CHAPTER THREE

During one of my first visits to Indiana, while spending time with Christine’s family, her Grandma Schroeder offered a thoughtful notion: “You know, Sean, you really ought to make a movie around here. Sam Elliott did Prancer in the next town over! We’d get to see you kids more often.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

“That would be wonderful, Grandma. But it doesn’t really work that way. You sort of have to go where the jobs are.”

She nodded. “Okay—but I still think you should make one here.”

I love Christine’s family. It may sound trite, but there is a peacefulness to the rural Midwest that I find very calming, soothing. Celebrity doesn’t seem to mean as much; certainly it isn’t the coin of the realm the way it is in Hollywood. Still, I never expected to spend time in Indiana for reasons that were anything other than personal. So imagine my surprise when less than two months after Christine and I were married, I was asked to read a script for a movie titled Rudy, set at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

Now, I was a West Coast kid, so I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about Notre Dame, aside from its fight song “Cheer, cheer, cheer for Old Notre Dame…” and the fact that Johnny O’Keefe, who lived down the street from me when I was growing up, used to watch college football every Saturday and liked Notre Dame a lot. But to me, college football was UCLA, not because I went to many Bruins games (I didn’t), but mainly because from my house I could always hear the school’s marching band practicing. We lived that close to the campus. (Not only that, but my aunt and uncle were professors at UCLA in the department of education, and every year we’d get Christmas presents from the college bookstore.)

Reading the script, however, was a revelation. It was like I was reading my own life.

Everything about Rudy’s mentality matched the way I looked at the world. Of course, Rudy’s story and my story were vastly different, but in terms of his ethos, it felt like I was reading about an alternate version of myself. In Little League, for example, I spent a lot of time on the bench, waiting, begging to get in the game. Even though my parents were famous and made very good money, their attitudes and values created in me a sense of connection to working-class people. That may sound condescending or convenient, but if you think that, well, you don’t know me. When my mom got remarried, it was to a soldier. Sure, he was a sergeant, first class, but he was “real people.” When my dad remarried, he was fortunate to find a woman who exuded a kind of nobility and an understanding of all people. I’ve always admired the working people I’ve met; everyone’s work—from the garbageman to the rocket scientist—seems valid and honorable to me. So my mind and spirit were primed to read Angelo Pizzo’s brilliant screenplay about Daniel “Rudy” Reuttiger.

Rudy was a working-class kid who talked his way into Notre Dame, an elite private college, and eventually onto the school’s storied football team, even though he was neither a great student nor a great athlete. Rudy was an underdog, and I found it easy to identify with him.

The movie would be directed by David Anspaugh. He and Angelo Pizzo were the same writing/directing team that had done such an impressive job of capturing small-town life in Indiana in the 1950s with the beautiful basketball film, Hoosiers. Like Hoosiers, Rudy was a fact-based, almost achingly earnest story; in lesser hands, both stories might have fallen victim to hackneyed clichés and stereotypes. But Hoosiers remains one of the best sports movies ever made, a nearly perfect tale of David rising up to defeat Goliath, told on a simple, heartfelt, human scale. Reading the script for Rudy, I knew it had the potential to be every inch the movie that Hoosiers is, not least because it was being made by Angelo and David. With every page I liked it more and more—it was just screamingly obvious that this would be a really good movie—and I became so excited that my fingers kept slipping off the pages. Rudy, I knew, was exactly the right prescription for the malaise that had set in while I was making Encino Man. I would be the star, the lead, the hero. And I knew I could do it.

I was so relieved that this wasn’t an ensemble film. Rudy was the title character, the role a tour de force for any actor lucky enough to land the job. I was determined to be that actor, to not let anything, including petty squabbles over compensation, stand in the way. After meeting with the director, I got the sense that he liked me and that the creative people behind the project—as well as the titular character himself, Daniel Reuttiger—thought I was perfect for the part. The head of production, on the other hand, wanted Chris O’Donnell. This was no small obstacle. Like me, Chris, who I’ve come to know pretty well and admire a lot, was a young actor (we were both in our early twenties) whose stock in trade was an earnest, boy-next-door quality. And like me, Chris was on the smallish side—physically correct for the part of Rudy. Unlike me, Chris had just seen his career take flight. In the previous year Chris had costarred alongside Brendan Fraser in School Ties and Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. The latter performance had earned him a Golden Globe nomination. It’s fair to say that Chris was the hotter actor by far. Knowing that I was the preferred candidate of the writers and director, and that the role was mine to lose, I waded carefully into the waters of negotiation.

