Confessions of a Bad News Bear

Confessions of a Bad News Bear

William Devane  

Confessions of a Bad News Bear
by Jon Zelazny


The Reverend David Stambaugh is the Pastoral Associate at Hollywood United Methodist Church. He earned his BA from Messiah College, a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary, and a Masters of Sacred Theology from Drew University.

Prior to entering the ministry, he portrayed infielder Toby Whitewood in The Bad News Bears (1976), The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978).


DAVE STAMBAUGH: I was actually playing Little League at that time, so it was a world I really knew. I remember one time I couldn’t make it to a callback audition because our team was in the area play-offs. I like to think that helped me get the job: “Hey, that kid can’t come in for our movie today— because he’s playing baseball!”

The first auditions were readings in NYC casting offices, but then we moved to Central Park, and started playing catch and hitting balls with the director, Michael Ritchie.

Getting the job was amazing. Imagine being eleven years old, and someone says, “Would you like to spend three months in California playing ball, and get paid for it?”


Bears was of course notorious in its day because of the kids’ profanity. Watching it today, it wasn’t so much the kids’ dialogue that shocked me, but how much Walter Matthau swears at the kids.

I don’t think you could do a word-for-word remake of it. Times have changed.

Another classic scene you probably couldn’t do today is when Matthau is taking you all somewhere in his convertible. He’s drinking a can of beer, doing about thirty-five mph, with maybe four or five of you riding on the back ledge of the car.

Yeah, we’re short about twelve seatbelts there.

You probably didn’t think anything of it at the time.

None of that stuff fazed us. Jackie Earle Haley riding a motorcycle down the middle of Devonshire Boulevard? Fine.

The only thing that raised some eyebrows was when Matthau hands out those beers to us after the big game. But even the guy playing my father; his only concern is that we hide the beer because the local news is there. He never says to Buttermaker, “Are you crazy? You can’t give alcohol to kids!”

I think it’s the perfect ending, given how they’ve been watching Buttermaker drink like a fish for the whole picture.

I also like that they’re celebrating that they lost. Here’s an interesting note: for a long time we didn’t know how the movie would end, because they actually filmed the last play of the big game both ways. The one they used has Kelly (Jackie Earl Haley) getting tagged out, but they also shot footage of an extra man on base, Kelly making his home run, and the Bears winning the game. Michael Ritchie took some of us out to dinner a few days before the premiere, and that’s when he told us what had been decided. I think we were all pretty happy about it. It seemed like the more authentic ending.

I’m surprised he even shot the other stuff. I would have been afraid the studio would pick the other one. Then again, maybe Paramount made him shoot it.

Was screenwriter Bill Lancaster around a lot?

He was. It’s hard at ten, eleven, or twelve years old to recognize the quality of the writing… though we were all certainly proud when Bill won the Writer’s Guild award for Best Comedy that year.



Was Walter Matthau on your kid radar at all? Had you seen any of his movies?

I doubt it. I certainly wasn’t like, “Yes! I’m gonna work with Walter Matthau!” Again, you don’t appreciate how amazing some of these people are until ten or fifteen years later.

One day, for instance, Walter’s buddy Jack Lemmon dropped by for the day, and the two of them took us all out to lunch at this BBQ place. At the time, we didn’t think much about it. Today? People are amazed: “Man, you got to have lunch with The Odd Couple!”

It was the same with Michael Ritchie. Here was a guy who directed a number of really high quality and successful films.

I think he’s due for some reappraisal. He was never a name that excited film students, but you can certainly see The Candidate (1972), Smile (1975), and The Bad News Bears a pretty biting trilogy of social critiques. And a later one that strikes that same chord is "The Positively True Adventures of The Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" (1993), which he did for HBO with Holly Hunter.

I was surprised how many prominent names there are in Bears’ opening credits. Stanley Jaffe produced it, John Alonzo shot it, Polly Platt was your production designer. Ritchie had a dream team on both sides of the camera.

