Hollywood Hellraisers (45 page)

David Thewlis was hired for one of the leads and on the night he arrived on location Marlon told him, ‘David, go home. This is not a good film to be on. It’s cursed.’ It ended up driving Thewlis pretty nuts, but he did later recall one amusing incident. Brando still used a radio earpiece that an assistant used to feed him his lines. Suddenly in the middle of one scene he started getting police messages. ‘There’s a robbery at Woolworth’s,’ he announced to everyone.

One night Stanley managed to get into Marlon’s trailer and they talked for hours. ‘He was in a bad way. Christian was in jail and then Cheyenne had killed herself; it all started to get on top of him and he was pretty much broken. What was happening to him was a million times worse than what was happening to me. I was losing my movie, he’d lost his daughter. It was very sad. He offered me a lot of money which I now really regret not taking.’ And Stanley’s pretty sure why Marlon was offering the cash: ‘Guilt. He knew I’d been screwed, he’d seen it all happen and he knew he hadn’t helped me and he knew he could have helped me. But he just didn’t have the fight left in him to try and keep me on the project or to stop New Line from tearing the movie apart.’

If you’ll notice the arterial nature of the blood coming from the hole in my head, you can assume that we’re all having a real lousy day.

Making movies has always been Dennis Hopper’s crusade, his true vocation. During interviews he’s never shy in pointing out that he’s a talented director (and he is), or that he should have been allowed to make more movies (and he should). Back in the days of
Easy Rider
he told everyone about his dreams of changing Hollywood, of changing the way movies were made. Dennis was at a dinner party one night with Peter Bogdanovich, the new vanguard, and George Cukor, who represented the old. Hopper couldn’t resist sticking it to him. ‘Old Hollywood,’ he kept saying. ‘We’re going to bury you, man.’ And what happened? Not a lot. All the things he was going to do. ‘I was full of shit,’ Dennis admits.

His final feature to date as a director came in 1994.
Chasers
was a pretty lowbrow comedy knock-off of Jack’s
The Last Detail
about a pair of US Navy police escorting a beautiful female prisoner, played by Erika Eleniak, an American
Playboy
Playmate best known for her role in
Baywatch.
Her chest is the best thing about the film.

It was as an actor that Dennis still fared best, picking up supporting roles in blockbusters, still cast as the crazed loon. In
Speed
(1994) he played a nut who puts a bomb on a bus that will explode if the vehicle goes below 50mph. Dennis tells Keanu Reeves’s gormless bomb-disposal cop: ‘A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning, its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.’

As soon as he got on the set Dennis realised that first-time director Jan De Bont was making a hell of a movie. ‘It had so much energy. It was like a big rollercoaster ride.’

Audiences certainly reacted that way to it, turning
Speed
into a massive success. Executives knew they were onto a winner when at the test screenings audience members would walk backwards when they needed to go to the bathroom so as to miss as little as possible.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, having played so many screen nutters, that Dennis might attract a real-life loon. Sure enough in 1994 he was the victim of a stalker who believed he was the reincarnation of James Dean. Dennis took out a court order to stop the guy coming anywhere near his home.

His next essay in nutballism was on the infamous Kevin Costner action epic
Waterworld
(1995). Prior to
Titanic
the most expensive movie ever made, everything that could go wrong on location in Hawaii did go wrong: crew injuries, tsunami warnings, the main set sinking, a budget that ballooned from $100m to God knows what and rumours that director Kevin Reynolds walked off the set with two weeks of filming left, leaving Costner to complete the film. Joss Whedon flew out to do last-minute rewrites on the script. He later described it as ‘seven weeks of hell’.

