CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Burt Reynolds Prophecy
I NEVER DID MUCH TV, BUT I DID WORK FOR HARRY THOMASON AND Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who did Designing Women and Evening Shade with Burt Reynolds. In 1989, when they first started doing the Burt Reynolds show, Evening Shade, there was this casting director who was always really good to me. Her name was Fran Bascom. I was living in Glendale, sleeping on a blow-up mattress on the floor at my friend’s house, when Fran called me one morning at, like, eight-thirty. She said, “Can you be at CBS over in the Valley at ten? They need somebody to play a florist in this pilot for this new Burt Reynolds sitcom.”
Years ago, before I was ever thinking about being an actor, my mom told me that one of these days Burt Reynolds was going to be “instrumental” in my life. I’m like, What the fuck does that mean? She didn’t know. I thought that maybe Mom’s psychic abilities were off the mark on this one.
Anyway, Fran Bascom said, “They need somebody to audition, and I think you’re going to get this, you just need to meet with the director. But I’m going to need you to get over there now.” I said, “Yeah, okay.” So I hauled ass over to Harry Thomason’s office, where I met with the director for the episode, who happened to be Charles Nelson Reilly. I talked to him for a couple of minutes, and he said, “There are, like, seven, eight, maybe ten lines at the most.” Then he read the lines with me. I went in thinking, I’m the last son-of-a-bitch in the world they need to be a florist, but what they were really looking for was a flower delivery boy. That made more sense to me. In fact, after we were done reading lines and he said, “You’ve got a job!” in that way Charles Nelson Reilly used to talk, I went over to the wardrobe people, who just kind of looked at me and said, “Yeah, what you’re wearing is good.”
I got on the set that night and looked around. Sitting up in the stands for the rehearsal, I saw Dom DeLuise, Doug McClure, and Rip Taylor. Then I saw Ossie Davis, Ann Wedgeworth, Elizabeth Ashley, Hal Holbrook, Charles Durning, Burt Reynolds, Marilu Henner, and all these people. I thought, Shit, Burt Reynolds brought all his pals out to see the show. I didn’t know they were all in it. I was just thrilled being around all those guys. I was always a fan of character actors, and here on this set were a bunch of the best ones. I’m like, This is high-dollar shit here.
That night we shot the show in front of a live audience. My scene was with Burt. The scene was about the father’s grave or something like that, it wasn’t funny. More of a functional scene, really. So I went up on the porch, Burt came to the door, I handed off the flowers, said my lines the only way I knew how—which was to just say them—then I came off the stage to see Hal Holbrook standing there.
“Son, come here a minute,” he said, “I want to talk to you.” I thought, Oh great. I fucked up and Hal Holbrook is mad at me. But he calls me around the corner—they’re still shooting while this is going on—and he whispers to me, “Son, let me tell you something. I’ve been an actor for forty-eight years (or whatever), and that was one of the finest, most natural pieces of acting that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, right there.” My knees were shaking and shit. Hal Holbrook was fucking Mark Twain, Jesus! I was like, “Thank you, sir.” All he said was, “I know you only did eight lines here, but I think you got something,” and with that, Hal Holbrook became another guy who affected me in a major way. Once again, encouragement.
All those guys from that show were really nice to me. They even brought me back to play the lead guest star, twice. We did one episode in a courtroom, and the bailiff was a guy named Alvy Moore, who played Hank Kimball, the county agent on Green Acres who used to say, “Well, I’m not exactly the county agent …” That guy. So here were all these big famous actors, and I just stood in a corner with the guy from Green Acres all day. Most people on the set didn’t even know who he was, but I’m like, “That’s fucking Hank Kimball from Green Acres! Don’t you know your ass from your elbow?”
That rolled over into Linda Bloodworth and Harry Thomason asking me if I would like to star in their new show Hearts Afire with John Ritter and Markie Post. I accepted, and on the show I got real close with John. I knew he had been on TV, but I never did watch Three’s Company a lot. I just didn’t watch the sitcoms of the late seventies through the eighties. Sitcoms kind of got over for me right after All in the Family and Sanford and Son.