I had just made $250,000 on Encino Man, so I was surprised when they offered me roughly half that amount to play Rudy. After all, I’d be carrying the movie. Now, I realize that while it had major studio backing, Rudy was designed as a small, personal film, one that would tug at the audience’s heart rather than grab it by the jugular. Those types of movies don’t necessarily become blockbusters. But the budget for Rudy was at least double the budget for Encino Man. Hoosiers grossed $60 million domestically, while Encino Man grossed nearly $40 million. So it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Rudy could perform just as well. At the least, small movies can be successful; otherwise the studios wouldn’t produce them. They can win awards, satisfy audiences, and make money, too. Although probably not as much money. Personally, I didn’t really care. I was told the offer was what it was, and it wouldn’t go any higher. The job was almost mine to accept or reject. If I played hardball, they’d make a deal with Chris O’Donnell.

Now, I’m not sure how much most people care about the art of the deal in these situations, but I’m happy to share a level of detail about my experiences because I think folks can learn from it. Obviously, we’re not talking about chicken feed here—$125,000 is a lot of dough. Never mind that we pay half our salary to the government and ten percent to an agent, ten percent to a manager, and a little more to a publicist, business manager/accountant, physical trainer, etc. It’s still a lot of money. But that’s not how you think in these situations. Showbiz is one of the only fields I can think of where what you’ve made previously can prove to be only a minor factor in determining what you might/maybe/should/ought to/probably will get paid this time. How much they want you relative to how much they want someone else, while factoring in everyone’s availability and the risk of possibly losing you or your competition, means much more to the bottom line than does past salary.

Christine and I were fresh back from our honeymoon, in love and feeling great. I was in excellent physical condition, running four miles a day and thinking pretty clearly all of the time. It was summer, so I could usually be found in our pool pondering business and creative issues. The head of production at Tri-Star then was Marc Platt, an extremely intelligent and proud family man. He was also a shrewd executive. I knew, or at least believed, that Kevin Mischer, the junior executive who was “covering” or championing Rudy, was in my corner. Kevin was a good friend of my agent, Josh Lieberman (I probably would not have played Rudy if I had stayed at the smaller agency at that point in my career). Kevin was an executive I had worked with on Toy Soldiers, and he would go on to have a very bright career—despite having worked with me twice!

I’m half kidding, but I’m pretty sure that’s how folks think: These movies grossed X number of dollars; therefore, nobody wants to see Sean carrying a picture. Of course, everything can change with a hit. All things being equal, I’d rather feel that a studio executive sees me as a good-luck charm for his career, rather than a two-strike stink bomb that.

To the best of my recollection, the way it was presented to me was this: Everyone wants you but Marc Platt. He insists that you “test,” and he swears he’s not budging off the $125,000.

I was in no mood to risk a game of poker, so I settled for it. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, for I didn’t consider it to be “settling.” I wanted the part. I needed it. Some jobs you take for your wallet; others you take for your soul. Rudy fell into the second category. And as Dominic Monaghan would admonish me years later during the making of The Lord of the Rings, sometimes you have to have a little perspective. Dom, who played the part of Merry, wears his hardscrabble Manchester (England) roots on his sleeve, and more than once he rather wisely pointed out to me, “You know what people earn in the real world, man? We are so fucking lucky!”

Absolutely right. We are lucky. But as with any line of work, it’s not what you earn that counts; it’s what you keep. I figure if I’m going to take the time to write a book, I might as well be honest about aspects of the movie industry that aren’t ordinarily discussed candidly, such as compensation and representation. The numbers I’ve mentioned are not insignificant; to most people, $125,000 sounds like a lot of money—and it is. But playing Rudy was now clearly not a decision about money. It was about my destiny. Thoughts flickered through my mind about old Hollywood screen tests and the building of stars from within the studio system. I envisioned my house in an earlier time, surrounded by orange groves, with crop dusters or biplanes flying overhead rather than private jets. I calculated that Marc Platt could rest comfortably knowing that if he didn’t get his first choice, Chris, he would at least have saved the studio a pretty penny. I felt emboldened by knowing the creative auspices supported me, and so, the gauntlet having been thrown down, I accepted the challenge.

