So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  Flea’s bandmate from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Anthony Kiedis, would visit occasionally, too, and I remember a nice chat with Kiedis at lunch, after which he walked away and a crew guy said, “Yeah, that guy’s got a real bad heroin problem.” I thought, But he’s so friendly!

  Flea was at the center of one of the more notorious inside jokes of the shoot, pertaining to a beloved dessert that the craft services people served: bananas and sour cream. As a starter actor of sorts, Flea didn’t get his own trailer; he got one of the many dressing rooms on a trailer called a honey wagon. One day he disappeared into his dressing room with a young lady, and after he reemerged he noticed an unfortunate stain on his costume. Conclusions were drawn. He asked for help in cleaning the stain, and a costume assistant put him on the spot by asking what it was.

  “Bananas and sour cream,” he blurted out nervously.

  For the rest of the shoot, this refreshing, delicious snack was marred by a truly unfortunate association. Anytime we’d get our dollop of bananas and sour cream, there was an exchange of particularly distasteful expressions on our faces. Gee, thanks, Flea.

  As for Penelope, she was everything I’d hoped she’d be: tough, honest, and helpful. She taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned as an actor. It had to do with a scene toward the end in which my character, now having fully adopted this cowboy persona, has the drop on the worst of the gang members who killed his friend. We’re in a movie theater, my target is watching a Western—ironically—and I pull a gun and point it at the back of his head. The conflict is, Can Grant do this? Is he that guy? That’s what I needed to feel, and I was using everything I learned at theater camp, every trick I learned at the Royal Academy, and every bit I stole from every great performance I’ve ever seen. Every tool I ever had. It was all being brought to bear at that moment. The gun is shaking, my face is contorted, I’m calling up the rage, and Penelope yells, “Cut! Cut! Cut!”

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  She walked up to me and said, “It looks like the gun is broken.”

  “What?”

  “You’re holding the gun and it’s shaking,” she said. “It looks like the trigger won’t pull.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “That makes no sense. I’m feeling this! The gun’s an extension of what I’m feeling. How is that possible?”

  “Well, don’t do any of that,” she said. “Just hold it.”

  I’m not usually defiant, but I just wouldn’t do what she asked. I couldn’t imagine not doing anything with my face. This was a huge moment. You have to see what’s going on, right? Well, I just kept working at it and working at it and she kept yelling, “Cut,” and telling me it wasn’t working. Finally she showed me the dailies, and she was absolutely right. It looked like the gun had jammed, and that I’d be firing if it weren’t the case. None of the Sturm und Drang I knew I was projecting came through, and I realized how vast the difference can be between the real emotion inside you and what appears on-screen. It’s like the famous editing experiment this Russian filmmaker did in the silent era. He took the same shot of a man’s expressionless face and cut it together with a variety of different shots—food, a body in a coffin, a pretty woman—and when he showed the different edits to people, they believed his emotion was different each time. In retrospect, if I’d just held the gun, looked at it, then put it down, the audience would have projected onto me what the emotion was, rather than my thinking I needed to do all the work.

  In the end, I had a good time making Dudes, and held out hope it might work, but it never got any traction as either a comedy or an edgy indie. That it wasn’t the movie I read, because it became something more ridiculous and comedic, is something I feel bad about. I genuinely can’t tell anymore if the movie is good or not, although I know it’s got its followers—any movie not available on DVD by its very nature develops a cult behind it. Hey, my hardware store guy is a big fan.

