, so he wrote him in as Villard’s twin brother.

  People who only knew Bobcat from comedy clubs were always shocked to discover what a smart, politically progressive person he was, which always surprised me. His politics seemed obvious to anyone who looked past the persona he presented, and just the way his act was structured spoke to his intelligence. I liked him immediately.

  Bobcat really became the center around which everyone else on the picture revolved. Everyone was drawn to him: John, Demi and Joel Murray because of his coolness, Savage because of his humor and the energy he brought to the project, and I because Bobcat shared my politics and feminism, which few men on the films I was making did at the time. It was his first film and as he told me many years later, “Yeah, when I first met you I thought, Oh, good, this is what these Hollywood people are like! This’ll be easy! Then you wound up being the last one I met like that for a long time.”

  And it wasn’t just energy he brought to the process. In at least one case, he brought a perfectly formed scene, in its entirety, to the film that both Savage and I wound up benefiting from. One day at lunch, Bobcat took me aside and said he had an idea he wanted to pitch to Savage, but he wanted it presented in full, which required my help. We went to the garage set where it was to take place, rehearsed it and, after lunch, presented it to Savage, who just kept exclaiming, “Oh my God! Yes!! Oh my God!!” Whatever we had been intending to shoot after lunch, this was what we shot in its place.

  It was the scene, well loved by fans of the film, when Egg Stork, played by Bobcat, takes Ack Ack, my character, aside to tell a story about a lonely little boy who nobody ever liked; everyone thought he was weird and he was bullied and beaten up by everyone in school.

  It is a weirdly touching moment. Ack Ack, going through a rough patch himself in the film at that point, thinks he understands. He gives Egg a shy, sympathetic smile.

  “And were you that little boy, Egg?” he asks gently.

  “Ahh, no!” screams Egg in Bobcat’s inimitable strangled delivery. “But I really used to love beating the crap out of him, though!”

  The one drawback to Bobcat’s presence on the set was that John, Demi and Joel, to varying degrees, started talking like him on camera. Not like Bob talked; how Bobcat talked. It was completely unconscious but unmistakable. It was sort of like an American being with someone English or Australian. If you are sensitive to these kinds of things, you find yourself aping the accent.

  In this case, it was obvious enough that Savage actually had to talk to Demi and John about it, which irritated John even more. Every time Savage approached John on the set, the temperature would drop fifteen degrees and the rest of us would all huddle together for warmth.

  Demi and I became set buddies. She was seeing Emilio Estevez at the time, but the relationship was rocky and I was happy to provide an ear. We had dinners, went to movies—she even took my sister to AA meetings when she was in town for a visit. We were both up for the film About Last Night and helped each other run lines before the quick flight to New York for the audition. (She got it. I didn’t.) It was nice having a calm, normal, platonic relationship with a woman on a set that was becoming increasingly testy as the shooting went on.

  Then, I got a call from Demi late at night. She apologized for the lateness of the hour but said there was something that had been on her mind for a while and she really needed to talk to me about it.

  There was something funny about the way she said it. I told her to fire away. There was a pause.

  “It’s not really something I can tell you over the phone. It’s … complicated. Could you come to my room?”

  I stared at the wall, listening to the blood in my ears. So this is how it starts, I thought. I emphasize that there had been nothing on either side of this relationship that would have given anyone the slightest indication that it could be going in a different direction. And yet here we were.

  I told her I’d be over directly. I hung up the phone
and took a few minutes to collect my thoughts. This had the potential to be an extremely delicate situation. But it really wasn’t something I had instigated. These things happen between sophisticated people, I said to myself. It was no one’s fault. But we had been thrown together in a beautiful place, far from home, and now, thanks to the mysterious workings of this talented, beautiful woman’s heart, she felt the need to take it to the next level. How I handled it was of the utmost importance.

  I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth, dressed and passed across to her room, my heart pounding. I have never considered myself an attractive man, certainly not to someone like Demi. But attraction is a complex and unpredictable quality. I found myself wondering if I’d overdone the Old Spice behind my ears.

