by Jon Cryer
I called the producer, who was not thrilled about the news. “We were really excited about seeing you. Are you sure you can’t come in? Bring your niece!”
I said, “My niece is four. You want me to do this filthy monologue in front of my niece?” (Reason number two: I’m a protective uncle!)
“Please, we’re begging you to come,” he pleaded.
“No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Well, that part was Mr. Pink and the movie was Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s iconic calling card as a talent to watch. That movie put him on the map, and yes, what helped put him there were the outlandish time shifts in the plot, and the legendary cursing, the stuff that for some reason dissuaded me from auditioning. That was a hard-won lesson in being open to new things. The truly funny part of my refusal to try out, however, is what I realized after the movie came out and caused a sensation: Had I gone in and done that vividly profane monologue with my cute little niece sitting on my lap, how could I have not gotten that part? Quentin would have loved that shit!
But again, the saving grace of my misreading of the situation was that Steve Buscemi was great as Mr. Pink. As it stands, the movie works, and they got the right guy.
Sometimes your own prejudices sink you before you can even allow yourself to do well. When I was a teenager, I scored a meeting with an Oscar-winning filmmaker at his Upper East Side apartment. While I was excited about auditioning for a man whose work I admired, the script for the movie was, I thought, complete crap. I was eighteen years old, you see, and had seen several movies, thus acquiring critical thinking skills vastly greater than those of an Academy Award–winning director. As I was doing the scene for him at his dining room table, I’m almost positive he could detect in my eyes the diminishing interest in having to read dialogue I thought was so dumb and clichéd.
Well, the director was John Avildsen of Rocky fame, and the movie was The Karate Kid, and after my intellectually disdainful interpretation of young, bullied Daniel, Avildsen asked me to sit in his kitchen while he brought in the next kid: Ralph Macchio. I perched myself in such a way that I could surreptitiously peek in on Ralph, who delivered the same scene I had just read moments before. But where I had bought out emotionally, he was simply, directly sincere. Ralph read the lines with apparently no greater goal than meaning what he was saying, and sounding as if they were occurring to him for the first time.
I wasn’t surprised to hear he got the role, but when I saw the movie eventually in its smash box-office run, the triteness I was quick to brand it with had been replaced by something honest, charming, and rousing. It drove home the lesson that sometimes the things we consider clichés can be transformed if they’re done with a complete lack of cynicism. Every story’s been told. It’s how you tell it that makes the difference.
Sometimes you know the movie’s going to be interesting, the part’s going to be great, and yet you’re utterly stymied by something about the actual audition. I auditioned for Platoon to play Bunny, the cocky young soldier eventually played by Kevin Dillon. It was an intense scene, involving killing a one-legged Vietnamese man, and on top of that, writer/director Oliver Stone had created a special audition script that combined the dialogue of several characters into one. That often stems from there not being enough dialogue for the character to make for a whole audition. The other characters’ dialogue allows a director to then see a lot of different facets in one reading.
What made the audition uncomfortable was that I couldn’t answer a key question: How do you act out shooting at a one-legged Vietnamese person without a prop gun, a well-timed sound effect, or, for that matter, a one-legged Vietnamese person? Do you do it with your finger and thumb extended, the way a kindergartener might when playing cops and robbers? Do you pantomime holding a nonexistent gun? Do you bring in a real gun at the risk of scaring the producers and/or getting the cops called but also being forever remembered as a badass? And in the act of killing, do you make a sound, or say, “Boom! I’m shooting now!” In the end, I went with a variation on the kindergartener that was lame yet somehow audacious in its stupidity.
And just let me add this: You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the face of the director of Natural Born Killers as he watches you scream, “Dance! You one-legged motherfucker, dance!” and then finish off with a finger-pointing, “P-choo . . . P-choo, p-choo!”
Please refer to the “eventually played by Kevin Dillon” sentence above to be reminded of that audition’s perhaps inevitable result.
Then there are the auditions that just go south due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. I was the first actor to audition for the lead role in the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy, due to the fact that I lived two blocks from their New York apartment at the time, which was on the Upper West Side right next to Riverside Park, where I grew up playing with my friends. It was as simple as Joel and Ethan were gearing up to try people out, they knew I was in town and so close, and did I want to swing by and read it? Well, sure!
As I got ready to try out in their home, I remember saying to them, “Wow, this will be the first time you’ve heard your screenplay read aloud by somebody else.” They took a moment and cautiously said, “Yeah.” I seized the chance to joke, with a little seriousness, “Then if anything’s wrong with this, you’ve got to fix it. It won’t be my fault, right?” They seemed to find it funny.
It was a pretty relaxed audition, and we were having a convivial time when there was suddenly a frenzied knock. It was a woman who lived next door, and she was freaking out. “My husband fell!” she cried. “He was getting out of the bathtub and he just collapsed! Can you help?!”
So we all rushed over to their apartment, and there on the floor was this elderly man, dazed, completely naked, and wet. We gathered around him, asking if he was all right, assisting him to his feet, and securing a towel around him. It was painfully obvious that we were trying to avoid looking at the parts of this man that are usually hidden in normal social interactions, but really, on somebody that old and naked, there’s no good place to look.