  * * *

  After shooting Dudes, I was off to London for a movie I knew in my bones had to work. When manager Marty pitched me on a planned reboot of the Superman franchise, the comic book–loving kid in me was instantly seduced. The script was sent over and I loved it. Christopher Reeve had taken the reins on reinvigorating this classic superhero’s world-saving status by developing a story in which Superman—motivated by a young boy terrified of nuclear annihilation—decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons. That’s some ballsy heroism for ya, and after what everybody seemed to agree was a deflatingly über-campy Superman III, this one looked to be doing things right. With producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind no longer involved, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus—the men behind Cannon Films—were stepping in, and though their reputation was for tacky action films (Delta Force and countless Death Wish sequels), this was being hyped as their bid for respectability. Besides, Margot Kidder and Jackie Cooper were back! Even the great Gene Hackman was returning as Lex Luthor, in a subplot about the creation of something called Nuclear Man, an irradiated clone of Superman with all the same powers but used for evil. Evil! It all promised something epic and fun. I was going to play his dim-witted nephew, Lenny—the Ned Beatty–as-Otis part, essentially—and damned if I wasn’t going to make him the dumbest motherfucker I could. I could not have been more filled with joy and hope and excitement that I was going to be a part of a blockbuster in the making.

  That first Superman in the 1970s had always been one of my formative moviegoing experiences, one that helped spark in my mind the notion that I needed to one day be a part of creating that kind of magic. If you’re of my generation, you remember how tempting those teaser posters were for Superman, with that double-down bet of a tagline, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” I think it’s safe to say every kid in the run-up to the 1978 release of the movie was thinking, “Challenge accepted, Hollywood. Alter my perception of physics!” And there we all were in theaters, patiently awaiting takeoff as the movie gave us the origin story, then Smallville, then Jor-El’s voice booming across the Fortress of Solitude . . . come on, come on! . . . and suddenly, there he is! The John Williams fanfare begins, Superman appears in full costume, he leans forward gracefully as his feet leave the ground and he glides toward the camera, sweeping out of frame, and goddammit if I did not fucking believe a man can fly! Hoot and clap, people. That was serious hoot-and-clap stuff.

  My first day did nothing to dispel my initial feeling of promise. We were actually shooting part of the very end first: Lex Luthor and Lenny, their plans having come apart at the seams, try to escape in an open-top 1930s-style car. We’re on our way out of town when suddenly the car takes flight. We look down in panic, only to realize we’re being transported to prison by the Man of Steel himself.

  Although nowadays such an effect would probably be handled entirely by computer wizards and actors in front of a green screen, this was 1986, which means we were on location, using a real roadster, which was hoisted with a crane fifty feet in the air, and Christopher Reeve was in costume on a wire underneath it. Shit, yeah, baby. They were pulling out all the stops on this one. I was in this crazy costume, sitting with Gene Hackman, also in crazy threads, looking down at Superman and making small talk:

  “How ya doin’ down there, Chris?” I asked.

  “I’m okay, Jon,” he said with a smile. Probably a forced one, since—as Chris explained to me later—he hated flying sequences because of the painful, bikini-size harness he had to wear.

  But that day I had no distracting thoughts of my costar’s squeezed nether regions. I was on cloud nine. I’m fuckin’ flying with Superman! I remember thinking. This might just be the best day of my life. I also remember thinking, It’s going to be like this every day!

  It wasn’t. With all the vaguely uncertain awareness of impending doom that Mia Farrow experiences in Rosemary’s Baby, I began to see that Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was getting cheesier and cheesier, from the sets to the props to the tone.
Even the craft service table and its array of fattening, sugary items was reducing in size. Days started getting cut from the schedule. Then one day I was talking to director Sidney J. Furie and I casually mentioned how he wouldn’t need me for a few weeks because of a big, important action sequence he had to shoot.

  “No, that sequence was cut,” he said.

  That seemed odd to me, because it was a pretty massive sequence, one where Nuclear Man was destroying things. I thought, How do you cut that and have the movie make sense? I chalked it up to the wisdom of the filmmakers and went my merry way.

