The Dangerous Animals Club Read online

  Because of the demands on the actor, theater has something called a “rehearsal period.” It can often go on longer than the run of the play, especially in high school. My friend Julie Hagerty is involved with a production of Ibsen’s play The Master Builder that has literally been rehearsing for over twelve years. At that point if a show doesn’t open, it should at least get bar mitzvahed. They recently performed for a limited run in an art gallery in lower Manhattan. It was wonderful. It demonstrated what my grandmother always said: “Sometimes it’s better if it stays in the pot a long time.”

  Compare that to film. Recently, I worked on an episode of the television program Californication. The director told us where we were to stand. He told Pam Adlon, who plays my wife, Marcy, where to enter. Then, without any rehearsal, he laughed and said, “Shall we just try one and see what happens?”

  I used to think that filmed productions didn’t rehearse as much as theater because they didn’t have the time, the money, or the interest. I had a theater actor’s prejudice. Now I am ready to admit I was wrong. Film directors are very interested—just not necessarily in what I was doing.

  In theater, the actor tells the story. The actor must learn lines, movements, and timing to create the piece’s reality. In a film, the technical people tell the story. The director creates the reality using actors as only one element.

  The “wow factor” of theater is seamlessness. The “wow factor” of a film is surprise. And to that end, film directors focus rehearsal on the technical aspects so they can record the sound of surprise. If an actor rehearses too much for a film and gets too comfortable, it may be counterproductive to a good film performance.

  I can think of an exception that proves the rule. In Single White Female we had a rehearsal period of more than a month. That almost never happens. We even rehearsed in sequence, which is as rare as finding a real diamond ring in a box of Cracker Jacks. We reached a scene near the end of the movie where I attempt to rape Bridget Fonda. Bridget repels my advances by kicking me in the crotch. This is the kind of scene you would spend days rehearsing if it were a play. On stage you would have to meticulously work out how and where I grab Bridget. What do I do to act like an authentic rapist? How do I do it without looking silly or getting sued by her people? How does she get out of my grasp? And most importantly, how do we negotiate her kneeing me in the nuts?

  Our director, Barbet Schroeder, curiously stopped rehearsal at this point. He said we would practice the rape and the kneeing in the groin later with a fight expert. Barbet told me not to worry about my privates. It would all be safe and “beautifully choreographed.” At this point I wasn’t expecting Swan Lake. I hoped to remain a baritone.

  However, once we started principal photography, we never rehearsed again. There was no fight choreography. No Swan Lake. We shot for the next two and a half months. On the day Bridget and I were to shoot the rape scene, I went into my trailer and found a brown paper bag on my dresser. Inside was a hard protective athletic cup with a picture of a hockey player on it.

  The fight expert stuck his head in the door and said, “Good. You found it. Just slide that puppy into your shorts. Cover up your jollies. We’ll tell Bridget not to whale on you. Don’t worry, man. Everything should be cool.”

  That was it. That was the extent of the fight choreography. Bridget and I would wing it. The safety net would be a hockey cup purchased at Big 5 Sporting Goods and my wife, Ann. Ann decided to come to the set that day to “supervise” the rape. She exchanged a bit of girl talk with Bridget before we started shooting. She explained she wanted me returned home with the factory equipment intact. Bridget smiled. Message received.

  We started to shoot the rape section of the scene. Bridget came up to me and whispered, “Stephen, it would really help me if you could put your hand under my blouse and pinch my nipple. Hard. That gets me really angry.”

  This is where it helps to be a good student. They don’t teach things like this at the university. Being a classically trained Method actor, I assured Bridget I could deliver the necessary pinch. Of course, I wasn’t sure how angry I wanted to get her. The “knee to the nuts” part of the scene was only a page away.

  We shot for three hours. There were over thirty takes of nipple twisting and nut kneeing. Bridget, with almost ninjalike skill, came full force into my lower forty-eight and always stopped one half of an inch from disaster. I have worked with hundreds of actresses in my career. The best two technical actresses without question were Meryl Streep and Bridget Fonda. I would trust them with my life or, in this case, my unborn children.

