The Dangerous Animals Club Page 18

  I showed up the next day for class. Again, the teachers looked confused. Joan continued to ignore me. Over the next two months, I was never given an assignment. I was never called on in class. My tests went ungraded, my essays were returned unmarked. I still showed up. Some teachers looked at me with irritation. Some, like Joan Potter, only smiled and continued to shut me out. I was not cast in any plays my junior year.

  Near the end of the semester Hob was waiting for me once more after first period. He nudged me into the men’s room. We stood at the urinals. Hob unzipped and started to pee. I was unsure of the proper etiquette so I unzipped, too, and joined him. It seemed like the only polite thing to do. He said, “I think she’s going to do something else.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. In the faculty meeting she asked what the requirement was to get someone removed from the school permanently. I told her two Unsatisfactories.”

  “Hob, I don’t know what else I can do that’s unsatisfactory. I’m not in any plays so I can’t miss any rehearsals. I’ve turned in all my assignments. It’s not my fault they haven’t been graded.”

  “I know. I’m just warning you. She’s going to try to get you kicked out.”

  “Thanks, Hob. I appreciate it.” We zipped and went our separate ways.

  I thought through my world of limited options. I learned the first real lesson of my time in school: never underestimate the power of being underestimated. I went to see Tony Graham-White, my Theater History teacher. He was a short, terribly bright, terribly idiosyncratic Englishman. He asked what he could do for me. I said, “A lot, Tony, a lot. As a member of the faculty you can give the Theater Comprehensive Exam, right?” The Comprehensive was the graduate test everyone had to take senior year to get a degree. People studied for it forever and hated it. Tony looked a little surprised and said yes. He was giving it to the seniors in about a month.

  “Tony, there are no bylaws in the theater department against me taking the test early, are there?”

  He shook his head nervously. “Are you kidding? People hate the bloody thing. Why would anyone want to take it early? You can take it whenever you want.”

  “Good. I’m sure you know about the problems I’m having with one teacher in the department.” Tony raised his eyebrows. “I want to make sure I take that test next month. But, Tony, this is important, no one can know I’m taking it. My name can’t be on any list. No one else in the faculty can know. You can’t tell anyone, not your friends, not even your family.” Tony’s eyes widened. This was as close as he had ever been to being in a James Bond movie. “One more thing, Tony. When I finish the test, I want you to grade it. Only you. And whatever happens—win, lose, or draw—save it for me in case I need it.”

  Tony shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. He nodded and said, “I could do that. Not a problem.”

  I studied for the next month and took the Comprehensive Exam for three hours one Saturday morning. About a week later, in the hallway, Tony cruised up alongside me. He gave me a thumbs-up and whispered, “Graded the test. Flying colors,” before he changed course and scurried off.

  It was a minor victory in this completely undefined war. My moment of triumph was short-lived. I arrived in Joan’s Oral Interpretation class and I got another essay back ungraded. Nothing had changed. That’s when the weight of the last year crushed me. I had never felt so much despair. The next day I had an assignment due in Jack Clay’s comedy class. We were working on songs. I was going to do “Reviewing the Situation” from Oliver. That night I started to look at the lyrics, and made an uncharacteristic decision. I blew it off. I could no longer muster the energy to prepare another useless assignment.

  I went into Professor Clay’s class and settled in for a big helping of being overlooked. This time I was counting on it. Mr. Clay said, “Who’s first up with their song?” Several students who loved show tunes raised their hands with such enthusiasm they almost fell out of their chairs. Mr. Clay looked past them and fixed his gaze on me. “Mr. Tobolowsky. Why don’t you show us what you’ve worked on?”

  Silence. I didn’t move. I was in shock. The only preparation I had done was singing the song in the shower two weeks ago. I walked to the front of the class and began to wing it. I stumbled through the first verse and part of the chorus when Mr. Clay called out, “Stop, stop, stop! This is unacceptable. This is shoddy and unprofessional. I won’t have it. Did you work on this at all?”

  I shifted on my feet, ashamed. “No, sir. No. I didn’t.” Mr. Clay never let down his gaze. He looked right through me. Under his breath he muttered, “Well, at least you’re honest about it.” He pulled out his little book and a pencil and pretended to write something.

  He looked up at me again. “Next class you will bring in this song—finished—and you will bring in another song as well. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You will never come in this class unprepared again. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The next Monday was Mr. Clay’s Shakespeare class. I was prepared. It was a good thing, too. He called on me first once again. I went up and performed a short monologue of Leontes’s from The Winter’s Tale.

  Mr. Clay observed me, coolly. He damned me with faint praise saying it was decent for a first time through, but that I was just scratching the surface of the character. For the next class he wanted me to take it to the next level. I headed back to my seat. Mr. Clay stopped me. “I’m not finished. For the next class I want you to prepare two more monologues: the Leontes act five speech from The Winter’s Tale and the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet. You are to be off book for both. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again, his gaze.

