The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  The point of acting, if you’re looking to do good acting, is to be realistic, to make it look natural. If you’re studying to be natural, you’ve already fucked up. It’s like somebody’s telling you to take a creative writing course. How do you teach someone to be a creative writer? It’s not possible. It’s like the old joke about military intelligence. So if an acting teacher says, “I’m going to teach you how to be natural,” then you’re screwed.

  I speak at different acting groups sometimes, and acting teachers love it when the first thing I tell the students is, “Ignore as much of this shit as you can.” Either you’re an actor or you’re not an actor, and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it. Brando was great just by being Brando. If he was a dishwasher and he came out to bus your table, you’d watch him all the way back to the kitchen and be like, “What was that?”

  In terms of acting process, you have a lot of really respected acting coaches and teachers, like the late Lee Strasberg, who really know their shit. They have some good ideas. But I think the way that acting classes can be best put to use is thinking of them as a place to work out. It’s like if you’re a musician and you’ve got nowhere to play, but somebody’s willing to let you come to their little workshop singing group every other week and play your songs. Now you have a place to work out and do your shit. Maybe you won’t get better at it, but you’ll get more comfortable. Acting classes are invaluable in that sense.

  So I go into Widlock’s class the first time, and I sit in the back of the class, like I used to do in Maudie Treadway’s acting class when I was sixteen. But now I’m actually watching all these actors going up there and doing scenes and monologues. The class is interesting enough that I come in a second time to watch for free, and this time, after class, I go up to Widlock to talk with him.

  “Look,” he says to me, “here’s what you gotta do if you really want to join the class: either prepare a monologue or get someone from the class or whatever to prepare a scene with you and come back next week to do it. We’ll see from there.”

  I knew I was being auditioned to see if he thought I was worthy of being in his class. It was like forty or fifty bucks a class, which to me was like $1.2 million, but I go back to my cousin’s place in San Bernardino, and I tell Tom, “Yeah, they told me I gotta prepare a scene or a monologue, I don’t know …”

  Tom had all these Shakespeare books lying around. So I flip through Othello and suddenly think, Oh, I know what I’ll do!

  I always wrote short stories, and in high school acting class I would do lots of characters, so I made a plan to rewrite Shakespeare using regular language. And I’d play every character.

  Othello’s a good story, I think. I know situations like that. I’ll do that one. So I start writing it down, but get lazy about twenty pages in and think, Oh fuck it, I can make the rest of it up, I know this story.

  So I go back Wednesday night to the Crossroads of the World. John, as always, is sitting up on this little platform on the stage, and he goes, “Billy, you got something?” I say, “Yeah, I got something, it’s a monologue or whatever.” When it’s my turn, I go up on the stage thinking I could do whatever the fuck I wanted because that’s what he told me. “Whatever you want to do,” he said, so that’s what I did. I rewrote Othello. The play was now called Othie and Desi, after the main characters, Othello and Desdemona, and I did it from the point of view of Iago, the bad guy, from his jail cell after everything had gone down. I called him “I-A-Go the Redneck.”

  So I start by saying, “Look, my name’s I-A-Go. I got in a lot of shit here a while back, and this is how it played out. There was a black dude named Othie, right? …” And that’s the way I did it. I played Desi as this rich chick—her dad was this rich dude, you know, Romeo and Juliet–ish—and Cassio as this real foppish kind of gay dude. At the end, I-A-Go goes, “What the hell hath thou wrought upon this girl?” or something like that, and of course Othie turns around and says, “Hey, man, I killed a bitch, can’t you see that?” I did all the different voices too.

  John stops me after I had been going for about forty minutes. Everybody had just been sitting completely still during the performance, but after John stops me, they all start applauding like crazy. Shit, I killed these motherfuckers, didn’t I? I think to myself. Then John jumps up on his perch and goes, “Wow, okay, first of all, right off the bat, I have to tell you when you do a scene or a monologue, it needs to be three to five minutes.” And I go, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that.” Then he goes, “Second of all, I’m sorry I stopped you. How much more of this is there?” I tell him, and he goes, “Come back and finish this next week if you can squeeze it down a little. But from now on, three to five minutes.”

