Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  Cinecom pledged $5 million to make the movie and hired me to direct it. I started tweaking the script, scouting locations, and working on preproduction. Richard Gere signed on to star, along with Penelope Ann Miller, Brian Dennehy, Kevin Anderson from Steppenwolf, and a young Helen Hunt, who later went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress in her role in As Good as It Gets. I brought over several other actors from Steppenwolf to round out the cast: Terry Kinney, Bob Breuler, Francis Guinan, Laurie Metcalf, Randy Arney, and Malkovich. I also cast Moira to play Richard Gere’s girlfriend, and in a small roll I cast a then-unknown actress named Laura San Giacomo (who later became known for her role as Maya Gallo in the sitcom Just Shoot Me!).

  We shot the film in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I found my transition from theater directing to film directing a little more difficult than I’d anticipated. I was just thirty-two years old and often felt unsure of my decisions. Moira and I rented an apartment in Cedar Rapids, across the street from the production offices we’d set up, and I spent so much time in our apartment tweaking the script that the production manager walked across the street one afternoon and urged me to spend more time in the offices—the production folks were all convinced I was hiding out from them. We began shooting. The days were long, and I kept cutting and adding things to the script. Laura San Giacomo had just the one small part in the movie, a few scenes, but the day she arrived I decided to cut her character. It just wasn’t working in the script, and I didn’t want to shoot something that would end up on the cutting room floor. Just as I had experienced with Tom Irwin and True West, one of the hardest parts of being a director is making decisions for the sake of the project that may disappoint people. Fortunately, Laura responded sweetly and didn’t hold it against me.

  Meanwhile, the production manager was set to receive a bonus from the studio if he brought the movie in under budget, so he continually sliced and diced where I wanted more. In one major scene, the brothers burn down their farm. I’d envisioned the Great Chicago Fire or Atlanta burning in Gone with the Wind, but we ended up with what looked like three candles on a birthday cake. Not enough money had been spent on the scene. So I scheduled a reshoot with lots of fire everywhere, spent a lot more money with multiple cameras rolling, and got what I wanted—so much so that we scorched the rented farmhouse and had to repair it afterward. I also decided to have the writer, Chris Gerolmo, rewrite the end of the movie. The script had originally ended with a big chase scene. An Iowa cop chases Richard Gere’s character, Frank Roberts, on dirt roads through the cornfields. We started shooting it with actor Daniel Roebuck in the role of the cop, but a big chase at the end wasn’t feeling right for the film that I’d been shooting for the past six weeks. I decided I wanted the movie to wind up with something more poetic, more heartbreaking, so I asked Chris to rewrite it and had to tell Daniel that his scene was out. He and I have remained friends, and he never fails to remind me that I fired him from my first movie. Chris came up with a beautiful scene between the two brothers as they are forced to go their separate ways and say goodbye. The producer, Fred Zollo, introduced me to the great composer John Barry, who wanted to write the score for the film. But by the time we started shooting, Barry had become sick and had to drop out. We needed to hire another composer, and fortunately we got Robert Folk. But with this aspect of the film, too, I would also second-guess which way to go. All the music I’d ever done for plays was hard-hitting rock and roll, but because Barry had wanted to write the score, I’d shifted my thinking to an orchestral score, so that’s what Folk wrote. It was beautiful, but I still wasn’t sure.

  To add to the pressure, in the middle of all this confusion, I received a call from the producers who said the selection committee at the Cannes Film Festival wanted to see a cut of the movie.

  Cannes! Holy crap! Cannes means red carpet and paparazzi, big movie stars chauffeured to the front door in limousines. Every filmmaker dreams of being in competition at Cannes. A great reception there can really help a movie out.

  The pressure was on to get the film ready for the festival. I cranked up my editing pace. The studio execs then decided to fiddle with the title of the film, changing it from The Farm of the Year to Miles from Home. I kept editing, right up to the point when Richard Gere, a pregnant Moira, and I all hopped on the plane for Cannes. Richard and I carried canisters of the 35-millimeter print with us. Richard had been there before, but it was an exciting and totally new experience for me. All the craziness of Cannes was a real shock to the system. Miles from Home didn’t win any awards and received mixed reviews, but it was fun to be at the festival.