At a certain point, of course, it really doesn’t matter. It all becomes Monopoly money. But at that stage of my career, I hadn’t accomplished anything remotely close to this. I’d never had this kind of opportunity. I was constantly trying to make enough money to carry me through the next six months—to bankroll a film I wanted to direct, or to put myself through college. And to simply pay the mortgage. In this case, though, there was no debating about whether to fight for the role, or to hold out for more money. This was a defining moment in my career. I felt like the universe was conspiring to make it happen. I was meant to play Rudy—it was as simple as that.

Accepting the financial terms of the deal was only part of the process. I also had to agree again to change my body for the part. I was simultaneously nervous and emboldened by this stipulation, since by my estimation I was pretty fit. Christine and I had gotten married, and I’d run off all the weight I’d gained during Encino Man so that I’d look reasonably attractive while standing next to my beautiful wife in the wedding photos. When I did my screen test for Rudy, I weighed 135 pounds, and the studio executives were less than thrilled with my newly svelte appearance. They offered me the role on the condition that I gain ten to fifteen pounds of muscle before the start of principal photography. In their opinion I was too skinny, too waiflike, to ever be believable as a football player at Notre Dame—even a famously small football player who made the team as a walk-on.

It seemed to me an ironic turn of events, since I’d been so fat in Encino Man that Disney didn’t even want to put me on the promotional poster. Talk about embarrassing! That movie cost six or seven million dollars to make and grossed forty million. But my focus wasn’t on using the forty-million-dollar success story of Encino Man to get the next acting job. Instead, I had turned my focus to directing the short film I’d been promised, and on building my own production company. Cashing in on the success of Encino Man, with all of the emotional baggage I carried from that movie, failed to appeal to me. So instead of hiring a personal trainer and trying to sculpt my body in the way that Hollywood demands, I was satisfied with just getting skinny in time for the wedding.

Now, though, I was ready and willing to do whatever was asked of me. I agreed to put on the weight, and pretty soon I was working out daily at the Sony gym, pounding weights, pushing myself harder than ever. Interestingly, I was there at the same time that Tom Hanks was losing the weight he’d gained to play a paunchy baseball coach in A League of Their Own, in preparation for his Oscar-winning role in Philadelphia. I’d make jokes as I passed him on my way out of the gym to my third or fourth high-protein meal of the day: “Hey, Tom, want me to pick up a burger for you?”

His response? Something along these lines: “Screw you!”

In so many ways, acting is an intensely weird, narcissistic endeavor. It requires immense self-involvement, the belief that people want to watch you perform, play. It’s like athletics without the competition. And as in sports, there is an assumption, a pact between performer and spectator, that the actor not only will give his best, but also, in most cases, will look his best. It seems part of the contract. While it may sound silly and shallow to suggest that most folks don’t go to the movies to watch unattractive people, it’s also probably true. At five-foot-seven with a body that does not naturally lend itself to washboard abs, and a face that is more cherubic than chiseled, I know I am not the classic Hollywood leading man. But there is a certain level of fitness and attractiveness that I can attain, and that I suppose a studio has a right to expect its stars to have. (For me, The Lord of the Rings is the rare exception to the rule. In those films Peter Jackson’s expectation, based on Tolkien’s writing, was that I look less like a leading man, not more; thus, Samwise Gamgee’s portly appearance.)

Obviously, I haven’t always lived up to Hollywood’s expectations, Encino Man being just one example. I remember Dan Petrie Jr., my friend, my mentor, my trusted ally, coming up to me at my wedding and saying, “Sean, you look good; don’t ever get fat like that again.”

I laughed, shook his hand, and didn’t really say anything other than, “I understand.”

“No, man, I’m serious,” he added, his eyes almost pleading with me. “For your career. Don’t let it happen.”

I knew he meant it. I’d heard it before. In fact, when I showed up on the set of Toy Soldiers a couple years earlier, Mark Berg, the film’s producer, fairly blanched at my softness in the midsection: “Come on, Sean. Get to the gym!”

