There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  “No, no, you don’t have to get me food, Sean,” he said at first. But I interrupted him.

  “That’s all right. I want to.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  So I retrieved a heaping plate of food and placed it in front of Warren, and began performing my rambling diatribe. I was nervous, so I stumbled and stammered a bit, but I got through it quickly enough, and I was pleased that he actually seemed to be paying attention, maybe even taking me and my words seriously. In all candor, I thought it was not only pretty well written, but also reasonably astute; it was a celebration of Warren and his idiosyncrasies, as well as an indictment of some of those things. I thought I’d found a way to make my point and comment on the character and the story, even though I hadn’t found a way to integrate it seamlessly into the story. Never mind that none of us had been issued a script! Basically, this was performance art, a weird combination of improvisation and detailed speech reading, which was precisely the way Warren seemed to like to work. By the time I finished, I was sweating and breathing hard; my heart was racing. I looked at him and waited for some type of reaction.

  “Well?”

  He paused, poked at his food, and said nonchalantly, “Not bad. Why don’t you try another version where you focus more on the girls?”

  The “girls” were two African American women who, like Gary C-Span, were part of Bulworth’s ever-expanding entourage. The point, I later discovered as the movie came into focus, was that Warren was thinking about trading on a kind of hippie sexuality, something reminiscent of the spirit of the sixties. You could see him looking for it, looking for something, but apparently I’d missed the mark in my presentation.

  As I’ve reflected on it over the years, I’ve come to think Warren might have had in mind a sort of comedic trio. Perhaps if there had been more of a spark between my personality and the personality of the “girls,” Warren might have seen some value in cutting to us as a kind of miscegenation or menàge comic-relief element. But I didn’t allow myself to go there, and I don’t think my personality had evolved enough to “play” in an improvisational way with them. One of the highlights of the shoot for me was making friends with some of the other actors. Notably, Josh Malina did just the kind of sketch or character comedy that Warren was looking for, and his stuff is rightfully all over the movie.

  But let’s get back to me standing in front of Warren, having presented him with my outpouring of creative writing. I was demonstrably hurt by his reaction, almost as though I expected him to jump out of his chair and offer to relinquish his credit to me.

  “Try another version?” I asked incredulously.

  I didn’t bother. Instead, I just sat there all day long, every day, feeling undervalued and underappreciated, eating myself into a stupor, getting fat and angry and depressed, much as I had during the filming of Encino Man. The funny thing was, eventually I came to understand my character. There wasn’t much written for him, but that was typical of Warren. He wanted his actors to be totally naturalistic and comfortable, to allow performances and stories to grow organically. The weird thing about my situation, though, is that Gary C-Span is a pivotal, if largely observant character; he’s there, hanging around, the entire movie. He’s following, videotaping, watching. But in terms of interpreting what’s going on, he does nothing; so I ended up in this odd position where I was there and present on the set, but not really focused on the movie. The result was a kind of amused reconciliation: while trying to be ready for the possibility that Warren might want to shoot a close-up with me, I had to accept the notion that my role would be reduced to a cameo.

  It was a unique Hollywood experience, trying to not just endure, but to also honor, the opportunity that had been presented to me. I fully accept responsibility for the way it turned out. I know that if I had been working out every day, if I had factored into the equation some cardiovascular exercise and had been disciplined about how I ate and transformed myself into the good-looking guy that’s (sometimes) within me, not only would my attitude have been better, and not only would I have felt more creative, but Warren might have used that energy in a way that would have yielded something more valuable in terms of the final product. So, to a certain extent, I’m culpable for my own frustration, as well as the fact that Gary is little more than a shadow in the movie Bulworth.

  Power, I’ve discovered, is an interesting thing, and sometimes the biggest challenge is knowing whether you have any control over a situation. Warren Beatty is like a Hollywood supernova: you can get burned right out of existence being anywhere near him. If you don’t know how to protect yourself from guys like him, or how to work with guys like him, or how to survive despite guys like him, you’ll have a short, forgettable career.

  Bulworth was not an experience I’d want to relive, but I’m proud to have it on my résumé. Simply by showing up for work each day, by being in Warren’s proximity, I heard stories I couldn’t have heard anywhere else. That was worth it to me, and Warren knew it was worth it to me.

  One could argue that I got exactly what I wanted, and just what I deserved.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Let me take you back to the spring of 1999, when Christine and I decided to buy a $650,000 house in Encino, a suburb of L.A. Forget for a moment the utter insanity of the Southern California real estate market, and the fact that six hundred grand doesn’t buy you all that much in L.A. (God knows, when my friends from Texas came to visit, they were shocked to discover that we didn’t live in anything remotely resembling a mansion.) This was to be our home, the place where we would raise our children and continue to fight the Hollywood wars. I was thrilled about it.

  And I was scared to death.

