SHREVIE AND FRIENDS

Laure and I getting married took a lot of people by surprise, including us. I had just turned twenty-three, and even though all my New York friends were ten years older than me, none of them had even gotten close to getting married, and as my high school buddies had just graduated college, marriage was the farthest thing from their minds. Sam Cohn loved Laure after working with her all summer, but even he told me not to get married, that it would be a distraction from my career. Laure had already been married and divorced, and her parents were rightfully skeptical about her trying it again so quickly, especially with a mostly unemployed actor six years her junior. My brother and sister were both confused by it. My dad was smitten with Laure and my mom thought she was great, although they did have a long talk with her to try to talk her out of it, because they thought she could do a lot better than me. But there was no doubt that Laure and I were destined to make our own family together. Peter and Virginia Yates threw us a wedding party at their home in the Dakota and had us invite all of our weirdo New York actor friends, none of whom had ever been inside the historic building. It was eye-opening to see how out of place my friends were inside such a classy apartment, with beautiful trays of hors d’oeuvres and fine china and the Yates’s kids and the feeling of a substantial home. Laure and I looked up to the Yateses so much; they were role models of what we were striving to be, and they gave our marriage an auspicious beginning.

Which is why it was such a perfect time to land the role of Shrevie in Barry Levinson’s first film, Diner. Whereas Breaking Away was a coming-of-age film about how childhood friendships get tested by the diaspora that occurs at the end of high school, Diner was a coming-of-age story about how childhood friendships get tested when everyone starts getting married. Barry saw me in a really good play I was doing, How I Got That Story, and asked me to come in and meet. There was no audition; we just sat and talked for a half hour about the movie. The script was great, and the part was perfect for me at that moment in my life. Shrevie was the first one married among his friends and so was

I. The movie took place in Maryland (where Barry had grown up too) and we knew all of the same sports trivia about the Colts and the Orioles. I got the part and was in Baltimore before I knew it, sitting in a hotel room reading the script out loud for the first time with some of the best actors and best people I have ever gotten to work with—Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Kevin Bacon, Tim Daly, and Mickey Rourke.

Barry Levinson has got to be the coolest cat to ever get behind the camera. It was his first film to direct and he had written the script. You would think he would hold on tight to his vision and his words, but his vision was about recreating the friendships and the world he grew up in—about hanging out, making each other laugh, riffing on each other’s bullshit, talking about girls—and we soon realized that Barry had cast each of us for our bullshitting prowess. We were all young men who knew how to hang out in a bar and kibitz the night away, which is what is at the heart of the Diner story. From the very first reading of the script he had us improvising, Barry telling his assistant to jot down some of the ideas we came up with. And it only got more loose as we started filming the movie. In the scenes we did with other actors, we stuck to the script pretty closely, although Barry always had an extra line or joke for us to try. But when it was just the guys, most of the script went out the window. He knew the film he wanted to make and was determined to make it, even though no one had ever made a movie that way before. There were about three or four weeks of night shooting where we did all the scenes of us hanging out in the diner. We would go to work when the sun went down, stay up all night improvising the hanging-out scenes, smoking cigarettes, and eating the prop food, and when the sun came up, we would go back to the hotel restaurant, order breakfast and Bloody Marys, and hang out again, with even more bullshitting and cracking each other up. We’d go to bed at ten in the morning and wake up at sundown to go to work again. It was absolute heaven! So many fucking laughs, but here are two I will never forget.

There is a scene when Guttenberg’s character is giving his off-screen fiancée a quiz about Baltimore Colts trivia to see if she is worthy of marriage. Steve thinks she will flunk the test and has a line where he wonders, “Do you think she’ll go down for the count?” When Reiser improvised the response, “No, but I heard she blew the Prince,” we laughed so hard and for so long that they had to shut down shooting for the night, because every time that line came up in the scene, we started laughing all over again. Reiser is as sharp as a razor and his quick-wittedness kept us all on our toes.

Steve, Tim, and I were all solid actors, but Kevin Bacon and Mickey Rourke were movie stars, even then. They had the animal presence and magnetism that defines all the biggest movie stars I have met, insisting on operating at their own rhythm, which can create moments of electricity that are priceless on film. But sometimes marching to your own drum in a scene can create moments of absurdity too. In one scene, Mickey’s character, a gambler, is in the diner having a conversation with his bookie, a guy named Bagel. Mickey’s character comes over to the table where the rest of our gang is sitting and tells us, “Bagel heard about my basketball bet,” to which we respond with some things like, “I hope you win” and “That’s a lot of money.” In trying to create a really interesting line reading, Mickey threw in a few extra punctuations marks, which totally changed the meaning, so that when he came over to the table, he said the line this way—“Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?”—as if Bagel was sitting at our table, which obviously he was not, and he was asking him if he heard about his bet. The scene came to a grinding halt and Barry explained to Mickey that Bagel is the guy he just came from, who heard about his basketball bet and now he is coming over to tell his best friends that “Bagel heard about my basketball bet.” Mickey nodded, and we began take two. Mickey started at the table with Bagel, walked across the diner to our table, and delivered the line the same way: “Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?”