I sort of resented it, because I thought I looked sufficiently heroic the way I was. But I was wrong. I wasn’t disciplined enough to take care of my body, which should be among an actor’s most important responsibilities. That’s not to say that an actor should be excessively concerned with superficiality. Of course not. Actors come in all shapes and sizes. But an actor’s instrument is in part his physical body. Sure, the mind, the spirit, general knowledge, and technical training are critical factors in being a solid, well-rounded actor, but the body is the vessel through which you communicate the ideas of the script. And I didn’t want to play tuba parts at that point in my life. I wanted to be able to do a drum solo or be the first violin. On Toy Soldiers I knew the genre. It was an action picture, a smart pubescent thriller—and I was the mini Bruce Willis. I can see Dan cringing while reading this, because he wrote a very sensitive character and I’m reducing poor Billy Tepper to a Slim-Fast cautionary tale. But I’m making a different point.

I needed to be told what to do, which is sad. I’d had no trouble working out when I played organized sports as a kid, or when I was training to run 10K races or even marathons, but I hadn’t yet reached the point where I was willing to accept it as part of my job. I felt I needed a reason. The obvious logic—it’s good to be fit—just wasn’t enough motivation. For better or worse, my life has been one of extremes, and that extends to my commitment, or lack thereof, to physical conditioning. Make it part of my daily regimen? Nah. I’m not a granola guy. Although I admire granola guys, I happen to love greasy food. Always have, probably always will.

The other obvious logic is that I needed to be fit and attractive for my career, but that didn’t resonate with me as being righteous. To be good-looking for the sake of being good-looking, well, that just bothered me. I wasn’t ever “turn-heads-on-the-street” good-looking, and never would be. Once, many years ago, I had a great photo session when I was in the best shape of my life. I was waterskiing a lot, running, and lifting weights, and my metabolism was still roaring in the way that it does when you’re almost out of your teens. By twisting and turning my body, and lighting the set just right, the photographer managed to transform me into someone I barely recognized. Someone with a solid, square jaw, and if not a six-pack, at least a two-pack. I look at those photos now and almost laugh about how good I look. But sustaining that? No chance. I was more concerned with the entrepreneurial part of my career, even if I understood on some level the importance of just simply looking good. It makes sense from a business standpoint to focus on the basics of being a movie star, and part of that is being in great shape. It just didn’t interest me to focus on it consistently.

For Rudy, however, I was willing to accept almost anything the role required, and that meant not only getting fit, but staying fit during filming. We began shooting in the fall, just as the leaves were changing in South Bend. Only months earlier I had married a Hoosier whose family lived a scant twenty miles down the road, so everything about the project felt right. On the first day of filming, the mayor of South Bend showed up on the set and welcomed everyone to the city.

He had a special message for me: “I don’t know what your political aspirations are, but there’s a little history here, you know? The last person who starred in a movie filmed at Notre Dame went on to become president of the United States.”

He was referring, of course, to Ronald Reagan, who had portrayed the heroic but doomed Notre Dame running back George Gipp in The Knute Rockne Story. (Yes, I know, Reagan wasn’t really the star. It was Pat O’Brien who played the titular character.) It was a nice thing for the mayor to say, and I kind of chuckled and tried to be appropriately gracious. This was a nonpartisan event, so I didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that Reagan was famously Republican and I was a Democrat. And while I wasn’t yet famous, I did (and still do) have political aspirations of my own. Never mind that the press conference was being held during our lunch hour and I hadn’t had time to change out of the football uniform I had been wearing. I felt at best unworthy, and at worst a little fraudulent sitting there pretending to be a bona fide, hard-core Domer! The appropriate thing to do was to keep my mouth shut, focus on the work, and try to honor the integrity of the movie.

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.

“No, I wouldn’t put it that way,” I replied.

He seemed to think this was coming out of the blue. Months earlier he had said, “You know, movies like Rudy don’t come around every day.”

Now, I took a deep breath. I’d be the first to admit that I have a bit of a temper, and I knew the potential was there for me to say something I’d regret, so I bit my tongue. Here’s what I was thinking: Nothing is coming around for me! I’m watching the things you’re doing, and some of it doesn’t make sense. You guys call me to ask if I mind whether you bring in Chris O’Donnell? Come on! I compete with him! Not only that, but I know the studios like him better than me. Remember when I had to cut my rate in order to beat him out for the job on Rudy? You promised me the part of Robin in Batman, and now I read in the trades that it’s Chris O’Donnell’s job? What do I do, sit around forever? That’s what I was thinking, not what I said. What I said was, “Look, I like you; I respect you; I will never forget that you made Rudy happen for me, but this is something I have to do.”

