BARBRA STREISAND IS GETTING MARRIED AND I’M NOT INVITED 207 DEEP DIVING INTO MALIBU

Ihad been working for a paycheck since I was eight years old and pretty much said yes to any opportunity to bring home cash. I have been driven to make money my whole life to take care of myself and I do everything in my power to give my family security and provide for them what they need and want. So I never imagined making enough money to say, “I have made enough money.” Now that reality was staring me right in the face. I had to face the fact that I also liked making money, because psychologically, it made me feel worthy, worthwhile, valuable, validated, hardworking, smart, and all the other feelings work gives us. To turn down work was hard to do, but also liberating. My whole life I had wanted to be a hippie, live close to the land, get married, find a community, and raise a family. I now had the chance to do just that, in the most amazing, financially free way possible, and I would be a fool to pass it up.

Besides, I had done three movies in a row that did not have great success at the box office, and that meant my turn at the trough was going to come to an end soon. When I started as an actor, the movie’s commercial success or failure had nothing to do with me. My only responsibility was to give a good performance. But when your name is above the title and the studio banks on your personal popularity, the box office numbers are a direct reflection of how the studio thinks their investment in you worked out. I never made the huge bucks—the five-million-, ten-million-, and twenty-million-dollar paydays that actors can make on a film—but even at my pay level, it is a very different kind of pressure and expectation that has nothing to do with how well you acted. Frankly, I was kind of tired of acting anyway. Directing films was the right job for me. So as I settled into my family life in Malibu, professionally, I decided to invest the next few years of my time into finding a great film to direct, and to only take acting jobs in Los Angeles.

In hindsight, the least interesting thing I did during this time was develop movies. I wasted so much time working on scripts that never turned into films. They were all great, and I believe all of them would have made great films, but the sad truth is that a script is only a blueprint for a film, so if the film doesn’t get made, the script is as worthless as the paper it is written on. The accompanying heartbreak that comes with realizing that the film is not going to get made, and that you have wasted all of that time and creativity, is hard to recover from. Guam Goes to the Moon, a wonderful script I developed for Paramount about a ragtag group of ex-astronauts flying old rocket equipment to the moon, actually paid for actors and set building, and pulled the plug just weeks before we were supposed to start the film. And I had turned down a great movie called Varsity Blues to do it, so I felt like I lost two scripts I loved. I worked for years on a wonderful film called Winterdance, adapting Gary Paulsen’s non-fiction book about being a novice dogsledder and running his first Iditarod. I wrote that script with Goldberg and Serdlow, going to Alaska to research and getting to run with the dogs through the Alaskan wilderness, but Fox wouldn’t greenlight it. Years later, they sold it to Disney, who turned it into Snowdogs with Cuba Gooding Jr., and it was heartbreaking to see the story contorted into a lame Disney comedy. I worked on a script about professional bass fishing for a year and a half, called Don Wayne Wyoming, only to be asked by the head of the studio, “Does it have to be about bass fishing?” What a waste of my fucking time. The most painful one was not getting The Bee made with John Hughes. John had so many projects going on and by the time I could focus on it, he was too busy to work on it. Working on so many scripts did get me more confident in my writing abilities, so that had value. But when I think about the man-hours that I and thousands of other screenwriters have wasted on unproduced movie scripts in Hollywood, it is almost too much pain to comprehend.

Those years I stopped working turned out to be the most productive of my life. I got really good at living a life of freedom and didn’t waste a day. We had a gardener named Vitalino, who was a genius at his job. He carved pathways to connect our two houses, repurposing all kinds of stones and wood he found on the property. He planted an enormous vegetable garden, and over the years, turned our three acres into a beautiful, natural wonderland. Laure speaks fluent Spanish, having spent her high school years in Madrid, and so she can communicate with everyone in California. But Vitalino didn’t speak English and I am a dummy and still can’t learn Spanish, so our verbal communications were always a comic event, a combination of physical gesturing, pointing, attempts at a foreign language, and always ending in one last non sequitur that would make us question what we had just decided or discussed. But we both knew who was boss. It was him. He taught me what “getting back to the land” really meant—the hard work, the inventiveness, using the right tool, understanding physics, weather, waterflow, and all kinds of land management that go into every agricultural endeavor. He inspired me to get my hands dirty, and I worked with him many afternoons. He would assign me menial tasks he thought I could handle—digging a hole or carrying rocks for the wall he was building. Eventually I broke out on my own and claimed the land around the little house as my area to work. I carved out the White Trash Sculpture Garden, where I made an installation of discarded washing machines, toilets, and other junk I had acquired and painted, including a dismantled Coke machine that the previous owners had left behind. My biggest accomplishment was building a chicken coop on the back of the garage. I hadn’t built anything since I was a carpenter’s apprentice for a time back in New York between auditions, and it felt good to see it completed, filled with chickens, and producing a dozen fresh eggs every day. I adapted immediately to the laid-back, surfer lifestyle of Old Malibu. Our neighbors were a firefighter, an electrician, an architect, a retired couple, and Clark Gable’s grandson, all in modest houses like ours. I never wore shoes, and on more than one occasion left the house without them on my way to somewhere that definitely required shoes, like the doctor or something. I made the little house next door my office/man cave. I had never in my life had my own place before, always sharing a space with family, roommates, wife, and children. It was very freeing to be able to completely focus on whatever I wanted to without distraction. And when I was done, I just walked up the path, back home.