We lost our shit laughing. “Bagel isn’t here! He’s there, at the table you started at. That actor there is Bagel. None of us are Bagel. We are Shrevie, Fenwick, Eddie, Modell, and Billy! No Bagel here. You are telling us that he heard about your basketball bet!”

“Okay, I get it now,” said Mickey. Take three, I swear to God he did it one more time. I don’t know if he had not read the script or he had just practiced the line so much one way that he couldn’t stop himself from saying it that way, but to this day, when the rest of us get together, “Bagel, heard about my basketball bet?” will still make us giggle. One night, I made the mistake of clashing with Mickey over the use of the single land-line phone we were allowed to use on the set. I wanted him to get off the phone because he was taking too long, and evidently, he wanted to put me in a headlock. Well, we both got what we wanted. Lucky for me, the fight was broken up quickly because Mickey is a beast—he went on to have a second career as a prize fighter.

Diner was one of the best creative experiences I ever had on a film, and the whole cast are still dear friends to this day. But the game-changer at the time was that I made thirty-five thousand dollars, which was a mind-blowing amount of money and made us able to afford to have a kid. The news of Laure’s pregnancy was another shock to friends and family, but Laure and I were more in love than ever, now bound together in a way that we didn’t anticipate. She couldn’t wait to be a mom and I couldn’t wait to be a dad. I had so much time on my hands between projects and wanted to put my energy into something real instead of wasting time living the unemployed actor’s life of Frisbee and smoking weed. Sam Cohn told me I had to be picky and patient in my career choices and that getting married and having kids leads to “selling out,” and he was right. I still had standards—no TV shows, no commercials, only good directors—but at only twenty-three with a kid on the way, I was in no position to turn down anything in the ballpark.

I got offered a role in my third Jill Clayburgh film, I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, in which I played a young man in a mental institution who has an affair with Jill’s character after she is admitted to the facility. One of the best and one of the worst film experiences of my life happened to me filming that movie. The worst thing happened my first day of shooting. The movie had already been shooting for a few weeks when I got to LA to do my part. My first scenes were supposed to be on the mental hospital grounds, but because it was raining outside, they decided to go to the “cover set,” an indoor scene set aside for just such a situation. Unfortunately, the cover set was the scene where Jill and I are in bed making love. I had been dreading this scene ever since I read the script, but it was scheduled for the end of the shoot, and I figured I would be comfortable with Jill and the crew by the time it came up. The day’s schedule was already screwed with the change of locations, so they hustled me right up to the set. I walked in, clothes wet from the rain, and saw the situation. There was a bed with Jill Clayburgh in it, wearing a sexy nightgown. There was a camera mounted directly above, looking straight down on it. There were lights shining and a crew of about fifty men and women surrounding the bed. The director, who I had never met, came up to me and introduced himself, and told me the scene. “The scene will be you fucking Jill Clayburgh. Ready? Okay, let’s go. Get in the bed. We are running very late!” Get in the bed? This was my worst dream coming true before my very eyes. I was standing in my cold, wet clothes in the center of a room full of strangers who were waiting for me to strip naked, get in the bed, and start fucking Jill Clayburgh while they watched and photographed it. And somehow, I did it. I reintroduced myself to Jill, who unbeknownst to me thought I was great as her student in It’s My Turn and had them cast me in this. She joked about how sorry she was that we had to start with this scene, while I stripped off my wet clothes down to my tighty-whiteys and crawled under the sheets, freezing cold. The director quickly gave us his choreography—first kissing, then her on top of me, then me on top of her, etc.—and said it was time to remove my underpants. I was numb not only with hypothermia but with the out-of-body experience of acting out an actual nightmare in real life. My memory of the scene is quite hazy. Jill was a good sport. I think my balls finally thawed out from their initial raisin-like state into something more along the lines of a date or a kumquat. I had my butt up to the camera, pretending to pump away, although I probably looked more like a walrus making its way across the sand and back into the sea. Thankfully, we will never know, because I was cut from the movie.

