My Life So Far (62 page)

There were a number of things Hal and I didn’t agree on (like my character’s husband’s suicide at the end), but I tried to make my points as clearly as I could and then let go and leave it up to him. I had neither the confidence nor desire to fight with Hal, whom I respected enormously as a director. The one exception was the Battle of Penetration. Both of us knew that the scene had to be really hot—not as arbitrary sex but as the centerpiece of their relationship, emblematic of her transformation and—for me, anyway—of a masculinity sans erection. Jon agreed with me, by the way, and there were endless, very funny on-set discussions about it between us: “Where
can
he feel something?” I would ask Jon. And, “Are his nipples sensitive?” That sort of thing. As the time approached to film the pivotal scene, we all agreed that Hal should not be limited in what he shot, that it should include total nudity, at least the semblance of oral sex, and anything else he might need to create a groundbreaking love scene. I knew I could not do that myself. I may have been
thought
of as a wild sex symbol for a period of time, but it was more the art of suggestion than anything overt. So I suggested a body double be hired to do all the long shots. We decided Hal would shoot those first, so we’d know what shots we’d need to match when we came in for the close-ups. I stayed away while they spent all day filming with the double, and when I saw the footage the next day it was evident from the way the actress was moving on top of Jon that Hal had won the first round of the Penetration Battle.

“Hal,” I said, “she can’t be riding him that way; he can’t get an erection. I thought we had agreed!” Hal, however, was not about to throw out the footage and concede to me. So I thought, Ah-ha, when the time comes for me to match my close-ups to the body double’s, I’ll just make sure I don’t move like that, and he won’t be able to intercut the footage.

With Jon Voight in a scene from
Coming Home.

(Steve Schapiro)

Accepting my second Academy Award (Best Actress in
Coming Home
) in sign language.

(© Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences/Long Photography)

Finally the day came for shooting the love scene. Large sheets were hung around the area of the bed and the set was closed to everyone except the camera operator, Haskell, and Hal. Jon and I spent most of the day in bed, naked under the sheets, being filmed from various angles. It’s a strange experience doing this kind of scene: There is a sexy, electric charge in the air, and everyone overcompensates by becoming very businesslike. You appear to be doing the most intimate things together, naked, skin against skin, pretending ecstasy, while signaling to your body,
Hush now, this is just a job.
Then the director says, “Cut,” and you stop and move away in bed because you want to show that it
was
only acting—but not moving
too
far or
too
fast, so as not to hurt the other actor’s feelings, all the while working on getting your breathing back to normal. I remember feeling grateful for Jon’s trust and happy that we could giggle together between takes, that we both had a commitment to our friendship above and beyond the scene. He was as much Tom’s friend as mine, after all.

Hal had saved the key shot for last, the one with me/Sally sitting on top of Jon/Luke with the camera framing me from my shoulders up. For me, Sally was experiencing oral sex, and I was moving and reacting accordingly when Jon suddenly whispered, “Jane, Hal’s yelling at us!”

From far away behind the hanging sheets, I heard Hal’s voice, “Ride him! Dammit! Ride him!” I froze, refused to move. I was not going to give up my concept of what was happening. The cameras kept rolling, Hal kept shouting, “Move your body, goddammit!” but I wouldn’t. Finally he gave up and stormed off the set. I felt bad. I’d never seen Hal mad; he was usually so mellow.

Hal ended up using both shots, even though the long shot of the body double didn’t match what I did in the close-up. In the end, I think audiences read into the scene whatever they wanted. God knows everyone had a strong reaction to it, though compared with today’s love scenes it seems pretty tame. Of course, in my opinion what made it especially hot was the sexual tension that had built up between the characters in the preceding scenes. Just as in life, the buildup of desire
beforehand,
especially when it is withheld, is what makes the act itself explosive.

To be truthful, Jon and I didn’t know up until we saw the final version of the film if it all really worked. Hal and Jerry showed a very rough cut for an invited audience of about fifty people in a United Artists projection room. These events are always fraught with anxiety, which was compounded by the personal, emotional investment I had made in the film. When the lights came back on, Tom got up and walked right past me without saying a word. As he went out the door, he turned and said to Bruce, Jon, and me, “Nice try.” The coldness of his response was devastating for all of us. It took me weeks to recover.

Tom was not used to seeing rough cuts, and it was true that the film was too long and had problems; but it also had powerful moments, even at that early stage. Yet Tom chose to dismiss all our work outright. I came to believe that the explicit love scene shook him more than I had anticipated, though he claims it was the film’s “watered-down politics.” This was the first time I had shot a love scene since Tom and I had married. I knew it was just pretend, and I hadn’t anticipated that my husband would get upset. Maybe I was too used to Vadim, who was famous for
liking
to put his wives in explicit scenes. Maybe it was an eruption of the unexpressed anger we both felt toward each other.

