Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (9 page)

“See if you still like this job after you do it for twenty-five years,” Willis said to me once, on the subject of our chosen field of the arts.

“I’ve been doing it fifteen years, and I still love it,” I countered.

I guess he took that as a challenge, though, since he fostered
an unpleasant and unproductive working environment whenever he was on set. He’d bitch about not being shot first, and he’d bitch louder about not being shot
out
for the day, so he could go home. He hated night shoots and blamed cinematographer Dave Klein for not wanting to shoot the scenes in broad daylight.

When Bruce wasn’t around, the shoot was fun and fruitful; when Bruce was on set,
A Couple of Dicks
felt more like that week I’d spent on
Live Free or Die Hard
, but with
me
in the director’s chair instead of Len Wiseman. All that was missing was
my
necklace of human ears.

The days he didn’t want to do dialogue were always interesting. Mark and Robb Cullen’s script for
A Couple of Dicks
had been a Black List favorite around town—the Black List being an unofficial collection of the best unproduced screenplays in the business, as suggested by an informal survey across all studios. Originally, the movie had been set up at another company, with the screenwriters attached to direct Robin Williams as Jimmy and James Gandolfini as Paul. When that version was put into turnaround, Warner Bros. grabbed
Dicks
with the caveat that the Cullens step down as first-time directors.

This is all a way of saying that the script for
A Couple of Dicks
was well-liked, strong, and funny. So it was always a little astounding whenever Bruce opted out of doing his dialogue. Sure—an actor is bound to run into lines he wants to
change
in a script. But this was a case of a guy dropping his lines altogether—in the midst of
dialogue.
It’s one thing to make a choice to play a
monologue
with a penetrating gaze or a single expression, but when you’re one half of a two-person scene and you make a “choice” to not do
your
half of
the dialogue? That leaves the other actor in exposition hell—because now the other actor has to deliver his lines and
yours
as well.

Bruce did this at the L&B pizza joint shoot in Brooklyn. We get to the set for a blocking rehearsal and Bruce tells me and the Cullens he’s not doing any of the dialogue. His rationale was that his character Jimmy, who’d just been Tasered and robbed of a very expensive baseball card, would be so mad at Tracy Morgan’s Paul for his partner’s lack of intervention, that he’d simply refuse to speak to him in the next scene. As if it wasn’t going to be awkward enough, he also insisted on wearing mirrored sunglasses so we wouldn’t even see this groundbreaking, nonverbal performance in his eyes. Douche Bag Achievement: UNLOCKED!

So there’s me, Robb Cullen, and Tracy, rebalancing all the
dialogue
into a
monologue
. Now Tracy has to convey twice the information in the scene, incorporating lines he never thought he’d have to learn. And as we got to the eighth and ninth takes, poor Tracy is struggling to even remember all the information he’s suddenly had to impart in what was once a two-hander but is now more of a one-hander, with a guy who we’re not even really sure is awake behind those mirrored glasses. At one point, he rocked us with his big move—he took off his sunglasses for a minute, cleaned the lenses with his shirt, then put the glasses back on. It was a little too David Caruso for my taste, and it didn’t help Tracy one iota.

I’m a lazy, fat fuck, so I can spot my own kind pretty easily. At the blocking rehearsal, Bruce took one look at all the unsexy, expository dialogue he’d have to deliver in the scene, and I guess he suddenly decided two pages’ worth of
his half of the dialogue would be best not said at all—at least not by
him
. You can call that an actor making a choice; I call that an actor making a choice for another actor, and then making the double burden he’s suddenly heaped on the guy no easier by barely being present in the scene with him. No fairness merit badge for the Last Boy Scout.

What made his “choice” even tougher to work around was the fact that he’d also dropped his dialogue in the previous scene. In the flick, Bruce is robbed of a valuable baseball card, and Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody, who play the nemesis cops opposite Bruce and Tracy, needle their cop frenemy about being the victim of a crime during their questioning. We’d shot Bruce’s coverage first, as per his request, but rather than read his half of the dialogue with the actors in the scene, Bruce again insisted on doing it all with world-weary, withering looks at Pollak and Brody. This resulted in hundreds of feet of footage featuring Bruce not paying attention to the guys talking to him. It was clear the scene wasn’t going to work with what he gave us, so Robb Cullen and I started coming up with new dialogue for Pollak and Brody to say that would cover the holes in the scene left by Bruce’s “choice.” At the
Cop Out
Film School, I’d slowly learned how to shoot a scene without my lead’s complete involvement, so I knew we had the rest of the day to turn around and build the scene properly.

