One unique, if pointless, aspect of Nerds III was that some scenes in the film were shot in 3D. You could get your 3D glasses at any participating 7-Eleven store and experience the nerds in the magic of a gimmick briefly popular in the 1950s and which was enjoying an even briefer surge of popularity in the 1990s.
Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love saw the sun finally setting on the Tri Lambs as they reunited to celebrate the unthinkable: Booger’s nuptials. The script was again written by Buhai and Zacharias and the film was directed by Steve Zacharias. Nerds IV was given a jolt of energy by some of its gifted guest stars, including James Karen, Robert Picardo, James Gleason, Christina Pickles, Joseph Bologna, Jessica Tuck and Corrine Bohrer as Booger’s beloved. Legendary comic character actor, the late Marvin Kaplan, played Booger’s father. Apparently, previous to filming, Zacharias, with all the enthusiasm of a first-time director, told Marvin—also a playwright—to feel free to add anything he wanted to the script, so on his first day of filming Marvin showed up on set with a sheaf of papers covered in gags and jokes that he expected to be incorporated into the script. The suggestions were mainly of the “You say this, so I can say this” variety and were generally unusable. Out of respect for the man, though, we were obligated to try all of them.
More shocking, and a fact only revealed to me recently, is how the producers treated Larry B. Scott. “I almost didn’t do that last one,” Larry told me. “They low-balled me. Shameful. Like, a couple thousand dollars to do that movie.”
There was probably no better indication of how far we had fallen since 1984 than the idea that the company was low-balling the one black member of our original cast. As I drove back into Hollywood after the last day of filming, I struggled to come to terms with the sloppy and cynical process that had gotten us to this point. That night when I got home, I poured myself a Scotch and watched the original film again and made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t be a part of this anymore. I was done.
Periodically, Robert would get in touch, talking with manic enthusiasm about the possibility of something else: a Nerds feature or another TV movie. I had reached the point where I knew sand castles when I saw them and I would just make noncommittal noises as he sketched out our future. So accustomed was I to this that when he came up with another new idea—a reality show based on Revenge of the Nerds—I wrote it off just as I did everything else.
It would be a while before our first group of nerds moved into Nerdvana, but Bobby’s idea turned out to be the inspiration we were looking for.
ENTR’ACTE WHAT IS A CAREER?
What is a career?
Everyone now knows Malcolm Gladwell’s theory, from his book The Outlier, about the “10,000 hours of practice.” Using the Beatles as his example, Gladwell posits that in order for an artist, say, or a musician to truly master her craft, she must put in 10,000 hours of practice. The artist who reaches that landmark can look back and feel every hour.
Ringo Starr—a man who knows something about the 10,000-hours rule, even if it had never occurred to him when he was doing it—had a theory of his own. Everyone, according to Ringo, has about ten years in which to do his best work. There will be good work leading up to that and there might be plenty of work after it, but ten years is generally the period during which the best work is produced.
Based on my own experience, I think they’re both onto something.
Ringo may have been talking about musicians, particularly rock-and-roll musicians, but the same could be said for actors. While there are always exceptions, I think what I call Starr’s Theory of Creativity is pretty sound in general, and certainly true for me.
My decade mirabilis really began in 1979 with that gradual, unbelievable mass of plays, beginning with regional, off- and off-off-Broadway productions, including my first tour, with Moliere’s Adventures of Scapin, which gave me my first introduction to life on the road. It was exhilarating and I wanted more. More road. More old theaters and opera houses. More bad food and lousy accommodations. More smelly buses. More loneliness. More applause.
It was being in this cluster of plays and working with the actors, playwrights, directors and designers that filled in the gaps in my education that the Academy of Dramatic Art didn’t fill. There isn’t a school in the world that can prepare anyone for a life as an actor. They can give you technique, impress upon you the importance of learning how to move and how to use your voice; they can even give you a sense, through their experience and their stories, of the history of the craft you’ve chosen.
But from there on, you’re on your own. If you’re lucky, and determined, you keep learning. “Education never ends, Watson,” says Sherlock Holmes. “It’s a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.”