Anyway, John was known as a sitcom guy—he was a very boy-next-door type—but he had a real sick sense of humor. Real funny and real dark. He was the first guy I put into Sling Blade.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sling Blade
Takin’ those curves just laughin’ at fate
Got a big destination that just won’t wait
—“Four Wheel Blacktop Tragedy”
(Thornton/Andrew)
I WANT YOU TO DO THIS MOVIE I’M WRITING,” I SAID TO RITTER. “I think it’s pretty good. I want you to play the part of this gay guy from St. Louis who now lives in this little town.” He said, “Yeah, okay, whatever you want, I’ll do it.” He thought it was just some horseshit that I was shooting on the weekend.
I wrote Sling Blade by myself, and nobody wanted to do it. Then I got a call from my agent at William Morris, who said, “This guy that runs a little company in New York, the Shooting Gallery, he hates the Hollywood system as bad as you do. I think you guys should talk. You’d like each other.”
So this kid, Larry Meistrich, and I sat in this boardroom thing, and he said, “Look, your agent is a cool dude, and he seems to think you got some talent. We don’t have any money to pay anybody, but I’ve seen One False Move and I loved it. If you have anything you’d like to do …” Larry Meistrich and these other kids were all production assistants in New York, and some of their dads had money, so they put stuff on their credit cards and made a movie for $60,000.
So I said, “Well, there’s this one thing,” and right there at the boardroom meeting table I did the character from Sling Blade, which I used to do onstage for my one-man show.
“I want to do a movie about this guy,” I said. He said, “I’ll do it. I can’t pay you any money, but I will pay you 50 percent of the revenue.” I said, “All right.”
When it came time to shoot, Ritter couldn’t look at me—he’d never seen the character, nobody did. I purposely didn’t do the character for the people in the movie, Dwight Yoakam included. So the first time Ritter saw me do the character was actually in the movie, and the first scene I shot with him was the one where we’re in the café sitting across the table from each other and he tells me he’s gay. After he sat down, I went in there, sat down, and started doing that character. Ritter just busted up. He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “But this is the character.” He said, “You can’t make that face, I’m going to laugh every minute.” I said, “John, I’m not making a face, that’s the guy.” And he goes, “You’re going to be like that the whole movie?” And I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “I can’t do this. I can’t do this sitting across from you knowing that it’s you. I can’t do this.” I said, “Look, you’ll get used to it, don’t worry about it.” He finally got over it, but the first day was hard because he couldn’t keep a straight face.
We made Sling Blade for $980,000 and sold it to Harvey and Bob Weinstein over at Miramax for $10 million. I think it was the most money ever paid for an independent film at that point. The Weinsteins know what’s good, and they pushed a lot of good movies through that wouldn’t have otherwise been seen by the broader public, like Sling Blade. I think Dwight knew Sling Blade was something different. I don’t think Ritter knew what it was.
DWIGHT YOAKAM ON SLING BLADE
Have I ever seen Billy Bob Thornton eat? Non-intravenously? I’m trying to remember. Maybe. Once. No, he spit that out, actually.
When I first got the Sling Blade script from Billy, I said, laughing at the outrageous reality of it, “My feeling is on Doyle, that character, he’s the most frightened guy in the room. As with most bullies, they’re bullying because the be
st defense is an offense.” That’s kind of how it was written. If you look at the character Doyle’s fear points, when he’s first introduced to everybody, he’s afraid of this guy that’s “retarded.” “What kind of retard is this? Is this retard going to make me sick?” It was completely based out of reality. The entire screenplay had such an absence of cliché that it was profoundly undeniable as an important kind of cultural observation in film. At the time we were making it, it was left to its own devices. Nobody knew we were making it, nobody cared that we were making it, nobody knew Billy Bob at that time. He hadn’t blown up as an artist. He had acted a number of years on TV, but the public and the industry didn’t know him and didn’t know he was capable of doing what we were doing down there in Arkansas, and I really believe that’s why the movie was so effective. It maintained self-irony without descending into petty self-awareness. Colloquial dramas like that can become laughable. The comedic elements that were involved, there were things that were laughably funny in Sling Blade. That Doyle character, the first time I read the role, I was on the phone with my then-girlfriend, who lived in New York, and she thought something had happened. I stopped, I couldn’t read after a moment because I was literally succumbing to the humor, the absurdity involved in the writing, and the outrageous reality of it. Because it was a guy, not written as an evil guy. It was just one of those guys that Billy knew or I knew that was really tough probably until it came to something that made him about to throw up, wet his drawers, and Doyle also was living in his own fear all the time. He was the most frightened guy in the film. That’s what I said to Billy, I said, “Is that the conceit we can approach this with?” and he said, “Yeah.” Backing away from the elements of that character, the genius of that movie to me is that it captured Southern culture without succumbing to the kind of grandiose trappings of it. Even Tennessee Williams presented Southern culture in context, but a kind of Gothic portrayal of the South. There’s a melodramatic note in Southern culture, but there’s, in Billy’s interpretation of things, this wonderfully kind of absurdist, banal, flat-line pulse that he captured in that screenplay. As I said, if he could only win one of the two Oscars that he was nominated for, I was thrilled that he got the Oscar for screenplay. I knew he would be nominated again as an actor, and I just thought that it’d be tough to win both. When he won the one, I thought, that’s the right one here, if he doesn’t win the other one.