  Once we got home, I went back into the editing room and kept making changes. The movie needed to be shorter, and I changed the music all around. I decided the scenes with Moira and Richard Gere were unnecessary, so I cut my very own wife out of the film. Ever the consummate professional, Moira told me not to worry.

  Miles from Home opened at the World Playhouse in Chicago on September 12, 1988, the same month Steppenwolf opened the inaugural production of The Grapes of Wrath. Richard Gere came into town for the movie’s premiere and we held a party. Some critics liked the film, including the great Roger Ebert, but publicity was limited, and I think a total of only five theaters ever showed the film. It never found its audience and fell flat, earning a grand total of $188,964.

  The experience wasn’t all bad—for me, anyway, although I’m sure the studio wasn’t thrilled. I learned many great lessons about filmmaking, including things that I would do differently next time. And I vowed there would be a next time. I just needed to find the right movie.

  Our first baby was due just after Miles from Home closed in theaters. The due date was November 8, 1988, election day the year George H. W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis. That morning we got up early, walked up the street to vote, then went for a bite to eat at McDonald’s, after which we planned to see a movie. But Moira started feeling funny. At first we wondered if it was the double cheeseburger and fries she’d been craving and had just downed. But then we realized she was having contractions, so we went home to wait for them to quicken. I had a little plastic drum and started beating on that, doing what I called a “labor dance,” singing and chanting in hopes the baby would hear and be motivated to come out. We kept the TV on, and by late in the day Bush appeared to be winning. Moira wanted to wash her hair before we went to the hospital, and when she emerged from the shower, wrapped in a towel, she stood at the sink brushing her teeth, watching the election results on TV. Just then a huge contraction hit. She moaned, still with toothpaste in her mouth, and uttered, absolutely deadpan, “The Dukakises must be sad.” It set me to laughing, despite our circumstances. Her contraction passed; she finished brushing her teeth. Then she said it was time. I started running around like a nut.

  We jumped in the car, heading for Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. In the car, Moira’s water broke. I was a nervous wreck, but Moira was amazing, breathing through each contraction. We reached the hospital, and Moira stuck with her commitment to give birth naturally. It was very clearly painful for her, but she got in her room and began to push, entering an incredible, tranquil zone where she pressed through the pain. Our beautiful baby girl was born just after midnight, the early moments of November 9. We named her Sophia Ana Sinise and called her Sophie.

  When we brought our new baby home from the hospital, we laid her on the bed and just stared at her. I looked at Moira, and Moira looked at me. So much had happened that year, 1988. We’d opened my first film, Miles from Home, and opened a great play in Chicago, The Grapes of Wrath. We’d been to Cannes. We’d had our first child. Together, we both looked back at Sophie.

  Nothing compared to her.

  In early 1990, Moira discovered she was pregnant again, this time with a boy. That summer I was acting on Broadway in The Grapes of Wrath, and Moira, now six months pregnant, was in Chicago doing a play with Steppenwolf called Love Letters. In multiple phone calls we discussed what we should name our son. One day
the name became clear to me. I called up Moira: “We should call him Mac, after your brother!”

  Moira was thrilled. Boyd McCanna “Mac” Harris—the Vietnam vet, Silver Star recipient, and West Point instructor—had passed away in 1983 of cancer, and we all thought of him regularly. When our son was born on November 10, 1990—almost two years to the day after Sophie—we named him McCanna Anthony Sinise—Mac for short. The Irish and Italian influences together sounded very American to us.

  One of my favorite films at the time was the American Civil War epic Glory, starring Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderick, Cary Elwes, and Morgan Freeman. The movie had opened the year before, and I loved its soundtrack. Moira had labored throughout the night with Mac, and he’d been born early in the morning, about five thirty. I’d been up all night with Moira, so I left the hospital about seven o’clock to go home, grab a shower, and change. As I drove out of the hospital’s campus, I put on the soundtrack to Glory. Stopped at a traffic light and thinking about my new son while the sun came up in the distance, everything hit me. My son was healthy. Moira was healthy. My family was beautiful. The magnificent music filled the air.