But the most satisfying part of controlling my own schedule was being able to spend so much time with my kids. The biggest miracles in my life are my children, and I reveled in taking advantage of the unprecedented opportunity of not working and just being there for the kids. Malibu was still a small town, having just opened their own high school a year before we got there, and it gave space for all the kids to find themselves. With our path to the Little Dume surfing beach, our house was where all our kids’ friends came after school, to do homework and then go to the beach, and Laure and I were in heaven getting to witness all of these amazing kids growing before our eyes. Henry was a star athlete and student and had a wonderful group of friends. We loved to play intense games of basketball in the driveway or Risk in the living room. He was in so many advanced classes, and I was astounded by the seriousness with which he took his studies. We had a blast working on his bar mitzvah together, after which all my friends were sure that he would be the future president of the United States. He started clubs in school to bring kids of different cultures together. He organized a weeklong Holocaust Survivor celebration, where a dozen or so survivors and liberating American soldiers came to the school and spoke directly with the kids about their experiences. He was an amazing kid, and obviously on his way to great things. We had a big, old Chevy Suburban, and that is what I was teaching him to drive, taking him on the small streets of Point Dume.

Sophie was coming up right behind him. Very different kid than Henry, much more like I was as a kid. She was not a good reader and wasn’t particularly interested in school. But she was great at music and dance and was funny as shit. Watching her journey as a girl growing up taught me more about life than just about anything I have experienced. I only knew how boys grow up in a society, with Henry following basically the same path as me, and I guess I assumed that a girl’s journey was similar. And it was, for a while. But around fourth grade, Sophie’s friends all started forming subgroups, gossiping about each other and doing “mean girl” things to each other. I knew and loved all these kids, so I was shocked to see them hurt each other like that. I said to Laure that I felt bad that Sophie’s friends turned out to be this way, and she explained to me that this was just how girls are and that this behavior was perfectly normal.

“Normal? Playing head games with friends and gossiping about them is normal for girls?” It turned out she was right. I did not know that while boys were torturing each other in physical ways, girls were learning to play three-dimensional chess in the emotional and psychological Game of Life. It was an eye-opener. Sophie also had to deal with having such a brilliant and accomplished brother, much as I had to deal with my sister’s academic success. So when we worked on her bat mitzvah speech, I told her that I wanted her speech to kick Henry’s speech in the ass. And she did just that—talking about women’s representation in the Torah, her role models, her dreams, her vision of how the world should be, as well as so many great jokes and laugh lines. She blew us all away.

Ella was still a little kid through these years. She always had the odd mix of a total academic nerd and terrific and fearless athlete. She rode her bike to Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School and excelled in reading and science. They took kids to the beach and did experiments and studies; Ella loved doing all of it. She also loved dance classes and soccer, but it got a little scary when she started taking horse-riding lessons where they learned to do rodeo tricks like standing on the horse and sliding around the saddle while the horse gallops. I hated watching that shit, but she loved it. She was so innocent, and we could still play pretend games and roll around on the floor, but I knew it wouldn’t be long until I would lose a big part of her to the mean girl games, where dads are sidelined for a lot of the time. Laure and I loved taking them all to the local diner, Coogie’s, for dinner and then getting frozen yogurt and window shopping at the surf shop. Just hanging out together as much possible, listening to them, guiding them, helping them become who they wanted to be. We were making it up as we went along, like every parent does, and we were committed to trying our best.

