Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography (16 page)

Also know this: After years of working with, or getting to know, actors like Jodie Foster, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Mike Myers, Jennifer Garner, Sally Field, George Clooney, and many others, I can tell you that stars are almost always the most gracious people on set. It’s part of the job and they know it. You don’t survive to become a star if you have a bad attitude.

Another thing I first observed on
Class
was the phenomenon of raw talent and star potential. In the movie, there was this gang of guys who were peripheral characters. To save money, local Chicago kids were cast and they all did fine. Except for one. He came from a large family with a history of acting locally—his dad played a priest in our movie. He was a nice-looking kid with big, soulful eyes, and was precocious and savvy in a way the others weren’t. And every time he had a line, no matter how inconsequential, he drilled it. He had a unique sense of humor and an uncanny knack for ad-libbing terrific dialogue. Wisely, our director began to incorporate his contributions, and John Cusack’s part expanded dramatically from its original, almost walk-on status to that of a memorable one. It was obvious that he was going to have a real future in Hollywood, if he wanted one.

Class
wrapped in the late fall of 1982 and I flew home to Malibu. In the space of nine adrenaline-filled months, I had gone from having no career at all to starring in three movies (one for television) back to back. Every now and then I found a moment to think about what it all meant. Was this all a fluke or the beginning of something real? What would happen when all these movies, all in postproduction, were finally released? What would my life become? These are obviously “first world” problems but still, the level of psychic and emotional stress, particularly for an eighteen-year-old, is not to be underestimated.

Having been away from home for such a long time also put a new twist on all my friendships. I still had my group of friends from school, but more and more, the time away and the one-of-a-kind experiences were conspiring to set us apart. Once again, I was feeling different and having to work hard to fit in.

*   *   *

The Outsiders
is scheduled for a big Christmas release. All the actors have been spending hours in the “looping” stage (rerecording or adding dialogue as needed), trying to make the release date. None of us has seen any of the movie, so we love having a sneak peek at these tiny moments from a few scenes. Francis has the best sound department in the world, many of whom worked on the legendary sound design on
Apocalypse Now
. They are patient and great teachers and I learn everything I can from them. Looping, or ADR as they call it today, is an art. Most actors hate it, few are good at it, but early on I was taught its value and worked hard to be good at it. Today, whenever I get a compliment in postproduction about my looping ability, I thank Francis’s team of experts.

The movie looks amazing. It’s shot in CinemaScope and looks as big and full of dramatic grandeur as
Gone with the Wind
, which Francis modeled it after. I want to see more, we all do, but until Christmas we must make do with these little teases. Somehow Emilio has gotten word that the very first coming attractions, or trailer, for
The Outsiders
is playing in front of a movie called
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
, with Peter Strauss and an unknown fifteen-year-old girl named Molly Ringwald. We are all dying to see it, and so Emil, Cruise, and I pile into a car and drive to the only theater we can find that’s playing it. We end up thirty miles away, in Marina Del Rey. There are only about fifteen people in the theater.
The Outsiders
trailer comes on, and it’s like watching our future flash before our eyes. When it’s over, you can hear the fifteen people murmuring. On the drive back to the Sheens’ house we are ecstatic.

But within days comes ominous news.
The Outsiders
release will be delayed from Christmas 1982 to the following spring. I am devastated. I want so badly to see the result of all the hard work. I also know that until everyone else sees it, my career (and life) will be in a holding pattern. I am too green in the ways of the business to understand that when a big movie moves off a Christmas release date, it’s a sign of trouble. In retrospect, I should have picked up that something wasn’t right. Tommy Howell is working so much on the postproduction that he is completely AWOL from any kind of socializing with us. Emilio also spends weeks doing and redoing lines for different versions of the same scenes. For some reason I’m not needed in this latest frenetic wave of work.

As the weeks drag on, and I wait for the release of
The Outsiders
, I spend hours in the looping stage on
Class
. There’s a lot of confusion over what the movie should be: a raunchy sex comedy like the recent hit
Porky’s
; a smart, subversive teen version of
The Graduate
(my vote, not that anyone cares); or a thoughtful, angst-filled meditation on coming-of-age à la
Catcher in the Rye
. The studio and Ransohoff want
Porky’s
, McCarthy and the director want Salinger. As always in Hollywood when there are competing visions and no one powerful and creative enough to unite them all, you get them all. The result is usually an uneven, toneless mess. The comedy isn’t always funny, the drama isn’t always dramatic, and sometimes it’s funny when you want it to be dramatic and vice versa. But, if you are lucky and you have some good people involved, enough of the movie works anyway. When they threaten to change the title to
Beginner’s Luck
, I know the
Porky’s
camp is winning. All I can do is work hard and hope for the best.

These kinds of struggles are what bond people in the business together. It’s why actors marry other actors and why sometimes they form cliques. Unless you have a personal experience or stake in the making of a movie, it’s hard to understand why someone’s going nuclear when his or her movie’s title is changed. So, I commiserate with Emilio, Howell, and Cruise. They, in turn, talk to additional pals they have worked with, like Sean Penn and Tim Hutton. We are one another’s support and sounding board. We aren’t looking to form some sort of “actors club” (Brat Pack, anyone?) or to be cool, we just want to be around people who are dealing with the same new, mysterious, frustrating issues.

As the release date for
The Outsiders
grows imminent, a group of actors is flown up to screen the movie for the school in central California that petitioned Francis to make it. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t invited, but I figure that there probably wasn’t enough room on the plane Warner’s rented. Besides, I’m set to see it the following week.

