Whether that was true or not, it was clear that Nerds II was not really a good fit for Joe’s talents. I liked him from the start because I found him intelligent and interesting. He had an interesting personal history. As a boy in New York, he had been at the center of a landmark case involving school prayer—his parents, opposed to school prayer, were the plaintiffs—which fascinated me. I was surprised to discover that this was not something he was proud of or even talked about much, as he had suffered for it in his youth. But there was much about Joe that I liked and I was hoping for the best as we started filming.
At the very least, I was hoping to see something of the instinctive genius we’d seen with Jeff Kanew as far as creating an environment conducive to the kind of movie we all wanted to make, despite the script problems. I was quickly disappointed. The absence of Kanew, Jeff Buhai, Steve Zacharias and Peter Macgregor-Scott was felt from the first day until the last. Joe’s main objective was to get the film done fast and cheap. That wouldn’t have been a huge problem, but he was missing a couple of key components essential in the making of a nerd movie: empathy and a sense of humor.
Joe was not a nerd. Of course, neither were Bobby, Tim or Larry B. Scott. Of the primary cast of Revenge of the Nerds, I’d say only Anthony, Andrew Cassese, Brian and I could really self-identify as nerds. But as long as we were good actors that didn’t matter. Jeff Kanew was such a nerd that he did the original film for that reason only. Joe struck me as sort of an intellectual jock. He was also born for the executive suite. He had been bullied as a child due to the unwanted attention he received because of the school prayer case, but that hadn’t seemed to create a sense of empathy in him, at least in so far as these fictional nerds were concerned.
That wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem if we’d had a decent script. But that combined with his lack of sense of humor was a real problem.
Tim Busfield said, “Joe was neither funny as a person nor was he funny as a director. He wasn’t a person, like Kanew, who could get a real chuckle out of it when anyone said something stupid. Joe would just get this kind of quizzical look on his face. He took the experience of making Nerds II a little lightly. That would’ve been my impression. In hindsight I think he thought if he could deliver that movie by a certain date, they’d make him president of Fox.
“That’s what it felt like, anyway,” Busfield continued. “It felt like a guy rushing through a movie, to get it in, to get it into the can. He kept saying, ‘Come on, come on, we don’t have time. We gotta release this thing.’
“I had a good relationship with Joe,” said Busfield, “and I was never afraid to go to him and sort of represent the actors and say, you know, what are you doing? You’re breaking everything down into camps, you’re making this divide between your guys [at the studio] and us. Us against them. I’d say, look, we want to contribute and help you play, but whatever it is you’re doing, it’s not making us feel like we can contribute and play. I said, it’s like you’re a pitcher on the mound. You got nine guys behind you helping out. Just relax and throw strikes. He understood that. But he still couldn’t do it.”
Bobby Carradine recalled, “All through that movie I remember wishing we had Jeff Kanew, you know? Then Joe becomes president of Fox and leaves Nerds II off his resume.”
Andrew Cassese was only fifteen when he played Wormser the second time, but his reaction to Joe was surprisingly perceptive for his age. “He kind of seemed like a fish out of water,” Andrew said. “It was like he wasn’t a director, but he was directing this movie. He wasn’t really a director but he was cutting his teeth on it. I had the impression he was in the studio system, but they gave him the movie because they thought he needed to know more about that part of it. But he was kind of like a father figure to me, or older brother figure. I remember him trying to do a magic trick for me but I was too much of a smart ass for that. I saw the trick and called him on it. I think he was a little frustrated with me.”
“Nerds II was really crazy in terms of the input,” Larry B. Scott says. “Joe and I didn’t really get along so well. I mean, we were okay, but he wasn’t really about anything. He just wanted you to do everything his way. I think he thought he knew how this should be done. The musical number was really the only time he left us alone. Other than that, it was a couple takes and move on.”