I also realized that my celebrity from being in movies about empowering kids could be used to help empower real kids, in real life. I had already coached my kids’ sports teams, as well as being a classroom dad to help tutor math and reading and playground supervision, but there was more I could do. My fame from Home Alone gave me an immediate connection with kids and parents. I noticed that the most common question they wanted to know was if it hurt when I got hit with the paint cans and the bricks. The parents were as naive as the kids in terms of the editing, stunts, music, and photography tricks that go into making any kind of media, and I found that concerning. It is great to enjoy television and movies, but you must be wise to the manipulation that the media-maker is using to tell the story they want to tell, otherwise you will be ripe to be manipulated in ways that can be dangerous. The need to be literate in understanding media is just as important as the need to be a literate reader. I met a terrific woman who ran The Center for Media Literacy, an organization that trains teachers and develops textbooks and lesson plans for teaching Media Literacy to kids of all ages. I took the training and bought the materials and signed up to teach a three-week course at Malibu Middle School and High School. It was so much fun, teaching five classes a day for three weeks, and the kids loved having a class that talked about movies, television, current events, and marketing. I saw how well the course worked and wanted to see if I could help get it into schools throughout California. Laure was already serving on the PTA and connected me with the director of the statewide California PTA. I gave a talk at their monthly meeting, going through some of the highlights of the class I was teaching, and they totally got how important it was. They arranged for me to meet with other PTAs throughout the state. The next year they named me Honorary Chairman of the California PTA, which enabled me to spread the message and get into meetings with boards of education and nonprofit education committees. I taught the course for three years at Malibu High and up and down the state of California. (I believe in my core that this should be a mandatory course in every school, in every state, in every grade, and should now include the critical thinking skills to analyze social media and disinformation, as well as mainstream media and entertainment. We need to be literate in all of it to navigate this clever world we live in.)

I gave my time to environmental groups, media literacy groups, and NORML, which wanted to reform discriminatory marijuana laws that sent people to jail for ridiculously long terms. Owning and using my celebrity for these causes made the distortion it caused in my life feel worth it. Home Alone opened so many doors and gave me people’s attention for a minute. My message about educating and empowering young people aligned perfectly with the message of the movies people knew me from. It was different than the social justice work my dad did, and different than the hard work my mother did as an elementary school teacher, but giving back to the community was in my blood, and it felt good to be getting those muscles back in shape, using my unique toolbox to get stuff done. By this point, Laure had become very involved in the schools, moving up the ladder in the PTA and making a name for herself as an incredible community helper. She had befriended Robyn Gibson, another powerhouse woman who had children in the same public schools that we did, who wanted to support our fledgling school system. Laure and Robyn launched a plan for a big party called Celebration for Education to raise funds for the school system. The famous record producer David Foster agreed to host it on his twenty-acre Malibu estate and to organize a celebrity show that would attract high-end donors and raise a boatload of money. And they wanted me to be the master of ceremonies, along with Robyn’s husband. Did I mention her husband is Mel Gibson?

Mel is a serious filmmaker, actor, and producer, but underneath that sexy exterior is a silly man who loves to laugh and tell jokes and puns. We all started hanging out together, planning the big show. Mel was the biggest movie star in the world at the time, and he could get anyone to do anything. We had the biggest studio executives buying tables, and Jay Leno agreed to do stand-up. David Foster got Lionel Richie and Natalie Cole to perform with a huge band and erected an enormous tent to do the show in. Laure and Robyn sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in tickets and set aside tables for kids and teachers and school officials. They got auction items donated for trips on private planes and vacations in Australia. Mel and I were lucky enough to get an incredibly funny Simpsons writer, Mike Scully, to write us some jokes and schtick. We played really well together and egged each other on, daring each other to do something sillier. The show was a fucking home run, one of the greatest pieces of crowd-pleasing theater I have ever been a part of. The audience went nuts for the music and the jokes. We had kids perform that night, including Sophie, who crushed it playing in front of all those people. And when it came time for the auction, Mel and I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only did we auction off the high-end items Laure and Robyn had secured, but we made money auctioning weird shit too. We got bidding up to three thousand dollars to be the first one to get their car from the valet after the show. I got five thousand dollars from a woman to come on stage and pour a bottle of champagne down Mel’s pants. I will never forget the deliciously sinful look that woman had in her eye. We stayed up late that night in the tent at David’s, counting the money, imagining the improvements to the schools this was going to pay for, and feeling the buzz of the electric night of performances. The money went to the school district and paid for so many things, from programs to teacher’s aides to building a theater at the high school, which I got to help design and open. But the long-term win from Celebration for Education was the unleashing of Robyn and Laure and David and Mel and me as a fundraising team.