  I choked up. Tears came into my eyes.

  Grateful didn’t begin to describe how I felt. I was so much more than grateful. Already I’d made so many mistakes in my life and so many times I’d chosen the wrong path, yet somehow a mercy was still being shown to me. Why did I deserve all this goodness? I wasn’t a believer in Providence. I never really thought about God. Yet something beyond me was so clearly involved in my story. Something unseen was pulling me along, never giving up on me, helping me find and fulfill my purposes in life. If all this blessing was an act of Providence, then that was okay by me, even if I still had a long way to go toward understanding what I was only then beginning to glimpse.

  As I brushed away tears at the stoplight, I think I whispered a semblance of my first prayer. The prayer was hazy, but the intention was clear. Call it a longing perhaps. The first twinges of belief. Two words, layered with more than one meaning . . .

  Thank you.

  CHAPTER 7

  Steinbeck Country

  Long before the images ever became a reality, I visualized this:

  A journey starts inside a boxcar, and you hear the clackity clack of the train going across the tracks. It’s night, and you see lights from outside coming through the boxcar slats. Opening credits roll as the camera moves across the slats of the car. Then the light breaks through the slats, and slowly it reveals something huddled in the corner.

  It’s George, sitting in the boxcar in the dark corner by himself. Why is he there alone?

  The camera cuts quickly to a young woman in a torn red dress, brightly lit by the California sun as she runs through a field of barley. Then it cuts again. George and Lennie are on the run, because Lennie has become too excited around the woman in the red dress. Lennie is a gentle giant, mentally challenged, who has the mind of a five-year-old. As an adult he’s harmless, but he’s a big puppy who can’t control his own emotions. And he’s always been taken care of by George. The girl has run away from Lennie, because she doesn’t understand. Frightened from the encounter, she runs, screaming and yelling, toward a group of migrant workers in the fields. Then we cut away from her, and see that George and Lennie are running in the opposite direction to get away as fast as possible.

  That’s how I envisioned the movie would start.

  Hold that thought.

  During Miles from Home, I’d struck up a friendship with John Barry, the Oscar-winning composer who’d originally been hired to do the music. He’d recovered from his illness, and one day in 1990, while I was performing in The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway, he invited me over to a private screening of a rough cut of a new movie he’d just scored. He hadn’t told me beforehand that it was Dances with Wolves, a huge, three-hour epic, starring, produced by, and directed by Kevin Costner. The movie went on to win multiple Oscars, including one for John for Best Score, yet the thing that stunned me most was this: although Kevin had never directed before, there he was, performing three vital functions in this movie. He inspired me to do the same.

  My agent, Sam, wanted me to focus on directing. But I knew I wanted to keep acting. I’d never produced a film, but I’d been around enough producers to know a little bit about it. I knew also that unless you take matters into your own hands, you can only have whatever comes to you. I’d always been a person who dreamed something up, then made it happen. So my goal became finding a project where I could produce, direct, and act.

  When The Grapes of Wrath finished, I searched for what to do next. I knew I wanted to do something epic, something that moved people, and preferably another movie. But what? Then Elaine Steinbeck reentered my story. Elaine had become a real champion of Steppenwolf. She’d seen that we could take her husband’s novels and handle the stories really well. On the last day of shooting the PBS version of The Grapes of Wrath, I stood with Elaine during a break out by the theater’s back steps. I thought about the boxcar image, swallowed, sucked up my courage, and said, “Elaine, would you give me the rights to Of Mice and Men? I’d like to try to make a movie out of it.” I paused and added tentatively, “I’d need your help, too, because I don’t have any money.”

  She chuckled quietly, smiled her beautiful, dignified smile, and said, “Well, honey, it’s already been a film. Three times.”