But suddenly, there was a wrinkle. Bruce decided to stay and do off-camera for the boys. This meant any rewriting to save the scene he’d fucked by opting to not do the dialogue was now not gonna happen, because when Bruce is on set, his will is law.

So we were shooting Pollak and Brody, and Bruce was
providing off-camera performance for his fellow actors—which is to say he was sitting there, barely looking at them, not doing the scripted dialogue. I had the boys looking at the dead center of the bottom of the matte box to represent the off-camera Bruce, and for some reason, this bugged Bruce. He wanted them to look camera left or right instead—not at the bottom of the matte box. It didn’t matter that the director chose that eye line, nor did it matter that the director was also the editor, nor did it matter that it wasn’t even a shot he was in: Bruce insisted we do one his way.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Next take.”

But Pollak and Brody
crushed
that take, rocking very funny, pitch-perfect ad-libs I could cut into the scene, possibly saving it. I was happy and I had everything I needed from them, so I indicated we were moving on with the standard, “Check the gate.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa …,” I heard Bruce say to me.

I looked at him and asked, “We’re not done yet?”

“One more,” said the guy who wasn’t even in the shot.

“Yeah?” I asked, kinda hoping he’d hear the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

Bruce waved me over for a private conference, and as I moved to do so, I said to the crew, “Flag on the play, everybody. I’ve gotta talk to the director.”

And you’d have thought I was Hans fucking Gruber himself, the way Bruce Willis suddenly
turned
on me, saying, “We got a problem here?”

I was wide-eyed. This man had such an issue with my dopey director comment—a comment that was based on fact, since the man was now literally calling the shots in this
scene—that he was stepping to me in front of the entire cast and crew.

“I don’t have a problem,” I said. “But it sounds like you do, Boss.”

“Well maybe you should clear the set so we can talk about it,” he said, giving me the hard McClane stare.

“You want me to clear the set?” I asked, trying to hide the terror I was feeling. From where Bruce was standing, he could easily hit me: He was in striking distance (movie nerd alert: He was also in
Striking Distance).
“Okay …” And to everyone in that tiny, fake baseball card store, I said, “Can you take five, folks? Outside.”

When everyone was gone, he yelled at me for not taking his suggestion. I said I had everything I needed for the scene and that I
liked
the eye line that I’d
asked
Pollak and Brody to give me.

Then, out of nowhere, he asked if I wanted to hit him.

It was fucking insane. I’d compare it to high school theatrics, but I’d never engaged in so petty and faux-macho a standoff in my teens. And worse? We were wasting time and money—just so this lion in winter could show me he still had teeth. Me: the guy who took the 84 percent pay cut to make the movie with the big, stupid jerk.

I kept composed and said we’d bring everyone back and shoot it
his
way. Then I went outside and told everyone to come back in and get ready for one more take of the same setup. Following that, I walked half a block to my trailer, locked myself inside the bathroom, and put my fist through the wall three times.

It sounds more impressive than it is, as trailer walls are
pretty paper-thin. But it wasn’t the actual damage that was so out of character for me; it was the throwing of a punch—even at an innocent wall. This man managed to get me in as emotionally confounding and confused a space as my wife could in the midst of our worst arguments. But I could fuck Jen and blow off steam; I didn’t have that luxury with Bruce. The frustration Willis created that day turned me into Cuba Gooding Jr. in
Boyz n the Hood
—swinging at the air, trapped in the mouth of madness. And for the rest of the show, whenever someone used my trailer bathroom and emerged asking about the three giant holes decorating the walls, my assistant Meghan would say, “We’ve named those holes Die Hard One, Die Hard Two, and Die Hard Three.”

I think it comes down to this: Bruce has been sitting behind directors for years, watching them make TV and film. You do that long enough, you know as much as everyone on set: You know how all the departments work, you’ve had experience shooting stuff that doesn’t make the cut, and chances are you’ve been around more movies than anyone else in the cast or on the crew. At that point, many actors simply make the transition to directing—Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Ben Affleck leap to mind.