  Here’s the truth: I was worried about looking after my family, and not being able to keep our brand new house because I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. I’d made the decision to purchase the house based on an interesting psychological conceit. Inside my head, I was bothered by the fact that because Christine needed to spend tons of time with Alexandra, our gorgeous daughter, and that because I was failing to live up to my commitment to coparent all the time, there was a little tension between us. I knew she rightfully resented my feelings in this regard, but I was wracking my brain trying to figure out the best direction for my professional life. I believed that I had the primary responsibility to be the breadwinner for our family. Never mind that Christine had already successfully run a 4½-star restaurant and worked a dozen different jobs in her lifetime. I was addicted to the old-fashioned chauvinist notion that the man should make the money.

  That we are still together is a testament to how forgiving Christine is, and to how I’ve managed to care for her at least enough to keep her from changing the locks or inviting someone less self-centered than me into our bed! A gift every husband should know not to take for granted.

  I still cringe when I recall how I managed to convince Christine—and justify to myself—that the $650,000 purchase made sense. I calculated—well, spitballed is more like it—what I’d been earning in recent years as a lead actor in independent films who also picked up the occasional small part in big films. On average, my income was about $250,000 per year. Now, you might think that someone who has made more than forty films and starred in a few substantial ones would have no problem meeting this standard, but as I’ve indicated earlier, that’s one of the curious things about the entertainment business. When it comes to financial reward, there is a disparity between truth and perception. Sure, some actors are ridiculously wealthy and lead lives that would make a pharaoh blush. But there are plenty of working actors, successful by any reasonable definition or objective standard, who lose sleep when they buy a new house or hear that they’re about to become a parent.

  I’d had an unusual life and career. I’d grown up in the business and made a little bit of money, but I’d also tackled some of the responsibilities of adulthood when I was barely out of my teens. I’d married, put myself and my wife through college, and invested tidy su
ms of my own money in my work as an aspiring director and screenwriter. Yet, while it was all rewarding in an intellectual and spiritual way, we weren’t seeing much of a return on our time or financial investment. By the time we bought our house, we were fairly racing through our savings account, to the point where it became critical that I hit that quarter-million mark yearly in order to keep the house. There was little margin for error.

  How had I allowed my life to reach this level of anxiety? Well, that’s a complicated question with complicated answers. At the time, I had a relationship with a personal manager who knew how to cash in on what my success would yield, and I was willing to settle for the small independent films that paid reasonably well but required little of my time. Then I could concentrate on other things, rather than focus my energy on acting and competing for the roles that would have resulted in an escalation of my stock as a Hollywood commodity—that is, roles as leading man. As I’ve explained, part of the reason for that was the convoluted relationship I had with my body. I knew that in any given week I was capable of treating my body like a high-performance race car—or a dump truck. There are periods of my life that reflect this battle, and when I look at the photos, well, sometimes it’s not a pretty sight. Alternately, I see a relatively good-looking guy or a fat slob who is so unappealing that no director in his right mind would hire him for even a secondary role, let alone ask him to play a heroic or romantic lead.

  There are, no doubt, complex reasons for this fluctuation, and if you put me through psychoanalysis you’d probably discover all sorts of issues related to loneliness and self-confidence and, yes, entitlement. My feeling of, Gee, my mom’s made all this money (even if she pissed most of it away). She was a famous actress; the least she could do is set me up with a little annuity. I mean, really, why should I have to follow a more rigorous, traditional path? I’m not just anyone, you know?

  I never said that, of course. I never voiced those thoughts—until now—because I know it’s wrong to have those feelings, which represent nothing but the whining of a self-centered, spoiled Hollywood brat. But I had them anyway. It’s funny, too, because I used to scold my mother when she exhibited similar tendencies. Why should Patty Duke—Oscar winner, Emmy winner, important actor—have to audition for parts? Wasn’t she above that?

  “Mom, the young directors out there now didn’t grow up with you. They don’t really know who you are. Of course you should audition for them.”

  “But why?”

  “Because even though he’s young, he’s spent his whole life preparing for this project, and it’s his prerogative to do it any way he pleases.”

  My mother spent a lot of time frustrated with her career because she didn’t want to do the work necessary to land the best jobs. She didn’t like the fact that she had pulled herself up by her bootstraps, carved out a meaningful career, and now, even as an adult, faced the uncertainty of unemployment, or underemployment. She had trouble developing the self-confidence required to say, I know I’ll be in this business a long time; I’ll always work; now what kinds of things do I want to work on? It was more about, I’ve made X number of dollars; I’m entitled to this type of lifestyle. Bad business and bad economics. When I finally read books like The Richest Man in Babylon, The Millionaire Next Door, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I realized there are certain laws of money. Like, if you spend it, it’s gone. As was the case with my mother, my inability to manage my own finances and to invest intelligently has caused me a bit of heartache. I’ve tried to turn it into a spiritual life lesson, into understanding who I am as an animal on the planet who needs to eat and forage, but it’s been painful, and it was particularly challenging around the time that I purchased our house.

  I had a young daughter, and it had been eight months since I’d made any money in acting. I’d been killing myself working eighteen-hour days, trying to figure out how Hollywood functioned—how to get screenplays sold and movies set up. I had written a screenplay, developed deals, and tried to improve as an artist, all while earnestly trying not to be just another child actor who couldn’t make the transition to adult performer. It was like there was a voice in the back of my head that kept saying, “Okay, you’re out of college, you’re married, you’ve got a kid, and you want to be the CEO of a multimillion-dollar production company? What steps are you going to take? How do you make it happen?” But the truth was, it wasn’t happening. We were almost out of money. I was floundering. So it was an emotionally exhausting and scary time, and there was this thought that kept me up at night, the nagging sense that I might not make it.