Life was fully engaging with the family, our house, and my volunteer work, but I was also a creature of show business and had been my whole life. I was forty years old and felt like I still had some stories to tell, that I might have something to say, but developing movies was not the way for me to say it. One evening Henry was doing his homework, and he had a book from his English class called Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott, which is a book about how to write. I looked through the table of contents to see what it was about, and a chapter heading caught my eye—“Shitty First Drafts.” Of course, juvenile as I am, it made me giggle that they had the word “shitty” in a schoolbook. But I was intrigued enough to open the book and read the chapter. The point of it was that every single thing ever written, from Shakespeare to the Declaration of Independence, started with a Shitty First Draft. A new writer can’t be afraid of writing a shitty first draft, because that is mostly the only kind of first draft there is, and without it you have nothing. Nothing to work on, to shape, to throw out. Resign yourself to the fact that it will be shitty. The “Shitty First Draft” theory has become a guiding principle in my life as an artist and has freed me to give myself a break when trying to create a new sculpture or a new character (or a new book!). It’s going to be shitty to start with, but have faith that it can only get better. Something opened up in me that night and before I knew it, I was sitting at a typewriter (yes, a typewriter) writing a scene.

They say you should write about what you know. Laure and I were twenty-something years into our relationship at that point. At forty, I had already lived more than half my life with her. She is the most fascinating, brilliant, loving, sexy, frustrating, selfless, selfish, nurturing person in the world to me. So I spent a day or two writing dialogue between a husband and wife. I can’t remember what exactly, but I can guarantee you it was shitty. And then, that next day, July 1, 1998, a strange idea hit me from above. I was in the little house trying to write again when a helicopter started hovering very low in the sky and just sat there. Then another one joined it. The sound was unbelievably loud and disruptive, and they just stayed there. I couldn’t focus on writing, so I gave up for the day, went back to the big house, and asked Laure what the fuck was going on with the helicopters. She said, “Barbra Streisand and James Brolin are getting married today. Those are news crews and paparazzi. She lives on Point Dume and there are a whole bunch of celebrities there.”

“So how come we weren’t invited? I’m not famous enough?” I asked, which made us both laugh.

When I sat down the next day, I realized who the husband and wife were and what they were talking about, and I started writing a play called Barbra’s Wedding. It was about Jerry, an unemployed actor, and Molly, his wife, who happen to live next door to Barbra Streisand. It takes place on the day of her wedding, to which they have not been invited. I was giving myself a chance to vent all of my frustrations at being an actor. The neuroses, fears, shame, and ego that I felt about show business could come through Jerry in a comic way. And all of Laure’s frustrations, compromises, and sacrifices she has made by being married to me, as well as our deep-seated love for each other, could come out through Molly. I didn’t know where it was all going, but I wrote this dialogue that day and made myself laugh out loud. It was enough to inspire me to pound out a shitty first draft. Then a little less shitty, but still very shitty, second draft. An equally shitty third draft. A much-improved fourth draft, and on and on . . .

Jerry is looking out the window at the wedding next door. Molly is on the couch with a migraine from the helicopters.

JERRY

What do these people have in common with Barbra Streisand?

MOLLY

What does anybody have in common with Barbra Streisand?

JERRY

What does James Brolin have in common with Barbra Streisand?

MOLLY

They have something in common, evidently.

JERRY

How could they? I mean she’s music and movies and he’s like . . . Love Boat and AAMCO commercials.

MOLLY

They’re in love.

JERRY

I know. I meant—

MOLLY

That’s why people get married.

JERRY

It’s just a strange combination.

MOLLY

I’m sure they are very much in love.

JERRY

I know. But how do those two people find each other?

MOLLY

They’re lucky.

JERRY

He sure is lucky.

MOLLY

They found each other.

JERRY

He is one lucky son of a bitch.

MOLLY

They love each other! They need each other!

JERRY

Why? Why do those people need each other? How do they get so lucky?

MOLLY

Because people . . . people who need people . . . are the luckiest people in the world!!! . . . I don’t know. What are you asking me for!?