There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  It was during this trip that I met (via telephone) the woman I would eventually marry. I was sitting in the bathtub of a fancy hotel in Tokyo, watching CNN and listening to Bernie Shaw as he crawled around the floor of the Al Rasheed Hotel, when the phone rang. The voice on the other end sounded as though it belonged to a beautiful young woman, and as it turned out, that was precisely the case. Christine was working for a commercial agent who had set up meetings for me in Japan. It was bizarre to think about “selling” myself as a marketable commodity to advertisers while we were in the first stages of a new war. I couldn’t help but wonder about my place in the grand scheme of things. I remember the issue came up of whether the draft might need to be reinstated if the war dragged on. As David Putnam and I were arriving at the airport for our journey home, I said quite emphatically, “I’ll go. If they call, I’ll go.” I knew that I was saying it just because it sounded good, so it was somewhat self-serving. But I meant it, too. Although my political feelings about it were not necessarily the same as my personal feelings, I believed that if the draft had been reinstated, I would have been obligated to serve, and I would have embraced that obligation. Of course, I’ll never really know what I would have done.

  I guess I was trying to take myself seriously, maybe too seriously, but then there are worse mistakes a young man can make. I was not all that sophisticated and didn’t have an extensive vocabulary. Ever since I was a kid I wanted to accept the responsibility of being an adult. I needed help, though. I needed guidance. So as I walked that day through the garden with David Watkins, one of the great artists of the medium, I solicited his opinion and advice. I told him that when I got home, I planned to shoot a 16-millimeter short film about this image in my head, the one of the two soldiers.

  “Why do it sixteen?” he asked. “Why not thirty-five-millimeter? You know, it’s not that much more expensive.”

  I felt like I’d been hit over the head with a bat. Until then, I had thought of myself as a student, someone not yet ready to embark on the journey of a grown-up filmmaker. But this simple suggestion from one of the industry’s giants changed my life. He wasn’t talking to me like a kid or a student. Implicit in his comment was the idea that we were equals. Maybe not in terms of accomplishments, but certainly in terms of potential. I don’t think he realized what he did for me in that moment, but I will forever be grateful to him.

  Practically speaking, David was right, of course. I’d planned to shoot the film in 16-millimeter partly because it was cheaper, but mainly because it seemed less pretentious. Real filmmakers shot in 35-millimeter; aspiring filmmakers settled for 16-millimeter. David Watkins understood the difference, and now so did I.

  When I got home, I poured tons of energy into my work. Along with two of my friends, I produced and starred in a play. I took an acting class with Stella Adler, and I went to work on my short film. I also began building my own production company, Lava Entertainment.

  In late January 1991, I finally met Christine in person, and we were almost instantly inseparable. We became life partners in every way imaginable. We like telling people that we were comfortably codependent. Along the way we moved in together, traveled to Asia, backpacked across Europe, and fell madly in love. I was nineteen when we met; Christine was twenty-two. Not long after we returned from Europe, I went to Indiana to meet her family. I think Christine’s father had mixed feelings about me. On one hand, he knew I had at least a shot at the brass ring, and thus might be capable of giving Christine the kind of life he naturally felt she deserved, the life any father wants for his daughter. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure he thought I was a complete Hollywood idiot, because I had no education, no practical experience, and no formal plan for achieving any of my lofty goals. This was a no-nonsense guy who had worked hard his whole life. A career firefighter, he had spent his life’s savings and much of his family’s emotional equity in a failed attempt to own and run a grocery store. When I met Christine, her family was finally coming out of the aftermath of that experience, so I was viewed by her dad as either the knight in shining armor or a flaky prince. Her family was nervous and scared and hopeful, all at the same time; I just didn’t want to let them down.

  As I think back, I realize that Christine’s dad really wanted me to marry his daughter, which was good, because I never wanted to lose her. The life Christine had known and still does know in Indiana is one of stability, unquestioning love, loyalty, and support from her family and community. I revere that quality in her and them, and I am proud to consider myself a very real part of their family.

  I always felt like I was destined for greatness2 on some level, even if I was afraid to express those feelings out loud, but I didn’t mind expressing them to Christine on our first date. It meant the world to me that she didn’t laugh. She believed me; she believed in me. She took me absolutely seriously, and I found that incredibly romantic. She was the sexiest woman I had ever met, and she was into me, which I found inordinately shocking. I remember a couple of rakes who were my friends at the time looking at Christine, and looking at me with utter stupefaction, and saying, “How did you land this girl?”

  I had no answer.

  * * *

  Not everyone was happy about my relationship with Christine. Among the skeptics was Milton Justice, a friend and one of my earliest mentors. Milton is a brilliant and creative man, a Yale-educated actor-turned-producer who earned an Academy Award in 1986 for his work on Down and Out in America, a documentary feature about the lives of transvestites and transsexuals. Milton was one of the producers of Staying Together, a movie in which I had starred in 1987, and he agreed to help me and my friends produce a play in L.A. that we wanted to act in. He would also help by producing my first short film with me, introducing me to Stella Adler, helping me land representation from what was then the biggest agency in town (Creative Arts Agency), and getting me into the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. Needless to say, he had a manifest impact both on my career and my thinking at a critical stage in my development.