  All around me, though, it began to feel more and more like people saw this as a job, not something special. Most of my scenes were with Gene, and the Oscar-winning master was genial, happy to chitchat. (His favorite role, incidentally? You’d think Popeye Doyle, but no, he told me it was the blind man in Young Frankenstein. The most fun, he said. His favorite movie of his? The Conversation.) Gene was also workmanlike. He’d show up, do what was asked of him, maybe have a little fun with it, and then totally put it out of his mind. It was all about the golf he was going to play after he was through for the day, and he couldn’t care a whit about the movie. That was something of a disappointment to me, because I assumed we’d all look at this as iconic, honoring this great franchise. In retrospect, Gene probably noticed the corner-cutting, and saw it as the writing on the wall.

  Gene did lend me my first cell phone. This was the early days of mobile phone technology, when you held what looked like a large brick to your head. I needed it because I was having problems getting a phone line in my London flat. British Telecom at the time was still essentially a communist organization, incapable of doing the one thing it was built for, which was installing telephone lines. Getting one installed in my flat was an ordeal, and when it finally was installed, I entered another institutional nightmare when I realized they never left me a number for it.

  What follows is the Kafkaesque exchange I had with the BT operator.

  Faceless BT bureaucrat lady: How may I help you?

  Me: Hi. Could you tell me the number I’m calling from?

  FBTBL: [Pause] Why do you want to know?

  Me: Well, because the BT guys just installed the phone, and they didn’t tell me the number.

  FBTBL: Why didn’t they do that?

  Me: How would I know? You sent them.

  FBTBL: I didn’t send them.

  Me: Okay, okay, you personally didn’t send them. Someone at BT did. Anyway, it doesn’t matter who sent them. The bottom line is, they installed a phone and didn’t leave a number. Is there any way for you to tell me the phone number I’m calling from?

  FBTBL: No.

  Me: Maybe I’m not making myself clear. Is it that you don’t know the number I’m calling from, or you can’t tell me? Or won’t tell me?

  FBTBL: Oh, I know what it is.

  Me: Oka-a-a-a-y . . . great. It’s sitting there on your computer screen. You could tell me right now but for some reason you don’t want to, even though I’m in the house, and calling from the number.

  FBTBL: Well, you could have broken in.

  Me: I . . . What? I’m breaking into somebody’s house to find out a phone number?

  FBTBL: Yes.

  Me: That doesn’t make any sense! Just tell me the damn phone number!

  FBTBL: No.

  She never told me the number. As long as I lived in that flat, which was approximately two months, the only calls were outgoing ones. The only way to call me was with Gene’s phone, after which I’d hang up and call them back on the BT phone. As for the production, they had to send the car a half hour early and someone knocked on my door.

  In the midst of the shooting, I got a little taste of home in the form of a visit from David and Artie, who had spent the previous two weeks on a spur-of-the-moment cultural tour of Italy, but had run through their funds after four days. So when I saw them emerge from customs at Heathrow Airport, they looked like hollow-eyed, emaciated immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. I’d been working pretty much nonstop for almost a year now and was missing them acutely. So I rushed them back to my flat posthaste. When we arrived those hollow eyes set upon something that must have mystified and shocked them: a suitcase full of British pounds sterling. Why did I have something that you would typically only find in a Guy Ritchie movie? The production was giving me a cash per diem that I was never using, because I’m basically a hermit when I’m on location. No restaurants, no nightlife, no gambling addiction, no drug dependency. The money was, literally, piling up.

  David’s and Artie’s faces were truly dumbfounded. They’d been without money for a week and a half, and had hardly eaten because of it. So we went to a local Chinese restaurant to fatten these boys up. David agonized over what to order, because he was still in a scrimping mind-set. He’d say “I want this, but what if it’s not enough?”

  “Then we’ll order more,” I said.

  His eyes welled up, but he held back. I felt like a benevolent aid worker in the Sudan.

  The rest of their stay, we spent our nights playing poker using the pile of real British money instead of chips. Of course, each night “the house” had to collect everybody’s winnings, which was usually met by disappointed awws from David and Artie. But we had a great time when they were there. These were the friends, after all, who knew me better than anybody, who had seen me through every tough time I’d had, and celebrated my good times without a hint of weirdness. When they left, I had the sense that this was my new life: having experiences beyond my wildest imagination, and getting to share it with them.

