CHAPTER THIRTY
John Ritter
WHEN RITTER FIRST GOT THERE, WE WERE STAYING AT THE RAMADA Inn in this little town we were shooting in, Benton, Arkansas. We had a makeup girl and then a hair girl. The hair girl really didn’t do hair, she did makeup, but we didn’t have a lot of money for anything and she was friends with the girl doing makeup. Her name’s Kate, good gal, now she’s a huge makeup artist. So I told Kate, “Look, here’s what we want for Ritter. I want you to give him a kind of flattop or one of those hairdos that goes up in the air like gay dudes have. Something kind of hip-looking … but not quite.”
Here’s the story: Ritter’s character is a gay man from St. Louis who works for a chain of Dollar Stores. They transfer him to this little town in Arkansas. We never said it was Arkansas, but it was a little state. Anyway, he still gets all the magazines he subscribed to in St. Louis—GQ and shit like that—in this little one-horse town. He takes his copy of GQ down to the local barber shop, and he shows them a picture and says, “I want to look like that.” So it’s Peggy from Millsburg’s version of this GQ haircut.
“I want it dyed,” I told Kate, “and I want him to be blond.” And Ritter goes, “Well, I got to do something when I get back to L.A.” He had to do some public service announcements for something, I can’t remember what they were for, but he said, “Don’t go too crazy with it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
So, we’re in his motel room at the Ramada Inn, and he’s sitting there. There’s no mirror in front of us. Kate dyes his hair first. It comes out red and black. It’s, like, maroon and black in the movie, but you know hair dye—when you first do it, it takes a couple of hours before it settles in. Then she cuts his hair. She gives him fucking whitewalls on the side and a flattop standing straight up in the air, and I look at Kate and say, “This is perfect. This is fucking genius. I had no idea it was going to be this perfect.” Ritter, all excited, goes, “What? What is it? Let me see!”
Ritter goes and looks in the mirror. “I’m going to fucking kill you!” he says. “I look like an idiot! Do you understand that I have to fucking be on television when I get back?!”
“No, this is perfect, it’s ideal! This is going to be great! You’re going to love it.” After the movie was over, he appeared on the PSA for whatever it was with a Dodgers cap.
RITTER WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST FUCKING GUYS. YOU TALK ABOUT A shock when he died.
We had just played Farm Aid in Columbus, Ohio, that past weekend, and I got the flu real bad. I was sick as shit. Columbus was our last date, but I was so sick I couldn’t come home after the show. I had to stay in the hotel room there for two or three more days by myself. Everybody else left. (Thanks, guys.) When I got off the stage after the show, Stephen Bruton was there with me, as was Jim Marshall, the photographer. Marshall took pictures of me with Bruton and Dennis Kucinich, the guy that ran for president—he was Willie Nelson’s candidate because he was all for pot—standing between the buses and stuff.
Anyway, I was getting sick already and my lungs were on fire. Warren Zevon was my buddy, and he was real sick at that time with lung cancer—that mesothelioma or whatever it was he had. After Marshall took these pictures, I did an interview, and they told me Warren had just died. I think that was on Sunday.
I get over this flu enough to fly home. A couple of nights later, I get this call from Jerry, my business manager—who was also Ritter’s manager—at midnight. He was all emotional. “We’ve lost John,” he said. “We’ve lost John.” It didn’t make any sense to me. I was thinking of my brother because my brother’s name is John, so I said, “What do you mean lost him? Where the fuck is he?” And he, knowing I didn’t understand, goes, “No, John Ritter. We lost him.” And I’m still not understanding, because when somebody tells me “we lost” somebody, it means they’re in Bakersfield and won’t tell anybody. “John died,” he says.
Dwight called me literally thirty seconds into the conversation with Jerry. Dwight was just calling to bullshit—we talk late at night all the time—and I said, “Dwight, hang on a second, Ritter just died, I’ll call you right back.”
I got off the phone with Jerry and got back on with Dwight. We talked for three hours about Ritter. But then I woke up the next morning, Johnny Cash had died. The very next morning. Warren Zevon, John Ritter, and Johnny Cash within, like, five days. I was friends with all those guys. Particularly Warren and John, but I knew Cash very well. It was just a strange week.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
You People
There’s a life not built for your convenience
And things that happen naturally
That we call experience
—“Look Up” (Thornton/Andrew)
WHEN I FIRST GOT NOMINATED FOR AN ACADEMY AWARD, THE FIRST two people who called me were Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck. I couldn’t believe it, could not believe it.
Though I hadn’t been famous long, my birthday appeared on the news, on the bottom of the crawl, and I got this voice mail:
“I just wanted to call and say happy birthday, hoss. Waylon Jennings. Give me a call back. I love your movies. That Sling Blade, that’s something else, man. You hit a home run there, son. Give me a call, hoss, happy birthday.”
