by Nick Nolte
I didn’t know what that meant, yet Conti wouldn’t take no for an answer and I finally relented, although I complained the entire length of the drive down the PCH into the city. When we reached Paramount Studios, Dino was clearly a man with a plan, and he marched me into an executive office where I was welcomed with big smiles by producers Michael Eisner, Larry Gordon, and Don Simpson; two coffee boys who would become high-powered executives themselves, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Joel Silver; and director Walter Hill, who had recently had great success with films like Hard Times, The Driver, and The Long Riders.
I may have still been in a deep hole of depression, but as Dino slid over to their side, it didn’t take me more than a second to recognize that this was a setup; they had recruited him to bring me in. Walter dove into his pitch, telling me that he wanted me to read a script. “It’s the worst script you’ll ever read,” Walter told me. “But take it home and get back to me in a couple of days.” When I asked why in the hell he was pitching me a terrible screenplay, he was nonchalant. “We just thought you should know where we’re starting from. I’m going to rewrite it and I’m going to make it, and we all want you to star in it.”
When Walter and I talked again, I agreed that the story was shit. It was about two white cops in San Francisco, and absolutely nothing happened. I was curious why Walter had wasted my time, but he was unperturbed. I had said no to many pictures by then, but somehow, I couldn’t this time, and I was able to get Walter and Paramount to agree to send me up to San Francisco to nose around for a bit and see if I could dig up a storyline, an angle, a character—something that might redeem this piece of crap that Walter and company appeared so determined to make.
Soon thereafter I headed north with my friend and assistant at the time, Billy Cross, an Oklahoma-raised Vietnam vet who had found his way to the fringes of Hollywood. Billy and I had drinks with a detective Paramount had selected for us to meet, and he, in turn, put us in touch with just the guy we needed, a black detective who agreed to show us the city’s criminal underbelly for a few days if we promised never to reveal his identity. Toward the end of the second day, the guy made our trip worthwhile and set history in motion.
When he really needed information, he explained, he would go to the city jail and look for a promising candidate, a current inmate whose rap sheet and known associates seemed perfect for the task at hand, then would check him out of the slammer for exactly forty-eight hours. The two men would spend time scouring certain neighborhoods, where the inmate-turned-snitch would identify crooks and their specialties, methods, and chain of command. With the wealth of new information, the detective would pressure small-timers identified by the guy on loan to turn on bigger fish, who then would decide to squeal themselves rather than go to jail, and before long the detective had made his case—or several.
It was gold—absolute gold—and for the first time I thought we might find a way to make the movie. Walter was thrilled. “Fantastic! There’s my hook!” he proclaimed as he dove into his rewrite. And as he locked himself into a room for a couple of weeks, I agreed to his request to go to New York to meet a black comedian from Saturday Night Live who Walter thought might be perfect to play the con whom my character would escort around the city for forty-eight hours.
I wasn’t a fan of Saturday Night Live. The very few times I’d watched it in its earliest days, I picked up a faux-sixties vibe that rubbed me the wrong way. I had no idea who was currently part of the cast, and I’d never heard of Eddie Murphy, the young and reputedly hypertalented comedian Walter wanted me to meet. After I reached New York, I hooked up with a black saxophone player I had made friends with many years earlier, and we quickly loaded up on coke and binged hard for old times’ sake.
A couple of days in, I mentioned that I was in town to meet the black guy from Saturday Night Live about the possibility of starring in a movie together. But my old friend was immediately quite concerned. “You can’t use him, Nick,” he said gravely. “He’s a base-head.”
I enjoyed our partying for the rest of the week, then returned to Los Angeles, where I shared the bad news with Walter in his office, telling him matter-of-factly that we couldn’t hire Eddie Murphy for the role because he was a base-head. Walter saw right through me. “Eddie Murphy? A base-head? You didn’t meet him, did you, Nick?”
