There and Back Again (8 page)

The real-life Rudy, who has become a Notre Dame icon almost as recognizable (in name, at least) as the Golden Dome or Touchdown Jesus, had arranged for me to have access to all of the school's athletic facilities, including the football team's locker room and weight room. I had a personal trainer. I lifted weights and ran every day. When the weather was bad, I worked out on a stationary bike that I had begged for, and that Rudy had arranged to have sent to our house. It occurred to me that I was being treated like the star of a movie, and while there was a certain pressure associated with that position on every level, I enjoyed it.

Christine, too, was happy. We had our “boy” with us, a Siberian husky named Byron. She could visit her family every day, and on weekends we'd have dinner on the farm where she'd grown up. It was wonderful, practically the perfect moviemaking experience. Every so often, we'd be featured on the cover of the local newspaper, which was kind of quaint and cute, and in the eyes of my in-laws, such local recognition was a unique and important sort of validation. On some level I believed I had arrived at what I was destined to do, which was to carry a movie, to be a movie star. I'd already been the star of
The Goonies
and
Toy Soldiers
, and even though I had done a bunch of ensemble films, I wanted to carry a studio picture; I wanted to be … well, I wanted to be Kevin Costner. That's who I wanted to be.

I remember going to the premiere of
Dances with Wolves
in 1991, shaking hands with Costner, and thinking,
Wow! He's accomplishing so much
. Costner was still in his thirties, and yet somehow he had the talent, the drive, and the intelligence—not to mention the balls—to put together this incredible project, one that no one initially wanted to support. It was too smart a movie, too ambitious, too political. Worst of all, Costner himself was a first-time director. A neophyte trying to make a historical epic? A western, no less? Everything about the project must have seemed misguided. But there was Kevin Costner at the premiere, smiling proudly, working the room like a pro, confident that he'd not only survived the process, but triumphed. You could just tell: he knew.

Dances with Wolves
made a ton of money and won the Academy Award for best picture, and Kevin Costner became one of the most influential artists in Hollywood. I couldn't help wondering if that was my destiny, too. Pretentious? Well, it was pretentious for Kevin Costner to think he could make
Dances with Wolves
. But he did. What really struck me was the fact that he was the director; he was a filmmaker. If it had been Robert DeNiro or Robert Duvall that I'd met at the premiere, I might have felt some distance from them, but this was what I wanted to be: a guy who could carry a movie and make a movie, all at the same time. I looked at Kevin as a likable, accessible film star who also produced and directed a brilliant film. He was the living embodiment of what I wanted to achieve.

What I lacked was the overt self-confidence that Costner obviously possessed. To a degree, all actors are neurotic and insecure, and how they manage those feelings, how they keep the demons of doubt at bay, goes a long way toward determining their success or failure. I can vividly recall being at the Omni Ambassador in Chicago toward the end of filming
Rudy,
and having a terrible crisis of confidence:
What if this is it? What if this is the best thing I ever do?
Christine still loves to tease me about our “pinnacle” conversations. I'll have a moment of self-doubt, and she'll just roll her eyes. For this particular pinnacle conversation, there was snow on the ground and we were filming the earlier scenes in the picture, interiors that did not require an autumn landscape and a packed stadium. Because the football scenes had been shot and I was no longer required to look quite as much like an athlete, I had stopped training feverishly and was letting myself slip out of shape again—in part because it fit the character, who begins the film as a factory worker, and in part because I really didn't feel like working out. There seems to be a direct correlation between my percentage of body fat and how I feel about myself, and as the percentage began to climb, I was gripped somewhat irrationally by a nagging sense of doom.

What if I just peaked?

A similar feeling would permeate
The Lord of the Rings
nearly a decade later. It happens on good movies. The exhilaration and pride in having accomplished something worthwhile are inevitably replaced by feelings of sadness and regret. After all, how can you top
The Lord of the Rings?
And how could I, as an actor, top
Rudy?
I had played a drug addict in
Where the Day Takes You
, which was so far from who I was, and I had done
Encino Man,
which was a major hit for the studio, regardless of how I felt about it. Now with
Rudy
I had done … well, me. And I didn't know what else I had to offer. I had played myself, or at least some idealized, amplified version of myself, and I had no idea where to go next. Christine witnessed my anxiety and was sympathetic if not bemused.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You should be proud and happy.”

The waiting really is the hardest part—the six months or the year that passes between the time a film is wrapped and the time it comes out is agony for an actor. If the film is bad and you know it's bad, there is dread at the prospect of having to promote it, which you are duty bound and contractually obligated to do. If it's good or you think it's going to be good, the experience can be different, complicated, with a daily shifting of emotions, ranging from genuine excitement over seeing the work put on display, to crippling fear that you might be wrong. And if in fact the movie is bad, there will be proof that you have not only bad judgment, but also no taste.

I didn't think that was the case with
Rudy
. I knew in my heart that it was a very good film, and that my work in it was strong. I was reasonably confident that people who get paid to recognize and comment on such things—namely, film critics—would have no trouble discerning the merits of
Rudy
. What I did not know, and could not know, was whether any of that would translate into the type of box-office success that can, when combined with an artistic and critical success, transform a career. To be honest, I wasn't convinced that
Rudy
was going to be a hit.
Hoosiers
had done great, but that movie was about a championship high-school basketball team. The climactic sequence is a lengthy game featuring a buzzer-beating basket and a wild celebration on the court. Tears of sadness on one side, tears of joy on the other. As General George Patton once said, “America loves a winner.”
Hoosiers
was about a winner.
Rudy
was a different kind of winner. He was the last guy on the bench, the last guy to get in the game. His achievement was no less meaningful, but it was smaller, quieter.