The next Tuesday, I’m standing in a tiny, claustrophobic hallway outside a screening room at Universal Studios. Only a few people are gathered in the hall. This is an extremely select, private advance screening. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited or more nervous. I see the cinematographer Steve Burum.

“This movie’s gonna make a hundred million dollars,” he says to no one in particular, staring at his feet.

I’m let into the screening room and settle into a midrow seat in the back. Even though there are maybe twenty other people in the theater, I want to be alone. It’s an old, run-down room, but as the lights go down and the first elements of sound come up, I know the equipment is state of the art. Stevie Wonder begins to sing “Stay Gold” and the
Gone with the Wind
–style credits begin. I see my name. It’s listed under the heading “The Greasers.” I read the list—Tommy, Patrick, Emil, Ralph, Matt, Tom—and I’m so proud of them. After the hair-raising auditions, the intense shoot, the extended delay of our big debuts, the point of the whole exercise is finally unspooling, with an opening credit sequence of amazing emotion and grandeur. In an instant you know there’s
never
been a movie for teens like this. Maybe Steve Burum is right. Maybe
The Outsiders
will live up to and surpass all expectations.

The first scene begins.

There must be a problem in the projection booth. Instead of opening with the first scene in the script, the movie has jumped almost ten scenes, to a big close-up of Matt Dillon getting ready to walk to the drive-in. I wait for the movie to stop and return to the beginning—the whole first fifteen minutes with the introductions to all the Greasers as we rescue Pony from the Socs (and I do my Starsky and Hutch move over their car), and the scene where Pony and I talk in bed about Mom and Dad and why we are orphans, and the other great scenes from the book that we had worked so hard on.

Soon I realize this isn’t like my misadventure back at the Malibu Cinema. These movie reels are exactly as the filmmakers want them. This is the final version of
The Outsiders
.

I feel like I might vomit. Most of the scenes of the Curtis brothers are just
not in the movie
. Is this a joke? Can this be happening? It’s like being invited to a big party in my honor that’s thrown by a favorite uncle, showing up in my best clothes, seeing all my friends inside, and the uncle appears to say, “What are
you
doing here? This is our party.” I am completely blindsided with humiliation.

The movie continues. I don’t even have a close-up until almost the halfway mark. The character of Sodapop, so essential to S. E. Hinton’s book, has been so excised from the movie that the filmmakers are forced to loop a terrible exposition line on the back of a girl’s head in an attempt to explain who my character is, since all of his introduction is now gone. “Oh, your brother is Sodapop. He’s the dreamy one who works at the D.X., right?”

I try to calm myself and enjoy the amazing scenes that weren’t cut out: the rumble; the beautiful scenes with Tommy and Ralph; Emilio’s ad-libbed laugh lines. But it’s hard. At least I will finish strong with my big breakdown scene in the park. After all the screen testing of that speech and the struggle to get it right when we shot it, it
couldn’t
be cut because it not only ends the movie, it sums up the entire relationship of the three central characters, the Curtis brothers.

On-screen, Matt Dillon is dying after ad-libbing the line “You’ll never take me alive.” (I remember shooting this scene, watching Matt bleeding to death on the street. It was a cold night and Matt was sent to his trailer. As I did my close-up I was looking at a sandbag lying on the ground.) I sit up in my seat. Tommy and I really went to the well together on this one; I can’t wait to see it pay off. Matt’s death scene ends. They cut away. Here comes the biggest sequence of my career … but instead, the end credits roll. The movie is over. The sequence is gone. The climax of the book is out as though it never existed.

The lights come up. I’m dazed. My entire story line was cut from
The Outsiders
, easily ten scenes and twenty minutes of screen time. Now I know why I wasn’t invited to the screening at the school. I try to look unaffected and gather my composure as I blink in the light of the emptying screening room. Later I sit in my car and wonder: Why didn’t anyone tell me? I drive home in a fog. All I can think is that I must have been terrible in those scenes, and no one wanted to say anything so they just took them out.

In my driveway, I sit in my car for a long while, trying to figure it all out.

My disillusionment and disappointment are so complete that I know then and there that I will never truly get over it. And I won’t—at least not until I find myself in another small screening room, this time in Australia, almost twenty-five years later.

*   *   *

The Outsiders
opened on March 25, 1983. I went with Tommy Howell and stood in the back of the massive Mann Theatre in Westwood Village near UCLA. This was the prime movie theater in all of L.A., maybe the world. It was packed; there were even people sitting in the aisles—illegally. That the movie bore no resemblance to the book made no difference to the masses of girls who screamed from the first frame of the film to the last. There may not have been much (if any) of my acting left, but the filmmakers made certain to keep the scene where I came out of the shower, barely concealing myself with a towel.

As the movie ended, people noticed Tommy and me and a mob rushed us. Security guards were called in as we were pinned into a corner. It was even more intense outside in the street. There was a line of people around the block for the next showing and they, too, had heard we were in the theater and pounced on us as we tried to run to our car. Girls grabbed our clothes and screamed as they pulled at our hair. We dove into Tommy’s truck, driving away in a frenzy.

It was official. We were young movie stars.

The Outsiders
didn’t make a hundred million dollars. It did something even more spectacular. It launched all of us into the zeitgeist. Almost immediately, each of us was rewarded with a big film role.
The Outsiders
was not just the first great teen ensemble, but it also created a group of male stars who would dominate the next generation of movies.