And that was that. I left CAA and, like a grown-up taking control of his own life and career, went to the esteemed William Morris Agency where, well, where nothing really changed. The joke was on me.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. My mom’s agent, Marc Schwartz, did a lot for me. He essentially helped put me through college by negotiating three different deals for television pilots, each involving less than two weeks of work but enough money to get my wife and me through several semesters of school, and to allow us to pay the mortgage on our house. If the shows went over (which they didn’t), I’d become a millionaire. So the television division of the William Morris Agency at least saw my potential and tried to do something with it. The film division, however, did not.

Again, I have to acknowledge some culpability in the sputtering of my career. I was concentrating on my studies and thus allowed the professional side of my life to slip, to the point where, the week that I graduated from UCLA, I was nearly broke. Not because we’d been irresponsible or lazy. We had reinvested all the money I’d earned from Encino Man, Rudy, and other smaller projects into our education and my production company.

By the way, around this time I made Christine a partner in Lava Entertainment. To this day she remains the vice president and chief financial officer. Oh, and treasurer, too. Technically, she can vote me off the board, I think. The point is, she’s also my business partner in Lava Entertainment ventures. I’m proud that her name is next to mine on the Academy Award nomination certificates we received for producing Kangaroo Court together. But the fact remains that around the time we graduated, we were just about broke. We weren’t living lavishly, but neither were we too careful about money. We traveled a lot to visit Christine’s family in Indiana or my mother in Idaho during breaks, and the result was a bank account that was dangerously, frighteningly close to depletion, with no obvious work on the horizon.

I don’t mind admitting that I was scared. Although I was realizing my lifelong dream of graduating from UCLA, I felt like my acting career was running on vapors. I was engaged in playing what seemed to me like a suicidal game of chicken with my William Morris agents (if you tell them exactly how desperate you are, they may undersell you or slot you into a subpar situation). The delicate poker game with potential employers requires all of your (and your agents’) acumen. Luckily for me, the education and Hollywood gods conspired to rescue us. I had started thinking about turning off the fax line, cancelling the subscription to the newspaper, those kinds of things. Then, out of the blue came a substantial offer to star in a film called Harrison Bergeron, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, and suddenly everything was okay. Another actor had fallen out at the last moment, and big-agency politics suddenly worked to my advantage the way I had always hoped it would.

Such is the Hollywood roller coaster.

Throughout the mid-1990s, I worked steadily if unspectacularly. Admittedly, I was not on the radar of most studio executives, and my name rarely, if ever, came up at news meetings of major entertainment publications. But it would be wrong to say that I had failed. My short film, Kangaroo Court, the story of a Los Angeles police officer who is captured and “tried” by members of a violent street gang (the late Gregory Hines starred as an attorney who defends the officer), was nominated for an Oscar in 1994. Not that anyone cared. I remember at the Academy Awards luncheon, the press didn’t want to talk to me. They seemed kind of bored when I stood at the podium to discuss Kangaroo Court, as if they were just killing time between appearances by the real stars. Finally, out of politeness, someone asked a question.

“What are you going to do next?”

“Finish college,” I said, pointing out that I had enrolled at UCLA. They all started chuckling. Later, Dan Petrie Jr. explained their reaction: “Sean, this is not how the big successful directors got their careers going. You don’t get nominated for an Oscar, then go to college.”

Ed Zwick, Dan pointed out, did a short film for the American Film Institute; he then created the television show Thirtysomething; and then made Glory as his first full-length theatrical release. If there’s a map for building a filmmaking career, that’s it. But as much as I admired Ed Zwick, I didn’t have his kind of confidence, his mastery of the language. Every time I met a college graduate in Hollywood, I was stung by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority, as if they had something on me, something that prevented me from competing with them. For that reason alone, I needed to get a degree. A dispassionate observer might find that hard to fathom, for there are in Hollywood today any number of people who eschewed college for one reason or another. Experience is perhaps the most important form of education to them. But not to me. Keith Addis, one of my former managers, once said to me, “I’m leery of working with you because I don’t like working with anyone who hasn’t been to college.” It seemed at the time to be a rather arrogant, condescending remark, but I have to say, as soon as I got my degree, I called Keith and thanked him. For a while, whenever I got distracted, Keith and my father (another vigorous proponent of higher education) were like twin demons in the back of my mind, reminding me of the importance of what I was trying to do.