It didn’t take long for tensions to rise on the set. I knew Richard Chew, the Academy Award–winning editor who was cutting our film and who had also edited Risky Business. To speed up the process, he was flown out to Florida and his editing bay was set up in a room in the hotel that was one of our main locations so he could do rough cuts as we shot. I dropped in on him one day to find him staring, frozen, at his monitor, his hands literally pulling his hair.
“What’s he doing?” he said to me, without preamble. “What is he doing?”
“Who? Joe?”I asked.
He looked at me with desperation and said, “He’s not shooting coverage. He’s not shooting coverage! How am I supposed to cut this?!”
My relationship with Roth, having started well, soured quickly. At one point fairly early on, he came up to me on the set and took me aside.
“What is your problem?” he said. “You are supposed to be part of a team here and you’re contributing nothing.”
I was speechless. He continued, “I think I know what the deal is. You’re on a big, popular TV show and you feel you don’t have to do your part. Well let me tell you, I expect everyone on this film to bring something to the table and that includes you.” With that, he turned and walked away.
Certainly my “big, important TV show” had had an effect on me when I started filming Nerds II, but it wasn’t the one Joe imagined. On the first day of filming, we were shooting the nerds on an airplane on their way to Ft. Lauderdale. We had shot the master and were coming in for my close-up. I was in my seat waiting when the first A.D. called for the other nerds to come onto the set to deliver my off-camera lines. My reaction was instant.
“No, that’s okay!!! They don’t have to! Don’t bother them! I’ll be fine!!”
The A.D. looked at me with a knowing smile.
“It’s okay, Curtis. I’m sure the guys won’t mind doing your off-camera. Where do you think you are? On Moonlighting?”
It startled me to realize that my relatively short time on Moonlighting had me reacting to normal set behavior like that. At no time, however, had I felt that I was “too good” for Nerds II. All of us were disappointed with the way it had been seemingly thrown together and we missed Tony, Brian, Julie and the rest of our cast. But I had thought I was doing my job to the best of my ability.
In retrospect, it may have been that Joe suspected I hadn’t done all I could to lure Julie down. Protracted negotiations had resulted in bringing Anthony in for just a couple of days: one in Ft. Lauderdale and one on the nerd-house set back at Fox. In an attempt to “replace” Tony, and to add some “youth” to an already aging franchise, Barry Sobel, a popular stand-up, was introduced as the orphan nerd who is brought into the fold by Lewis. Barry was extremely funny as a stand-up and a nice man, but even he would admit he wasn’t an actor. All of us were working on bits, coming up with ideas and rehearsing. Rehearsing was anathema to Barry. The idea of working as part of an ensemble was a completely alien concept to him. The lack of connection was felt on screen and was definitely felt on the set. This was nothing against Barry, who was brilliant at what he did. It was just not the same thing that we were doing. But when he surprised us by showing up when we were appearing together thirty years later at a Nerds tribute at the San Francisco Sketchfest, we were delighted to see him.
Nerds II did boast a great supporting cast: Ed Lauter and Bradley Whitford were superb as our Alpha Beta nemeses, and Priscilla Lopez and James Hong were wonderfully over the top in what were basically stereotypical eighties racist comic roles. Courtney-Thorne Smith, as the embodiment of male nerd fantasy, was funny, professional and a delight to have around.
&n
bsp; We had shot an extensive scene that included U. N. Jefferson (Bernie Casey), Mr. Skolnick (James Cromwell) and Dean Ulich (David Wohl). It was cut. There appeared to be less and less a sense of continuity and more a feeling of desperation about the whole project. As our fictional incarnations would do, the nerds clung to each other for support. We rewrote scenes, improvised when we were allowed and basically did everything we could to make the movie work.
We were thrilled to have Andrew Cassese back as Wormser, though he was unrecognizable; no longer the tiny, adorable boy from the first film. While Andrew isn’t that well known in films outside of the Nerds franchise, he had an extensive career on the New York stage, including on Broadway in the musical 9 and had been working pretty much nonstop since the first Revenge of the Nerds movie. He was, though, at fifteen, still a virgin and that was a problem that Tim Busfield and Larry B. Scott decided needed fixing.
