I once worked with a star actor who replaced another star in a play I was featured in. After the stage manager ran through a rehearsal of a scene with the two of us, the actor asked me what I thought. I said I didn’t think it was appropriate to comment on what a fellow actor was doing.
He said, “I’m asking you!” I replied, “I think you’re coming off too angry.” He said I’ll give you a buck for every laugh (and then he said the star’s name he was replacing). “I’ll give you a buck for every laugh I don’t get that he got!” Well, on his first night in the scene with me, he didn’t get one laugh, and then he was angry at mefor the rest of the run, and I didn’t even ask him for some bucks!
Another star who followed that actor in the play once told me he wanted to see me in his dressing room after the performance. He was livid as he circled me—I was standing in the center of the room. I had no idea what was going on and told him so. He said, “You’re trying to make me look gay! I told him I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I think he saw I meant it, and amazingly, he immediately dropped his anger and walked away.
I later learned that irrational outbursts were not unusual for him.
One of the strangest experiences I’ve had came early on in the first play I wrote. It was done in Nyack, New York, in 1971, and all the actors were asked to wear their own clothes, as if they were going to a social gathering.
One actress showed up at dress rehearsal with a dress that looked as if it were made of a hundred shiny mirrors shooting light in every direction.
I drove most of the cast from New York City to the theater in Nyack and back. On the way home after the dress rehearsal I said to the actress, who was sitting in the backseat, “Would you wear a dress that’s, uh, a little more conservative?” She said, “That’s the only dress I have.” I said, “That’s your only dress?!” She said, “That fits. Yes.” I said, “Buy a dress, and I’ll pay for it.” She said, “There won’t be time for alterations.”
I suddenly felt I was in the middle of some neurotic game, so I stopped talking about it. When I dropped her off at her building she said, “So what do you want me to do about the dress?” I said, “I’ve said everything I can say.”
At the next rehearsal, she showed up with exactly the kind of dress that was needed.
Ironically, this actress went on to become quite famous, but recently when I mentioned her name to another actress, she just about turned white. I chose not to pursue the conversation, but I’m sure I’m not the only one, for reasons best known to the actress with the mirrored dress, with whom she chose to play strange games.
I recently looked up my name in a memoir she wrote, and her description of the play was that it was written by the actor Charles Grodin, but the money wasn’t there to take it to New York, which I took as a subtle dig. I’d never had a thought about New York at that time. Again, it was my first play. Ironically, twenty-one years later it did open in New York and was very successful, with a good review from the New York Times, which she chose not to mention in her memoir. In fairness to her, she may not even have known that.
One leading lady was going through a difficult time with her boyfriend during filming a movie and barely spoke to me or anyone else for months. Not fun. I was the writer and male lead of the movie, and one day the leading lady, whom I had chosen for the role, said to me, “Why do you have all the lines in this scene?” They were expository lines that were needed to explain the complicated plot. I said, “Would you like them?” She said yes, so I gave her all the expository lines, and when she saw herself on the screen looking at the dailies (the previous day’s shooting), she looked at me like I had pulled a fast one on her. In fact, I was just trying to get through the day with her.
I was on location in another country with a most unusual director on a movie. He always seemed angry and agitated. One day I asked him what was bothering him. He said that I and the other two leading actors had motor homes, and he had something significantly smaller. I said, “You can use my motor home anytime you want.” I didn’t sleep in the motor home, so I had no problem sharing it, particularly if it would calm him down.
Sometimes when I would be in my motor home with someone, he would burst in, not speak to anyone, open the refrigerator, guzzle down a large bottle of juice, then storm out, still without saying a word.
We once had a scene where there was a violent shoot-out. There were explosives rigged all over the bedroom as Farrah Fawcett and I crawled across the floor—Farrah, bare-legged. I said to the director, “This feels a little too violent.” He said with disdain, “It’s in the nature of the shot.” Farrah ended up bleeding from about twenty places on her legs.
At the party to celebrate the completion of filming, the director brought a woman who was dressed as though she might be a prostitute. He danced wildly with her while holding a bottle of scotch, like in a bad movie. Then he joined the producers and their wives, the other actors, and me at a table with his date, still not speaking. Not exactly the boy next door, not even close.
For reasons known only to him, he would say to his assistant, referring to me, “Ask our star to come to the set.” In a fight scene an actor accidentally broke my nose. It didn’t really hurt, so I said, “Let’s keep shooting.” He said, “You’re showing me something.” I have no idea what I showed him before that, but he stopped referring to me patronizingly as “our star.”
Then there was the producing couple who said about a movie I’d written, “We’re going to do your movie.” Two weeks later I heard they weren’t going to do my movie. I phoned and said to the guy, “I thought you were going to do my movie.” He said, “When we say, ‘We’re going to do your movie,’ that doesn’t mean we’re going to do your movie.”
I once read an entire movie script I had written to a producer at his home. I played about thirty roles, men and women. He fell asleep about three-quarters of the way through, woke up at the end, and proclaimed, “I’m going to make this movie!” Later, when he became head of a studio, he did make the movie. My agent, who was negotiating the deal on my behalf, suddenly left the agency business and joined the studio that he’d been negotiating with. He then proceeded on more than one occasion to be openly hostile to the movie. When it was finished, I heard that he told the studio head, my former producer, that the movie was a catastrophe. Happily, when the studio head saw it he loved it.
Once I was sitting at a screening of this same movie with the director and my former agent, now studio executive. In one scene there was an audio cut, something common in movies, where a character on-screen is describing someone. The audio continued over a shot of the man he was describing, who was sitting in a car on a stakeout.
My former agent called out angrily from the back of the screening room, “The audio is still on from the previous screen!” I responded, in a little angrier tone than he had used, “It’s supposedto be!”
I don’t know if that guy is still in the business, but I haven’t heard his name in decades.
I once worked with a movie director who told me in a meeting before we began filming that he tends to scream at people. When I stared at him, he said, “I wouldn’t scream at you.” I suggested it wouldn’t be in his interest to scream at anyone. When we began filming, he began screaming, and he was soon fired. It didn’t help his cause that when he filmed a scene in which it was supposed to be raining, it was raining on only one side of the street. Clearly, screaming wasn’t his only problem. I heard he had gotten some strange injections in Europe.
When I was making the movie Catch-22 in Mexico in the late sixties, some of the people working on it got into a scuffle with some of the local Mexican guys. I was told that the Mexican police who were assigned to our movie asked our producers if they should speak to the local people or kill them. The producers opted for speaking. Years later, I was making another movie in Mexico. I asked a young Mexican woman assigned to the movie as a translator out for dinner. She told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend, having learned he was married, but she felt obligated to tell me he was very jealous.
I said, “You learned he was married?! What right does he have to be possessive of you?”
She again said he was very jealous, and then added he was a policeman. I immediately remembered what I was told about the police years earlier, but I had too much pride to act as though I was concerned. Somehow, though, I managed to turn our proposed dinner date into a lunch with her—and her sister.
When I began the movie I was shown an incredibly luxurious penthouse suite with a balcony that seemed to overlook all of Acapulco. You entered through a stairwell on the road. I said, “I can’t stay here.” Everyone looked at me, baffled. I said, “There are bandits in the mountains right behind the stairwell. They can easily come down out of the mountains and do whatever.” They reassured me sufficiently that I chose to stay there. During the movie, bandits came down out of the mountains, stole the car that was assigned to Farrah Fawcett, and killed her driver.