  Our friendship started simply enough. Milton had produced a play that I’d been in, and as I was trying to figure out the Hollywood game of forming meaningful and important relationships, I invited him out to dinner in the hope of picking his brain and perhaps absorbing some of his wisdom. I took him to a nice restaurant, which I think he found rather charming. I was an eighteen-year-old kid, and he couldn’t believe I was paying for his dinner, since actors, especially young ones, just didn’t do that kind of thing. But there was so much value to knowing him and learning from him. And I liked him a lot, both as a person and a potential business partner.

  So we developed what I considered to be more than a friendship; it was a mentorship. Milton supported me; he believed in my ambitions and ability, and wanted to help nurture my talent, and eventually help trade on it, of course.

  Milton and I worked well together—until I met Christine. When I told him how much I cared about her, and how I planned to marry her, he was dismissive.

  “You say that about every girl.”

  “I know. But this time it’s different.”

  Not long after that, when I told Milton I didn’t want to continue carrying such large overhead expenses—I was spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month, with barely anything to show for it—he became incensed. He took it personally and walked out. And I let him go.

  We had been working out of a rent-free space, which is a funny story on a couple of levels. First, Milton and I had independently known about a postproduction facility in Hollywood called Matrix Alliance. I knew one of the guys who worked there, having worked with him on several occasions over the years. His name was Barney, and whenever I had a looping session at Matrix, Barney always seemed to be in charge. There was an upper room in the industrial area that nobody was using, and one weekend while Barney was on vacation with his family in Palm Springs, Milton and I literally moved in. We put their boxes into a storage area and turned on phones and furnish
ed the space with rented furniture; I even put some posters up on the walls. On Monday, when Barney returned, I called him in and said, “Hey, Barney, look—Lava Entertainment!” He was, like, “Oh, boy, look what you did.”

  But I calmed him down by appealing to his genuinely decent nature.

  “Please,” I said, “I can’t afford to pay for office space. Let me use it. You won’t even know I’m here. Eventually it’ll pay off, and if you need the space, just say the word and we’re gone.”

  The funny, silly, sad lesson for me probably won’t ever become the stuff of Hollywood lore that I wish it would. You see, during preparations for On My Honor, my first short film, I called virtually everyone I had ever worked with to ask for help. To a person, no one would contribute a cent, but just about everyone offered help in some way, shape, or form. Notably, Steven Spielberg offered to let me use his editing suites at Amblin on the Universal lot. I’ll never forget driving into Universal Studios with ten or so reels of film in cans in my hatchback. Those cans represented a thirty-thousand-dollar investment, and I had them cooking in the L.A. sun in my car! Regardless, here I was, a bona fide filmmaker heading for the sacred work space that Spielberg had so generously offered for my use. I found myself alone in the editing room with no idea how to load the 35-millimeter film into the Moviola in order to look at it. I was terrified that Steven would pop his head in, and I would be exposed for the neophyte/fraud/idiot that I had pretended not to be. I opened the first canister of film and picked it up incorrectly. The core of the film fell out, and there I was, sitting in a tangled ball of film. I hightailed it out of there and have only been back once, in a failed audition attempt for High Incident, Spielberg’s television show about the LAPD. Ironically, Steven told everyone in the room that he’d seen my second short film, Kangaroo Court, and that I was an excellent filmmaker.

  The point of this story is that I was too embarrassed to ask for help and too impatient to figure out a problem on my own. I believe that mistake cost me the possibility of having Steven check up on me and the untold benefit that might have come from the folks at Amblin seeing me as a familiar face around the shop. While I deeply regret my fallibility in this regard, I am grateful to Milton Justice for stepping into the breach and working with me despite my idiosyncrasies. I think today he still considers me someone he’d be willing to work with, and that thought makes me happy.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Mark Rocco, a young director, was paying for a big suite of offices adjacent to our “storeroom” office, and he was in the process of putting together a movie about homeless drug addicts. Mark, the son of actor Alex Rocco, went on to forge a reasonably successful career, highlighted by a critically acclaimed movie titled Murder in the First, which features Kevin Bacon giving perhaps the performance of his life as a prisoner on death row at Alcatraz. At the time, however, Mark was just a hungry young director, eagerly trying to make contacts and assemble projects. Judging from the traffic in and out of his office, it seemed that a key component of his strategy was to form friendships with young Hollywood actors. At first, I thought he seemed like a scurrilous individual, and I didn’t have a lot of respect for what he was doing. I knew he was planning to make a movie about street kids, and he just seemed kind of creepy.

  Oddly enough, we wound up playing basketball together on a semiregular basis. I would come out of the little cubicle that I had co-opted and play hoops with the people who were Mark’s assistants, friends, partners, and so on, and he ended up offering me a part in this movie about drug addicts and homeless kids called Where the Day Takes You. My first response was to turn down the offer, but then I agreed to do a cameo. I was trying to figure out what he was doing, and whether he had a real script, a real budget, and the ability and resources to put together a legitimate project. I had my doubts.

  “It’s union scale,” Mark said. “That’s the best I can do.”