That was on my voice mail. I called him back, and that’s how I got to know Waylon. I loved Waylon. Out of all four of those guys, Willie, Waylon, Cash, and Kris Kristofferson, Waylon was the one I could talk to the easiest. I was always nervous around Cash. I always feel dumb around Kris.
RIGHT AFTER WE’D MADE SLING BLADE, I MET A VERY FAMOUS MOVIE actress and singer at a party with a lot of big stars. That was when I was first getting around big Hollywood people. She was telling me how much she loved Sling Blade—such an interesting world, she said, a world she knew nothing about. She said the movie was beautiful and went on and on about it. But then she said, “So where are you from again?” And I said, “Arkansas.” And she said, “What do you people do down there?” She actually said, “What do you people do down there?”
After years and years of living in California and becoming more sophisticated myself, I’d kind of gotten over a lot of my insecurities and low self-opinion about feeling that I’m some hillbilly who has no business being out here. I mean, I went from being this three-year-old kid running around with a fucking World War I gas mask on, getting his ass beat with a razor strap, pissing in the yard, watching knife fights with my uncle, living among people who nail their wives up in the house and make their kids eat mustard and biscuits, to a guy standing in a major party in Malibu with all these big stars—I remember Mel Gibson was there, and Lionel Richie was playing piano—and there I was, being asked by this very rich, enormously famous singer-actress person, “What do you people do down there?”
After that night I told somebody the story, and they said she was raised kind of normally—she wasn’t like some rich sophisticate—so it was more like the regional thing than it was the money thing. She just didn’t know that world I came from, but to actually have somebody say that to me—it made me think about the different ethnic groups who have had that said to them before. “You people.” I’ll never forget it because it made me feel like, “Oh yeah. I forgot. I’m still just a hillbilly from Arkansas.”
Anyway, I remember afterward going outside and having a smoke by myself on this big veranda. The house was out by a hill and the ocean, and I was kind of just walking around, looking out at Malibu, thinking, Goddamn. You know? It still shows, don’t it?
I’ve never gotten over it. Not her comment—I’m not that fucking thin-skinned—but I’ve never gotten over my belief that I’m not as good as most people. I still have a real low opinion of myself. As I said, my belief in myself—which has gotten me to this point—has a lot to do with ignorance. Sometimes I just don’t know any better. People used to ask, “When you came to California, if it was so fucking hard all those years, why didn’t you go back?” I’d say, “What would I go back to?” It w
asn’t like it was any better for me back there. I was broke as shit when I came to California. But if I had known how long it was going to take … I don’t know, I always thought tomorrow was the day. I’ve thought that since I was a little kid. I always thought that tomorrow everything’s going to be all right. I’m still kind of like that. I’m the most pessimistic optimist you’ll ever meet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Viva la Independence
THE REASON SOME PEOPLE CAN’T ARTICULATE WHY THEY LIKE INDEPENDENT films as opposed to commercial films is that in the independent film it’s about the people who are involved in it, not just Handsome Actor X. If you watch these standard $100 million action movies, more often than not Handsome Actor X is there to kill all the bad guys and ends up doing the thing he’s set out to do, get out of the pickle he’s in, save whatever it is he’s supposed to save, get the dope, get the money, or whatever it is. The bad guys are nameless, faceless characters who you know goddamn well are just going to get killed by Handsome Actor X. It’s not important who they are or where they came from, so as a result you’re not afraid of the bad guy, and the feeling you get from the commercial movie is not profound.
But if you see a mobster in a movie sitting down to dinner with his family, playing with his son, giving him a toy—a little rabbit or some shit—talking to his wife about how the power’s out in the garage, all of a sudden you got a real guy. If you got three scenes of a real guy playing with his kids, fixing the garage door opener, watching Lucy and Desi on TV, and laughing at it because Lucy got into another mess and Ricky ain’t going to let her sing, and then getting in his Cadillac to drive across town where he goes to a building and waits around the corner for a woman in a red dress who comes walking out and he comes up behind her and puts a .22 caliber hollow-point in the back of her head, then fixes his briefcase and gets back into his car, you’re scared of that motherfucker—all because he gave the kid the rabbit. If you never saw him give the kid the rabbit, you’re not afraid of him because he ain’t real.
There are things that they market the shit out of that make a lot of money. There are things that aren’t marketed that sometimes do well and sometimes don’t. We rely on critics and awards for these kinds of movies to take off because they’re not going to put big money toward marketing them. But you can’t really rely on marketing anyway. When I did Sling Blade, I thought the critics would love it, but I thought maybe my mom, a few family members, and friends would see it. I thought it was going to be one of those little movies that a handful of people saw and liked. It turned out to be hugely successful. Because then critics weren’t snot-sucking guys on the Internet and it got good word of mouth.
I’ve got a couple of things so far that have become iconic in some way, and that’s been a great thing. Especially since I’m alive to see it. But I was lucky that I became a legitimate movie star. Most people become movie stars because of the way they look—they’re twenty-three and look like models—but I became a movie star by playing extreme characters from the beginning, which allowed me a lot of freedom. It gave me longevity, because while an audience might accept me as a leading man, I can go back and play an extreme character again because that’s the way audiences first came to know me. They’ll buy me doing a guy in Monster’s Ball and The Man Who Wasn’t There, but they’ll also buy me as a character actor in A Simple Plan or Sling Blade.