  By the end of shooting, I was pretty curious about how it would turn out. I came back to the States and began working on my next movie, Hiding Out—we’ll get to that one—so I was too preoccupied to worry about Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In fact, I felt a surge of excitement all over again when I heard that the Smithsonian was going to open a comprehensive exhibit on Superman, tied to the film’s release, and they asked me to attend a big press event there. In Washington I reconnected with Chris, which was nice. He and I didn’t get many scenes together in the movie, but anytime we got to talk in London, we’d end up talking about New York theater, which is where he came from. He was always concerned about how I was doing. Chris was about as approachable and friendly as they come.

  We met for lunch in advance of the Smithsonian event, and I was literally rubbing my hands together in anticipation as I said, “How’s the movie?”

  “It’s a mess,” he said. “An absolute mess.”

  My hands went from well rubbed to clammy.

  “Cannon ran out of money toward the end of principal photography, and a huge amount of stuff we were supposed to shoot just never got shot,” he said. “I was scheduled for six months of flying work. We did maybe a month. We had to cut all these scenes that pertained to the stuff we were missing, so now the movie barely makes sense.”

  I was mortified, absolutely crestfallen. Chris had begun distancing himself from the fact that the movie stemmed from an idea of his, but he was a good soldier, even showing up for a publicity event like the Smithsonian’s. I left that lunch in a state of semishock, but I held out a glimmer of hope that it would come together in some way.

  I was visiting my grandparents in Indiana when the movie opened, so we all went to check it out. One of my favorite things about the first Superman was the opening credits, which practically screamed, “Prepare for epic.” There was that spectacular John Williams overture, and a space backdrop against which these names whooshed at you or away from you like flashes of celestial blue. It was awe-inspiring and, frankly, over-the-top, but boy did it psych you up for awesomeness.

  Superman IV, on the other hand, opted not to pay for fancy credits, and tacked on a ripoff opening with video-produced effects that looked like the beginning of Reading Rainbow. Names appeared with a cheap ghosty trail and then fled
behind the horizon of Earth as if they had something to hide. This was not the movie I had hoped it was going to be. Nobody was going to hoot and clap at this crap.

  How was I in the movie? As with that scene I had a problem with in Dudes, I finally grasped that I was trying too hard, especially when my getup—pleather and leopard prints and ridiculous hair, a marriage of metal, glam, and new wave—did all the work for me. You never forget your first pair of skintight faux-leather pants, by the way. Mostly because the smell you produce at the end of the day, after sweating in them for hours, is an exceptional thing.

  The movie had created its own scent, too, one even my sweet grandmother picked up on, because after twenty-five minutes, she turned to me and said, “Oh, honey, this is terrible.”

  So much for the big blockbuster in my master plan. . . .

  * * *

  One of my post–Pretty in Pink perks—there’s some alliteration for you—was a holding deal at Paramount, which included an office on the lot and the chance to develop scripts and make movies. For the actor who gets it, it’s a monetized ego boost—I’m going to be a Hollywood producer!—that promises richer involvement in your destiny. For the studio, it’s a way to keep an actor from working somewhere else, as they methodically block you from ever actually making anything of your own. Marty Tudor and I figured that out pretty quickly, as our repeated cries just to get a printer for our hovel of an office repeatedly went ignored.

  After that deal ended, we split and opened up an office on Sunset Boulevard, which was where Hiding Out came together. After the disappointments of Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home and Dudes, neither of which had planned release dates, and the sketchy feeling I had upon returning from filming Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, I really felt the need to take control of the reins, and produce and develop something, the quality of which I could oversee. That project was Adult Education, a comedy about a grown man returning to high school. It was a fun, broad concept, and addressed my particular niche, since I was a twenty-two-year-old who still looked very young. I’d be in a high school comedy again, and the last one I made seemed to go “pretty” well, if you catch my drift.