I folded, admitting that I hadn’t actually met Eddie, no, but nonetheless I had learned of his addiction from a very reliable source. I tried to make a joke so we could simply laugh the whole thing off, but Walter wasn’t amused. “That’s the last time I’ll send you out to do anything,” he assured me, and all I could do was acquiesce to his choice. “Just cast him, man,” I said, surrendering. “It’ll work out.”
The saxophone player had presumed that I meant Garrett Morris, the original SNL cast member who had left the show in 1980. Eddie Murphy, on the other hand, I quickly discovered, was a twenty-year-old comic “genius” from Brooklyn who had taken his first season on Saturday Night Live by storm and who, people predicted, was poised to have a huge career in television and in film.
I was already settled into the San Francisco hotel where we would be staying during the shoot for the film that now was titled 48 Hrs. when Eddie arrived. I made a point of meeting him in the hotel lobby and invited him to my room, where I introduced him to my assistant Billy Cross and showed him the Pac-Man and Space Invaders video games I’d had installed in my room, and Eddie—still just a kid—was impressed.
“Can I get an assistant?” he wanted to know, and I told him sure. “Can I get some arcade games, too?” Yes, I said, nodding, he could. “Just call the producers when you need something and tell them what it is and, yeah, they’ll get it for you,” I said, and Eddie was amazed, thinking it sounded like making movies was going to be a real workable deal for him.
48 HRS. WAS GOING TO BE AN ACTION-COMEDY FEATURING two unlikely partners—and none of us had a clue that its success would spawn a whole “buddy cop” subgenre that would include Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, and Rush Hour. All we knew at the time we shot it was that we had a great concept, a workable script, and two leads who were proving to have great chemistry together in the dailies despite the fact that Eddie and I came from very different backgrounds and that I was twenty years older than him.
I played plenty of pranks on Eddie and he, in turn, constantly assaulted me with his quick wit and sharp tongue. His astonishing ability to ad-lib in very funny ways improved the movie virtually every day.
Eddie and I regularly threw racial slurs at each other and flashed anger in our scenes, raising the eyebrows of lots of people in the process. By the early 1980s, only Lilies of the Field and In the Heat of the Night had dared to let whites and blacks yell at each other on-screen, and the nation was still in the midst of a long and awkward effort on the part of both groups to find comfortable ways in which to communicate. Could a white guy call a black guy a “brother”? Could a black guy tell a white dude he was full of shit? No one—least of all the filmmakers—was sure of what the post-civil-rights-movement rules were.
I tried to get Eddie to call me “Banana Skin,” because that was the affectionate name the black musicians in Omaha’s jazz clubs had called me when I was a teenage kid, but Eddie wanted no part of it. “What’s that even mean?” he asked. “That’s just weird, motherfucker. I’m not going to call you no ‘Banana Skin.’” There was a fundamental element of each of us that was nonracial, and it allowed us to really develop our unique relationship in the film. Yes, the white guy was the cop and the black guy was the criminal, but Eddie’s character Reggie was much more sophisticated and smarter in many ways.
Eddie had a background in boxing, and he lobbied for his character Reggie to be an Olympic boxing champion—something that was fine with me. But when Eddie suggested that the two of us should truly box on camera, I just had to mess with him. “Oh, fuck, Eddie, you wouldn’t get a punch on me. Seriously. If you try, I’ll knock you clean through the wall.” Instead of boxing, in
the end, we focused on the two characters’ hugely unpredictable volatility, as well as creating comic action of every kind—plus a hell of a lot of gunplay.
Eddie was more than a little skittish about guns, but I helped him get comfortable. I taught him the two-handed revolver grip that I’d learned from cops at the Los Angeles Police Department; it was real, and it looked dramatic as hell, and I couldn’t help but notice how it later became virtually the only way an actor would shoot a handgun on film in the years to follow.
Walter Hill was great about letting me do the driving of the old Cadillac ragtop that we careened around the city in. I would have hated to have a double do the driving, but I didn’t have to worry, as it turned out. Walter had a camera mounted on the hood of the car and let me have at it, and I just kind of went wild behind the wheel—narrowly avoiding serious accidents a few times and regularly scaring the shit out of Eddie.
