Defending Your Life was the last good movie I acted in. Albert Brooks wrote it, and starred in it, and directed it, and handled all of us on set like a pro. And Rip Torn, Meryl Streep, and I were not an easy package.
Albert had been interestingly neurotic about showing me the script in the beginning. He had us meet first in the public park across from the Beverly Hills Hotel. He introduced himself and walked me through the small green park for about half an hour. Telling me the story.
He was very intense, very quiet; he’d stop and look at me every once in a while to see if I got it. We walked to his car. He opened the trunk to give me the script. “When are you flying back?” he asked. (I’d been living in New York for almost ten years at that point.)
“Tomorrow.”
He thought a minute, then slammed the trunk full of scripts shut. “No, I can’t take a chance. Tell you what—I’ll mail the script to you express. You read it and mail it back to me the same day.”
“You promise? You’ll mail it right back? You won’t show it to anyone?”
Me: “Promise.” After I flew home there were several more calls of caution before the script arrived.
I could do it. I should do it, just to be on set with Meryl, whom I idolized. The problem was almost all my dialogue was courtroom speeches. Long, long pages of just me, talking on and on about Albert’s past life on earth and how he blew it.
I get dizzy now as I write this. I was dizzy with fear when I read it that I’d forget my lines. I have to take a deep breath writing about it, the panic is so palpable. The part was simple. Before—before the Neil Simon play, when I went up on my lines, when I was still a free actor—I would have jumped into the water, happy and free. Now I had to hide my self-doubt and fear and this fucking, ever-present tension.
I said yes, of course. Since I was basically in one place at my table in the courtroom, I could write out my lines in my law book and refer to them within the action. That relieved me. It made me more confident, I think that showed, and when I went in for the camera test, the DP, bored at the process, looked at me through the lens and got really interested. He liked what he saw in the camera. I could feel it, and that made me feel more secure.
Well, this cameraman saw something just slightly fuckable in his lens, and I could take a deep breath and relax.
And Meryl Streep. Meryl was “the pretty girl actress.” Usually “the pretty girl actress” in most comedy scripts written for the leading man has to be a little ditsy, young, pretty, have a great body, and either worship the leading man or play hard to get, giving him an objective, to try anything to get her to love him through the whole movie.
No, Meryl was brave casting. Her giant talent had to be diverted into a small piece of herself for this comedy.
Still, halfway through filming, Meryl burst into my trailer and leaned back against the door. “They want me sweeter!” she said in a hoarse whisper, and gritting her teeth, she ran back out. She, Meryl, was playing “the pretty girl actress.”