Even some people in the lower ranks: there was a 2nd assistant director on Breaking Training named David Nicksay who became a very successful producer. Or an actor like Vic Morrow: I didn’t know him going in, but what a great body of work that guy had.

It’s very brave what he does in Bears. Roy is a nightmare of a suburban dad, and Morrow doesn’t try to sugarcoat him in any way. Not a lot of name actors would want to play a guy who’s so mean to kids, and then even more cruel to his own son.

You know who played that part in the remake with Billy Bob Thornton? Greg Kinnear. Now, he’s a fine serious actor—

—but he’s warm and friendly.

Exactly. Guy-next-door. It certainly didn’t have the impact of Vic Morrow.

That’s how William Devane comes off in Breaking Training. He’s very likable, but the character has no edge at all. When he cracks that first Budweiser, it suddenly hit me how much I missed grumpy old Matthau.

Now Tatum O’Neal must have had a fair amount of pressure on her. It was only her second movie—after winning an Oscar for her first—she had second billing, and was a celebrity and the daughter of a celebrity. How does an eleven-year-old handle all that?

Quite well, I think. I mean it was clear that she was Tatum O’Neal and we weren’t. She had been in the business longer and more prominently than any of us, and when you live in that world, you are different. Personally, I got along with her very well.



I think her best scenes are the ones where she gets to play the same dynamic with Matthau that she had with her father in Paper Moon (1973). The ones where Buttermaker comes off like a hopeless ne’er-do-well and she’s the more mature person looking out for him are really very touching.

Your character Toby is a straight man. Was it easier on you playing a kid who didn’t have to walk around carrying a cliché like some of the others?

Toby felt very true to who I was. There’s no shtick; I didn’t have to be the fat kid eating candy bars. Toby is usually described as the peacemaker. His dad is the downtown politician, and Toby is like the team politician. He explains things to Buttermaker. He’s the one who gets up and says, “We took a vote on this.”

