American on Purpose Read online

  I was a hooker.

  In some peculiar way I felt like I was copping out of the deal I had made with the universe in the Mojave Desert.

  Between safety and adventure I was supposed to choose adventure.

  I shared my frustrations with Sascha, who kept telling me to quit, but I didn’t have the nuts. The last time I quit a job we got into real financial trouble, and I didn’t want to go through that again, although I think that was just a excuse. Things were getting a little difficult between Sascha and me, but I was reluctant to confront it.

  I was away all the time, shooting or trying to set up movies, and I should have made her my partner and taken her with me, but I didn’t, so she found something of her own to be enthusiastic about. She started getting involved in Pilates, then the new physical fitness craze sweeping L.A. She used some of our money to open a studio in the middle of West Hollywood, filled with all the strange medieval-looking equipment that Pilates requires. When I told her I didn’t want to be married to the CEO of a company because then I would never see her, she said I never saw her anyway so what the hell was the difference—and she had me there.

  In the late summer of 2000, having papered over the cracks in our marriage, we went for a bike ride in Griffith Park, near our home in Hollywood. After a while we took a break and sat on one of the green wooden benches that pepper the area. Sascha drank water from a blue plastic bottle and then smiled her big happy smile and told me she was pregnant.

  I can’t remember what I said, but according to Sascha I just giggled like an idiot and wouldn’t let her ride her bike home.

  We had only just decided to try for a baby and it happened so fast that I think we were both thunderstruck; delighted, but thunderstruck. I suppose that’s why you’re given nine months to get used to the idea.

  This was the best time of our marriage, we were both so thrilled and happy about becoming parents. We walked every day for five miles because Sascha had read that it was good for the baby. We went to one of L.A.’s ridiculous “Kum Ba Ya”—ish birthing classes, where we did prenatal yoga together and watched badly shot videos from the 1970s of actual births. These videos were so awful and the people in them were so weird and hairy that during one of them Sascha started to giggle. I was trying very hard to hold in my laughter, making it a thousand times worse, while also trying to avoid stern looks from the spiritually advanced yet paradoxically humorless teacher. Sascha was shaking with suppressed hysterics just as I was, but then it all got too much for her tired pregnant body. It released the pressure by squeaking out a tiny fart that, I’m not kidding, went:

  “Boing!”

  We almost had to be stretchered out of there, and for the next two weeks it was hard to stop laughing.

  Sascha was still pregnant when Saving Grace came out. The studio, Fine Line, gave us premieres in both New York and Los Angeles. It was the first film I’d ever been involved with that had good advance buzz and turned out to be something of a hit; it even won the audience award at Sundance. When that happens, lots of people you don’t know start kissing your ass. The dishonesty is unnerving. You have to be careful who you listen to, so I listened to Sascha.

  On the way to the L.A. premiere at the Egyptian Theatre I sat quietly with my wife in the back of a ridiculously oversized limo.

  “You taking this in?” she asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re going to the big premiere of a movie that you wrote and starred in. This is what you came here to do—anything from here on in will just be variations of this.”

  She was wrong, though. I loved Saving Grace and I’m still proud of it so I wanted to promote it and wanted it to succeed. I was to find out just how rare that is in the next few years.

  Sascha’s predictions, however, can be spookily accurate. Like the time we were leaving David Letterman’s New York studio after my first-ever visit to his show, to promote Saving Grace.

  “You’re going to be asked to take over for him one day,” she said.

  I told her she was nuts, that I was an actor and a writer, not a late-night TV host.

  “I’m telling you,” she insisted.

  No one has remotely suggested to me, as I write this, that I should take over for David Letterman when he retires, but I would say it’s a little more likely than it was when I first visited the show, and I certainly would be more interested in the idea now than I was then. We’ll see.

  No matter the box-office track record of the actual films, the scripts of The Big Tease and Saving Grace were very highly thought of in Hollywood, leading to a call from Victoria Pearman, the bookish Englishwoman who runs Mick Jagger’s production company. She read my work and wondered if I was interested in collaborating with Mick, who had an idea for a movie. As you might expect, I said yes.

  I was flown to Istanbul to take a meeting with Mick. He was then on the Bridges to Babylon tour and Victoria explained that it was easier for me to go to him than the other way around. I could see how that might make sense, given that Mick seemed just a bit busier than I was.

  Our first discussion took place in the penthouse suite of the Istanbul Hilton, and I don’t think I have ever been so nervous about meeting someone in my life, seeing as this particular someone had been a world-famous rock star—the rock star—as long as I’d been alive.

  Luckily Mick was used to people being nervous and bumbling around him and quickly put me at ease with his easy laugh and generous nature. He picked up the phone himself to order us lunch—I could hear the excited yelling of the room-service operator clear across the room—and as we waited for it to be delivered he told me about his idea.

  It was a story, much like Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, about a rock star and a roadie who change places for a few days, and though it seemed pretty thin as a premise, what the hell was I going to do, turn the gig down? It was Mick Jagger, for Christ’s sake!

  Plus, Mick’s producing partner, Paramount Studios, was offering me a three-picture development deal, just to keep me happy.

