NO-BRAINERS

In the meantime, the Malibu money-laundering case got resolved and we got a call from the federal marshals asking if we were still interested in buying the house with the path to the beach. We met them the next day, signed a contract for a price of one point one million dollars, gave them a deposit check, and suddenly the house was ours. At the same time, we had noticed the abandoned old house next door and had the realtor find out whose it was and if they wanted to sell it. We got the answer that they would take six hundred thousand dollars for this little beach bungalow, and we said, “We’ll take it.” We paid for them both in cash, since I had just socked away a couple of incredible paydays, and Laure and I suddenly owned two houses on three acres of prime real estate, with a swimming pool and a path to the premiere surfing beach in all of Malibu. I had the most beautiful wife in the world, my kids loved their lives, and since our house had access to Little Dume, we became the hangout place for all of our kids’ friends, which brought so much wonderful energy into the home. It really was the greatest and happiest time of my life.

When it came time to sign on to do the sequel to City Slickers, it was a no-brainer, for better and worse. I had loved making the first one so much that there was no way I would not want to join in the fun again. And this time, I had the all-powerful Creative Artists Agency as my representatives, so I would not have to handle the negotiations myself. Like I said, a no-brainer. But there was a fly in the ointment—the script. The original City Slickers was a film about friendship, about risking your life to honor your obligations, even if that obligation is just bringing a herd of cattle to safety, and it was one of the funniest and most heartfelt scripts I have ever read. City Slickers 2—The Legend of Curly’s Gold had funny things in the script, but its message was about greed and searching for gold to get rich, which was the opposite of the moral of the original story. Bruno Kirby told Billy he wouldn’t work with him again, so they had no choice but to leave his character out, which left a big hole in the heart of the film. In his place, they added a very annoying and unsympathetic character, played accordingly by Jon Lovitz. And even though he had died in the first movie, they brought back Jack Palance to play his long-lost identical brother, an obvious and flimsy movie device which undermined the reality of the world we were trying to create. Billy probably should have directed the film himself, but instead hired a very weak director who was expected to kowtow to Billy’s vision for the film, but who was very bad at kowtowing and wore his resentment on his sleeve. My part was okay, a few funny scenes and jokes but nowhere near the character arc and complexity of the first film. By the time I finished reading the script, I was having real doubts about whether I should do it. I was starting to get a reputation as a good comic actor and needed to have material I believed in. Then my agent called and said they would pay me two point one million dollars. I immediately shut off my brain and said yes. What am I, stupid? It was a no-brainer.

Sadly, the movie ended up kind of lame, but I had a wonderful time doing it. We shot it in Moab, Utah, which is an otherworldly, beautiful place. We worked at incredible locations where many classic John Ford Westerns were shot. I rented a little house on top of a mountain, with views forever, and a hot tub too. At the bottom of the mountain was a golf club, with membership included in the rental. I had tried golf a few times and liked it, but never took it seriously. But I played every day I wasn’t working and got pretty good. One of the set decorators on the film happened to be an ex-pro golfer, and he gave me lessons on the set, which I would take directly onto the golf course. In a scene directly out of Caddyshack, on my last day on the course it was pouring rain. I was the only person out there and I played the game of my life, powering through some lightning scares to finish one over par. One of the great accomplishments of my lifelong sporting activities. I have played only a few times after that and sucked as bad as ever. None of it stuck, but man, was I in a golf groove there for a couple of months!

It was great to spend time with Billy, but he had a very full plate—starring in the film, producing it, and overseeing the direction as well. Lovitz was nice but always had a bit of an act going on, so I didn’t really get to know him much. The real gift of friendship on this film was getting to know Jack Palance a bit more. We had a lot more time together than on the first film, and this time I could see that his passion for his work outside of show business—his painting, family, poetry, ranching—was hugely important and necessary to his sanity. Living “the life of an artist” brought him deep satisfaction, with his acting career being just a small part of it. I started to conceive a plan. What if I made enough money that I never had to work again and could spend all my time at home, being a dad and a husband, with my work consisting of making art of all kinds and volunteering for causes I believed in? How much money would I need to save, invested in only the safest possible treasury bills and bonds, to be able to use the interest to pay for all of the needs of my family? The idea of “living the life of an artist,” having the freedom to pick and choose how I spend my precious time here on this Earth, seemed like not just a beautiful vision but a true possibility. And even more, an obligation. If I actually had the opportunity to buy my own freedom for the rest of my life, and didn’t take it, it would be an insult to every man and woman working their asses off just to get a few weeks’ vacation with their families and who would leap at the chance to be able to afford this kind of unheard-of independence. I wasn’t there yet, but I could see the path forward.