  The class was embarrassed for me. They thought I had just been publicly chided. They had no idea that they were witness to an act of almost unbearable kindness. I walked back to my seat, looking at Mr. Clay. He met my eye and once again pretended to write something down in his little book. For the rest of the year and throughout my senior year, Jack Clay doubled and tripled my workload. He gave me extra reading. He criticized me continually, but fairly.

  Professor Clay gave me hope when there was absolutely none. His attention to me was unsolicited and unexpected, and it dismantled Joan Potter’s attacks. Years later, when I worked on Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis told me show business is impossible. To succeed you need at least four heroes. Alan Parker, as I mentioned, is one of my heroes. Jack Clay is another.

  Two curious details also marked these years at SMU. First is the attitude of my fellow students. They considered the events happening to me as unrelated to them as a tornado in the next county. They still pursued Joan’s favor. Everyone remained friendly but no one stood up for me for fear of getting the same treatment.

  And even though Joan never graded my papers, she gave me A’s in her classes. It’s perplexing. Every movie made about abusive teachers centers around giving a student bad grades. Not Joan. I have no answers, only theories. Perhaps she had good days and bad days. Perhaps she was bipolar. Or perhaps she knew an artificially low grade would be a tip-off to parents or administrators that something untoward was going on in the drama department. Perhaps she had deeper, darker plans for me. A’s in her classes would provide a perfect cover.

  Her final assault came a month before the end of my senior year. Hob called me into his office. He asked me to sit down. He said he had bad news. Joan Potter had given me a second Unsatisfactory Critique.

  “What on earth for?” I asked.

  Hob pulled out my file and read, “For having a poor attitude in her class.” Hob tossed my file on his desk. “She waited until the end of the term. There’s not much we can do about it. With the previous Unsatisfactory Critique it means, unfortunately, that you won’t be able to graduate.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you have the hours and the grades, but now that you are officially expelled from the school you won’t
be able to take the Comprehensive Exam.”

  “But, Hob, I’ve taken the Comprehensive.”

  “That’s impossible. We haven’t given it yet.”

  “I took it last year, as a junior. It’s in Tony Graham-White’s office.”

  Hob was incredulous. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Hob tapped his fingers on his desk. “If that’s true, that would change everything.”

  Hob picked up his phone and dialed a number. “Tony? Hob here. I heard that Stephen Tobolowsky has already taken the Comprehensive Exam?” Pause. I could hear electronic jabber with an English accent on the other end of the line. “Well, do you have it?” Pause. I sat in the chair crossing everything I could cross for luck. Hob raised his eyebrows and hung up the phone. We sat in excruciating silence. A couple of minutes later Tony Graham-White sauntered into the office with a large manila envelope. He had saved it for me for over a year. He tossed it on Hob’s desk, turned, and gave me a devil-may-care salute and left. Hob opened the envelope. I had made an A on the test.

  I graduated first in my class from the SMU Theater Department, due in large part to all of the A’s Joan Potter gave me.

  In 1982 I did my first Broadway play. I heard a familiar voice backstage. Joan had come to congratulate all the SMU alums in the show. I saw her in the hallway outside my dressing room. We caught each other’s eye in my makeup mirror. She stuck her head into my dressing room and said over the din backstage, “You’re still no good.”

  In 2008, Joan passed away. I tried to make sense of what happened. The years tell a story. After I graduated Joan continued to teach at SMU. She taught in Westchester, New York, and many of her students considered her to be their favorite acting teacher.

  I have no idea why I became the focus of so much of Joan’s energy for three years. From the Shakespeare Jack Clay made me study, I can only cite Julius Caesar, act three, scene two: “The evil that men do lives after them / The good is oft interred with their bones.”

  In 2010, SMU invited me back to be the featured speaker at Conference Hour. I looked at all those faces and wondered if I was ever that young. Faces filled with such hope and terror. I started to talk about Hollywood and auditions when one girl raised her hand. She asked, “What is the most important thing an actor needs to know to be successful?”

  “Not fencing,” I told her. “And probably not even Shakespeare, even though it got me through Deadwood. But seriously, the most important thing for you to learn is something I was lucky enough to learn here. Along the way many people will tell you, ‘No. You can’t do it. You have to go home.’ You have to survive that. You have to stand up to that, and say, ‘This is my life and this is what I’m doing.’”

  Fairly or unfairly, many people are tried in life. The mistake people make is that they think the trial is a sign of failure. It’s not. It’s only a doorway that leads to who you really are.

  16.

  LOST IN ACT ONE

  ONE REASON WHY studying acting at a university will always be misguided is because you will inevitably work on plays written by Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Neil Simon. These authors’ primary aim was to write material that made sense. When you get into the professional world, producers and writers have actors work on projects that make no sense at all. They do this without remorse.

  There are many reasons. Sometimes the producers can’t help it. One of the first professional jobs I got in Los Angeles was performing in a Japanese commercial. I played the role of “Yankee Sailor Man.” The commercial had no script. I was brought into a room in West Los Angeles. Three Japanese clients in expensive suits sat in school desks. They never made eye contact with me. An American casting director pointed to a line of white tape on the floor at the front of the room. He told me to stand on it. I did. The casting director tossed me a sailor’s cap and told me to “put it on and move around.”