What impresses me about you in all three pictures is your spirit. You’re always engaged and excited by what’s going on, even when it’s a stupid scene, like that Japanese talent show in the third movie. You’re a trouper. Well, I certainly wasn’t the type of actor who stood around thinking, “Hmm. What’s my motivation here? Why am I throwing this ball?” I was a kid having fun playing a kid having fun. Playing a lesser-known character also must have been easier in the sense that I imagine for years after those films, people would meet the kid who played scrappy little Tanner (Christopher Barnes) and expect him to be Tanner. I think that’s very true. It happens to a lot of kids in the business. And adults. You become identified with a particular role, and then you’re typecast. Barnes did not pursue acting as an adult, right? No, a number of us decided when we got to be college age that we were going to do other things. The business is very different for kids and adults. When you’re a kid and an agent calls your parents and wants to send you on an audition, the best part is you get out of school for the day! It’s wonderful. And I was lucky enough to have a great guidance counselor who understood what a tremendous gift it was for me to work in the industry, but he also looked out for me by saying it was only okay as long as I kept my grades up. Once you get to be fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five, it’s a different story. An adult has to put money on the table. If you don’t have that passion in your veins to be going out on auditions, hitting the streets, working as a waiter until midnight… you don’t do it. When the first movie broke out as a major hit, what was the impact on you? I had been in the business since I was about five. I did commercials, and I was on a soap called "Love of Life" for a while, and those kinds of jobs just came and went. What happened after Bears that was all new to me was suddenly doing publicity tours, and press junkets, and promotions. We went to movie theaters, we did interviews, we went on local TV shows. I can remember big crowds, and signing autographs, and taking pictures with people. I think I realized it was becoming a cultural phenomenon when I went in a convenience store and saw an issue of Sports Illustrated with a cover story about the Chicago Bears, and the title they used was “The Bad News Bears.” Of course, you know the thing has really taken off when they ask you to be in the sequel! "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" begins with the team setting off in a stolen van for a non-chaperoned road trip to Houston, where the delinquent Kelly enlists his estranged father Mike (William Devane) to serve as their new coach. The Bears take on the best Little League team in Texas at the Astrodome, and win the big game. I get the impression this one was the most fun for you guys. You seem like an “Our Gang” group of pals now, and without a Matthau or O’Neal in the spotlight, you can all just be yourselves and have a good time. The biggest difference was that for a lot of us The Bad News Bears was the first feature film we ever appeared in. Some of us had been around: Alfred Lutter had been in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), and Jackie Earle Haley had done movies, but for most of us it was a very new experience. So when it came to the sequel, it wasn’t like going to a new school, it was coming back to something we knew. Just walking into the commissary at Paramount, for instance. We were used to that now. And now people knew who we were. One day I was waiting for my mom to pick me up at the studio gate, and Henry Winkler—only one of the biggest TV stars in the country—came walking by. “Hey, what are you doing around here?” “Oh, we’re doing another Bad News Bears.” “That’s great! I loved that movie, blah blah blah… Good to see you!” We also got to travel. We played in the Astrodome, while a lot of that road stuff was shot in El Paso. So it was an actual road trip for us. We spent a lot of time together in that van. I think it’s the strongest idea in the picture, and the scene where you all fool your parents into thinking the maintenance man is your chaperone is probably the funniest. And underage boys hitting the road is a great premise, so I was surprised that not much comes out of it. I thought there would be all kinds of shenanigans, but the only real Bears-ian moment comes when Jimmy Baio buys Playboy magazines at the 7-Eleven. Overall, it’s really just an amiable family film, with very little of that cynical, politically incorrect tone of the first one. Breaking Training was the first studio film by director Michael Pressman, and the first screenwriting credit of Paul Brickman, who enjoyed his greatest success a few years later as the writer-director of "Risky Business" (1983). Pressman and Brickman were both only twenty-eight years old. How aware were you guys that the reins had passed to less experienced hands? Was Brickman even there? I don’t think so. It could have been just an assignment he turned in. If he did come to the set, he certainly wasn’t the presence that Bill Lancaster had been on the first one. And Michael Pressman may have been just starting out, but he was a great director for us. We worked well together, and I