Fortunately, they had someone at hand who was both philosophically and biologically accommodating.
“I got a phone call at the hotel,” Andrew told me recently, “and it was Tim and Larry and they were inviting me up to hang out. No idea of any funny business. I go up there and there’s Larry and Tim and this girl. Everyone’s hanging out. Tim and the girl disappeared into the bathroom for a while and I’m thinking, ‘What’s goin’ on in there?’ Anyway, they come out and then there’s stuff going on between them, just sort of sexy stuff, you know. Larry B. said something privately to me, like, ‘You like her? You find her attractive?’ And, yeah, I mean she was beautiful. Well, next thing I know Tim and Larry leave us alone. They just left me in the room with her. She was very much in control of the situation, trying to help me relax. I didn’t really know what was going to happen or what was coming next. I was just sitting there, trying to be cool. She offered me a joint, but I turned that down. You know, ‘No, I don’t do that.’ A real prude.
“She was talking sexy to me and being physical and I wasn’t sure how it happened but suddenly, my pants were down and she was giving me a blowjob. Ultimately, I’ve told the story a little differently, but the truth is, I didn’t have sex with her. I would’ve loved to, but finally, I just chickened out. I really regret that.”
With the accumulated wisdom of a quarter century or so, Tim’s recollection was a little more circumspect.
“Well, it was just Larry B. and I arranged to have somebody spend a little time with Andrew. There was no money involved. She was someone we were hanging out with, you know, ‘Would you consider spending a little time with our buddy Wormser, just help him get this out of the way? You, know, he might be able to focus better at work a little bit.’ I think I made it about how it would improve the movie. Just tried to help the lad score. I mean, they were both teenagers, we figured just leave ’em alone for a while, they’ll figure it out. Actually, she wasn’t a teenager, she might have been in her forties. That’s the problem, I think she was maybe fifty years old.”
Larry B: (laughing) “She wasn’t any fucking fifty years old!! You could not believe how beautiful this girl was. She was in her twenties or something. And generous! Generous and fine? That’s like ringing the bell twice!”
* * *
There was plenty of blame to go around for Nerds II winding up the way it did. Primary responsibility probably lay with a studio eager to do a sequel fast and cheap so they could get a strong opening weekend out of it. They hired writers who had to write a script on their hiatus from their day jobs, and who had no real sympathy for the project anyway. Joe was not the right director for the project but Kanew was probably right in his assessment that there was no real future for a Nerds franchise anyway. We told the story the first time and all we could do was to retell that story indefinitely.
For all the difficulties between the cast and Joe, Tim Busfield points out something else to be considered.
“I’m really proud of what I contributed to the second movie. That we went forward with some of those ideas and that some of them wound up in the movie. More than anything, looking at the movies now, is realizing what you can get when you allow actors to play. That’s the thing about Kanew. He let us create and he never got in the way. When you don’t allow actors to play you’re never going to get inspired, stupid stuff. But it’s tough, ’cause nobody makes those kinds of movies anymore.
“With Nerds II, though, if I had been Joe, I don’t know what I would’ve done. It was the eighties and we were young and in Ft. Lauderdale at Spring Break, doing a sequel to a big cult movie. And what would you do if you had your cast rolling in drunk from judging wet T-shirt contests at two in the morning?”
I left the set of Nerds II to return to a Moonlighting set even more bitter and dysfunctional than the one I had left in the spring. My marriage was ending, so the endless days on the Fox lot were a welcome respite. But soon, even that distraction had come to an end. The response to the end of Moonlighting was almost as toxic as the environment in which it had been filmed. I saw Revenge of the Nerds II, when it was finally released, as an embarrassment. I felt unmoored and directionless.