One of the most important lessons I had yet to learn—and the point of this chapter—was some years away and I’ll get to it in its place. In the meantime, as I stepped into the 1990s, and the decades beyond, the lessons were coming over the plate too fast for me to get any wood on them. Not to say I wasn’t learning things. Anyone in my line of work will tell you that your worst professional experiences are the ones you learn the most from. And in the nineties, I was in for some intense higher education.
I don’t think I ever really stopped working. But once I started working in television, as well as film and theater, the amount of dross exponentially increased. It wasn’t even that the jobs I was taking were all bad. Some of them were wonderful. But many of them involved episodic appearances on shows of varying quality or low-budget independent films or festival “shorts” that were seen by few. I did many pilots for shows that never made it on air. In one case, I was cast in a CBS pilot—Almost Perfect—from which I was fired immediately following the first table read.
I returned whenever possible to do summer stock at my beloved Totem Pole Playhouse. The purity of just disappearing into the bucolic surroundings of south-central Pennsylvania to do plays like Dracula or Charley’s Aunt or The Nerd was a glorious respite from what was becoming sometimes a grind of uninspired, hackneyed half-hour comedies or hour-long procedurals. At Totem Pole there was, despite the serious work involved, an almost Zen-like serenity to it: living communally, all the men in one dressing room, all the women in the other. And always, there was the magic of the woods, the oppressive summer heat, the cool of the evening under an impossible expanse of stars. I continued doing plays in Los Angeles, but Totem Pole was the last time I had a theater that I could call my home. Anyone curious about this period would be well advised to check out a lovely little movie, written and directed by John Putch, called Route 30, which I filmed many years later, but which is a love note to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and environs, and to Totem Pole Playhouse itself. It includes scenes filmed in the theater, and the house used as my character’s home was the one I lived in while working at the theater. Talk about being frozen in time: while filming in the house, I found some of my books were still on the shelves. Home indeed. Of all the films I’ve made it remains my personal favorite.
I look back on the period following the cancellation of Moonlighting and even I’m amazed at how much work I did. It had the pleasure of diversity, if nothing else. But I’m amazed, too, at how much repetitive, joyless, laborious work I did without ever seriously questioning whether I had made the right choice in picking this path. Amazed at toting up the days, months, probably years spent unemployed completely. And missing in this book is any kind of accounting of the literally countless auditions that led to nothing. This is an essential part of what makes up an actor’s life. Obviously, the time it takes to prepare an audition and then go through the process of auditioning, sometimes numerous times for the same role over a period of days or weeks, is part of our 10,000 hours. The jobs you don’t get, the pilots never seen, the films never issued, the plays on nights when your cast outnumbers the people in the seats—those are all part of it, too.
All of this is important to impress on people interested in an actor’s life, but frankly it doesn’t
make for compelling reading, which is why a couple of decades here will go largely unaddressed as to specifics. But there were jobs that stood out: Shooting Disney’s Adventures of Huck Finn on the banks of the Mississippi with my hero Jason Robards, Robbie Coltrane, Courtney B. Vance and Elijah Wood. Recurring roles in wildly different shows: Eunetta T. Boone’s One on One; J. J. Abrams’s Felicity; David E. Kelley’s Ally McBeal and Boston Legal; Mara Brock Akil’s The Game and James Duff’s The Closer/Major Crimes. The quirky and occasionally brilliant SciFi series, courtesy of Mark Sumner and Javier Grillo-Marxuach called The Chronicle, in which I played Sal the Pig Boy—literally a man who was half pig, half person, and who worked at a Weekly World News–type tabloid.
Savage Steve Holland brought me into the cast of Terrible Thunderlizards, the much-mourned cult animated comedy that had spun off his equally beloved Eek! the Cat, co-developed with Bill Copp. That would lead to virtually a second career in voice work for shows such as Disney’s Emperor’s New School, Nickelodeon’s Robot and Monster and my particular favorite, Dan Vs. created by Dan Mandel and Chris Pearson in which I played one of the great antiheroes of my career. Dan, the angriest little man in the world who was abetted—or more often rescued—by his best friend, Chris (voiced by Dave Foley) and Chris’s secret agent wife, Elise (Paget Brewster). For more than a decade as of this writing, the voice job that keeps on giving is American Dad, Seth MacFarlane’s enduring satire. My character on the show, Snot, was created by MacFarlane for me as a tip of the hat to Booger, a character he had loved as a boy. Another benefit of longevity.