And it wasn’t as if I retired from the movie business while I went to school. I finally started directing professionally. I got the opportunity to do some episodic television and took smaller parts in a number of movies, some of them memorable, some not so memorable. Among the former was Ed Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, during the filming of which, as I’ve mentioned, I devoted considerable time to studying for my classes. As usual in my life, I was trying to get sixty seconds out of every minute, as Rudyard Kipling writes in his classic poem “If.”

I’ve worked with a number of world-class filmmakers (Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner, Peter Jackson, among them), and Ed Zwick is up there with the best visionaries. If Kevin Costner was an emblem of everything I wanted to achieve when I met him at the premiere of Dances with Wolves, then Ed Zwick became my model both as a pure director and a director/producer, and in some ways I felt like I was following in his substantial footsteps. For example, in college, he had studied English and history, just as I had. He did his short film at AFI; I did my own short film and got nominated for an Oscar. I looked at Ed and thought, There’s the template. There’s my path. Granted, he’s probably a little bit smarter than I am, a little bit sharper (okay, maybe a lot smarter—he went to Harvard), and probably more honestly passionate about drama than I am. If you cut our minds open and laid them out on a table, his would look better than mine; but I wanted to do as much with mine as I possibly could. The point is, Ed was a beacon to me, and I wanted to bask in the glow of his talent.

The word “prescient” comes to mind when I reflect on Ed’s choice of material. For example, The Siege is a picture that looked at issues related to domestic terrorism years before September 11. He is unafraid to use his talent and considerable skill to explore serious issues facing even the most sacred institutions in our society. Unwittingly, Ed Zwick’s influence in my life taught me a very important lesson.

A little background … I auditioned for the part that Zwick eventually offered to Matt Damon in Courage Under Fire. While I was extremely disappointed that he chose Matt over me, I could certainly understand his choice. Once I saw the finished film, I really understood. I remember when I lost a part in Rob Reiner’s movie Stand by Me to River Phoenix, how crushed I was initially, and then how utterly inspired I was by River’s stunning performance in the picture. It became clear to me that River was ready to perform with a vastly more intense emotionality and basic level of toughness and sophistication than I had at that point in my life; I would only have been pretending. Similarly, Matt Damon was more capable of capturing the nuances required by the role he played. I could have made a good stab at it, but Matt just nailed it. I remember at the premiere that I was worried for him that after so dramatically altering his weight for the part, he might fall victim to the same problems I had endured. While he appreciated my gentle warning, he was totally unconcerned and has proven over the years that his commitment and discipline are unimpeachable. For all this and more, Matt has my admiration.

So, I’d like for it to be clear that as an actor—for example, in a picture such as Memphis Belle—I am proud to perform in movies that depict the United States and possibly other armed services honestly and in a way that feels historically accurate (one of my favorite films is the German classic Das Boot). Courage Under Fire promised something even more interesting than simply honoring the valiant service of brave men and women. In choosing to make Courage Under Fire, Ed raised the uncomfortable issue that the proffering of medals is, by its very nature, a political process. The director leveraged his power in Hollywood to make a film that did not initially receive approval from the United States Army. I had a unique vantage point from which to gain insight into the process, because I was then serving—and continue to serve—faithfully, proudly, and honorably as a civilian aide to the secretary of the army. During preproduction, I was waiting and trying to help work through the necessary bureaucracy in the eager hope that the army would agree to be involved in the making of the picture. Absolutely nothing can replace the realism and power of an M1A1 tank, to say nothing of a brigade-level array of them.