I was given the short he did a couple of years earlier, which was an outgrowth of his one-man monologue that he would do onstage as an exercise and as a performance. He would do Karl in the interrogation scene with the journalist, about being released. That was then stretched out into about a twenty-five- or thirty-minute short called Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade. Billy reshot all that. That was the opening of the movie, literally up to the part where he gets out of the mental institute. I saw that and went and met him. I said, “If this has anything to do with what that was, I’m interested.” He said, “I’m finishing the script, the feature-length version, and I do have a role I think you could pull off because people have never seen you do this.” At that point I think I had done five films. I don’t know if he saw me in Roswell, but anyway, we met and we hung out. It was on the set of Hearts Afire, in the dressing room on the set when he was shooting that TV series with John Ritter. He said, “I’ve written something really great for John Ritter in this,” and he explained some of that character. It was hilarious. And John did an exceptional job playing that role. If it had been pushed or shoved or nudged too far one way or the other, it would not have resonated as earnestly. So I went home, got the screenplay, read it, and I knew.
I got the script and read it in January or February. We didn’t get to go shoot until May. I arrived a few days into the shooting, and Billy said they were holed up doing editing of dailies in a bank office, some bank building, not in the vault but they were in an adjacent room in the bank where they were being loaned space. They didn’t have any trailers, they didn’t have any dressing rooms, they strung up sheets, so he said, “Do you want to watch some of the dailies?” and I said, “Sure.” He played a couple scenes—they had been shooting four days—and that’s when I got on the phone back to L.A. and told my then–office manager, I said, “I’m in something pretty real here. This may be something that really makes a mark, that really has an impact on film viewers.” It then took another year and a half to get it done, to get it sold. He sold it to Miramax in the spring of ’96. It was almost a year later, and they held it until the fall of ’96, actually December of ’96 it came out. It came out Thanksgiving week in just small theaters, and it qualified, and then they ran it for the Academy Awards.
It’s really tough for Billy to collaborate with film companies. It has been and will be because it’s such a seminal, almost singular cultural moment, that film, a statement of culture. It so captured the nuance of Southern American culture, and because it was so absent the kind of grandiose, Gothic, Tennessee Williams–esque proscenium presentation of it all. It transcended Southern culture and really captured American rural and common culture. Working-class culture in America. I’ve had people from Wisconsin to Washington State to Maine to Texas say, “My brother-in-law is just like that guy.” So it resonated, and ironically, it didn’t get the kind of huge box office push it might have now or otherwise. It sort of had its longer-lasting impact, I’ve found, in the ensuing years on television when people would watch it on DVD.
It’s a great role. On the page it was brilliantly written. There were only two ad-libs, and he let me do them. One was on the floor after the kid, Lucas Black, ran out of actual prop material to throw, so he started throwing real books and real things, and I got hit a couple times with some real stuff. I was on my knees, and I looked down and the ad-lib was, “Fuck me.” He left that. And there were a couple of other moments—the blow-up scene with the band. I think “you tuning son-of-a-bitch” was not on the page. It was such a gracious script for an actor. I think every actor involved would say that. Every character written in there, from the character that Rick Dial—God rest his soul, he recently passed—he played the lawn mower shop owner who told the joke about two guys peeing off the bridge and Karl tried to repeat later. There was the Scooter role. Billy deftly executes one of the great watercolor cinematic paintings in terms of every nuanced piece of dialogue, the way that Lucas Black’s character Frank speaks with Karl. The way Karl speaks with Frank, the way I speak with Frank—“Frankie, the adults are talking.” “You’re a weird little shit, Frank.” All that was just singularly unique in its ability to capture and convey the absurdly banal and often tragic existence of common lives.