  I took the job, of course, and spent a lot of time on the phone with Mick over the following six months, but try as I might I couldn’t spin the story into a movie Mick wanted to make, even though Paramount was happy with the script.

  Mick kept asking if it could be “more edgy,” until eventually I asked in exasperation, “Mick, what exactly do you mean by ‘edgy’?”

  He said, “Well, you know that film As Good As It Gets, with Jack Nicholson?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, could it be more like that?”

  I told Victoria I had no fucking idea what Mick was on about. She seemed sympathetic but fired me a week after I delivered the second draft.

  38

  Father

  The Big Tease was made before Saving Grace but didn’t get released until a year afterwards because of the antiquated and monolithic studio distribution system. When the big hairdressing movie finally came out, though, Warner Brothers did it proud with a lavish premiere for the U.K. opening, a mammoth party during the Edinburgh Film Festival. My commitments on The Drew Carey Show made it difficult for me to get from L.A. to Britain in time, so they flew Sascha and me out on the Concorde.

  On the morning of the premiere we arrived in our luxurious hotel feeling terribly glamorous. While Sascha unpacked I went for a pee in one of our suite’s four bathrooms. We were on the top floor, and, looking down through the open window, I could see the glass roof of Waverly Railway Station far below. Through the cracked panes in the ceiling I could see the same Photo-Me booth that I had slept in during the 1986 festival, years before.

  Our flight on the Concorde didn’t turn out to be round-trip. Once Warner saw the first weekend’s box-office returns they decided we could travel back like regular folks. The Big Tease was ignored by the Brits, prompting Warner to drastically reduce their sales campaign in America.

  Saving Grace had also received terrible reviews and failed at the box office in the U.K., but Fine
Line, in particular its CEO, Mark Ordesky, who later went on to champion the Lord of the Rings trilogy, believed in the film and wouldn’t let the negativity of the British press sway their decision.

  In large part thanks to this supportive attitude of the American distributor, Saving Grace went on to be a hit in the U.S., but The Big Tease was doomed. I hated what happened to it, because I think it was a funny and touching film, but when the studio involved loses faith in your project, for whatever reason, it’s over. They don’t care what’s on the screen, they will promote two hours of pigs fucking in black and white as long as they believe it will pay off.

  The Big Tease was a very disappointing experience. In the space of a few months I’d gone from being a big success to an equally big failure in the movies, but I soon stopped caring because Milo was born.

  On the afternoon of May 14, 2001, I had just left my doctor’s office in West L.A. after my annual physical. I was starving from the fast that started the night before and fantasizing about IHOP’s Colorado omelet when my cell phone rang.

  “I’m at Cedars. It’s on,” Sascha said.

  I ditched the omelet idea and drove straight to the hospital and in the early morning of the following day Milo came into the world, a sticky, angry, and slightly confused mess, just like his dad.

  Anyone who has been present at a birth knows how weirdly adrenal the whole event is. As a first-time father, I found myself terrified in a whole new way, not afraid for myself but for my child, who until that moment had been an abstraction. All of a sudden he was real and the world had changed beyond recognition. Now there was someone I would unthinkingly lay down my life for, and I felt a massive, uncontrollable, powerful, feral love.

  As I cut the umbilical cord, Milo started to cry and shiver. One of the nurses, a dour Russian woman who had bossed Sascha around a little too much for my liking, said, not unkindly, “Oh, baby, life is hard.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped. She looked at me with astonishment.

  “He just got here. He doesn’t need that shit yet,” I told her.

  She looked at me like I was insane, but I didn’t give a toss. I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to a supporting player in the movie of someone else’s.

  I placed Milo on his mother’s chest and the two of them cuddled and got their breath back. I watched them until they both fell asleep, exhausted.

  California law states that newborns have to receive a vitamin K supplement after delivery and the hospital staff wanted to take Milo away and clean him up and give him his shot, but I wouldn’t let them unless I could go, too. They had seen me snarl at the Russian nurse and must have decided it wasn’t worth a fight, so they let me carry my son to a little room where a much nicer, mumsier nurse gave him a little bath, weighed him, injected the vitamin, and wrapped him up in a blanket.

  Milo was pissed at all the fussing. He yelled at the nurse at the top of his lungs, protesting at a decibel level that made me feel immense pride.

  It was past four a.m. when the mumsy nurse finally placed him in a clear plastic crib, swaddled in his blankie and wearing a tiny white wool cap. When she left us alone, Milo’s eyes were wide open and as deep and dark and blue as the sea on the Scottish coast.

  For the first time it was just the two of us. He stared at me for a few minutes and I stared back at him. My American son.

  After a few moments he let out a long tired sigh, like the whole thing had been such an ordeal.

  “I know,” I told him, “but don’t worry. I got your back.”

  Soon enough we were home and in the middle of the massive chaos that any newborn baby brings. For the first six weeks I don’t think I changed out of my pajamas once, but eventually the three of us got into some kind of routine, and I started to look around for work.

