by Jon Cryer
So of course we changed it into a thriller. My character was now on the run from the mob. I was a producer now, and I fancied myself knowledgeable enough to know that if we could just turn Adult Education into Beverly Hills Cop—laughs and excitement! comedy and violence!—then we’d have a hit. Suddenly making audiences laugh wasn’t important enough for me. We could go deeper. The protagonist needed the threat of death to keep his impersonation ruse going, because the jeopardy would then really juice the comedy.
We hired writer after writer to do the rewrites for what was now Hiding Out. The problem was that with every subtle change, other parts of the script were affected. There’s a logic in your head as to how it should all be, and we kept ignoring the stuff that really needed to work on paper, which were the funny bits. By the time we started filming, we had successfully ironed out a really dark opening, and it simply didn’t set the right tone for the stuff we wanted people to find humorous, which was essentially the rest of the movie.
You know who picked up on this dilemma early? Dino De Laurentiis and his daughter Raffaella, who were bankrolling us. At one point we had sent them rewrites, and we went in to meet with Dino and Raffaella at the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group offices on Wilshire Boulevard. This father/daughter pair were a fascinating combination of genuine characters—the thick Italian accents, the enormous eyebrows—yet real Hollywood veterans. We’d heard they didn’t like the rewrites, that they felt there were two movies there, but I chalked it up to the fact that the scripts had to be translated into Italian so they could read them, that something was lost in the translation.
At the meeting, where Dino sat behind an enormous desk, he gave his notes, and then there was a long pause.
“But you gonna be-a the funny guy, right?” he said, then began gesticulating wildly with his arms, in what I can only imagine was the universal sign for going broad.
Now I paused. Dino had agreed to make the movie because he wanted the Pretty in Pink guy. The “funny guy.” I knew the nature of the movie had changed, that I was not going to be the funny guy, but I also knew the answer to this question was very, very important.
“Yes, Dino. I’m gonna be the funny guy.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll make-a the movie.”
To direct we brought on Bob Giraldi, a highly regarded commercial director who made the legendary “Beat It” video for Michael Jackson. Bob had a great veteran’s strut. He’d seen everything, and even though this would be his first feature film at the age of forty-something, he was skilled at being up-front about his opinions without being obnoxious about them. At one point he looked at me, pointed generally at my entire frame, and said, “You’re gonna do something about this, right?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re gonna work out a little, get in shape.”
“Bob,” I said, “I’m playing a stockbroker. I don’t recall any nudity in the script.”
He said, “Yeah, but . . . you know . . .” and then pointed at me again, as if there was overtly something lacking in my appearance. I agreed to get more in shape, and he suggested a gym on New York’s East Side that was the neon-lit, teased-hair, pastel-colored exercise emporium of Sonny Crockett’s dreams. This was where Bob worked out, and the first time I went there, he noticed me in the locker room, said, “Hey, Jon!” and walked over completely naked. Although I was uncomfortable—never imagining I’d get a gray-pubic-hair visual to accompany my mental image of the director of the movie—it did reinforce the idea that this is the kind of confidence you need to be a director. You just can’t care what anyone else thinks.
As for the casting process, I remember a very young Winona Ryder coming in to read for the part of Ryan, the high schooler who befriends my character. We all sat around uncomfortably, because even though she was a sweet girl not trying to be coquettish at all, she was strikingly gorgeous and exuded an effortless sexiness that we grown males in the room knew would be completely inappropriate to comment on. We also saw a future Academy Award winner who was incredibly wooden and bad. (Sorry. You’re not getting that name.) We eventually cast Annabeth Gish, who had a charming soulfulness to her without being sexy. (Not that she isn’t a sexy woman now, but back then it wasn’t her vibe.) The problem was, though, that in deliberately avoiding that tricky chemistry—because it would have suggested an inappropriateness when one character isn’t of age—it also deprived audiences of their need to see a spark between two people. We were so scared of it, we looked at it logically instead of emotionally.
By opening weekend in November of 1987, I had invested much of the year to Hiding Out. I was in it from the beginning, overseeing rewrites, helping get the director attached, pitching in on casting choices, even being all over the marketing and ad campaign. The movie was what I wanted it to be. It tested well with audiences, too. But opening weekend it was just not a movie people wanted to see. That’s when I learned a central fact about testing: Pleasing random moviegoers you’ve asked to see your movie, who don’t know what to expect, and who come out and say, “Yeah, that basically worked,” is different from people wanting to see your movie. And people just did not want to see Hiding Out when it hit theaters.
Performers are prone to the illusion that if they could just run the ship, it would all work much better. Well, this was the project that made clear to me the limits of my expertise. Making movies is hard. It’s a process so convoluted, and so charged with the unsteady anticipation of what audiences want, that you understand why the few who’ve been successful at it multiple times are considered so valuable in the industry, and why they make tons of money. I walked away from Hiding Out with serious questions about my judgment. I had thought I was setting myself up for a varied career of different types of movies and different types of roles, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. It was a tough lesson to get after almost two years since Pretty in Pink had come out, but it was a lesson with a punishment attached: With four flops in a row, it seemed I had effectively squandered all the showbiz heat I’d acquired from playing Duckie.