I don’t think Sling Blade aspired to the moralizing heights that To Kill a Mockingbird did. To Kill a Mockingbird, in a strange way, doesn’t have the gravitas of Sling Blade. Because it doesn’t ever make an attempt to preach or condescend in any moment. Sling Blade is like Hud, although I think Sling Blade had a greater cultural access point than Hud. There’s a duality to him and to life, Hud, Doyle, in this, that you actually, while not approving of him, you can’t help but like him. “I don’t approve of you at all, Hud, but I like you and I feel sorry for you.” There’s a sorrow to that guy Hud. There’s a sad tragedy to that guy. I believe it’s true what they say about directing—that 90 percent of great directing is casting properly. I believe that with everything. I don’t know what Billy feels, but I would think he would think that you can only do so much if it’s the wrong person cast.
We weren’t friends before Sling Blade. He didn’t know me. I’d never met him. First of all, I said, “Somebody’s yanking your chain.” I said that to Darris Hatch, my then-theatrical manager who had been my agent for a year. She said, “You’ve got to set that meeting up, for Billy Bob,” and I’m like, “Hold it. This is someone yanking my chain. Ain’t nobody named Billy Bob in Los Angeles that’s writing movies and putting me in them. They’re pulling on the cowboy hat wearing hillbilly singer’s chain. Boy wants to be in a movie,
tell him Billy Bob wants to meet him.”
The funniest thing that ever happened with me with Billy Bob was the movie Don’t Look Back, an HBO film, and he had me cast in it—that was after Sling Blade—before it came out. We were acting this scene where he kills my character, who was as nervous as a cat. We’re about to play billiards, and he stabs me to death with a cheese knife. So they put blood capsules in my mouth so they could do it. They did a couple of dry takes. They had replaced the first director, and the guy they brought in was this colorful English director. Billy and I were in the middle of this scene, and they had overfilled my mouth with makeup blood. Billy and I were literally inches apart, face-to-face, and this is a guy who is completely, utterly germ-aware. And he said something and did something, and it was a blown take. He had stabbed at me, and I couldn’t catch myself and blurted out an entire mouthful of makeup blood. He had it all over his face, all over his chest, it dripped down his face, and I couldn’t stop laughing because I knew how horrified he was. It’s spilling out of my mouth, saliva and makeup blood that I had been holding in my mouth for about a minute and a half, waiting for this take, and it was literally like somebody had come along with a gun nozzle and sprayed him to the wall. The horror on his face—I was on the floor on my hands and knees trying to cough, to choke from laughing, cough, and saying I was sorry at the same time. I was so sorry, and the more I said it, the more I laughed because I knew how horrified he was by the element of … God bless him, I guess he didn’t become sick from it, I was germ-free to some extent, but still, the idea of him in that clumsy moment, he had stabbed at me already, and I had jerked away because I was choking because the guy had filled me up with too much blood. It was a series of things that led up to this split-second moment where I literally sprayed him with spit and makeup blood. And the horror of that was the funniest thing I’ve ever witnessed with Billy Bob Thornton, and the ensuing attempt at apologizing on the floor when I was literally coughing up makeup blood and laughing incessantly. I was like a hyena. The second it happened, it’s like a sneeze that goes off and you’ve got a mouth full of food with a sneeze, it’s the equivalent of, “Oh shit, I’m going to sneeze, and I have this mouth full of food, and I can’t sneeze and HUYYAHHH!” There’s no delicate way for that to come off, and it went face-first into him. He asked me, “What was the funniest thing that you ever saw happen to Billy Bob?” I said, well, I was a party to it. That, to this day, is still the funniest moment. That and the Gary Busey moment that I can’t go into. Gary Busey was telling me a very funny story about Strother Martin doing something to him, and in the process of telling it Gary Busey proceeded to goose Billy Bob up his ass and walk him around the room with his hand on his ass. Again, it was a moment if he would have had a hatchet, he would’ve chopped his way out of it. At the moment there weren’t any hatchets available, and he couldn’t get away from the storytelling hand of Gary Busey.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 14