  By then it was evident that The Drew Carey Show was beginning to creak and show its age and I was being used less and less. Sometimes they would just pay me to stay home and not do anything else, which sounds fantastic but doesn’t do much for your ego. It’s probably a little like getting alimony—the money is nice but has a nasty aftertaste.

  I got a leave of absence from Drew to shoot a movie in Russia for six weeks, thinking I’d be able to come home once or twice during that time, but a few weeks before filming started, those murdering ratbag motherfuckers crashed those planes into the World Trade Center and international travel became a whole lot harder. Once I got to Moscow, I was stuck.

  During my six weeks away, Milo developed croup, and Sascha had to deal with it alone. We talked every day but she didn’t tell me how scary it got with his illness, figuring there was nothing I could do. I still feel like a prick for being away at that time.

  Once I returned I was grumpy and unused to family life. It was a tough transitional time for both of us. Sascha’s business was beginning to take off and she needed to spend more time at the Pilates studio—which I could hardly bitch about, given how long I’d been gone, but I bitched about it anyway.

  Things were getting pretty snippy between us. It was odd that when I was in Moscow our phone conversations were fun and warm, but in person we were irritable and cold with each other. Clearly our marriage was in trouble, but because we both adored Milo we tried to ignore this, hoping that things would somehow work out.

  39

  Crash

  With Philip McGrade, a good friend since we first met in London when I was newly sober, I wrote a spec screenplay called The Family Business, about a has-been rock star who finds out he has a daughter he never knew existed. It was quite a dark story but ultimately uplifting, so when I shopped it around the studios, I got a bit of interest. Eventually we made a deal with Morgan Creek Films, which was prepared to let me direct the movie as well as play the lead. I thought that as director instead of producer I would have more control over the outcome of the film, but in this I was hugely mistaken, especially with Morgan Creek involved.

  It’s an indie studio owned and run by James “Jim” G. Robinson, a Baltimore businessman who at the time had a distribution deal with Warner Brothers. You will no doubt remember that Warner fucked my last movie, but that’s showbiz; you can’t bear a grudge too long or you’ll never get anything else made. Jim is a forceful, bullish man who likes things done his way, and so am I, so it was a difficult relationship. Jim is a businessman, a good one, but he is no filmmaker, and he has about as much taste as a carny with a head cold. Though if you want your film made by Morgan Creek, you’d better not tell him that.

  The Family Business was shot in and around London in 2002, and I made all the classic mistakes early on. Like allowing the studio to insist I use an actor I really didn’t want in the role of the rock star’s daughter. In the script she is also a singer, and the studio wanted the Welsh teenage soprano Charlotte Church, already a big star in Britain, for the part, on the assumption that she’d be a box-office draw over there. My problem was that:

  (A) Charlotte was a tabloid magnet with a pushy alcoholic showbiz mother and no credibility as an actor, having never done anything but sing.

  Plus:

  (B) I never have any success in Britain. For the movie to have a chance, it had to be aimed at a U.S. audience. Shot in Britain but made for America, like Saving Grace.

  I was overruled, yet the casting of Charlotte, who actually isn’t that bad in the movie, might not have been catastrophic if the yes-men at Morgan Creek who called themselves “development executives” hadn’t shit all over my script. Changing music choices, changing lines, changing the title of the movie from The Family Business to the loathsome and insipid I’ll Be There. Generally just sweetening the whole thing beyond recognition until it became an expensive Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

  Much as I would like to blame those guys, it was really my fault. I should have been stronger from the start, should have said “Fuck it, no way!” and pulled the project. I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never
again. Never fucking again.

  I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love. The shoot was arduous enough, but to cap it all I was in a motorcycle crash halfway through production, which meant I had to act and direct with a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs. Plus, it was summer in the U.K., triggering my hay fever, and every time I sneezed, a white-hot bolt of pain shot through my battered skeletal structure.

  Sascha and Milo came to London for a visit, but I was such rotten company, my wife took our son off to Paris with her friends.

  Somehow I finished the movie, which opened in May 2003 to resounding failure in the U.K. Predictably, Warner declined to release it in the U.S., so it went straight to video. I had spent a year of my life on a project that had damaged my marriage beyond repair, ruined me as a filmmaker, and had been no fucking fun at all. I didn’t even make much money after all the taxes and commissions and travel.

  Also in May of 2003 I went to the Cannes Film Festival, hoping to raise money for another project and salvage the doomed I’ll Be There, but I came away deeply discouraged and empty-handed.

  It was time to clean house. I felt that no one had protected me from the disaster, that the agents had been lazy, and that Rick, my friend and manager for eight years, had been outmaneuvered. I fired them all, and I wished I could have fired myself, too. On the way back from Cannes I stopped in Paris. As I walked around the city, trying to figure out my next move, it seemed to me that I had hit some kind of a wall. I determined that if I ever had another story to tell I would do it in the form of a book, not a film, so that I wouldn’t have to collaborate with a bunch of people I wouldn’t trust with a fork.

  As it turned out, I did have an idea for a story. It was about a Scotsman who experiences a lot of setbacks but ultimately triumphs, albeit in a very obscure way.