But the army had certain stipulations, and Ed would not adjust the script. I was in an interesting position, because Ed offered me a small part in the picture. I was going to play the part of a tank gunner who accidentally commits the atrocity of killing a “friendly”—someone on his own side. Despite my frustration at not getting the part I wanted, I was grateful that Ed saw a way to use me. I thought the part had merit because it showed the reality of the horror that a brave, heroic patriot can suffer during the heat of battle, as well as afterward. I remember being in an odd position at the National Training Center in the California desert. One week I was the guest of General William Wallace, the commanding general on the base, and the following week I was the guest of Colonel Terry Tucker, who commanded the opposition force against the troops who went to the desert to train. On one trip I was a distinguished guest with a protocol ranking; on the next trip I was an actor in the entourage of Denzel Washington getting critical time to prepare for my role.

During the National Conference of the Civilian Aides that year, I approached the head of the public affairs office to inquire about the status of the film company’s request for the army’s support. I distinctly recall feeling that I might be forced to make a choice between acting in the picture and continuing to serve as a civilian aide. At the time, if forced, I would have chosen the movie. In my heart, I believed a few things: First, I am an actor, and acting is my craft, my profession, and my passion. Second, I thought, whatever the army’s objections might be, the movie ultimately showed the army in an extremely positive if not perfect light. As it turned out, the army chose not to support the film, and the director was forced to go elsewhere for realistic props. He eventually got Australian Sheridan tanks and dressed them up to look like American and Russian/Iraqi equipment. The lesson I learned is that the military’s primary objective is to fight and win wars when called on to do so, and that artists have a separate charge: to tell stories they can believe in regardless of how those in power may feel about them.

*   *   *

This next little story deals with the politics of celebrity, and I want to tread cautiously and sensitively. We filmed Courage Under Fire in the late fall or early winter around the time that American forces had been deployed to Kosovo. A friend and colleague of mine was running the Armed Forces Radio Network in Europe. He asked me to record some holiday greetings that could be played for the soldiers, many of whom would have absolutely no form of entertainment during the holidays far from home. I wanted to honor the request that had been made of me and, in so doing, I asked others to help. Of course, my mom was the first to volunteer, and her greeting was heartbreakingly sincere and beautiful.

Knowing that the army had turned Ed down, I probably should have wondered how well the director would treat my request. To Ed Zwick’s absolute credit, he allowed me to approach his stars. I think it was unfair for me to even ask him or them for this kind of permission. Life is a lot about timing, and I made my request impulsively, which was wrong. Unfortunately and unintentionally, I put Ed in an awkward position. He would either have to disappoint me by turning me down or run the risk of having Meg Ryan, his leading lady, upset by being distracted from her work with a political request. I sensed Ed’s displeasure, but he didn’t try to stop me, and I never felt an iota of reprisal from him. To the contrary, he has always been gracious and supportive any time I have seen him since.

As I’ve thought about it over the years, I’ve realized that it may have been a little inappropriate for me to inquire spontaneously in the way that I did. At the very least, I was being opportunistic.

As far as Meg Ryan goes, well, to say that I have anything more than a passing connection with Meg is just not true. Sure, my mom played her mom in a movie, and she and I acted, if not together, at least in the same film. She has been polite to me when we’ve met each other at parties—maybe even something a little more than courteous. But we’ve never had a fully realized exchange about anything, and that makes me a little sad. I wouldn’t mention it except that this is a feeling I’ve had many times before, mostly in “Hollywood” settings.

Denzel Washington was a prince. We recorded his greeting in the morning right after the sun came up, with Denzel waving a big cigar around, smiling and turning on the charm. Meg, interestingly, was a different story. She initially agreed to my proposal while seated in the makeup chair, and then she got up to do her scene—but when I approached her afterward, she apparently had changed her mind.

“Do you want to do this now?” I asked.

Meg sort of hemmed and hawed, then drifted away, saying, “I think I’m going to do something else for that.”

Maybe she did; maybe she didn’t. I don’t know. In fairness, I’m not sure she even realized who I was (we had no scenes together) or what I was talking about, but I was disappointed nonetheless. There is a certain shallowness to Hollywood relationships that sometimes leads to disappointment, at least on my part. I like to think that I’m open with people and that I can find a common ground with almost anyone, so when what appears to be a friendship instead turns out to be nothing more than a short-term working relationship with no real foundation, it bothers me. The truth is, people in show business, probably more so than in other walks of life, are accustomed to feigning interest or protecting reputations, for whatever reason.