  She opened the door and I stepped in. We exchanged a couple of brief hellos, then the room got very quiet.

  “So,” I said, “what’s up?”

  Demi backed away and then nervously started moving around the room, adjusting things. Books were moved, glasses taken from a table to a bedside stand, a jacket taken off a chair and hung in the closet.

  “I … just wanted to talk, you know. I mean, we’ve been spending a lot of time together … and you’re someone I feel I can really trust…”

  “Of course,” I said, stepping toward her. “Anything.” I uncorked an encouraging smile and she did a startled backward loop, positioning herself against the wall with a big black chair between us. Clearly this was proving very difficult for her.

  There was another silence, broken by the distant crash of the ice machine. She couldn’t seem to get the ball rolling and I realized it was going to be up to me. I took a deep breath.

  “Demi…” I began.

  “Well,” she said, “here’s the thing. Everything is kind of taking off for me right now and I’m doing a lot of press. Like, really a lot of press. People are starting to ask me things about important issues and I’m fine with most of them, but the one thing I just can’t get a handle on is this whole Central American war.”

  “The … war in…?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “People are asking me about it, what my feelings are about it, and I can’t keep it straight. I know it’s Nicaragua and El Salvador, but which side are we on? And who are the contras? You seem to know a lot about politics. Could you explain it, ’cause I just find it really confusing.”

  * * *

  Nothing solidifies a calm, normal, platonic friendship quite like a late-night chat about the history of the CIA and American military intervention in Central America, and Demi and I remained friends over the course of the filming.

  The same could not be said for John and Savage. John wouldn’t speak to Savage if he didn’t have to and openly resisted whatever he suggested on the set. Conversely John would come up with ideas that he would insist on using whether Savage liked them or not. One was the scene at the drive-in when Hoops (John’s character) was on his clandestine date with Cookie, during which Hoops, terrified of being spotted by Cookie’s boyfriend, is watching the film wearing sunglasses and a pith helmet, literally hiding behind bushes inside the car. Kimberly Foster, who played Cookie, told me afterward how awkward and embarrassing the whole evening was.

  “He didn’t want to be playing the fool,” Savage said. “Which is too bad, because there’s a lot of falling down and silliness in the script, which he knew going in. But he just didn’t want to be that guy.”

  Even years later, Savage remembers John’s cold contempt with pain and hurt. He was already insecure about his abilities in general and One Crazy Summer in particular. If he had felt he at least had John’s support it would have been easier. But faced with the innate challenges of shooting a film, the additional stress created by John’s intransigence and what Savage referred to as his “emotional disengagement” made him feel like he was losing the thread completely.

  “I mean, I liked John,” Savage told me. “I thought he was a really cool guy. I respected his opinion. I liked talking about movies with him. But now I was thinking, how could I have been so wrong about something that I thought was funny? Suddenly it … it was almost like I should be ashamed of myself. It just became so disappointing because I did respect his opinion and then it became one of those things, ‘Maybe I really don’t know what I’m doing.’ You know, you start questioning yourself. And that’s how the poison got into the thing.”

  If John had just been an asshole from the beginning it would’ve been one thing. But he was really a funny, charming, down-to-earth person at the time we did Better Off Dead; and even on One Crazy Summer, unless he was dealing with Savage, he was much the same person. But he also had an insecure side. One evening we were at the hotel watching Savage, Bobcat and Joel—three brilliantly funny people—riffing off of each other. When they were on a roll, nothing short of live ammunition could slow them down. Individually, they were effortlessly funny people, but when you put them together they were like a single, well-oiled joke machine. After a while, Bobcat started shooting off fireworks in the hotel (as was his wont) and John and I left them to it and went to sit outside.

  John glanced back to the room, where the screams of laughter could still be heard. “I don’t know about you,” he said to me after a few moments, “but sometimes I just can’t keep up.”

  I gave a weary laugh. “I gave up trying weeks ago,” I told him. John and I were both straight-men in One Crazy Summer, both on screen and off. It wasn’t a role either of us was accustomed to and neither of us was really equipped to compete with the others. It was worse for John, of course, who didn’t want to be there in the first place.