think he had a good handle on the franchise. Last question on Breaking Training: after the success of the first one, Jackie Earle Haley was starting to be promoted as a young teen idol. Did that increasing fame effect his relations with you guys during the sequels? Not really, because Jackie was a couple years older than most of us. His family and mine became fairly close friends. I think I started playing the drums because Jackie played drums. I think his dad played drums as well. So of course it’s been amazing to watch his comeback. He clearly had a great gift for acting when he was young, and you can see that he never lost it. Well over a decade after quitting show business, Haley was recruited by director Steven Zaillian for "All the King’s Men" (2006). That same year, Haley earned his first Oscar nomination for the indie feature "Little Children" and in 2009 he memorably portrayed the psychotic superhero Rorschach in "Watchmen." So come 1977, and now you’re asked to work on the second sequel. You’re one of the few kids who appeared in all three movies. I think there were only five of us: Jackie, Erin Blunt, Brett Marx, George Gonzales, and me. In "The Bad News Bears Go to Japan," the team is signed by a down-on-his-luck sports promoter (Tony Curtis), who takes them abroad hoping to stage exhibition games he can sell to American television. Now the franchise has its award-winning screenwriter Bill Lancaster back in the fold… but Japan feels like something he tossed off in a weekend while he was drunk. Was that the way the script read? It was definitely… I’m trying to think of a good word… disjointed. That’s an excellent word for it. And Michael Ritchie was back as well, except he only produced Japan, he didn’t direct it. What was going on there? I don’t know what decisions were made at the studio level, but Michael was there in Japan on the set supervising. I think we spent a month over there. It’s also surprising that the Bears are relegated to almost a tag-a-long role in this one. There are long stretches of the picture you guys are not in. Right. Tony Curtis is trying to make deals, or he’s got scenes with Ahmad’s little brother. Jackie is in a different city having a love story. But honestly, as a kid, you don’t care what’s in the script. What did I think when I read it? “We’re going to Japan?! That’s awesome!” I was going to get to hang out with my friends again. You probably didn’t know who Tony Curtis was, but your parents must have been impressed. Absolutely. Again, it was another opportunity to spend time with a great Hollywood star. And it’s another reason the script took a back seat. “We’re going to Japan with Tony Curtis? How bad could it be?” Until the movie comes out… and you see how bad it could be! The only thing I like about Japan is how Curtis’s part recalls the sleazy press agent he played in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). This TV hustler is just incredibly unappealing. Whisking a dozen children off to a foreign country under false pretences, with no money, and no idea what he’s doing. Like, how many laws is this guy breaking? Yeah, somebody should have called Child Protective Services. It is a lot worse than anything Buttermaker did. And at least Buttermaker wasn’t under any illusions. When he tells Tatum O’Neal, “I’m a bum. You shouldn’t have anything to do with someone like me,” that’s a very incisive portrait of a broken man. When you guys saw the finished film of Japan, did you all get the sense that the ride was over? By the time it opened, we were all three or four years older than we were in the first one. We were kind of aging into that awkward young teenage stage, and we couldn’t really play a Little League team much longer. I think a lot of the appeal of the first one is that we’re so young. That’s why they did a TV show. Then they could start over with a new cast of younger kids. That’s how the “Our Gang” series lasted for decades. When the kids got to be about thirteen, they were put out to pasture, and new ones were brought in. We also saw how the box office was declining with each picture. So I think we knew it was over, and people were moving on. It was certainly a great run while it lasted. And it was a great, positive experience for me. I think I am who I am today, and where I am today, because of my work in the entertainment business when I was a little kid. You don’t hear a lot about people like me. The media has always tended to focus on child stars whose lives went astray, like the "Diff’rent Strokes" kids, or Corey Feldman. Do the Bears keep in touch? Some of us do. The best story is when I came out to L.A. for a friend’s wedding about fifteen years ago. I called a bunch of the guys who lived here and said let’s get together for dinner. So maybe five or six of us met at the Hollywood Athletic Club—me, Christopher Barnes, Jackie, Brett Marx, Alfred Lutter, and maybe one or two more. We were hanging out in the bar before dinner, the only people in the room. After about half an hour, the bartender quietly leans over and says to me, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” “No, what’s up?” He said, “You guys are The Bad News Bears, aren’t you?” Rev. Dave Stambaugh as he appears today. This article originally appeared at Eight Million Stories.com