After we parked him in a chair, the extent of our actual ability to “help” when none of us were doctors (at that point I couldn’t even say, “I play one on TV” yet) became abundantly clear. In fact, I’m not sure it “helped” this elderly gentleman at all to know that not only Duckie, but also the guys who directed Barton Fink and Raising Arizona got to see him without his clothes on. We made small talk as we waited for the EMTs. After the medical team arrived, we said our good-byes to this big, old naked guy, who appeared to be in good hands. It seemed the time to bid adieu to the Coens, too, and we exchanged awkward “well, that was memorable” farewells. I didn’t get the part, but for a brief time there it certainly felt as if I’d been in a Coen brothers movie.
By the time I cowrote, produced, and starred in my own movie, Went to Coney Island . . . (hard work? check; terrible conditions? check; low pay? check; no audience? check!), I’d had enough experience auditioning to know a lot about the process. But then I got to see it from the other perspective, as the one doing the hiring, watching hopeful after hopeful come through the door and show what he or she had to offer. I considered my years in the business an invaluable resource in picking the right cast, but I also naively assumed each actor we were going to see had the chance to win the part. If you get the opportunity to try out for a role, why show up if you don’t have that belief, right?
That’s why it was shocking to then see actors I revered from Broadway, films, television, wherever, come in to read for this tiny indie and just blow it. I was even stunned a few times. (Sorry again. Names are being withheld to protect my pretty face.) The first couple of instances I felt sort of a sinking in the pit of my stomach, but the more it happened, the greater was my realization that auditioning is not just something very hard that an actor endures, but also a process that by its very nature fells many very quickly, for—as I mentioned earlier—a wi
de variety of reasons.
If you’re not right for a part, no amount of preparation, confidence, or invention is going to get you there. I watched actors step up and nail it, yet they weren’t right for the part. How did I know? I just knew. Think of auditioning as going full throttle toward what can only be a halfway mark: Once you’ve done your job going up for a role, the rest is absolutely beyond your control. It’s an epiphany that has given me tremendous peace going into auditions now, because I think of them like this: If I’m the one, I’m going to get it, and if I’m not, no sweat.
My advice, then, to aspiring actors is to enjoy the ride. Do the hard work, make your choices, but then have a good time: Say hi to the casting director you haven’t seen in a while, catch up on current events, wave with a smile to the colleague in the waiting area you think is your competition, then get the fuck out and go have a nice meal with a friend.
You’ll have a healthy life as an actor if you realize auditions aren’t missed opportunities. They’re parts you weren’t supposed to get.
A final note about the Coney Island auditions. Actors are pretty used to reading for a part opposite a director or casting person delivering the other lines with barely any emotion or affect. It’s not as weird as it sounds, because you want to be able to focus on the man or woman vying for the part. But because this was my movie and I was going to be sharing the screen with whomever we picked, I read with the auditioners. This one young man came in, and between us we delivered a mighty fine scene. At the end, you could sense the exhilaration from him, and he turned to me and said, “Wow, thank you. That was great!”
I said, “Hey, no, thank you! Thank you!”
We offered him the part the next day, and a couple of days after that, I ran into him on Sixth Avenue. “Dude,” I said, “you’re going to do the part, right?”
“Yeah! Yeah!” he said excitedly, before adding, “And by the way, you’re the best reader I’ve ever worked with. You should act!”
Chapter 22
Not Really an Answer to the Winter Part
When the cheaply made comedy The Brothers McMullen became an indie sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, it seemed to spark a wave of similarly talky, shoestring-budgeted relationship movies set in as few locations as possible. The vibe among moviemakers and budding creative types suddenly seemed to be, No excuses. Quit sitting around in a bar complaining about your lack of work opportunities. Sit around in a bar and make a movie!
Actually, my friends and I had come to that conclusion years before.
By the early nineties my film career was in the doldrums, which had done wonders for my free time, so I did a lot of hanging out with my New York friends Richard Schenkman, the director, and Adam Oliensis, an actor and playwright. One day we looked at our combined skills—directing, writing, acting—and realized, We’ve got most of what we need right here! We came up with a story about guys like us in New York, single and struggling to understand who they are and how women fit into their lives, and decided each of us would go off and write scenes alone, then come back and hash them out with the other two. About a week later we had a movie script about four guys and their romantic misadventures, which we called The Pompatus of Love.
A natural theme emerged from our individual writing sessions: that we were a generation of guys raised to believe that communication fixed everything, but we were discovering that it also had incredible limitations. In spite of the barrage of words you could exchange with a prospective mate, you weren’t immune to further cloudiness just from talking more. (The title refers to the line from that Steve Miller song “The Joker,” which has spurred a million “What the hell does ‘pompatus’ mean?” conversations. More on that later.)
One of the scenes Adam wrote really nailed the idea that honesty is a tool used as much to control and/or hurt others as any willful deception. “Just say what you mean!” this girl says, and the guy responds, “You can’t say what you mean, because the saying is tiny, but the meaning is huge!”