  She was referring to its first adaptation in 1939 starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and Burgess Meredith as George, and its second adaptation in 1968 starring George Segal and Nicol Williamson, plus Will Geer, the grandpa from The Waltons. It had also been made into a TV movie in 1981 starring Randy Quaid and Robert Blake.

  I explained to Elaine that from the time I first saw it onstage at the Guthrie Theater in high school I’d loved the story, one of the first that had excited me about acting. I hadn’t known anything about John Steinbeck then, but the story had moved me greatly, and this was exactly the type of story I wanted to tell on film. Elaine smiled again and said she’d think about it. She was so gracious. Within a short time, I was able to make a deal with the Steinbeck estate for the rights to Of Mice and Men for one year—completely free of charge. Suddenly I was a producer with a project. I could direct it and act in it. We’d already done a production at Steppenwolf where I had played George, and I knew the story forward and backward. I just needed to make a movie happen.

  That’s all.

  Having been focused on Steppenwolf and my work there for so long, I had made a decision that this project was going to be a new challenge for me, separate from theater. While I would end up working with a few pals from the company, unlike Miles from Home, which included several Steppenwolf company members, this project would be a distinct effort altogether. So before going forward I wanted to let my two best friends, Terry and Jeff, know that I was striking out on my own with this one. It was a difficult thing to do, but I felt it was time to try something else. This created a bit of tension and distance between us cofounders at the time. Terry had directed me in the Steppenwolf production of the play back in 1980, and Jeff had played a pivotal role in that production. But now, I was going to make the movie on my own, and because of this, we parted company for a while.

  So, how do you create a movie from the ground up? Earlier, my agent had set up a dinner between Alan Ladd Jr., the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and me, and I’d worked on a couple of development projects with MGM in the past, although nothing had come of them. So I met again with Alan and explained how I wanted to make Of Mice and Men. Alan loved the idea and jumped on board. The studio made a deal with Elaine (my rights were only to pitch it; the studio still had to pay for the rights to use it), and suddenly we were in business.

  I reached out to a producer buddy of mine, Russ Smith, and asked him to coproduce with me. MGM gave us $8.8 million to put the production together, a relatively small budget but definitely workable. Malkovich and I had done the play together ten years earlier, so he wa
s the obvious choice for the role of Lennie. The fact that he’d been nominated for an Oscar for Places in the Heart was a definite plus with MGM. I signed on to play George, and Russ and I started searching for the right screenwriter.

  A movie isn’t made overnight, and I couldn’t sit around and wait while things came together, so in the meantime I auditioned for a role in a small-budget World War II movie titled A Midnight Clear. The great cast included Ethan Hawke and Kevin Dillon, and I landed the role of Vance “Mother” Wilkins, my first major role in a feature film. The story is set during the Battle of the Bulge, so we needed a location with lots of snow, mountains, and trees. We ended up shooting in Park City, Utah, in winter. The character I play is very fragile, a soldier experiencing shell shock who’s been in the fight for some time, so I needed to lose some weight for the role. Just before shooting began, Moira and I visited her mother in Florida. I spent much of my time running on the beach, drinking SlimFast shakes, trying to get myself to look thin and gaunt.

  While in Florida, Russ and I talked on the phone about finding a screenwriter for our film. He recommended the legendary Oscar-winner Horton Foote, who’d written the screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck and Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall. I called Horton at his home outside Wharton, Texas, and told him he’d be perfect to write our script. He wanted to know why we possibly wanted to make another version of Of Mice and Men. Considering how I might persuade him, I thought of one of my favorite films of all time: 1973’s Scarecrow, starring Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, about two misfit loners who develop an unlikely friendship. The acting is edgy, powerful, and moving, and I said to Horton, “I want to make a movie just like Scarecrow. Have you ever seen it?” He hadn’t, but I mailed him a copy; he watched it, called me back immediately, and gushed, “I love that movie! Now I understand what you’re talking about.” He signed on that day to write our script for Of Mice and Men. Russ and Horton flew up to Utah while I was filming A Midnight Clear, and in between takes we went through the first draft of the script for Of Mice and Men.