When the film was released in December 1982, it was an immediate hit and went on to earn $80 million in domestic box-office receipts alone. Although no one took the movie too seriously—we didn’t intend for them to, after all—it continued to raise my film profile ever higher, and Eddie even received a Golden Globe nomination for best male film debut of the year a few months following the film’s release. He went on to have a great run as a comedic actor, but he and I ultimately looked at our careers a bit differently.
He telephoned after 48 Hrs. had become a bona fide hit, asking for advice. Paramount was offering him $120 million for seven pictures and he wanted to know what I thought. I hesitated for a minute, then said, “Listen, man, I’m not going to tell you to turn down a hundred and twenty million dollars, but if you make a deal like that, you get roped to Paramount. You may get a good script the first time, then maybe another one, but the rest—who knows? They usually run out of creativity. But if you stay independent and go to this studio, then to that one, you can probably bid your price up and get even more money.”
He listened, but Eddie decided to take the offer. Some time later, he told me he wanted to be doing what I was doing—artistically satisfying, small, gritty movies. I told him he ought to, but warned that he’d have to cut his salary.
“Oh, I can’t do that, Nick,” Eddie responded, as if I’d just said he’d have to cut off his hand. “I have my needs, man.”
THE SUITS AT PARAMOUNT HAD BELIEVED EARLY ON THAT they had a real hit on their hands with 48 Hrs. They were so bullish on its prospects, in fact, that they let it sit in the can for most of a year so it could be a Christmas-season release. Those kinds of decisions are entirely out of an actor’s hands—unless you’re both starring and producing, of course, which I virtually never was. Delaying the movie only meant that I would make another movie following the 48 Hrs. shoot, and it would be released ten months before 48 Hrs.; that happened several times over the years.
I’d been surprised to discover that literary people back east looked down their noses a bit at the work of John Steinbeck, his Nobel Prize notwithstanding. I loved his books—not so much the big, heavy Depression-era books, but the simpler, more sympathetic comic novels like Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row, as well as his hugely popular memoir Travels with Charley.
I knew David Ward, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Sting a decade earlier, had written a screen adaptation of Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, and I liked it a lot and thought David understood the material well enough to direct the picture, which would be his first. The script was languishing at Orion and its prospects for ever getting made weren’t good, but I told Sue Mengers that Steinbeck was a giant in need of exploring, and I added that David Ward’s idea to shoot the entire film on a soundstage was a terrific one. It would look and feel a bit like a play and that was something that would support the material’s literary qualities, I was sure.
Indomitable Sue went to bat for me once more; this time she called David Begelman, the new head of MGM. Begelman had survived a very messy 1977 embezzlement scandal at Columbia Pictures—even after being convicted, fined, and forced to do community service. Sue painted a pretty picture for him. “Look, David,” she told him. “This is your first year at MGM. You need to establish yourself as an executive who makes twenty films this next year. You need to have good strong commercial films in there. And you’ve got to have prestigious literature in there, too. And I’ve got the literary piece. It’s Cannery Row, and it will star Nick Nolte as Doc Ricketts, and we’ll find the woman.”
Sue was legendarily persuasive, and David said yes. But he changed his mind not long after we’d signed contracts. I think his ego kicked in and he didn’t want to restart his career with a movie that he had been cajoled into doing. “Nick, I’ll pay you your full two million,” he said when he telephoned, “but let’s just call it a day.”
I told him we had to make the movie, and I persevered, even as Begelman continued to sabotage the picture. “I’m going to make it real tough in casting,” he later warned. “You don’t have any choice. Raquel Welch or Liza Minnelli for the part of Suzy.” I thought both were completely wrong as Doc Ricketts’s girlfriend. I held fast.
“David,” I told him, “I don’t care if you hire Maude fucking Frickert, I’m going to make this film.”