My production deal at 20th Century Fox was great. I hired a development team and assistants, all looking for books and stories to develop for me to act in, direct, and produce. We bought the rights to a few and dove into trying to develop them into scripts that the studio would want to make. We came across a film called Tenderfoots, a family, kid-empowering movie about a group of Cub Scouts who get kidnapped by a thief on the run. The script was not very good, but the idea was strong and the studio was happy to have me direct and star in a film that would appeal to the same audiences as the Home Alone movies and Rookie of the Year. We hired new writers, Goldberg and Swerdlow, who had written Cool Runnings, and who were really funny and great with structure and character development. We developed the script into an epic comedy, complete with climbing a mountain, fighting a bear, and riding the rapids of a raging river, and the studio greenlit the film. Having already directed Rookie of the Year, I felt comfortable and confident at the helm of the film and started hiring some of the great people I had worked with on other films. I was running on all cylinders, storyboarding the action sequences, scouting locations in Lake Tahoe, auditioning actors, working on the script, etc. Over the Fourth of July weekend, I had some time off. I was so exhausted I thought I must be coming down with something. But on Sunday, my lips were looking kind of blue, and my doctor met me at his office, just to be sure. He took one look at me and put me in the hospital immediately. It turned out I had a bleeding ulcer and had lost 50 percent of my blood supply. They cauterized it, and I spent a couple of days in the hospital recuperating before I was released. Now I just needed to rest, have my body build back up my blood supply, and avoid stress as much as I could—which is hard to do when you are directing, producing, and starring in a twenty-million-dollar comedy. We decided that I would still produce and star in the film but would hand over the directing reins to someone else so that my day-to-day workload would be that much less. We hired a very nice guy, Greg Beeman, who understood the situation. I had just watched Billy Crystal unofficially codirect City Slickers 2 and wanted to avoid confusing the cast and crew as to who was in charge, but since I had been directing the film up until my ulcer, Greg understood that the crew was my crew, I had cast the actors, scouted locations, etc., and we got along very well, personally and creatively.

He made it easy to focus on playing the role of Max Grabelski, the petty thief who ends up being a reluctant hero and father figure to a group of ten-year-old Cub Scouts. We had written some crazy set pieces, and now I actually had to shoot them. I got the fearsome pleasure of shooting a scene with the legendary Bart the Bear, playing dead as he was pawing me (which was so much more terrifying than having that fucking tarantula crawl on my face). There was a scene in which my character is climbing a sheer cliff and, sure enough, one day I found myself being lifted thirty feet into the air on a crane. A mountain climber, attached to the sheer cliff on ropes from above, met me, attached my harness into some rings that had been drilled into the mountain, and left me dangling in the air. I am terrified of heights, but somehow sucked it up and did the scene. Probably not the stress-free activity my doctor wanted for me but an experience I will never forget.

One of my favorite show business moments happened while we were shooting the sequence where the kids and I get swept into a river and free-fall down the rapids, heading for a waterfall . . .

(Side note—you need to know that the most important element on any film set is the catering. The flow of food on a movie set is mind-boggling. The major fuel source for the entire Entertainment Industrial Complex is Fritos. It has become Pavlovian, our need to be fed on set on a regular basis. I am not talking about three meals a day. Of course, we need those provided for us. Full breakfast, anything you want—from pancakes to burritos, BLTs, oatmeal, seventeen kinds of cereals, coffee, coffee, and more coffee. Keep the crew fueled! Craft Services keeps it popping with tables filled with peanuts, candy, donuts, peanut butter, and jelly. You name it, it is there. But that is not enough to keep the crew going. No! We need snacks as well! Pigs in blankets, sandwiches, dips! Who the fuck knows how they do it, but they bring new stuff all day, every day. God forbid they bring ham sandwiches two days in a row! Grumble, grumble, the crew must be fed something surprising! This all takes place before eleven, and then we finally make it to lunch, the big meal of the day! This can be anything and sometimes everything. Meat, meatless, salads, desserts, beverages, ice cream. Sometimes a sushi chef might show up and the crew goes crazy. Then it’s back to work, another few rounds of snacks, both served and self-serve, and then, if you go late enough, they might bring in fifty pizzas, or Chinese food from local restaurants, which is called the Second Meal, a misnomer if ever there was one.)