Among a dozen or so films during this period, two remain remarkable for the very best reasons: Ray, Taylor Hackford’s Academy Award–winning biographical drama of the life of Ray Charles. Cast in a straight dramatic role as the legendary head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, I was given some of the best reviews of my career. The film starred Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington and Regina King. Then there was Akeelah and the Bee, written and directed by Doug Atchison and starring Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett and Keke Palmer. Despite the Academy Award for Foxx, both films were criminally undervalued and will stand the test of time.
Sometimes when you’re deep in this kind of soup of experience it can surprise you how other people view what you do from a distance. While I had been pretty sure for decades what a nerd was, and what an actor is, it took another, younger actor, with far less experience than I at that point, to teach me what a career was.
This happened sometime in the early nineties, during a conversation one day on the set of the Fox/CW series Grounded for Life, which starred Donal Logue and Kevin Corrigan. Kevin, who had grown up with the Nerds and Savage Steve Holland films, was asking me what I’d been doing lately. The truth was, I’d been doing quite a lot. A pilot that hadn’t sold, a recurring part on one show, a guest spot on another—but somehow at that point I was discouraged about the grind of doing one substandard network piece of shit after another and never apparently getting anywhere. So as I recounted what I’d been doing as a working actor, I did so with some bitterness and, weirdly, shame. Shame because I was looking at myself through the eyes of a younger man who had grown up admiring my work and what did I have to show for it? Well, at that stage, I’d had about twenty years of near-consistent employment, but I guess I didn’t see it that way at the time. I don’t think I actually used the words “usual rubbish” to describe what I was doing at that point, but the tone I was using was unmistakable. I considered myself someone who sold out a career in the theater for good movies and television and now I had sold those out for crap movies and television. Kevin was looking at me with a curious expression during this litany of self-flagellation before saying, “You know, you do have a career that most actors my age would kill for, right?”
He said it quite seriously and it got my attention. I give you my word that until that moment I had never thought of myself as having had a career. I got that I was an actor who had spent a couple of decades acting (except when I wasn’t) and then I was trying to start acting again. But somehow I never made the connection that if you continue to do that, over and over, for years, without quitting and going into another line of work, then you have what people call a career. What Kevin was pointing out, without saying so in so many words, was that few people have careers that are composed exclusively of “career highs.” A career is much more a quantitative thing than a qualitative thing. Your “career” will start down and then go up and then down again and then up again. Unless you only do that up-and-down thing once: in that case “career” is probably the wrong word. “Dabbling” might be a better word. I had gone far, far beyond dabbling. I was a lifer. An actor whose decades of work have left him, finally, with something to show for it: a career.
SUPERNATURAL/NEW GIRL
VANCOUVER/LOS ANGELES
Strange that I should have at my fingertips the date and time of my audition for the Academy of Dramatic Art back in 1974 and yet be unable to retrieve the day or even month in 2012—May, possibly?—that Supernatural first tugged on my coat.
It was an auspicious day, at any rate. I had two auditions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. At this point in my career, more than one audition a day was an extremely rare occurrence. In this case, I had already booked an audition in the early afternoon for Liz Meriwether’s show, New Girl, which starred the inventive and adorable Zooey Deschanel.
I was having some little difficulty with the audition for New Girl. There wasn’t a lot to the role of Principal Foster and the only clue I could get as to who this man was came from the fact that he was described in the script as being a notorious “slow talker.” A slow talker? I wasn’t even sure what that meant. Surely they didn’t mean he just talked slowly. What was funny about that? For a while I wondered if that might have been a sort of snarky code for something else, like someone who has really eccentric sexual tastes. No, it appeared that that was the joke about Principal Foster. He talked very, very slowly.