True to his word, David did cast Raquel in the role of Suzy, although she, too, thought she was too old for the part. I told her, “Rocket, just show up on time. It’ll be fine.” Rocket was my affectionate name for her. She took my advice to heart and showed up at the soundstage already wearing her makeup long before her call every morning. But Begelman, the son of a bitch, fired her for being late nonetheless. He sued her in an attempt to get back the money she’d been paid, and Rocket sued MGM in return, claiming the studio was trying to ruin her career by telling the world that she was difficult to work with. It would be six years before a jury awarded her $10 million in damages for being wrongly fired, and Begelman’s career spiraled downward until he committed suicide in 1995.
In the very early 1980s, however, David Begelman was still a very powerful and influential man, and I was determined not to let him have his way and kill what I believed could be a good picture. David Ward and I knew that the first order of business was to keep shooting every scene in the picture that didn’t require Suzy, which would give us a couple more weeks of work and ensure that, by then, Begelman’s financial commitment would be so big that he simply couldn’t fold up the tent. I told Ward that I knew that our Suzy would find us in time.
The set our crew had constructed was magnificent—so big that it encompassed two soundstages—and it was an uncanny replication of what the real Cannery Row in Monterey looked like in photographs and paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. Word got around so widely that our set was something special that industry people like Elizabeth Taylor and John Huston visited just to see it for themselves. I loved its feel. You got the sense that the set was real and make-believe at the same time—and to help me pour as much of myself into my character Doc as I could, I began to sleep on the set, on the same cot where Doc slept amidst his menagerie of sea animals. It was so groovy; at night the octopi would crawl out of their tanks and make their way across the floor to find crackers and crumbs lying around. It became second nature for me to scoop them up and get them back into their tanks before the cast and crew arrived each morning.
One day, as I was sitting on the steps outside Doc’s place, a girl walked by and bumped my chair with a laugh. “And who are you?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m just here to see the set,” she said.
“You’re Suzy, aren’t you?” I asked her.
She smiled coyly at me before she replied, “I don’t know. Who’s Suzy?”
I hadn’t seen the recent megahit Urban Cowboy, so I didn’t know who Debra Winger was, but I was immediately curious about this young woman who was checking us out. And it didn’t take long for Ward, me, and everyone to learn that Debra’s agent knew we needed an actress and had urged her to stop by and see whether she might be keen on b
ecoming my love interest, Suzy.
Debra was beautiful, in her own way, and she had a wicked sense of humor that I really loved. She had a reputation for being rough and constantly demanding to be the center of attention, but we needed our Suzy—needed her now—so we offered Debra the part and she accepted it before she left that afternoon. She would be utterly believable as one of the Cannery girls, I knew, but I wouldn’t know until a day or two later that she could also be hellfire to work with.
One evening a couple of weeks into what I began calling “The Debra Show,” David Ward invited me to join him, his brother, and Debra for spaghetti at a nearby restaurant. Our food arrived as Debra was regaling us with jokes, imitating my gravelly voice, and generally holding court. I noticed her give David a kind of “say it” look before he turned to me and announced out of the blue, “You know, Nick, I’ve never worked with a more unprofessional actor. You’ve been very difficult to work with.”
He continued his rant and I looked puzzled, I’m sure. I looked at his brother, but his brother simply looked the other way. When I turned to see what Debra was making of David’s little tirade, she was grinning like a Cheshire cat. She clearly had pressed David to give me some shit, and he was doing it simply because she had wrapped him around her finger. I wasn’t happy, not a bit, but instead of saying something harsh to David, I scooped up my spaghetti in both palms and smashed it into my face. I rubbed it in real good for a second or two, then picked up my hat and walked away.
The next day, Debra gushed to me that what I’d done was the coolest thing she’d ever seen. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before Debra, too, was smashing food into her face in public. In something of the same vein, it wasn’t rare for her to come into my trailer in the morning and say hello and then, wham, hit me. Yet much of her erratic behavior, we assumed, was caused by her constant worry about her father, who she said had suffered a massive heart attack and was only clinging to life by a thread.