Dennis had a ball, though; there are worse things than having to stay for months on end in Hawaii. It shows in his performance as a scuzzy pirate and leader of a gang of cut-throats who roam the sea on a flooded planet Earth in a polluted future. ‘Dennis was great,’ recalls Kevin Reynolds. ‘I’ll never forget when I met him, we talked for a moment and I guess knowing that his reputation precedes him, he said, I won’t give you any trouble, and he didn’t, he was a total pro. Needless to say
Waterworld
was an incredibly difficult shoot, but Dennis was a trooper. What I admired about him was, this kind of role, which was so over the top and could be really intimidating to a lot of actors, the kind of thing that you have to throw yourself into completely or it won’t work, he wasn’t the least bit intimidated and really went for it and that’s what made it work.’ Even more impressive as Dennis wasn’t Reynolds’ choice but the studios and was parachuted into the film after they’d already begun shooting. Immediately Dennis seized on the comic potential of the character and Reynolds allowed him free rein to run with it. ‘As a director you’re hoping that a guy like Dennis will show up who will bring a lot to the set and be inventive. The last thing you want to do, especially on a movie like
Waterworld
where you’ve got a million other things to deal with, is to have to stop and try to push buttons to get a performance out of someone. That was never the problem with Dennis, he showed up and got it, and when you have a guy like that you just turn him loose.’ It’s a cartoon villain and a suitably cartoonish performance, with one eye and scarred features. ‘I’m ugly, man,’ said Dennis. ‘This guy is really bad news!’

Inevitably, considering the obscene amount of money spent on the film, it was seen as a financial failure, despite a solid box-office performance. Unfairly it was dubbed ‘Fishtar’, after Warren’s box-office bomb
Ishtar
. ‘At the time so many people were gunning for us,’ says Reynolds. ‘But particularly gunning for Kevin, who had reached that point in his career where the press decided it was time to knock him off his pedestal. So because of the cost
Waterworld
just became this huge thing that the press wanted to hate. I’ll never forget the first screening in New York, they wanted it to be a bomb and afterwards one of the critics walked out and said, with disdain, well, it didn’t suck. It was like damning with faint praise.’

You know that I’ve never been faithful to anyone in my whole life.

Warren Beatty had taken to fatherhood with a delight and joy that surprised many. Not least sister Shirley, who once couldn’t imagine Warren with children. ‘When he first met my daughter, he examined her quietly as though she were just a specimen of human life instead of his niece.’ In the end he and Annette had four kids. ‘Warren’s a blithering nut,’ said Jack. ‘He just turns into a goo machine around his children. Nothing’s come close to making Warren as happy in his life as these children. Nothing.’

Annette once laughingly revealed that when one of the kids asked her dad what an orgasm was his unusual terminology for it was, ‘It’s a sexual sneeze.’ Some wag suggested that before marrying Annette Warren must have suffered from chronic hay fever.

Not unnaturally, tensions existed in the marriage, namely about how Annette could juggle motherhood with movies, for she undoubtedly still wanted a career and she is an exceptionally fine actress. There was also an attempt to establish them as a screen partnership, misguided at best both artistically and commercially.
Love Affair
(1994) groaned under its own autobiographical weight in its story about a one-time lothario who meets his match. Everyone said it was a mistake;
Variety
called it ‘a textbook exercise in narcissism’. But after the darkly gothic
Bugsy
, Warren wanted to make an unashamedly light romantic movie.

Yet again, his vision caused friction with his artistic partners. Originally Robert Towne was set to both write and direct the film, marking the first time they’d worked together since
Shampoo
. Months into the process Towne complained that Warren was encroaching too much, trying to modernise what Towne felt was essentially a traditional period piece. They argued. Towne was also playing around with Beatty’s suave screen persona, having his character endure an on-screen proctology exam, for example. After numerous drafts Towne either walked or was asked to leave. There were also reports that in post-production Beatty took over the creative reins from director Glenn Gordon Caron, who was hardly seen.

According to some sources,
Love Affair
did not entirely live up to its title, in that it put undue strain upon the couple’s marriage. There was a report about a shapely blonde Warren hadn’t seen in a while visiting the set. Just to be polite he invited her inside his trailer for a chat, but Annette saw them leave and went off the deep end. ‘You don’t take bimbos to your dressing room,’ she decreed. Annette had to admit she didn’t think Warren had changed all that much since their marriage; he still eyed the pretty girls, quite naturally. ‘What has changed, I hope, is that he doesn’t seem to have that urge to bed these ladies. And Warren respects me.’

Maybe it was because age was finally catching up on him. More than one critic commented that perhaps Warren was getting a little too long in the tooth to be playing romantic leads. And he was obsessing more than ever over diets and health foods. In one hotel in New York, after ordering an oil-free egg-white omelette with vegetables, he went into the kitchens to supervise the cordon bleu chef himself. Annette sometimes kidded Warren about his scrupulously healthy habits. Few colleagues have seen Warren put anything gastronomically indecent in his gob. At a restaurant he was eyeing a particularly tasty looking titbit on his wife’s plate. ‘What is it?’ he enquired, finally. ‘Goat cheese,’ she replied. He reached over with his fork and said, ‘I think I’ll try some.’ ‘Good,’ said Annette. ‘Live it up, Warren.’