Kevin Spacey: The Hollywood Interview

Kevin Spacey: The Hollywood Interview

Russell Crowe  

Actor Kevin Spacey.



KEVIN SPACEY:
HOLLYWOOD'S CHAMELEON
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

In a relatively short amount of time, Kevin Spacey has moved to the forefront of American actors. A brief list of his credits include starring roles in A Time to Kill, Looking for Richard, Seven, Swimming With Sharks, Outbreak, The Ref, Glengarry Glen Ross, Consenting Adults and The Usual Suspects, for which he won the 1995 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. In addition, The National Board of Review, New York Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics, Seattle Film Festival and the MTV Awards honored him for his role as the crippled and deceitful criminal Verbal Kint in director Bryan Singer's dual Oscar winning thriller.
Kevin Spacey was born July 26, 1959 in South Orange, New Jersey. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley area of California, becoming active in high school dramatics. After doing the round of local comedy clubs following high school graduation and community college, Spacey was accepted to the prestigious Julliard drama school in New York, where he studied for two years. He soon made his stage debut as a messenger in Joseph Papp's 1981 Central Park production of Henry IV, Part I. A year later, he made his Broadway debut as Oswald opposite Liv Ullmann in Ibsen's Ghosts. He was an understudy in Mike Nichols' production of Hurlyburly on Broadway and co-starred opposite Colleen Dewhurst in the Kennedy Center production of Chekov's The Seagull. Other theatrical work includes Barbarians, Right Behind the Flag, Real Dreams, and As It Is In Heaven.
His breakthrough came as Jamie Tyrone in Jonathan Milller's 1986 Broadway and London production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night with Jack Lemmon and Peter Gallagher. He most recently premiered Athol Fugard's Playland at the Manhattan Theater Club, directed by the author.
Television audiences know Kevin as Mel Profitt on the CBS series Wiseguy, and for his performance as Clarence Darrow in the American Playhouse production of Darrow, directed by John Coles.
Kevin also recently made his directorial debut with Albino Alligator, starring Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise and Faye Dunaway in a claustrophobic tale of two bank robbers who hole up in a dingy New Orleans bar.
Upcoming projects include F. Gary Gray's The Negotiator, with Samuel L. Jackson, and then repeating his stage role of Mickey in the film version of David Rabe's Hurlyburly with Sean Penn, Holly Hunter and Robin Wright Penn. He will also play Hickey in the Howard Davies production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida Theatre in London next Spring.
Kevin just wrapped the film adaptation of the best seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, directed by Clint Eastwood, and his upcoming film, the adaptation of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson. With his masterful performance in Confidential, Spacey has possibly earned himself another Oscar, and at the very least a nomination, for his role as the opportunistic, fame-chasing cop Jack Vincennes. In his relatively short time on American screens, Kevin Spacey has become the sort of actor that most people thought died out with the likes of Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy and James Stewart: a brilliant character actor who seems to morph and disappear into every role that he plays. A character actor who has also become a movie star.
Kevin, who lives in New York City full time, took some time recently over lunch in L.A. to talk about his past, present and future as an actor, director and Hollywood chameleon.

You seem to be a consummate artist quite naturally. Did you come from an artistic family?
Kevin Spacey: My father was a technical procedure writer, which means that if you were building the F-16, my father would've written the manual to tell you how to do it. Very technical work, work I suspect that was not all that interesting for a man who really fancied himself a creative writer and really wanted to be a novelist and spent most of his private time working on a variety of stories and novels and things I really only discovered after he died. My mother was a private secretary for quite a while. But we moved around a lot and without being a Navy brat, I almost felt like one.

Any siblings?
I have an older brother and sister.

Were you always fascinated with things creative from the time you were a kid?
I think probably my earliest recollections are sneaking downstairs while my parents were asleep and watching the late show, or the late, late show and seeing a lot of great black and white films. So before I ever started going to the movies, my introduction to film were the movies of Tracy and Fonda and Bogart and Stanley Kramer and that kind of style. Then when I actually started going to movie theaters...there was a theater in Thousand Oaks called The Melody, which some told me was just demolished...I remembered being really frightened initially by my early experiences in the theater itself. I remember my mother taking me to some really bizarre films...Peckinpah's Straw Dogs sticks out, and Blade of Grass as two that really disturbed me. Later on in junior high and high school we'd go to the film festival here in Century City and for years and years the Nuart was my home away from home. I'd go there and watch Eraserhead, or Peter Brooks' King Lear. I remember once a friend and I got really angry because the prints at the Nuart were so bad. Scratched and cut and jumping all over the place...We went to the manager's office, knocked on the door, said 'hi,' and very calmly suggested that instead of calling the theater the 'Nuart' they should change the name to 'Oldart.' He told us to get the fuck out (laughs).