  I have to admit, at the time, I thought the lack of rape rehearsal was poor planning bordering on recklessness. I recognized some years later that Barbet wanted to preserve the surprise. A movie is pieced together months after filming. After editing, sound editing, special effects, and scoring, it can die unless the performances carry spontaneity that grabs the audience.

  Ridley Scott is a great general of all the film elements. I worked with him on Thelma & Louise. Before each scene he called a meeting with the actors to discuss what we wanted to do. I played Max, the head of the FBI team in charge of tracking down the women. In my first scene I come into Thelma’s house with all of my men. Ridley suggested, “I think you should take over the room.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  Of course I had no idea what “take over the room” meant so I just did what a lot of actors do. I copied things I had seen on reruns of other cop shows. During camera rehearsal I came in quickly. I ordered each one of my men to do a certain task using their last names. Using last names is very coplike. Things like “Morgan, put a wiretap on line one. Johnson, I want a T1 line set up to base.” All sorts of butch commands like that.

  Ridley nodded. He said, “Fine. Shall we shoot one?” We all said sure. I went outside the front door and got ready to make my entrance when the spirit of surprise started whispering in my ear, “Stephen, that was terrible. Derivative. Phony.” (I should mention that myself is very hard on me sometimes.) I continued, “When you direct a play you don’t walk in and say, ‘All right, Carol, go design the costumes. John Lee, make the sets. Pat, learn your lines. Let’s do this play!’ You assume everyone knows his or her job.”

  On the set I could hear the AD calling places and telling the cameras to roll. I continued talking to myself, “What do you care about when you run things? Come on, man, I need an answer fast!” I answered myself, “Okay. Okay. Snacks. I care about snacks.” The First AD yelled, “Action!” I entered.

  I walked into the room, looked around, and ad-libbed, “People, attention.” The room got quiet and everyone looked at me. I continued with an FBI sort of confidence, “I’m going on a deli run. Who wants turkey? Morgan, you want roast beef again? Cole slaw?” The other actors looked perplexed. I continued, “I’m going with the turkey, rye, Swiss, anyone else?” There was a momentary pause and then miraculously the other actors started giving me food orders! Ridley called, “Cut!” He ran up from behind the camera yelling ecstatically, “I love it, I love it!”

  From then on Ridley wanted me eating different food in every scene. The gods of surprise formed a dramatic narrative. It christened Ridley and my character, Max, at the same moment. If we had rehearsed the scene for a week, it never would have happened. Ridley Scott is one of the great directors working today. Many other directors might not have liked the food bit, and I could have gotten fired or just told to come in with more of the Law & Order stuff. I have found the greater the director, the greater the likelihood they enjoy being surprised.

  SOMETIMES REHEARSAL ON a film is a dangerous waste of time. Or worse. I was hired for a one-day part on the film National Security, starring Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn. I played a machine shop guy delivering some crucial story points about the metallic composition of a beer keg. Our set was an actual blast furnace in a part of L.A. that was so scary, so nasty, that I petitioned to have the area banned from Google Earth in the public interest.
r />   There was nothing in this shop that couldn’t kill or maim you in less than a minute. The foreman of the shop was our safety monitor. He told us, “Stay away from that furnace. It heats up to six thousand degrees.”

  I raised my hand. “Six thousand degrees? Isn’t that like the surface of Mercury?” He didn’t answer. He just stared at me and continued on the safety tour.

  He pointed to another red-hot oven and told us, “If a shard comes out of this oven and lands on your shoe, it’ll melt your foot.” He pointed to the back of the shop. “Don’t open that door, the light in that room is so bright it’ll burn your retinas.” He gestured to another corner of the set. “Don’t walk in that part of the shop. The fumes will eat your lungs out.” Into this intoxicating mix we added one final unstable element: people.