  Then he goes, “How did you feel?” which acting teachers ask, but I didn’t know acting-teacher-speak yet, so I say, “I feel all right. I could use a cheeseburger, but other than that I’m all right, you know?” And he goes, “Did you feel you accomplished what you wanted to accomplish?” And I go, “Not yet, there’s a lot of this shit left, I mean, like you said, I’m going to come back next week.” And he says, “No, I mean, what you did here, do you feel like you accomplished something?” And I say, “Yeah, absolutely. I was just telling you a story, you know?” And he goes, “Amazing, amazing. Okay. We’ll talk later. We gotta get on to some other people.” So somebody else comes up, and they do their thing from Forty Bales of Cotton or whatever the hell it was.

  After class Widlock comes up to me and says, “I didn’t want to say this in front of everybody, but I’ve never had anybody in my class that does this kind of thing.” I’m thinking back to Maudie Treadway when he adds, “I’ve had a lot of good actors in my class, but you’ve got some kind of thing here, you’re very different. I think you should probably always stick to what you did tonight, which was original, something of your own invention. And I have a feeling that you need to write your own stuff, that you need to come up with your own characters. I don’t think you’re the kind of guy that needs to stand in the cattle call. You’re going to make your career as a true original.”

  The class after he said all that stuff to me, I say, “John, I’d love to be in this class, but I don’t have any money. I’m completely broke and rooming with my cousin in San Bernardino.” He goes, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll either pay me back or you won’t, but I think this is going to be worth it for me.”

  After that, I would take Tom’s car every Wednesday into L.A., into Hollywood, to the Crossroads of the World on Cherokee and Sunset. John Widlock became like my keeper. In Hollywood, sometimes acting teachers become your protector and your psychologist.

  John had this house over on Bronson Avenue up by the Hills that was pretty modest—a nice house, probably five or six rooms—but to me, his house was a mansion. He taught in San Francisco and L.A., so he’d go away for periods of time and would have me house-sit, which for me was this amazing luxury. He had cable television, and I watched Z Channel and I couldn’t believe it. During that time of watching Z Channel, I got into watching foreign films and all these things that I’d never really watched before. There was all this great shit that would eventually come out of that. Today Widlock’s a cattle rancher in Australia.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Let’s Don’t Start No Circus

  IN ’81 OR ’82, I JOINED A THEATER GROUP CALLED WEST COAST ENSEMBLE, where I had the great opportunity to hang out with this guy Don Blakely, who introduced me to all these great character actors like Phil Peters, Jimmy Victor, and Rip Torn. The first thing Rip Torn ever said to me was, “They told me you were from Arkansas. I’m from Texas, and I don’t like Arkansas for shit.” And I said, “Well, nice to meet you too.” Somehow through that bunch I also met Phil Bruns, a New York character actor. If you ever watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, he played Mary Hartman’s father, who on the series went crazy.

  I had some great times in the West Coast Ensemble, which I was in from 1981 through about 1987 or 1988. I’m still fr
iends with those people. I have a few friends who are leading actors. I consider Dennis Quaid and Bruce Willis good friends. I don’t see Bill Paxton that much anymore, but we came up and spent most of our time running around together in the mid- to late eighties through the early nineties, and I talk to him every now and then. But the friends that I see on a regular basis are not famous guys. The guys I was in the theater group with are the ones that come over and hang out. A couple of those guys come over just to watch movies and talk about character actors. It’s the character actors that I always loved. The guys that made me want to be an actor are the guys who were down the line on the cast list usually.

  These friends are still struggling—my age and still in acting classes. They actually have other jobs. But John Ford always had the same guys in movies, and I have a couple of guys like that I try to always get in my movies, even if it’s not a movie I’m directing. Ritchie Montgomery from Natchez, Mississippi, is one of them. Cat Daddy, as we call him, was in Monster’s Ball and Jayne Mansfield’s Car—this movie we’re working on now—and a couple of other things. Brent Briscoe is another. He’s from Sling Blade and A Simple Plan, which was the part of his lifetime. I also cast him in Jayne Mansfield’s Car. Those guys are really precious to me. As you know by now, characters are real precious to me.