The best part of making that movie was that Joe Pesci was playing a fellow inmate at the mental hospital and we became good friends. Even though this was a serious drama, Joe and I loved making each other laugh, a precursor to our future partnership. Joe put me on the floor with laughter one day when he walked over to the ping-pong table in the therapy room, took the huge roll of maps his character was walking around with, put it up to his nose like a straw, and pretended to sniff up the entire white line down the middle of the table. We still laugh about it. It was also the first time I stayed at the Chateau Marmont hotel, living in the bungalow next to my old friend, John Heard, who was shooting Cat People at the time. Having my big brother there was a blast, and the hotel ended up being my home away from home for years to come. Just goes to show that you never know what magic mushroom might grow out of a pile of cow shit.

Laure was very pregnant by the time I got into my first action movie, Blue Thunder, starring Roy Scheider. Sam Cohn had gotten me eighty-five thousand dollars for the part, which was almost triple anything I had ever made before, so Laure quit her job and for the first time was able stay on location with me. She was gorgeously pregnant, and this was our last hurrah at being footloose and carefree. We would swim in the pool at the Chateau, go to nice restaurants and explore LA, all while making money and being in a movie. It was a time of perfection. The movie was easy and fun. Flying in helicopters, crashing helicopters, doing a few stunts too. I played a rookie cop who gets killed, and I got to do a whole sequence of being chased by a car with my hands tied behind my back before getting run over. So fun! Roy was a client of Sam’s, and Roy’s wife Cynthia was the editor of Breaking Away who I got to know when Peter Yates took me into the editing room, so Roy and I were very comfortable with each other right off the bat. I knew Roy was a great actor and a huge movie star, but what I did not know was that he was a sun-worshiper, with an almost religious fervor. We wore one-piece flight suits as our costume and Roy had nothing on underneath his except a Speedo bathing suit. He kept a chaise lounge nearby at all times, as well as a reflector pan to hold under his chin, like you have seen in cliché movie scenes with rich movie stars sunning themselves. Whenever the crew had to set up for another shot, Roy would strip down to his Speedo, lie on his chaise lounge, flip open the reflector pan, and bake himself in the sun. It seemed funny when we were shooting on the Warner Brothers lot, but it was kind of weird when we were on location. I will forever remember the image of Roy sunbathing on one side of the chain-link fence and on the other, a crowd of South Central LA residents staring at him and yelling questions about Jaws or The French Connection. Blue Thunder was also the only time I was ever stoned on a movie set, although it was by accident. They had wrapped me for the night, and I had smoked a joint with the prop guys when the director realized he had forgotten to get a shot and asked me to come back to the set. All I had to do was walk up to my apartment, put the key in, and go inside. It sure seemed simple enough, but my heart was pounding and my guilt raging at being so unprofessional, so it took a few takes for me to get it right. Making movies is all about creative precision and focus, and being stoned never felt more wrong.

We came back to New York when the film was done and had money to buy a crib, do Lamaze classes, and get ready for the baby. I was in midtown when I called from a pay phone to check on her, and Laure said her water broke. I raced home and we gathered the baby bag, but when we got outside, I could not get a cab to save my life! Our doorman, Sammy, who still is a dear friend to this day, was an auxiliary policeman in his spare time and he was as nervous as we were about getting across town to the hospital while Laure was starting contractions. Sammy locked up the building, got his car, put his blue flashing light on the roof of it, and sped us across Central Park with his horn honking the whole way to Lennox Hill Hospital.

Life changed that night. I watched Laure go through labor and finally understood the near-mythical strength and power that women have that men can’t even begin to conceive of. At the moment of truth, when the baby’s head first popped out, the doctor let me reach in, grab the shoulders, and pull the baby out the rest of the way. I held the baby up, facing his mother, saw his balls hanging between his legs, cried out “It’s a boy!” and put him on Laure’s chest. The whole thing was utterly miraculous. I went to the coffee shop downstairs, got Laure some food, and we sat and stared at Henry until Laure was ready to go to sleep. I met my best friends at a bar where we drank and celebrated until dawn. I went back to the apartment and shot a little Super 8 film of myself, which to this day I have never had the courage to watch. I have been a father since that moment, and having our children is the most powerful, profound, religious, meaning-giving experience of my life, with nothing else even a close second.

Diner came out a few weeks later to an outstanding critical response. Another underdog film like Breaking Away—the audience and critics fell in love with it (and continue to hold it in high regard). The Diner boys and I did some publicity for the film, and we had a blast hanging out again, amazed that all the improvising we had done was actually in the movie! They were so excited and awed that I now had a child, and had tiny little T-shirts made saying “Hank,” “Dr. Stern,” and “Bird Jr.” I was only twenty-four years old, but I had it all. A wife and child, a budding career, incredible friends, an apartment, and even a little money in the bank. The tricky part of “having it all” is that in order to keep “having it all,” you have to work your ass off or else you end up “having it all turn to shit,” which is something I always try to avoid.