  Ever.

  And then, at precisely that moment, a project that carried with it the promise of greatness fell from the sky.

  It’s interesting the way things work, how sometimes there seems to be a greater force at play in the universe. No sooner had we made a decision to buy the house than I got a phone call from my agent at William Morris, Nikki Mirisch. It was a call that would change my life. I was in my car at the time (the cliché that a lot of Hollywood business gets conducted behind the wheel happens to be true), driving on Burbank Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, not far from my home.

  “Honey, it’s Nikki.”

  This was a good sign, for the simple reason that she had initiated the contact. The truth was, I hadn’t gotten many calls from my agent in recent months; it always seemed as though I was the one reaching out. But not now. Best of all, there was more than a hint of excitement in her voice.

  “Listen, Peter Jackson is doing The Lord of the Rings trilogy for New Line. You’ll need a flawless British accent by Thursday.”

  That’s what she said, but for some reason—the traffic? the noise? the fact that the tone of her voice indicated this was important?—well, for some reason, that’s not exactly the way it registered in my mind. I heard three things: Peter Jackson, New Line, trilogy. But the most important part of the message—the words “Lord of the Rings”—sailed cleanly from one ear to the other, without pausing to introduce themselves to my brain. So that’s how I came to hear of this project, which in fact had been in one stage of development or another for several years—not through Daily Variety or any of the other trade publications covering the movie industry, not through any of the hundreds of Web sites devoted to J. R. R. Tolkien. No, the first time I had any inkling that The Lord of the Rings was being made into a movie was at this very moment. And it meant nothing to me. The most important thing I had heard was the name of Peter Jackson.

  I knew Peter not as the mad scientist behind such cult splatter flicks as Dead Alive or even as the genius behind Heavenly Creatures, the critically acclaimed 1994 film starring Kate Winslet as a young woman involved in one of New Zealand’s most painful and famous murder trials. I knew Peter as the man who had directed my father, along with Michael J. Fox, in The Frighteners, a weird and morbidly comic film released in 1996. In fact, I had met Peter at the movie’s premiere, and had spoken on the phone both to him and to Fran Walsh, his wife and creative partner, while Dad was making that movie. So there was a bit of personal history, including the vivid memory of my father showing me footage from a documentary Peter had produced and directed. It happened one day when I visited his condo in L.A. Dad popped in a videocassette, stood back, and said, “Watch this. It’s incredible.”

  Indeed it was. On the television screen was Peter Jackson, with his rumpled hair and cherubic face poking through an unruly beard. “I’ve found the most amazing thing,” he said to the camera. “My neighbor next door had a chest of drawers downstairs in her basement, and I went in one day because she needed help moving stuff. I noticed some old film canisters, so I asked if I could look at them.” Here Peter paused for dramatic effect. “And what I discovered was an absolute treasure.”

  Then, in perfect documentary fashion, Peter invited the viewer into the house—and it was clearly the neighbor’s house, exactly the one my father had shown me in pictures. With camera in tow, he guided the viewer downstairs, explained again precisely w
here he found the film, and how it was old and brittle and had to be painstakingly restored. But, oh my, was it worth the cost and effort! For what Peter Jackson had discovered, right here in his neighbor’s house, was something so remarkable, so shocking, that it would change the course of cinematic history.

  With that, a sample of the footage was played, in all its fragile, ancient glory—shimmering black-and-white images of a rickety airplane wobbling down a makeshift runway before climbing into the sky. The narrator explained that this was, in fact, the first footage ever shot of an airplane, and that the flight took place in 1903, approximately two months before the Wright Brothers’ historic accomplishment at Kitty Hawk. Hard to believe? Not to me. I had been to New Zealand once before, when I was sixteen years old and working on a movie called White Water Summer. While there I got to know a few guys who made homemade planes and helicopters, and I came to think of it as something of a pastime in New Zealand. I can remember sitting outdoors at lunchtime and hearing something that sounded like a loud lawn mower, and looking up to see a man flying a … well, I’m not quite sure what it was. It was less than a plane but more than an ultralight. He was doing all kinds of wild aerial maneuvers, climbing high into the sky and then diving straight back down, pulling out of a death spiral at the last second. I thought of that pilot as I sat in my father’s living room, watching this amazing documentary film and thinking, almost incredulously, Well, why not? There’s a tradition of adventure and exploration in New Zealand, and a tradition of aviation as well. It’s a land of pioneers, so …

  I bit.

  “Dad, this is amazing! Did Peter give this to you?”

  Poker-faced, my father simply nodded.

  “And the world news media hasn’t picked up on it yet? They don’t know that Americans weren’t the first to fly?”

  “That’s right.”

  I could barely contain my excitement. “Oh, man, we have to call CNN. The New York Times!”