Sell crazy someplace else, we’re all stocked up here.

Director Sean Penn pulled off one of the casting coups of the year when he got Jack Nicholson to star opposite, guess who, Anjelica, both playing divorcees who, well, hate each other.
The Crossing Guard
(1995) marked the first time the ex-couple had worked together since
Prizzi’s Honor
and Jack confessed they hadn’t been in touch since their split, so the set could have turned into the ultimate nightmare of recriminations and reprisals, but Penn claimed they were both professionals and there were no problems. Jack said they just did their job and avoided the obvious; none of the trauma from their seventeen years together came up. ‘It was a privilege to work with her again,’ said Jack, genuinely glad that she was now a happily married woman. He also playfully speculated as to why Anjelica might have agreed to play the role. ‘She’s got a lot of hideous things to say to me in the movie. I’m sure that’s why she wanted to do it. I’m only kidding, but our scenes are all vicious.’

Jack also found himself acting opposite Penn’s own mother Eileen Ryan in a quirky scene that had him licking her fingers. ‘Don’t worry, I washed my hand,’ she told him before filming. ‘You’re the one that best worry,’ Jack replied. ‘I didn’t wash my mouth.’

Jack next teamed up with old pal Bob Rafelson for another low-budget movie made outside the mainstream, the tough crime thriller
Blood and Wine
(1996). Agreeing to cut his usual fee, although not by all that much, Jack demanded, due to his hatred of commercial airline flights, that he travel only in private jets for the duration of shooting, at $50,000 a trip, which hiked the budget considerably. He also clashed with Rafelson over the not inconsequential backside of Jennifer Lopez, appearing in an early film role. Jack’s argument was simple, ‘Jennifer Lopez was going to be famous for her ass,’ and with his experience of female anatomy, he should know. When, according to Jack, Rafelson overslept the actor himself staged a short dance number, ‘with my hands on Jennifer’s ass’. But Rafelson wouldn’t put it in the picture. ‘Bob, you’re insane!!’ Jack was later told the studio had insisted on its removal.

Although their personalities couldn’t have been more different, Jack got on well with co-star Michael Caine. After a day’s shooting Jack would go out to party and play, Caine would return to his wife. Jack’s idea of play, according to reports, was snorting cocaine. Indeed, a production source claimed Jack made no attempt to hide the habit. In recent years Jack rarely spoke about drugs publicly. Sometimes when the subject was raised he could be riled into making a heated response, spitting into the face of one reporter, ‘Yes, I smoke marijuana! Do you want to see me do it?’ As late as 1987 he publicly acknowledged that he still enjoyed getting high, but never admitted in print any cocaine excess, though articles on his life routinely referred to his drug use. In Hollywood rumours were rife that he had a capacity to snort vast quantities.

Things turned awkward for our Jack in October 1996, when self-confessed hooker Catherine Sheehan accused the star of duffing her up after a sex romp. She alleged that Jack called her up one morning at 3 a.m. and asked her to come round to Mulholland Drive, and to bring a friend. According to court documents the women arrived, were greeted cordially and taken upstairs. Catherine claimed the three of them engaged in various sexual activities which stopped at around 7 a.m., when she noticed Jack was ‘fatigued’. I’m not surprised, poor guy.

It was when the issue of payment was raised that Catherine alleged Jack became, ‘loud and abusive, stating that he had never paid anyone for sex as he could get anyone he wanted as a sexual partner’. She also claimed Jack pushed her, then grabbed hold of her hair and showed signs that he might become more violent. He then asked both women to open their purses to see if they had stolen anything before chucking them outside. Once in her car, Catherine called the police. A squad car arrived shortly afterwards and Jack was interviewed by two officers, though no arrest was made. Catherine meanwhile had admitted herself to hospital, later discovering that a silicone implant in her breast had ruptured. In November Catherine’s lawyer advised her to file a civil action against Jack claiming unspecified damages for assault, battery and emotional distress. Once again Jack settled out of court.