Fuck 1987!
Chapter 14
So We Did Something Strenuous
Before 1987 became the 1987 of “Fuck 1987,” it was more of a regular 1987, except for the fact that I learned I had a very minor, rare, weird form of cancer, a lump that attaches to the underside of one’s skin. It’s called dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans, and if you are considering getting cancer, this is the one to get. First, it’s very rare, which sort of makes it valuable, right? And best of all, it metastasizes in only five percent of patients, so I highly recommend it.
But in every other way, 1987 was a good time: I was enjoying my bachelor pad in New York and making movies, living what I determined to be the ideal existence for a working actor. Learning about the lump was a left turn, but the doctors said it was easily taken care of by way of an operation. They’d simply cut it out of my chest.
The operation went smoothly, and I was told to go home and rest. I can do rest. I like rest.
“Don’t do anything strenuous!” they said. Thumbs-up to that, medical professionals!
I was chilling out in my apartment later—probably watching reruns of Mr. Belvedere—when I got a phone call. Who should it be on the other end of the line but a certain someone I hadn’t heard from in four years. This certain someone was a she, and a very attractive she at that. Actually, this Very Attractive Certain She (VACS) was an easy memory to call up, you see, because VACS was the one who, during my senior year of high school, took my virginity.
“I’m back from college,” she said. “I’m not with that guy anymore.”
Oh, I thought.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes.” she answered. “Are you around? I want to see you.”
You really never forget your first, whatever the circumstances surrounding it. In the case of my sexual education growing up, I definitely didn�
��t put much faith in the idea that my first time would happen easily. I was simply too perplexed by what it took just to get a girl to look at you, then look at you twice, much less talk to you, then perhaps convince her to see you alone, then see you alone alone, followed by the part where clothes come off, and then the hoping and praying the girl doesn’t hurriedly put the clothes back on before she lets you do highly personal things to her.
Again, though, it starts with the social stuff. My buddy David Dennis was the type of freewheeling social animal I dreamed of being at that time, a smooth talker who could charm adults and peers alike. Girls especially. Listening to David talk with Artie about the opposite sex was like being a student in the best seminar ever, even if a lot of it went over my head. It was pretty plain that they were intimately involved with girls at the ages of fourteen and fifteen, whereas my concurrent experience amounted to unfulfilled crushes marked by moon-faced silence, while a virtual loop played in my brain of fantasies that involved instant reciprocal love because I’d saved the object of my affection from drowning or, more realistically, a moving train. Listening to David and Artie, however, I found it painfully clear that I had a way to go, since they were getting into the kind of anatomical detail and procedure that didn’t make sense to me. Basically it was a lot of me going, “Really, how would she . . . ? Doesn’t that hurt . . . ? But she’s someone’s daughter! . . . Do you have to brush your teeth?”
It would be a few more years before I had the wherewithal to make a move and get serious with a girl. It happened just after I turned eighteen. At the time, my summers were at Stagedoor, but during the school year, I’d keep sharp by doing Jack Romano’s winter workshop productions at the Carter Theater in the Times Square hotel of the same name. Fun fact: The Hotel Carter would end up being voted “the Dirtiest Hotel in America” for an impressive three years running during the mid-2000s, but back then, it could only aspire to such accolades. It was during rehearsals for one of Jack’s musicals that I met her.
I was learning the choreography for a dance scene, trying to stay focused on the task at hand, when I was paired with a beautiful redhead. Immediately my laserlike attention shifted to her. Smiles were exchanged and chatting took place, and we discovered we had been in another production together before but had never noticed each other. We realized how odd that was, and in a strange way, it forged a bond. We began hanging out, my jokes making her laugh, her dry sense of humor winning me over, and suddenly in rehearsal one day, we were holding hands. It seemed natural. Something was happening here! I picked up her hand to look at it more closely, and I noticed a ring on her finger.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m engaged.”
Not expecting that. “Sorry? Engaged?”
“Yeah, he’s away at college right now,” she said. “I’ve known him for a long time.”
I dropped her hand like it was the wrong end of a torch.
Then she took mine again.
Uh-oh.
The two of us began dating, and it was the perfect mixture of innocent and forbidden you’d expect from a nervous novice and someone more experienced but exploring her options: four-hour makeout sessions with no sex. We’d meet up and go to movies, and I was falling pretty hard. Mom met her and liked her. All that was missing was dealing with the guy who was missing.
Then he came back from college, and she told him she didn’t want to be with him anymore. But he took off, and she was crying all the time, worried about him in a way that was indicative of something deeper, and she broke it off with me. She explained that her ties to him were hard to break and that since she’d planned her whole life around him, she felt as if she couldn’t break from that path. It seemed like faulty logic to me, and overall the split was hard to take, but by this point, she’d been accepted to a university in another state—shocker! where he was enrolled, too—and I knew I’d have to get over her and accept that this was just a fling.
That is, until she called me one day that summer following my senior year, said, “I have to see you,” rushed over, and gloriously seized my virginity on the floor of my mother’s office. (Sorry, Mom.)