In the end, there were many aspects that made the completed film work. One was Hal’s style of directing: He had started off in the business as a film editor. Unlike other directors with whom I had worked, he would do thirty or forty takes of each scene, not saying very much to the actors about what they should do differently each time—and
he’d print all of them.
Then, in the solitude of the editing room, his brilliance would shine like that of a sculptor with clay. He would take a glance here, a sigh from me there, a slight turn of Jon’s head, and would edit them together in a way we hadn’t expected—or in some cases hadn’t intended.

Then there was the way Haskell shot the movie, using long lenses and natural light, which gave the scenes a sense of beauty and voyeurism, as though the audience were looking through a keyhole at something intensely private and real. The improvisational nature of our acting added to this feeling of cinema verité. Then there was the music, which was all Hal. He wallpapered the film with the essential music of the sixties, and all of us who had lived through it were transported back to the rage, the existential angst, the desperate idealism of that time.

There was also the heartful attention and care with which Jerry Hellman attended to every detail of the project. By the time the film was completed, all the senior executives at UA had left to form Orion Pictures and Jerry had the unenviable task of, in his words, “delivering it to a skeptical group of new executives who had had little or no involvement in the project, and hence, no particular emotional commitment to it.” But he kept the film safe from the vagaries of Hollywood. All of our tenacity paid off when, in April 1979—six years after its inception in my bedridden head
—Coming Home
received Academy Awards for Best Screenplay for Nancy, Waldo, and Robert; Best Actor for Jon; Best Actress for me, and nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. Tom, Vanessa, and Troy were with me at the ceremony; I wore a dress that a supporter of Tom’s designed for me, and I accepted my Oscar in sign language, to acknowledge GLAD, an advocacy organization for the deaf and hearing impaired that supported Tom. I had learned from them that the ceremony wasn’t made accessible to the deaf in the United States. It was one of the happiest nights of my life. Besides, Ron Kovic told me later that the film had improved his sex life immeasurably.

In 1980 a Veterans Administration poll asked Vietnam veterans which feature films portrayed them most favorably. The highest ratings went to John Wayne’s
Green Berets—
and
Coming Home.

O
ne day during the filming of
Coming Home
actor/producer Michael Douglas sent Bruce and me a script called
The China Syndrome,
about a near meltdown at a California nuclear power plant that company executives try to cover up. Everything about the script rang with authenticity, owing to the fact that it was written by Michael Gray, who had studied to become a nuclear engineer, was extremely knowledgeable about all that had gone wrong with nuclear technology in various plants over the years, and had consulted closely with three former nuclear engineers who’d resigned from General Electric over safety concerns. Gray had fashioned a taut, low-budget thriller about a nuclear engineer and a radical crew of documentary filmmakers. The only drawback was that there was no woman’s role. Jack Lemmon, a passionately vocal opponent of nuclear energy, had agreed to star in the film, with Michael producing as well as starring. The third star, Richard Dreyfuss, had dropped out.

Bruce Gilbert and I had been developing a film about the nuclear industry inspired by what happened to Karen Silkwood, a worker in a Texas County, Oklahoma, nuclear power plant who was killed under mysterious circumstances when she was on her way to deliver evidence of defective welds in the plant’s core. We had considered having me play a television reporter who gets involved in a nuclear story. The research we had done showed us that local news was undergoing a disturbing change: In an effort to boost ratings, news consultants had recommended to station heads that they develop a new format where a racially balanced team of slickly attractive men and women would deliver “news lite,” lacing their stories with “happy talk.”

We were developing our story for Columbia Pictures and, it turned out that Michael Douglas had brought
The China Syndrome
to the same studio. A studio executive, Roz Heller, suggested we combine our efforts, and that was when Michael came to us to see if the Dreyfuss role could be rewritten for me—with Bruce as executive producer this time.

We wanted Jim Bridges, best known at the time for
The Paper Chase
(and later for
Urban Cowboy
), to rework the script and direct. He excelled at character-driven stories, and he did not see our nuclear thriller as something that suited his particular talents. While Michael was working on the film
Coma
and I was in Colorado filming
Comes a Horseman,
Bruce kept coming back to Bridges in an effort to get him excited about the idea of creating a parallel story to the nuclear accident: the morphing of TV news into infotainment, with a female TV reporter who is trapped between pressure from her bureau chief (who wants to bury the nuclear story) and her growing commitment to getting it told. The reporter, Kimberly Wells, is ambitious and doesn’t want to rock the boat, yet she resents being assigned fluff stuff and being told how to look. I told Jim the story of my early experiences in Hollywood, when Jack Warner wanted me to wear falsies and Josh Logan suggested I have my jaw broken and reset so that my cheeks would sink in. These were personal issues to me. Again, as with
Coming Home,
we were able to bring an added gender dimension to a story that hadn’t started out that way. After turning us down four times, Jim finally saw his way into the story and its potential character dynamics—not just between Kimberly and her bureau chief, but between Kimberly and her more radical cameraman, played by Michael Douglas.