  I have a friend named J. P. Shellnutt who we put in Jayne Mansfield’s Car. I admire him more than I do most people. He’s just a guy from Americus, Georgia, who lives in Houston and used to be a car broker, but he’s kind of a mythical creature. I met him through Billy Gibbons—I’ve known those guys from ZZ Top for more than thirty years, and they’ve always been real good to me. J.P. does security for us on the road—that’s his job title anyway—but he’s really just our hanging-out buddy. J.P. was sort of Gibbons’s mascot for a long time—now he’s mine, mainly. He’s the kind of character I’m drawn to.

  JIM VARNEY WAS A GOOD FRIEND AND ONE OF THE ALL-TIME GREAT character actors. He did all the “Vern” commercials and the Ernest movies, Ernest Goes to Camp and Ernest Goes to Jail. He ended up making a lot of money from it.

  Varney grew up working in a tobacco barn. He’s a descendant of the Hatfields and he and I tried to make the Hatfield and McCoy story for years. Nobody could quite get it. Varney had a DeLorean up on blocks in his yard—a DeLorean up on blocks, now that’s a hillbilly—and with all the money he had, he still lived in a three-bedroom brick house in White House, Tennessee, which was Andrew Jackson’s stopover place when he’d return to Nashville.

  He even had a bumper sticker on the back of his sports car, which said, IT’S ME, IT’S ME, IT’S ERNEST T, you know, from The Andy Griffith Show. One time he came to pick me up in front of the Loews in Vanderbilt Plaza there in Nashville. The car park guys came out, and I said, “No, he’s just picking me up.” But then I saw Varney—who kept mouthwash in the middle of the console—opening his door and spitting the mouthwash right out by the car park guy. He was just that way.

  He used to call me Elvis. One time he goes, “Hey, Elvis, I want to take you to a place that will blow your mind,” and he took me to this strip joint that was in the middle of a dirt parking lot. You’d walk through this curtain, and there was a guy behind one of those windows where you pass the money underneath. Now, this was in the mideighties, before I was famous. I was an actor, and I was in shit, but I wasn’t like Jim Varney. People in Nashville knew who he was. Anyway, we go in there, and he goes, “You’re going to love this shit, Elvis, the chicks in here are hotter than hell.” But this was in the middle of the day, and the two in the afternoon shift at a strip joint is usually not very good. I could see through the curtain, and it was just three drunks and a couple of old worn-out girls who had operation scars and shit.

  So, I was just kind of standing there in the shadows when the guy behind the window goes, “Hey, man, wait a minute, are you who I think you are?” Varney puts our five bucks or whatever underneath the thing and goes, “Yeah, but let’s don’t start no circus.”

  Varney was a real cheap tipper, and he gave the guy a dollar to keep quiet. A dollar. I used to go behind Varney all the time because his tips rattled. We’d be at the Four Seasons and Varney would give them, like, fifty cents on a $300 bill, so I’d always go behind him and put some money down because it was embarrassing. But he was the greatest guy I ever knew in my life and a great actor who got pigeonholed as that Ernest character he created, but it was fantastic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “When I Come Around”

  I can’t give up before I even try

  I can’t put on the clothes before I’m dry

  If I’m strung out before I come unwound

  Then I may end up coming back before I come around

  —“When I Come Around” (Thornton/Andrew)

  TOM AND I EVENTUALLY MOVED INTO A ONE-ROOM APARTMENT OVER on Motor Avenue that was a converted motel. Then I went to work for about a year and a half at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in Culver City, while Tom looked around for some kind of highbrowed work. He was under the impression that since he had been an English teacher back in Arkansas he was going to become an English teacher in California, until he found out that you have to take a whole other damn bunch of tests to be an English teacher in another state. Tom was smart and I was a dumb ass.