Talking slowly is actually harder than you’d think if it doesn’t come naturally, and I was having some trouble nailing down this person. And it was just at that point that the second appointment came in for the morning of the same day, for a character on Supernatural called Metatron.
The idea of reading for two such wildly different and possibly recurring roles on the same day was remarkable enough. To have landed both of them was unprecedented in my experience. It was the start of a very busy four years.
Of the two shows, New Girl was definitely the least complicated from a scheduling point of view. I was usually required only one day per episode and virtually all my scenes were with Zooey, which no one in their right mind could describe as hard labor. The first time we rehearsed a scene and I looked into those eyes of hers, I forgot what stage I was on, let alone what my next line was. I have since learned that all was not sweetness and light on the New Girl set, but everyone seemed to make it their job to keep the unpleasantness away from me, like a couple whose marriage is breaking up but manage to hold it together when friends are over. Zooey was always unfailingly charming and extremely funny and very clear—in the politest but firmest of ways—when she was done with a take. In the early days, we would always complete the scene as written and then improvise it to see what else we could come up with. That would change. Toward the end of my tenure as Principal Foster on the show, I would come in to find that alternative lines—as many as five “alts”—had been written for virtually every line in the scene. This meant, practically, that a half-page of dialogue would be two pages of dialogue by the time we were finished. Almost invariably, in our scenes at least, the take chosen was the original scripted one. I have enjoyed my time on New Girl, a job that continues as of this writing, despite Principal Foster’s retirement from the school he had overseen so ineptly for so long.
As it turned out, the lightness of my schedule on New Girl was a lucky thing, because Supernatural, which I began within just a few weeks of New Girl, would prove to be a
much more involved commitment.
When Metatron, the Scribe of God, a hermit armed with a shotgun and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of books, made his first appearance, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Given everything I had seen on the page, I could see this fallen angel—eccentric, violent, articulate, unpredictable and hilarious—as being an unexpected gift to any lucky actor, even if he only lasted three episodes, which it turned out was the intention of the show’s writers at the time.
At the same time, as I flew up to Vancouver, British Columbia, to shoot my first episode, I was a little concerned about the kind of set I’d be walking onto. I had only seen a couple of episodes of Supernatural at that time, but I knew that the show’s stars, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, had been playing these parts at that point for over eight years. Misha Collins, who played the angel Castiel, had been on since season four. These, I was thinking, are young men. I imagined them bitter, bored and exhausted. I recalled countless long-running shows I’d worked on in the past and the insufferable behavior of those lucky actors whose regular employment on popular programs seemed to be the worst kind of cross to bear. Contractually obligated to play the same role for sometimes unimaginable amounts of money, they seemed to feel, was a kind of wretched suffering that people like us—mere supporting players—would never know. I knew nothing personally of these men who were already international stars thanks to Supernatural, but under the circumstances, I was prepared for the worst.
When they turned out to be professional, supportive, thoughtful and funny men who came to the set on time and prepared to work and were welcoming and generous to boot, I was flabbergasted.
More astonishing still was realizing that the absolute believability Jared and Jensen brought to playing brothers Sam and Dean Winchester extended to their real life as well. I would say that they are as close as brothers but I understand from people who have brothers, like my sister, that you really want to kill your brother most of the time. One of these men and his wife actually moved to Texas to be closer to the other man and his wife. During my final episode on the show, we had a four-day weekend and the two of them took off with a friend of theirs into the wilderness to fish and shoot at exploding targets. (“Yep,” said Jensen to me when they returned, “a real redneck holiday.”) They don’t argue, at least not publicly. They are two good-natured, even-tempered Texas men who found themselves on a show that appears to be running forever and who are smart enough to realize a good thing when it’s handed to them. And it is their warmth and generosity of spirit that sets the tone for the remarkable Supernatural conventions. These are not Comic-Con–like conventions where there is a booth and panel dedicated to Supernatural—these are three-day Supernatural conventions, attended by all of the series stars, plus assorted guest stars and occasionally writers and producers as well. Thousands of people attend them, and they are held not just domestically, but internationally. And the actors appear at these conventions ten times a year, all over the world. And what makes all of that possible—the money, the travel, the private jet—is the fandom.
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