I think everybody has at some point done movies for money. When you watch an actor do a movie that’s obviously not their bag, you’ll see them use the same tricks in that movie as they did in that other movie they did for money because their heart and soul aren’t in it.
I honestly feel bad for the top leading actors who want to explore other characters and do independent films when the audience only wants to see them be the handsome hero. The audience just won’t buy them doing other stuff.
But the reason actors want to do independent films is that an independent film—and this is the artistic part of it—is usually more narrowed down to a singular vision. It’s more pure, and it’s going to tell the best story. And when you’re doing an independent film, you can cast the best actors for parts. In a commercial film, because of the money they’re spending, they want the guy who was just in that $500 million movie. The movie that you’re making for $4 million, they don’t give a shit as much, though even that is changing.
INDEPENDENT FILM HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST TEN OR TWELVE YEARS. When I started out in it, it was completely pure. It got soiled when actors saw they were making these great films that used to be called “B movies,” and all of a sudden they’re called “independent” and have a cachet. The studios say, “Well, we can’t pay you.” And the actor says, “That’s okay, I’ll do it for nothing because I want to be in a good film. The last movie I was in, I was playing a dog that turns into a Martian, and I don’t want to do that shit anymore.”
So they’re now going to do an independent film because they want to use their acting chops and be in a great film that tells a real story. Then the independent film studios say, “Look, we don’t have to go get the big actor for $10 million anymore. We can make a $3 million movie, and because he or she wants to make a good movie, they’ll come do it for nothing.” All of a sudden, instead of the $5 million independent film having a bunch of unknowns and maybe a couple of guys you’ve heard of before, even the hatcheck girl is being played by a big movie star. I’m not saying independent film is completely ruined. I’m just saying it’s gone down the wrong path. If you’re going to make the independent film the same way you make the commercial movie, then what’s the point?
MY BEST ADVICE FOR A YOUNG FILMMAKER OR ACTOR, MUSICIAN, OR writer who doesn’t give a shit—the guy who just wants to go out there and make a movie with a bunch of toys and shit like that—is to spend your life doing the physics of it. Find out what button it is that you push out here that makes you a star.
I’ve always admired William Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Bridge Too Far, and many other movies. He wrote a book called Adventures in the Screen Trade, so if you want to be a screenwriter, read that book. He’ll tell you what it’s like dealing with people. It was something that was invaluable to me and to Tom Epperson when we were coming up. It’s kind of the bible for screenwriters in a lot of ways. The book doesn’t tell you how to write a screenplay, it tells you what it’s like once you do start going down that path.
Right now, they’re making 3-D vampire movies, or they’re making CGI movies where they give a guy a six-pack abdomen with a computer. They’re making movies that are basically from video games and directing them at fourteen-year-olds. Well, if that’s what you want, if you could give a shit about art, and if all you want is to make a movie that’s going to make a gajillion dollars and make you the biggest director of horseshit in the world, then sit down and figure out the science of it. Go see the worst fucking shit you’ve ever seen in your life—watch all the horseshit that’s out there—and copy down that formula. It won’t take you long. Just know that whereas a commercial film is trying to appeal to a broad audience, an independent film usually does not appeal to the lowest common denominator.
But I would tell young filmmakers who love movies that independent film is still the best way to break in. That’s where you’ll do your best work. People may not like it, they may like it and not like you in it, but one way or the other, it’s honest. That’s why people do independent film, because you can be honest. Even though I said these days they’ve been ruined some because they’re becoming commercialized, independent film still allows you to start out as an expert in what you’re doing—to direct or write or act in the vein you grew up in. As I said, your best work is going to be what you know. If you’re a writer, just sit down and write a short story about something that happened to you when you were twelve, I don’t care what it is. Like, if you’re a guy who grew up on a farm in Georgia, write about a farm in Georgia. You’ll be an expert in that.
The Coen brothers, u
ntil recently, haven’t really done their movies in a studio system. Their movies are generally financed outside the box by people who get them, and they’ve had financial successes doing movies that became bigger movies than what the concept might’ve been. In other words, the Coen brothers don’t set out to make a big commercial movie, though now they have with True Grit and the Cormac McCarthy thing. They did set about to make bigger movies there.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Black and White
THE COEN BROTHERS ARE SOME OF THE GREATEST PEOPLE TO WORK with, they’re amazing. They know just what they want. I do quite a bit of improvisational acting in movies, but the couple of times I’ve been in a Coen brothers movie I did pretty much what they said. I improvised a little bit in Intolerable Cruelty. In that movie, they told me to throw out a couple of things that I wanted to do, but their stuff is so tightly written that you don’t have to ad-lib. You don’t find the need to.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 15