It was capital-A Awesome. It was, to combine euphemisms and get at something romantic and carnal, making sex. Then she was off, probably back to that guy, and just like in the movies, the melancholy plunk of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” filled the apartment, and I was like, “Aww, fuck.” Nobody explained the part where you want that feeling again, you miss the person immediately, and realize, What if I never see her again?
I’ll be honest: I really never did expect to see her again, until I got that call years later as I recuperated in my apartment. There was a severe case of déjà vu going on, too, because that magical day in my youth was preceded by an “I have to see you” phone call, and here I was hearing her say to me over the phone, “I want to see you.”
Who am I to say no to visitors? I’m practically an invalid! Nothing strenuous about catching up with an old friend. Right, Doctor?
As soon as I saw her in my doorway, looking no less beautiful than the last time I’d laid eyes on her, I thought, Well, well, well, it has been a lo-o-o-o-ong time.
So we did something strenuous.
This time there was no running out. She stayed, and we rekindled that flame until it was a nice little glow. After a while we decided to take this intimacy into a public space and go see a movie. We chose Innerspace, the sci-fi comedy in which Dennis Quaid plays a pilot miniaturized by science to a microscopic size, and Martin Short plays the hapless guy who gets injected with him.
I wouldn’t call the movie’s humor ironic, but the experience was, because as I was watching Martin Short’s insides get shaken up, the wound I wasn’t supposed to strenuate began to grow, and grow, and grow, until it was baseball-size and creating a strange bulge under my shirt. It looked like it was about to pop out of my sternum. At that point, I turned to her and said, “It hurts too much; we have to go.”
At Roosevelt Hospital it took seemingly ages for them to admit me for surgery, because I wasn’t outwardly bleeding. What was leaking, though, was this romantic reunion with my old flame, who with each passing hour in the emergency room was getting in more and more trouble with her family, who apparently had forbidden her from seeing me, since it had become easy to blame me for poisoning her semiarranged marriage. Eventually she had to leave the hospital—probably never to see me again for real this time—and with perfect emotional timing, my wound opened up as if I were a character in Alien. Surgery, please!
Not that I needed any more body ache to go with my heartache, but because the wound was now open, they couldn’t give me an anesthetic, which meant they operated on me while I screamed bloody murder. But I learned something interesting that day about one’s pain threshold: Once you hit the top, that’s it. It doesn’t go higher than that. A paper cut hurts like a motherfucker, but a big gaping hole in your chest doesn’t hurt that much more than a motherfucker. It may be prolonged, but it doesn’t go from, say, ten to twenty. It just hurts like it hurts. Get a tattoo while you’re at it, I say.
Let me conclude by saying, it all gave new meaning to the phrase “When she left, there was a hole in me.”
Chapter 15
Don’t Make Me Gary Sandy
Famous true story: When Marlon Brando was a Broadway sensation snapped up by Hollywood at the end of the 1940s to make his first movie, The Men, Lew Wasserman—head of the talent agency behemoth MCA—told one of his junior employees to pick up Brando at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and drive him all over town, since Brando didn’t drive. The kid became so adept at catering to the rising star’s every need that when Wasserman finally got around to asking Brando who he wanted at the agency to represent him, the actor said, “I want the kid who’s been driving me around.”
From then on, even Wasserman couldn’t get Brando on the phone. He’d tell people th
ey had to call Jay Kanter first. Kanter went on to become one of Hollywood’s top agents, representing Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly to boot.
That story was the basis for a new television sitcom I was pitched in 1989 as a starring vehicle, called The Famous Teddy Z. Its creator, Hugh Wilson, liked the idea of turning Kanter’s origins into a Hollywood satire about a mailroom kid who, after a chance meeting with the biggest star in town, is tapped by the actor to be his agent. I liked the idea, too. But the bigger question was, was it really time to do television?
Nowadays, the idea that television is a step down from movies sounds ludicrous, what with the deluge of praise heaped on shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. Matthew McConaughey’s winning an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club at the same time you could watch him at home in the HBO series True Detective pretty much tore that wall down for good. For actors who want to go where the good roles are, toggling back and forth between movies and television is sound career advice.
But in 1989, that divide between the glamour and prestige of film and the familiar factory feel of television was very much in place, and if a movie actor decided to shoot a TV series, it signaled that one’s career at the multiplex was over. And at the end of the eighties, based on the film scripts I was being offered, it seemed pretty clear to me that I was hanging on to a life in film by a slimmer and slimmer thread.
So when my agents and managers told me there was a real market for me to do something in television, I knew I was looking at the proverbial step down. But the prospect of working with writer/director Hugh Wilson was appealing. Though he’d made films (Police Academy), his clear métier was TV: He’d created highly entertaining shows with interesting characters, namely the hilarious ensemble sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati and the critically acclaimed Frank’s Place, which at the time of its brief 1980s run was lauded as a TV show with the vibe of a good film. There was already buzz about The Famous Teddy Z, too: that it was going to be a fun skewering of insider Hollywood. The lure of being part of something hot was pretty attractive for someone whose last film role was a one-day cameo in the immediately forgotten Penn & Teller Get Killed.