Anyway, I had to jump into an actual raging river and be taken along by the current through some rapids. It was really fun and physically challenging. There were so many safety people around that I knew I wouldn’t get hurt, so I let myself really go for it, even though it felt dangerous each time. I went pretty far down the rapids each take, and there was no easy way to get me back to the starting place for the next take because the riverbank was such tough terrain. So we hired some Olympic kayakers—amazing athletes who had the strength and ability to paddle their kayaks back up the river and the rapids. I would jump in the river and float downstream, doing the scene while trying to stay on the route I had practiced, and when they yelled, “Cut,” my kayaker would come get me. I held onto a rope attached to the back, and he paddled me back up the river to the starting place. In one of my great “Only in Hollywood Moments,” on one of my trips back up the river, I saw another kayak coming up beside us and passing us by. His strength was impressive, but even more impressive, he was balancing an entire tray of cappuccinos on the fucking kayak! Balancing a fucking tray of cappuccinos while paddling upriver, through rapids going the wrong way, and not spilling a fucking drop. All to get a caffeine fix for the crew upstream. It had to be the World Record Time for such a challenge, which I hear will be an Olympic event in 2032. I nearly drowned laughing as he passed me by.

I had a great time filming the movie with my friends and crew-mates, rewriting as we went and using everyone’s creative input to make a really funny movie. I loved working with the kids on the film, and had gotten Freddie Hice, the stunt coordinator from Home Alone, to do the stunts. We had a blast doing the physical comedy. Once we finished filming, the director announced he had taken another film and left, leaving the editing, scoring, and other post-production activities to me. Since I had been codirecting the film all along, that made it much easier to do my job, which was to make the film as good as it could be, and then help market and sell it as best as I could. The movie came together well, and the test screenings went great, with lots of wild laughs from the family audiences. But we got caught in a pickle. The film went before the Ratings Board, and they gave the film a PG-13 rating instead of the PG rating we were hoping for. There were two scenes in particular they deemed too risqué for a family audience and that they wanted us to cut, and they happened to be two of the biggest laughs in the whole movie. One was a scene where the Cub Scouts piss off the side of a mountain while singing a song, and the other was a scene where my character is teaching them about the birds and the bees while demonstrating with Barbie and Ken dolls. We tried recutting the scenes but nothing we did, short of cutting the scenes altogether, would satisfy the Ratings Board. I really wanted to keep the scenes and thought it wouldn’t matter that much between PG and PG-13, and the studio backed me up. We finished the movie and, once again, I got to score the film with Bill Conti, who brought his magic to it. I was very proud of what we had done, but when the movie opened, I learned a very hard lesson. That PG-13 rating really did matter. This was a movie about ten-year-old Cub Scouts doing heroic things. The people who look up to ten-year-old heroes are six-year-olds or eight-yearolds. But if the youngest audience member can only be thirteen years old, then, to them, the heroes of this movie are a bunch of little babies. A thirteen-year-old doesn’t look up to ten-yearolds; they want to be like sixteen- or eighteen-year-olds. Parents didn’t want to bring their impressionable little kids to it, and slightly older kids didn’t want to watch a movie about kids younger than them. So the movie did not open well. I am still very proud of the film and all of my work on it, and I loved the experience of making it. But I still like to win and be successful, and having it not be a hit hurt.

Now, I don’t usually do extravagant things or waste money, and I don’t like to leave home either, but the legendary Boston Garden, home of the Celtics, was closing and I went crazy and bought myself a trip back to see the final game. I had loved the Celtics at times, and also hated them passionately sometimes too, and the history of that building and all of the amazing moments that had happened there inspired me enough to get off my ass and make the trip to see it before it closed. Unfortunately, the final game was sold out and I could only get a ticket to the next-to-thefinal game, but I took it anyway. The building was everything I had imagined it would be—the parquet floor, the steel rafters, the intimacy of the place, and the crazy, die-hard fans. I had a good seat, and at one point a young man came over to me and asked if I was Daniel Stern (which I was). He was a producer for the radio broadcast for the game and asked me if I would come on the show at halftime and do an interview with Tommy Heinsohn, the great ex-Celtic player. I said “absolutely” and did a really fun interview. After the show, the young producer, Mike Casey, who also happened to be the son of one of Boston’s bench coaches, asked me if I wanted a ticket to the final game. Are you kidding me? Fuck yeah! The gods were with me! Being at that last game at the Garden was maybe the greatest sporting event I have ever been to. They had the all-time great Celtic players take the floor and take a bow. The fans went nuts, kissing the floor, never wanting to leave. I stayed until the end, then went with Mike to the bar where the players go to drink, and we drank with everyone. One of the great nights of my life. Who could have ever predicted that just a few months later I would be back in the Boston Garden, on the parquet, playing hoops, making a film, and getting paid millions of dollars to do it? You are looking at the luckiest man in the world.