Christine and I went back to California and enrolled in community college, which had the not unpleasant effect of allowing me to pursue my longtime goal of getting a degree, while distracting me from the postproduction phase of
Rudy
. In retrospect, I realize that distraction, while in some sense soothing, was not a sound career strategy. I remember trusting in the back of my mind that everything would work out all right, that Hollywood was built on a system predicated upon the assumption that agents and managers wanted to make money, and to do that they had to find work for their clients. That's the business they were in, and they'd figure out how to do that for me. They'd make the necessary phone calls, hold the necessary meetings, and devise a way to capitalize on the work I'd done, most notably
Rudy.
Even though the film hadn't been released, there was, as they say, a little “buzz.”

I was waiting for the world to knock at my door. To my agents, I said, in effect, “I was in the title role of a major studio's picture, so do your job, and I'll be focusing on developing myself the way I want to while waiting for the next opportunity you people present me.” That's the way it was supposed to work, or so I thought; nevertheless, it wasn't happening. I got the distinct impression that my agents were hedging their bets, not wanting to pick up the phone and call people, or that people were just waiting to see what would happen with
Rudy.
Meanwhile, I wasn't paying sufficient attention to the business of my own career. Basically, I had this complex psychological issue, related to my own feelings of intellectual inadequacy, that made it imperative for me to get a formal education. I wanted that degree—and I needed it. It was one of the most important things in my life, and the fact that I was able to put myself through junior college, transfer to UCLA, and graduate with honors remains one of my proudest accomplishments.

Of course, I probably never would have realized that dream if it wasn't for having Christine in my life. She is my life partner, my wife, my study buddy, mentor, disciplinarian, and taskmaster. Our college transcripts are virtually identical. For example, when I'd pop off for a week to work for Ed Zwick on
Courage Under Fire,
she would audiotape the lectures, FedEx them to me, and be the “face” of our team to the professors or the study groups we were in. I'd fax my homework to her, and she'd hand it in for me. We worked together brilliantly. Probably our favorite part of college was that I read just about all of our assigned books out loud to Christine. That exercise satisfied the performer in me and focused my mind on what I was doing, and she simply loved being read to. People either admired us for the way we worked together or thought we were crazy, but we didn't care. It worked for us and we loved it.

I can't deny that I doggedly pursued the goal of earning my degree. And yet, doing so contributed to my career stalling out. I was concentrating on school, exercising my mind rather than my body (and getting fat again), and at the same time feeling at least a modicum of resentment that film offers were not tumbling in. I wanted everything all at once. Hollywood doesn't work that way. Life doesn't work that way. Essentially, I had just miscalculated. I trusted that my income and the potential for my income were so enormous and so obvious to my agents that they would be working hard outside my purview to help bring about a successful ascent for me.

At a certain point I realized that not only was my career stalling, so was CAA's perceived power—the ambient sense in the air that they were
it
. And perhaps a change was in order. My mother had been a client of William Morris for years, and had repeatedly tried to convince me to join her as a client of the agency. As time passed and my frustration with CAA and its handling of my career continued to grow, I warmed to her overtures. I remember on several occasions trying to get information from my agents that I felt was important to my career and personal situation, and essentially being dismissed. I knew the door that had opened when I'd made
Rudy
was now closing. The movie had been warmly received by critics, and my work had been politely applauded, but the film itself, while not a box-office failure, was hardly a hit. The time to capitalize on my work in
Rudy
was shrinking, and I no longer felt as though my agents were committed to me or my career. So, even though I liked them all as individuals—I could have a pleasant dinner with any of them right now—I decided to leave. It wasn't personal. CAA, in my opinion, simply didn't recognize my value and didn't find a way to take advantage of the work I'd done.

Concurrently, it's also true that I was failing to live up to my responsibilities to present a marketable package to studio executives and audiences. I wasn't doing my part. I kept waiting, thinking,
If I get offered what I made before, then I'll jump in. Now, excuse me, I have a class to attend.
I had told my agents many times that if there was a great job or a great part available, or a brilliant filmmaker to work with, I'd stop college in a heartbeat, knowing that it would always be there when I was finished. I trusted that the agents' self-interest would keep them focused on that mission. Had I stayed at a smaller agency or been with agents who really cared about me or knew my heart and mind, I could have rested assured that my interests were being looked after with sensitivity. My miscalculation!

The “power center” that I wanted to be part of by definition feeds on success. It is a mistake to think that money made even within a given year is an indicator of money to come for an actor in Hollywood. It's not like being a rising executive at a company who makes fifty thousand dollars one year, seventy-five the next, and one hundred the year after that. There's no logic. You could be offered scale for a movie you really want to do this week, and turn down five hundred thousand for a movie that shoots for six weeks but will stop you from making the one you really want to do. It's random and arbitrary, and each individual actor has to make the right decisions in order to develop a relationship with an audience and sustain credibility. Some performers deliver exactly what their audience wants, time after time, and their pay increases accordingly. Others try to develop themselves and hope the audience grows with them. While I was struggling to sort out these dynamics in my own mind, I sensed the time was right to make a move—that's industry shorthand for changing agents. Christine agreed, and so we held a rather clandestine meeting with some folks at William Morris, including the head of its film division, and pretty soon I had a new agency.

The reaction at CAA was mixed. I'm sure some people couldn't have cared less, because I was not exactly the biggest stallion in the stable. One of my agents, however, was hurt and angry.

“You're firing me?” he asked incredulously.