  At this time I knew almost nothing about the fine art of negotiation. I’d had a very complicated relationship with my representatives at CAA, trying to figure out how money was made and eventually coming to the realization (obvious to anyone with a bit less naïveté) that they were more interested in making money for themselves than for me. So I was really grappling with the dynamics of what negotiations were. I was learning on my own the way things work in Hollywood—that multiple sets of books may be kept, and that on virtually every movie a quiet sort of compensation can occur. The studio has contractual obligations with the network or the producers or the distributors, and cash goes under the table, behind doors, and so on. It seems to happen on virtually every project. You just have to decide how much you want, what you think you can get, and what you’re willing to not know.

  In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly innocuous little story about a very small, independent film, a director seeming to do whatever was necessary to get his movie made, and a young actor trying to figure out how to make deals and keep his integrity while profiting at the same time.

  “I can’t give you any more money,” Mark said, “but is there anything else you’d like that would make you consider doing this? Can I give you a birthday present?”

  My thoughts turned to my younger brother, Mack, also an actor. He’d made quite a good living working on the television show The Facts of Life. Unfortunately, he’d spent most of what he’d earned by spending crazily on such things as renting an indoor hockey rink in Los Angeles just so he and his buddies would have a place to play. Mack was always begging me to join them, but there never seemed to be enough time, and anyway, I didn’t have any of the proper gear. I’d grown up playing baseball, football, and basketball. Hockey? In Southern California? It didn’t make much sense. Now, though, as Mark Rocco asked me if there was something I might need, the thought of Mack and his ice-rink buddies flashed through my mind.

  “You know, I could use some hockey equipment.”

  The next thing I knew, I was in Mark’s office, hoisting a huge black hockey bag over my shoulder, filled with top-of-the-line gear: skates, helmet, mask, pads, stick, everything. I remember the weight of that bag felt like the exact weight of compromise; it felt like the weight of having sold out. I wanted the bag and everything in it, and yet I wanted somehow to keep a firm grasp on my own integrity, and it occurred to me then that perhaps it was possible to do both. The very idea of that possibility, that moral ambiguity, confused and bothered me.

  Looking at Mark Rocco, I realized that he was a young businessman, maybe even an artist (I wasn’t sure yet), who would do whatever was necessary to get his movie made, including extending favors to his actors. Instead of despising him for it, I admired him. I even admired the fact that he’d gotten off cheap with me. That was a conscious decision: I chose to admire him, or at least that aspect of him. His determination. His will. His creativity.

  “Okay, Mark,” I said, “I’ll play the lead in your movie.”

  He smiled.

  “What changed your mind?”

  My answer was complicated, but it came down to this: Mark had tapped into my own integrity. I had perceived him as something other than what he really was. Originally, I saw him as a guy who was not only trying to figure out how to cash in on actors’ success in order to get movies made, but worse, was also trading on the misfortune of homeless kids. I couldn’t understand why he was doing that. I questioned his integrity. It seemed like he was profiting from other people’s experiences, and he was just a slimy, backroom sort of guy. Mark always seemed to be shrouded in a veil of thick gray cigarette smoke. He had dark unruly hair, he dressed badly, and he seemed to be perpetually sleep-deprived. To my eyes, he could even have had some firsthand experience with the material he was filming. But none of that mattered now, because he had done it. He’d found a way to reach me and get his movie made. I felt like I had compromised my integrity.

  There was just one problem.

  “We’re closing a deal with David Arquette to play your part,” Mark said. “But I think we
can get him to take the smaller part you had agreed to play, and you can play the bigger part.”

  Sounded good to me, although there were a few other stipulations. Mark wanted me to visit a juvenile detention center and interview some of the kids there. He wanted me to meet with doctors to discuss the ravages of heroin abuse.

  “One other thing…,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You have to lose ten pounds in the next ten days.”

  “No problem.”

  Not exactly true, as it turned out. With the help and guidance of a doctor and nutritionist, I shed the weight. I subsisted on four hundred calories a day, mostly raw vegetables and chicken breast, and by the time shooting started I was carrying only 125 pounds on a five-foot-seven frame. (As a point of reference, my ideal walking-around weight these days is about 165; for the role of Samwise Gamgee, I deliberately packed on another thirty to forty pounds, bringing me up to a nearly corpulent two hundred.) The benefits of this transformation were instantly evident on screen: I was gaunt, haggard, sickly. In other words, I looked like either a drug addict or someone who is terminally ill. Not quite Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, but definitely moving in that direction. The unwanted fallout of this rapid weight loss was that it wreaked havoc on my metabolism, a problem I still face to this day. But I have no regrets. Where the Day Takes You remains one of the greatest creative experiences I’ve known. It showed me what I could do as an actor, how it was possible to develop my craft through hard work and sacrifice and research. I’ve done some good movies, and I’ve done some bad movies. Where the Day Takes You is a good one. It belongs in the pantheon of really interesting films about drug abuse, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy. I’m proud to have it on my résumé. Thank goodness things worked out the way they did, and my initial thoughts about Mark turned out to be wrong. I regret that I underestimated him as an artist.