  I was advised that Martin Lawrence was traveling with his assistants who also worked as his personal bodyguards. The AD called a rehearsal for the first part of the scene. The director called action. Steve and Martin entered the shop followed by Martin’s posse: four guys with long sports jerseys, baggy jeans, and gold chains. I felt like I was in an MTV video.

  We started the dialogue. Instead of just watching the scene, Martin’s posse walked toward me. I kept acting and got to the point in the scene where I walk over and put my arm around Martin. His bodyguards reached into the waistbands of their pants and pulled out guns and aimed them at me. I put my hands in the air and froze. Martin, to his credit, yelled out, “Guys! Chill! It’s cool. It’s cool. We’re just rehearsing. This is part of the movie.”

  I was still frozen. “Yes. Guys, let’s just chill. We’re acting here. This is just acting.” The guys put their weapons back in their pants.

  “Shall we continue?” the director asked. Martin, again to his credit, said, “Why don’t we just shoot one.” I agreed. If someone’s gonna bust a cap in yo’ ass, might as well be for the real thing and not just a rehearsal.

  There is one time on a movie you don’t want to capture surprise—when you work with explosives. In the movie DMZ I played a sergeant on my last day of duty on the border between North and South Korea. In the scene a group of North Korean peasants were supposed to make a desperate run for freedom through the DMZ while being shot at and blasted by the soldiers of the North. The producers brought in real Koreans to play the escaping Koreans because they thought it would be “more authentic.”

  We rehearsed the scene for hours. Special-effects people planted dynamite in the ground and marked each explosive with a small bit of white powder as a visual reference. A Korean translator walked through the path with the extras, demonstrating the serpentine course they had to run to avoid getting blown up. They rehearsed the “run to freedom” in slow motion several times.

  Everything was perfect until the director yelled, “Action!” Either the sound of his voice in the megaphone was too loud or the word “Action” meant something different in Korean. Panic ensued. The extras screamed and ran straight through the pass in a nonserpentine fashion getting blown to bits.

  The good news was we got great footage. And fortunately, there were no casualties. Injuries, yes. Deaths, no.

  It boggled my mind to imagine the hardships these people went through: leaving Korea, coming to America, only to get blown up in a movie where they pretend they’re back in Korea coming to America. It hurt my brain to think about it.

  IF WE OPERATE on the assumption that the goal of a film is to preserve surprise, there would appear to be method in the madness of David Milch. I have had the privilege of working with David in various capacities on four projects from L.A. Law to John from Cincinnati. But I think David’s most amazing achievement so far is the series Deadwood.

  It was television, but it is misleading to call it a television program. It would be like calling the rings of Saturn space dust. The scope of Deadwood was beyond television in any number of categories: size, cost, quality, and profanity. Deadwood broke the mold in every way.

  It may be an apocryphal story, but the way it was told to me was that David wanted to shoot a series about the rise of civilization during the Roman Empire. He wanted the drama performed by actors, in Latin, with subtitles. It would feature the unimaginable violence of the age coming into conflict with the inexorable forces of the future. He pitched it to HBO. They listened and said, “Well, David, what we’re looking for is a Western.” And David said, “It’s the same thing.” And Deadwood was born.

  Instead of the actors speaking in Latin, he had characters speaking in streams of profanity, or in backward Shakespeare like my character, Hugo Jarry. Regular viewers of the show told me that they had to record each episode and listen to it over and over again to decipher what was happening.

  The haiku that describes Deadwood was the infamous “cocksucker” scene. If you have seen it, you can’t forget it. If you haven’t you should rent the DVD just to see it. In the scene a Chinese worker is trying to warn his boss about a dangerous man arriving at the train station, but the only English word he knows is “cocksucker”—which is horrible and hilarious in its own right. The scene goes on for several minutes as the Chinese worker frantically repeats the word “cocksucker” with various inflections to his mystified boss. The levels of emotion and torment and danger and frustration in the scene are a perfect statement of the foreign film David wanted to create.