  I took the cap and pretended to look into a mirror. I placed it on my head. I smiled in the pretend mirror and made different faces, straightening and repositioning the cap. Then I walked around the front of the room. I picked up a make-believe mop and pretended to mop the deck. When that idea ran its course (about four seconds later), I started singing “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man” and making muscles. The clients seemed to like the Popeye song. They laughed and started whispering to one another in Japanese.

  I got the part. I celebrated. Beth and I opened a bottle of champagne and toasted the coming of the Golden Days. I called Mom and Dad to tell them I was a success in Hollywood even though I still had no idea what the commercial was.

  On the set I put on my white sailor suit. I got a doughnut and coffee and headed for the makeup trailer. Sitting in the trailer were three beautiful models: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead in high heels and miniskirts. They were already made up and now getting their hair blown out. Our Japanese director briefed them on the story of the commercial. English was not his strong suit. He spoke in a hybrid language that fell somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He came over and shook my hand warmly. He started filling me in on my role.

  “You sailor man. You want the woman. Many, many woman. You chase the woman.” Despite the choppy English I recognized the director was referring to what the famous cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, called the “international language of love.”

  The director handed me a script. My line went something like this: “We American sailor like girls in big city. They nice and all right. But not like girl in backcountry. No. No. But we American sailor man like the pretty girls, yes, yes indeed.”

  I broke out into a flop sweat. There was nothing in my training at SMU or the University of Illinois graduate program that could prepare me for this. I walked around on the roof of a nearby parking garage and tried different approaches to the material. I thought, “What if I’m drunk? What if I’m laughing? What if I’m Robert De Niro?” Nothing worked. The director took me out to the set and explained the scene. “You chase the womans down the street. You try grab the womans. But they too quick. And then you get by camera, stop, and say line.”

  The models started running down a steep hill with me in hot pursuit. I had to pretend to run. It was hard for them to get up to speed in their high heels. The girls ran past the camera. I stopped and tried to say my line. “We American sailor like girls in big city. They nice and all right—”

  The director interrupted, “Stop. Stop. Stop. You too tall. Need to be small to get on camera. Can you run smaller?” I looked over to the models. They looked at me with no compassion at all.

  “Yes. I will run smaller.” We did another take. I stooped over and bent my knees so I looked like Igor, the hunchback in the Frankenstein movies. I chased the girls again. I got to the camera and scooted into frame. “We American sailors like the girls in big city . . .” I started laughing, ruining the take. The director was perplexed. He called cut. I tried to be diplomatic. “Uh, these lines are a little odd in English. Can I rewrite them a bit?”

  He said, “You say whatever you want ’cause we put Japanese over you face.”

  I realized I was going to be like a Japanese actor in a Godzilla film. That made me feel better. We did the scene again. The models ran. I squatted. I waddled into frame at an appropriate height and started a speech from Hamlet:

  Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

  thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

  Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

  His canon ’gainst self slaughter! Oh God, God. . . .

  That it should come to this.

  The director loved it. It was a print. Ironically, it remains the only time I ever performed Shakespeare in Los Angeles.

  Sometimes an actor has no idea what he or she is doing because no one has any idea. This happens a lot when you work on special-effects projects. Usually special effects are added after principal photography, so no one really knows what’s chasing them. I’m always amused when I see a scene i
n a science fiction movie in which the New York police fight a giant demon from the underworld with spider legs and a dog’s head. The actors playing cops always have a “business as usual” expression on their faces. Maybe in New York that’s business as usual, but my bet is that neither the actors nor the director had any idea what the final object of their pursuit would look like.

  My first encounter with special-effects acting was in The Philadelphia Experiment. I played Barney, the computer tech guy. I come out of a truck and see something referred to in the script as “the Vortex.” When I see it, I utter the line, “Oh my God!”

  I had no idea what a vortex was or what it looked like. I figured it was just another one of those rips in the time-space continuum. Stewart Raffill, the director, also didn’t know what the final effect would look like. Stewart told me he would talk me through it. I nodded and prepared to step out of the truck. They called, “Action!” I came out and Stewart started coaching me.

  “All right, Stephen, you look up. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, it’s big and you say—”

  I dropped my jaw and said, “Oh my God.”

  There was a pause.

  Stewart was disappointed. “Stephen, let’s try it again. And action! You come out of the truck and you see it and it’s big. It’s enormous. You are terrified and you say—”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Bigger, Stephen, it’s HUGE.”

  “OH—MY—GOD!!!”

  “Okay, Stephen, maybe it’s not so big. Maybe it’s small but very, very sinister.”

  “Oh . . . my . . . God.”

  I gave the director four flavors of nothing. It is also a reason why movies aren’t what they used to be. As the special effects become the main course and not the side dish, the performances become less affecting. The actors have no idea what they’re doing.