We kept the script deliberately loose and rough, a free-form jazz improvisation of sorts, and though we originally envisioned it as a DIY project, we suddenly got a surprising amount of interest from actual producers, including Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron. When the usual Hollywood stalling tactics of interest and disinterest started to irk us, though, we set a date for ourselves: If we didn’t get it set up by such-and-such day, we were just going to shoot it with whatever we could scrape together ourselves.
Then the appointed day arrived, and we did our gut check. I’d been able to save some of my money from TV gigs, and Richard and Adam had a little bit of money as well. Plus, they knew people who had money. Then Richard worked an in with a financier who knew Kristin Scott Thomas. She wanted to be in the movie, which led to French money, because Kristin was especially revered as an actress in France. Et voilà, it was a real movie.
We were amazed. We had wrought something from nothing, a real film from the three of us sitting around bellyaching. And we were going to be shooting in New York, our hometown! I hadn’t shot anything in New York since that Zestabs commercial when I was four. We had a cast that included Adrian Pasdar as a womanizer, Tim Guinee as a verbose playwright, and Adam as a lovable lug of a plumber. I played an overanalytical therapist. The women in our characters’ lives were played by Kristin, Mia Sara, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Kristen Wilson, and Paige Turco.
One of my favorite memories from putting the movie together was Richard telling me about a singer/songwriter he knew who had been a backup singer for Michael Jackson, but wanted a solo career. He asked her early on if she’d record a new version of “The Joker” for the movie, and she said yes. Then he asked me to go see her at a club on the Sunset Strip, and she was terrific. I remember thinking, Why isn’t she huge? Well, she soon was. It was Sheryl Crow.
We were a tiny indie movie, but in New York, as long as you’re willing to pay for a cop, you could get the same treatment Law & Order gets. When Richard was directing a scene in the Times Square triangle between Seventh and Broadway—one of the city’s busiest, most iconic locations—he simply asked our cop, “Can we shut down the traffic?”
“Okay,” the cop said, and promptly halted Times Square traffic so we could shoot. Cars were honking, bystanders were pissed, but it felt like we had this magical cinematic immunity. Normal human rules did not apply. I remember at that moment I looked up at a Jumbotron and saw a pop music top-ten countdown, and there she was: Sheryl Crow. She now had a hit single. It felt as if the world were bending to meet us. This was surely a good omen that we were onto something.
Again, my delusion about these things caught up to me. Going to the Cannes Film Festival market to sell the film proved to be a learning experience as a producer. There was a real disconnect for me between the opulence and glamour of the Croisette—the famous promenade lined with huge ads for blockbuster movies on one side, and a beach full of topless women on the other—and the dingy hotel suite we were set up in by the company that was representing us, where we had to sell the movie to buyers from around the world. The level of bullshit showmanship involved to hawk a movie was something my heart was just not in, and I had money in this labor of love. That part of the business—the razzmatazz P. T. Barnum aspect, schmoozing a guy with five theaters in Lichtenstein who might be interested in your film—has never been a talent of mine, although Richard did try to bed one of the potential German buyers, and I thought that was awfully sweet.
Also, our financier turned out to be a complete douche. One of our production assistants was a great guy named Phil who was dating my sister, Robin. As a favor, he took the job making no money, but figured he’d be getting a wealth of on-set experience. One night he was slated to drive actors back to the production office, and we were so tired that a bunch of us leaned on him to do so as quickly as he could, whereupon he got a speeding ticket. I told our moneyman that the production had to pay the
fine, since we’d told him to go fast, but this asshole refused. It wasn’t even a lot of money, but for Phil it was more than he had, and he eventually lost his license for a while over not being able to pay the fine.
Another dickish thing the guy did was, well, lose the film rights. When he never paid the Screen Actors Guild for residuals—a minuscule amount—the union had the movie seized, and they eventually sold it for less than ten thousand dollars without our knowledge. A movie that cost a million dollars to make was sold for a pittance because of this prick. I’m proud of The Pompatus of Love, even though it didn’t exactly set the indie world on fire. And we did get an unqualified rave in The New York Times, which is never not fun.
But did you know that we also solved one of rock music’s great mysteries? That’s right, people: In the course of making this movie, I found out what the hell the pompatus of love means.
Richard, Adam, and I had been as puzzled as everyone else about the meaning of this enigmatic lyric. That its definition was essentially unknowable was a part of the metaphor we were constructing about love. But it had to have come from somewhere.
See, Steve Miller was a huge fan of fifties R & B; he quoted several famous lyrics in both “The Joker” and another song he wrote called “Enter Maurice.” If you recall, “The Joker” went like this: “Some people call me Maurice, / ’Cause I speak of the pompatus of love.” Well, “Enter Maurice” featured this doozy: “My dearest darling, come closer to Maurice so I can whisper / sweet words of epismetology in your ear and speak to you of / the pompatus of love.”
Richard and I were content to let it remain unknown, but while we were in postproduction, a friend of his alerted us to the fact that there existed a doo-wop song called “The Letter” by a group called the Medallions, which had a spoken verse that appeared to contain the line, “Oh, my darling, let me whisper sweet words of epismetology and discuss the pompatus of love.” Jackpot! Clearly there was a link.