  Physically, the show was gigantic. The shooting schedule for a one-hour television program in the 1990s could balloon into fourteen days. That was huge. Later in the decade, with the influx of inexpensive Canadian productions, shooting time shortened to seven days. That was brutal. I have worked on feature films shot in twenty-one to twenty-eight days. The final episode of Deadwood in season two took thirty days to film.

  Deadwood often worked with two full-time crews, two cinematographers, and two directors, with David Milch overseeing everything. And they were always the top-line people. One of our camera crews included some of the team Alan Parker used on Mississippi Burning.

  On a typical day at Deadwood, we would arrive at five a.m. and get breakfast. Rehearsal would begin in the dark, supervised by the director of the episode and David Milch. David liked to shoot in natural light as much as possible. He wanted to be ready to go at sunrise. We would rehearse and get the scene up to speed. Then David would toss in something like, “Oh, and we should have a cattle stampede going down Main Street somewhere in there.” Once in season three, I was rehearsing a scene and we were just wrapping up when David left rehearsal saying, “Great, great—so, Stephen, when we shoot it, do it like a bird.”

  “Beg your pardon?” I said.

  David said, “Do what you’re doing, but just do it like a bird. You know, with wings and feathers and a beak. Just see what happens. Try to fly or something like that.”

  “Okay.”

  In one scene Tim Olyphant, as Sheriff Bullock, takes me to jail for protective custody. After watching rehearsal, David felt the street was too empty. He added a huge yoked bull to walk in front of us. During the take, the bull lifted his tail and took an enormous dump on me. Tim and I kept going, even though I squished when I walked.

  When they yelled, “Cut,” Tim busted a gut laughing. I complained to David that I got crapped on during the shot. David was thrilled. He said, “Are you kidding? You can’t plan things like that! It was great! That was the best part of the scene. And he almost did it on cue! That’s a print.” As I started slogging my way back to my trailer, David yelled, “And remember, Stephen, we don’t wash costumes on Deadwood.” Which was true. David wanted the stains to match from week to week. That bull gave me a gift that kept giving for the rest of the season. At the end of two or three months, the clothes walked on their own.

  More than once after rehearsal, David rushed off to rewrite the scene. Actors would sit in their trailers for hours only to be told there was a change of plan. “David hasn’t finished rewriting, so we will shoot tomorrow’s scene today and today’s scene next week. I don’t know. We’ll call you.�
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  The other popular scenario was when the AD called at eleven o’clock at night with the news that you were added to a scene that shoots tomorrow at dawn. Pages were being sent in an email. You run to your computer and find that you have a new six-page monologue of backward Shakespeare to learn. Then you cry. After the nervous breakdown you have a decision to make: Stay up all night and learn the scene? If you do, odds are David will just rewrite it after rehearsal. Should you just blow it off and get a good night’s sleep in case they let a stampede of cattle loose, and you need the energy to run for your life? Once I offered to pay the AD a hundred dollars to move my scene to later in the day. He said, “Sorry, man. David wants to shoot you first.”

  It could have been David’s way of injecting surprise into the process. Or it could have been that he was just nutty in a brilliant way or brilliant in a nutty way. Either way, it was the poetry of chaos.

  Weather also injected surprise into the process. We never stopped what we were doing because of burning heat or torrential rains. I had one scene where I had to walk down Main Street and enter the Bella Union Saloon to meet Powers Boothe, who played Tolliver, for a bit of scheming and betrayal. The camera started with me outside and followed me through the swinging saloon doors.

  The rain outside was incredible. It was more reminiscent of Calcutta than Los Angeles. Several inches had fallen that day, and there was no sign of a letup. The mud was a foot deep in the streets. On one take, a horse in the background had enough of being out in the weather and made a dash for the bar as well. He came walking through the swinging bar doors right behind me. Talk about the sound of surprise. The horse came up and stood at the bar with us. No one called, “Cut.” Powers played the scene to me and the horse. I choked back tears of laughter as Powers, with deadly earnestness, told each of us what our part in the plot was, including the horse. They called, “Cut.” Afterward Powers asked me if the horse was a last-second addition of David’s.