Did you start acting in high school?
I sort of fell into it when I was in junior high, although my parents would say I'd been doing it in the living room for years. One of the first things I ever did was a pantomime and just that reaction that I got in my class of twenty people, was a pretty impressive feeling...so I just found myself falling right into it and embracing it in a major way and within a couple years I was directing scenes and acting in plays and writing plays, doing drama festivals. There were these festivals that they used to have at Northridge College where they chose the three best representatives of high school plays throughout southern California, although now I think much of the funding that paid for these sorts of things has been cut...So on a weekend these schools would have workshops, then on a Saturday and Sunday these schools would re-mount their plays. We were fortunate enough to be chosen, doing a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. The day before we went on, Chatsworth High School did The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Mare Winningham and Val Kilmer in the lead roles! I remember sitting out in the audience and thinking "Who the fuck are these actors?! They're so good!" And at that point I was somewhat frustrated by the opportunities I'd been getting at my school, so I thought I'd really like to go to Chatsworth because those are the sorts of people I'd like to fall in with and I wound up transferring to Chatsworth the following year and we all ended up doing our plays together. Val wound up going to Julliard two years before I did and was enormously encouraging to me that I should audition and come out there if I was really serious about it. I took his advice and did it. So we ended up spending his last two years and my first two years together, then we wound up doing our first play together, playing spear carriers or something in a Joe Papp production of Shakespeare in the Park. It was the greatest way to spend a summer in New York, just the coolest. We'd take a rowboat out to the middle of the lake and have lunch before the show. It was a really priceless experience. Mandy Patinkin and John Goodman were in the show as well. There was actually a whole troupe of us in the chorus who went on to make lives for ourselves. A pretty great summer. 1981.

I heard you did the comedy club circuit for a while. Were you the class clown?
I only did that just at the tail end of high school. I wanted to see what it was like and had really admired comedians, but had no idea what stand-up was like, other than what I'd seen on The Tonight Show. But I was a bit of the kid in the back of the room, making voices, getting other people in trouble, then acting my way out of going to the principal's office, or actually acting my way out of the principal's office that it was all a terrible misunderstanding between me and the math teacher or English teacher. But as an experience, stand-up was a challenge but...when it doesn't go well, it really doesn't go well.

Were you good?
I was good at impressions. That was the thing that I found myself falling into. I was doing Johnny Carson, Jimmy Stewart, and watching in those clubs Robin Williams, Jay Leno, all those guys who've gone on to bigger things. I was such a little punk and I'd get up on amateur night. I was doing other venues as well, like bowling alleys. They'd have talent contests at the Canoga Bowl at midnight, and you slowly realized as you were standing there, hearing nothing but the noise of bowling pins being knocked over, that people who are in bowling alleys at midnight don't watch Johnny Carson (laughs).

You truly had humble beginnings, it sounds like.
That and working at the shoe store to try and get enough gas money to go around to these different clubs...it's just a tough life. Somewhere there is a tape of a pilot of a potential ABC stand-up show where comedians got up one after the other. It was based on a British series that never aired. We did a pilot and I sort of hosted it. I was about 19, I think, but never got a tape of it and never saw it. So maybe if someone out there reading this has a copy, they'll be nice enough to send it to me! Boy, that seems like a long time ago...

Tell me about Julliard.
First of all, New York City hits you like a wave of steel. Julliard was an extraordinarily intense, competitive place. It's an experience I'm enormously grateful for because it taught me so much. Many of the people there I'm still close with and many of my teachers there still work with me. I have this sort of long relationship with the school that's continued. But, I was very anxious to work. And I decided in the middle of my second year that I wasn't sure if I was going to stick out the full four years, and I ultimately chose not to, although I'm convinced that had I chosen to stay, they would've thrown me out the door anyway.

Why is that?
I didn't fit into a certain idea of the program. I was making a lot of choices that were creating some degree of tension. I mean I wasn't being a bastard and I wasn't obstructing anything, I was making choices a bout which classes I'd go to. Instead of going to class sometimes I'd rehearse plays. Whatever it was I felt that I'd gone there to learn, I somehow felt that I had. I felt it was time to move on, even though I had no agent, no money, no prospects and I was now a Julliard drop-out. It didn't take too long to get that job in the park. There have been many times in my life when I've made a decision to leave someplace, even though it's a risk, it just feels right. It's been a real pattern in my life where I'll get to place and just...go! And I enjoy it because it keeps giving me new stuff to live off and new experiences and new people to come in contact with and allows me to keep re-defining myself and my world. The downside is you take a risk and some things suffer when you make choice like that. Some people don't understand those kinds of choices.