  There were times of unadulterated joy, but they were few. One was the night John, Bobcat, Joel and I spent on a Nantucket beach watching the inimitable Joe Flaherty, as Ack Ack’s crazed Patton obsessed father, giving a training speech to a group of clueless, increasingly frightened Boy Scouts. Joe had a script but clearly regarded it more as a list of well-meant suggestions. A kind of comic jazz soloist, he knew when to come in, how long to let loose and how to always go out on a top note. No two takes were the same. When he found a riff that worked, it stayed in. One that didn’t would be discarded automatically. He went on for hours. The four of us sat in the darkness just outside the bonfire-lit location, laughing in silent delight, conscious of what a treat it was to be able to watch a real master at work.

  But oddly for a film so suffused with sunshine and silliness as One Crazy Summer, most of my recollections of the time were tinged with melancholy. John, ranting on about some forgotten injustice, while Savage stares at him with a bewildered half-smile of sadness. Tom Villard on a beach in Falmouth at sunset, on his knees, facing a young man none of us had ever seen before, also on his knees, the two staring wordlessly into each other’s eyes, within arm’s reach but with chasms between them. Demi and Emilio, famous, celebrated and envied, sitting across from each other at a restaurant, silent, awkwardness and impending dissolution radiating in great hopeless circles around them. And I, more and more aware of my own weaknesses and failings, befriending a waitress who was struggling in an abusive relationship, offering what support I could, which could never be enough. The last time I saw her, she asked me for a kiss. I gave her one. As I pulled away, her eyes were wet.

  “No,” she said. “A real one.”

  Savage had returned to L.A. from Cape Cod to oversee the editing of One Crazy Summer and the release of Better Off Dead only to find that people weren’t answering his calls. Something was clearly amiss and Savage couldn’t get anyone knowledgeable or honest enough to tell him what it was.

  It was Revenge of the Nerds all over again. The preview screenings of Better Off Dead had been off the charts and yet the studio had inexplicably gone stone dead on the project. The number of theaters set for the film’s release were cut back. There was no press. Suddenly, Savage Steve Holland had become the loneliest man in Hollywood.

  The final indignity was reserved for the day Better Off Dead opened. Reviews were bad, box-off
ice terrible, and when Savage called his agents that morning, he was told he was being dropped. He still had One Crazy Summer to release, but the writing was on the wall.

  * * *

  It was 1985 and I was thirty-two years old. I had been working almost without a break since 1979. I had been married since 1981 to Cynthia Carle, though we had been spending increasing amounts of time apart and the separations were starting to take a toll.

  After One Crazy Summer, my old mentor, Terry Kilburn of Meadow Brook Theatre, offered me a part in Noël Coward’s brilliant farce Present Laughter. He offered Cynthia a role in it as well, which settled the matter and shortly after wrapping the film, I found myself back in Detroit again, onstage at the theater where my professional career had begun and acting with my wife for the second, and final, time. For now, the circumstances felt very much like a circle closing.

  The production also starred Jayne Houdyshell, my old classmate from the Academy, and Carl Schurr, a fine actor and director whose day job was artistic director of Pennsylvania’s Totem Pole Playhouse, where I would find a second home in the years to come doing summer stock. The show was a great success but by the time Cynthia and I had returned to Los Angeles, it had become clear that change was in the wind.

  Since Revenge of the Nerds, I had really been a man without a country, or at least without a home. The roles on stage and film had been pretty much constant, for both of us. We had the apartment in New York but were also renting a place in Hollywood, because we had both been working there. But Cynthia was from L.A. and living there was something she had no interest in doing. It had reached the point where we had to make a choice—did we want to put our efforts into salvaging a failing marriage or did we want to cut our losses and focus instead upon saving our friendship? There were no children to consider and eventually the solution seemed inarguable: I would stay in Los Angeles and she would move back to New York. I would keep her beloved cat, Butch. She couldn’t bear to take him back to the apartment, when he had grown so used to the California life of basking in the courtyard, dodging coyotes and killing things.