  I have dyslexia and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, so when I’m reading a book, I can’t end a paragraph on the letters th or d. So when I finish a paragraph, I have to go back up and find a word that’s soft and doesn’t have any sharp edges on it or anything that ends in a th. Like a word that ends in an f is good, or a word that ends in a b is good, so I have to go back and read the sentence that ends in a b or an f and skip to the next paragraph without, even out of the corner of my eye, seeing the th or the d again. If I read things that are bad signs for my obsessive-compulsive disorder, I have to go to the previous page, reread it, and go to the bottom of the other page without looking at the rest of that page again before I go on. It can take me a month to read two pages. My obsessive-compulsive disorder is not “I put my left shoe on first,” it’s geometrical configurations in my head. I now figure out these things naturally, so you would never know that I’m doing all these things while we’re talking. Besides, as we’re talking, these are angles that are comfortable for me right now.

  So you combine dyslexia with obsessive-compulsiveness and it gets to be some really complicated shit.

  The point is, I’d never done anything except physical labor.

  My first job was working in the grocery store that I lived by. I went in the morning or the afternoon, depending on when the guy wanted me out there at the ranch, stamping prices on cans and stocking the shelves. When I was done doing that, he sent me out to haul hay. That was a miserable fucking job. I also worked at a machine shop like out of a Charles Dickens book. That was also a miserable fucking job. I worked at a sawmill, which was a dangerous fucking job. I worked for the Arkansas Highway Department, Hot Spring County Road Department, where I drove a truck, shoveled asphalt, ran a backhoe, and hauled heavy equipment. I also worked as a carpenter and in a storm-door factory.

  Anyway, sometimes I took Tom’s car, sometimes I took the bus to Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, where I made it all the way to assistant manager, which meant I was just kind of in charge of all these eighteen-year-olds. There was a manager, who was about my age—twenty-four or something—and we were the old guys. All the rest of them were kids. It was a pretty good job, though. It got us through.

  I brought home $96 a week. We paid our $90 rent by the week for this one-room apartment with a bed and a bathroom—no kitchen or anything. It was just like the damn motel room that it used to be. Tom had a toaster oven, and we had one of those little bitty refrigerators about two feet tall, like you get in a minibar, but we didn’t have any money so we didn’t have anything to put in it anyway.

  With the six dollars we had left over after rent, we’d buy a bottle of generic rum at Lucky Supermarket and a box of powdere
d doughnuts every Friday. You’re wondering how we ate. Obviously a box of powdered doughnuts wasn’t going to hold us over. Working at Shakey’s, every day on your lunch break you made your own little eight-inch pizza. I knew Tom wouldn’t have anything to eat until Friday, so every day, instead of eating lunch, I would make this damn personal pizza at the end of the night, and instead of just making a little pepperoni pizza, I stacked everything they had on there, cooked the shit out of it, and brought it home.

  I would get home about one or two in the morning. Tom would go to sleep real early, so I’d wake him when I came in, and we’d get up and eat. At one or two in the morning, every night.

  Nobody lived in this place that Tom and I lived in but probably dope addicts and stuff—and me and Tom. Tom had decided that since I was the junior partner of the team, I would sleep on the floor because we didn’t want to sleep two guys on the same bed. I mean, I would have been happy to—I sleep on the corner anyway and I don’t move when I sleep—but Tom had decided it would be better if he slept in the bed and I slept on the floor.

  We were writing screenplays then, and on Friday nights we’d drink the rum, eat the powdered doughnuts, and talk into this voice recorder we used for writing our scripts. We started writing what was our second screenplay back then. It was called “Good Intentions,” and it was never made.

  There was this girl that was living in the building who got a crush on me. She got a big crush on me. She would kind of follow me around and stare at me. She wore a newsboy hat, jeans, a shirt, and tennis shoes, but she must have been in some type of bad accident because she was burned and horribly disfigured beyond recognition. I can’t tell you how old she was, though she seemed to be maybe in her twenties or thirties, but she was literally melted. She had no nose, a hole for a mouth, and a very high-pitched voice. She had patches of hair, but it was mostly all burned off. She had no hands—she just had two sort of knobs there at the end of her arms, like pincers. Just horribly disfigured.