Bruce would be an amazing director, as he’s accumulated a shit-ton of moviemaking ability, simply by being in as many flicks as he has over his whole career. But instead, Bruce simply opts for telling people what to do on
their
sets. Sadly, he only tells you what a shitty job you’re doing, shaking his head like nobody understands cinema except
him
.

If you’re going through hell, as the adage says, keep going—’til you get out of hell altogether. One of the things that helps you focus less on an undesirable present is the
eternal promise of a hopeful future. So while I was earning condescending looks from Walter Bruce simply for doing the job I was hired to do, I was dreaming of
Hit Somebody
—the hockey movie I intend to be my last film.

When I got to the
Dicks
set, I had my heart set on casting Bruce as a grizzled hockey vet who dies on the ice. In preparation for this, I bought a glass desktop hockey puck trophy case, which colorfully displayed all the pucks of every World Hockey Association team that ever hit the ice. It was meant to be bait.

The idea was simple: I always cut the flicks I shoot during production and invite cast and crew to visit the editing room anytime they want to see their work put together the way it’ll look in the finished film. I’ve been doing this since
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
—and sharing it with the cast and crew, who always love seeing the flick take shape day by day. Always be a big includer, kids; exclude folks, and you’re excluding their possibly good ideas as well.

So in my head, the scene would go like this: Bruce would eventually come to the editing room after my many invites. And while I’d screen his cut footage for him, he’d see that glass puck case sitting atop a speaker and ask, “What’s this?” And then I’d hit him with three periods full of hockey talk and
Hit Somebody
highlights—during which he’d learn all about the character I was writing for him. And he’d say, “Gimme a script as soon as it’s done.” And eventually, Bruce Willis would play that role in my flick and win the Academy Award doing so, or other plaudits I always felt he deserved but never saw him receive. I’d show the world how cool and talented the Pride of Penns Grove really was. And
Bruce would love it because, finally, he wouldn’t have a gun in his hand as he ran around on the screen; he’d be skating, brandishing a hockey stick instead.

That was before I put my fist through the nearly cardboard trailer walls. I returned to the editing room that night, took the glass hockey puck case off the speaker, and hid it in the back of the closet.

Thank God for weed, is all I can say. At the end of every workday, I’d go back to my apartment, spend time with my family, then blaze out and edit the previous day’s raw footage. It didn’t occur to me to bake a smoking lunch to bring to set until halfway through the show, when I saw Willis having a drink one afternoon. It was nothing scandalous: just a lunchtime stiff one. Dude’s entitled—he’s a grown adult. But so am I. So as grown adults were making choices to imbibe alcohol with their lunches, I’d smoke up in my trailer and play NHL 08 with friends and various puck-heads from the crew. I should’ve spent lunches napping, since I wouldn’t get much sleep at nights, editing ’til the wee hours of the morning. But a nap wouldn’t make working with Bruce easier to take—THC would. By the end of lunch, it was back to work on the set, crisp and ready to roll with oceans more tolerance for Mr. Morose.

To be fair, Bruce wasn’t always doom and gloom on the
Cop Out
set. One time, I saw him lose it and laugh hysterically. We were between takes at video village—the arrangement of monitors that allows you to see exactly what the camera’s seeing, so everyone on set has a general idea of what’s being seen in the frame. My friend Malcolm was cracking people up when Bruce told us all we didn’t know comedy. He asked us if we wanted to see true comedy. A
laptop was brought over and Bruce instructed us to go to YouTube and look up Red Rose Tea. In doing so, we were presented with an old black-and-white commercial from the ’60s. It was a spot for Red Rose Tea in which chimpanzees in suits were “playing” instruments and “singing” over and over, “Red Rose Tea. Red Rose Tea!” At first, it was charming to see Willis crack up at the clip: Apparently, all mirth hadn’t abandoned him yet, and maybe Anakin Skywalker was still buried somewhere behind that mask. But upon the third straight viewing of the primate pitchmen, when the laughter was over for everyone but Bruce, I started to wonder if the apes were still alive and if they were available for day-play on the show—simply to put a goddamn smile on this man’s face while he was on set. It seemed that the only way to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla’s heart was with a bunch of chimps.