During the months that followed I sank deeper into an overwhelming sadness and a sense that I had thrown away whatever potential I had started my career believing I had. It was as if I were coming out of a decadelong dream. As an actor, I had come further than I ever could have imagined back at the Academy. But I couldn’t help feeling that I’d sacrificed something at the same time, and not just my evangelical devotion to live theater. I dove into a series of doomed relationships with wonderful, accomplished women, all of whom deserved and eventually got better. The combined income of Revenge of the Nerds II and Moonlighting made the year 1988–89 the most lucrative year I had ever had and I wouldn’t make that kind of money again for another quarter century. But now my professional life, by the beginning of the decade, was becoming a blur of uninspired jobs in which I delivered lackluster performances. The change in my fortunes in every respect was sudden and bewildering. I never imagined ever doing anything else but acting, but I had come to a point that I couldn’t fathom what my next step would be.
And then after a few years it was announced that someone had green-lighted a television film pilot based on Revenge of the Nerds called Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation.
There really isn’t very much to say about the final entries in the Nerds franchise but I’ll say it anyway. The first, as advertised, was a pilot for a proposed television series featuring a whole new batch of nerds at Adams College. Here, the freshman Tri Lambs are under siege from the Alpha Betas, under the leadership of Stan Gable (Ted McGinley) and the Big Bad Alumni character, played by then notorious right-wing talk show host Morton Downey Jr. The former nerds come to the rescue: Lewis, Booger, Lamar, Takashi, Ogre and Betty Childs (now married to Lewis, who has become a yuppie and is ashamed of his nerd roots). Booger, in this telling, had become a personal injury lawyer. Written and executive produced by original Nerds scribes Zacharias and Buhai, the screenplay was a cross between an essential rewrite of the first film in the first half and what amounted to a kind of Nerds fan fiction in the second. Most of the “next generation” of nerds was played by stand-up comics rather than actors, and Robert Carradine got co-producer credit on a Nerds film for the first time.
Nerds III had a few things to commend it: the introduction of women into the fraternity, the return of James Cromwell and Bernie Casey (not cut out this time) and Ted McGinley’s dramatic breakdown at the conclusion when he reveals that he too is a nerd. McGinley was a revelation to me in this film. From the moment he’s first seen as the adult Gable, now a bullying, smarmy traffic cop, to his final moment of coming out of the nerd closet, he gives a performance that frankly shames everyone else’s. Julie Montgomery was cool and professional as Betty Childs but was given, predictably, little to do but be patient with her man-child Lewis in the time-honored tradition of male comedy writers uncomfortable with the concept of women as characters.
All of this, though, was overshadowed by Buh
ai’s and Zach’s decision to bring in “Poindexter,” “Wormser,” “Dean Ulich” and “Gilbert” at the end of the film, but played by other people. I thought it was a horrible mistake and begged everyone to rethink it, but Zacharias, Buhai and Robert were convinced “the audience would love it.” Anthony, obviously, had had to be begged to do the second movie. Nothing would’ve possessed him to do this one. Tim Busfield had also—wisely—jumped ship at this point. As for Andrew, when I asked why he was not brought in, I was told by Zach and Buhai that they had “tried to find him, but he’d, like, disappeared.” I told them I thought he lived in New York, and we should either get him or cut his character out of the sequence. They went ahead as planned. I found the whole thing acutely embarrassing as a creative decision and insulting to the actors who had created those roles.
Andrew himself said in a recent email to me: “Regarding Nerds III, I was never contacted. I wasn’t that hard to find, either. I imagine they just didn’t want to go to the expense of flying me out and putting me up just for a walk-on cameo, so they just said they couldn’t find me. I did feel a little sad that someone else was playing my role. I would’ve loved to have seen everybody and to have been a part of it.”
Possibly as a result of Andrew’s “disappearance,” a rumor started around this time that he was dead. From a pop culture point of view this was a win, putting him in a very small club with people like Paul McCartney and Mark Twain. The version I heard of Andrew’s demise was that he’d been killed in an adult bookstore in Phoenix. The version he heard was he’d been shot in a nickelodeon in Westwood, California. In fact, he was attending NYU Film School at the time, which isn’t the same thing at all.
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