You did extensive theater work in the 80's, both on Broadway and regionally. Tell me what the best experience was and the worst experience was.
I think one of the best experiences I remember from regional theater was going to the Williamstown (PA.) Theater Festival one summer and doing this brand new play by Trevor Griffiths called Real Dreams, about the SDS student movement in the U.S. in 1969. The entire cast found this house in Williamstown and lived this sort of commune life together. Trevor came over from England and directed the play. It was the last play I did on the road, after three years of doing various plays all over, before deciding it was time to go back to New York. This was the one that made me feel I was ready to play in the leagues I wanted to play in. I just remember that summer as being a really creative, argumentative, stimulating, time. Even the play was stimulating. In Williamstown there's American flags on every other porch and many people there perceived it as being an anti-American play, which of course it wasn't. So it became the best of thinking man's theater. There were huge arguments between people in the lobby during intermission...and you just sort of went 'Wow! This is fucking intense!" It was a wonderful experience. A great group of people. And Trevor was very into Tai-Chi. And Trevor would start every morning by doing Tai-Chi with all 16 actors on the front lawn of the house we were living in. Everyone thought we were just nuts! Just bananas. Next to Barrie Keefe, Trevor is one of the most extraordinary writers. The worst...was when I was understudying an actor in a play at the Kennedy Center and just hating it. Never got to go on. Was grateful to have the work, but it was frustrating and I was just thinking "What the fuck am I doing with my life?!" But, that's all part of the journey, you know? I just remember being very depressed and very lonely, very vulnerable and feeling like I had no future (laughs).

Then Mike Nichols gave you your first big break in New York.
Right. I had actually been back in New York for three months, auditioning non-stop and landed an off-Broadway play that I ultimately didn't stay with. There was something that told me that wasn't the play to come back to New York with. So I asked to be let go of it and within that same two week period, I went in and auditioned for the national tour of The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard. Nichols was going to take it on the road with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons. And I'll never forget this. It was at the Plymouth Theater and Mike Nichols came down to the edge of the stage and called me over and said "What's your name again?" I had just gotten done auditioning. "That was very interesting. I'm going to suggest a very odd thing: have you seen a play called Hurlyburly? I've directed that as well and I'd like you to go see that play and next week, I'd like you to audition for that play because I'm in the process of replacing actors, getting understudies, and so on." So I went to the play, which was by David Rabe, and had Bill Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Chris Walken, Judith Ivey and Sigourney Weaver in the cast. I watched the play and I thought, "Who in the hell could he possibly want me to play?" I was considerably younger than anyone else in the play at that time. Then I got this message that they wanted me to audition for Phil, who was being played by Keitel. Now Phil, in the play, is an out of work actor who is kind of like a thug. This guy's got to look like he can beat the shit out of anyone on stage. And at that point I was very sort of tenuous about my ability to be able to do that. But Nichols was insistent and I auditioned and he offered me the opportunity to either do the national tour of The Real Thing, or stay in New York and stand-by or understudy in Hurlyburly. So I decided to stay in New York and I started rehearsing and literally got thrown up on stage one night when someone wasn't available...eventually Ron Silver, who was playing the role of Mickey by this time, left the show to do a miniseries in Canada. And one night Mr. Nichols was at the show, came back stage, and said to me "That was really good. How soon could you learn Mickey?" I said "What?" He said "You were really, really good as Phil, but I think you'd be really good as Mickey." So then I found myself playing Mickey, which I played longer than any other role, and later on I played Eddie (the other male lead)! I mean I became like the pinch hitter! If he could've gotten me to play any of the women, I know he probably would have! I was understudying all the men in the play and, I kid you not, it would happen that I'd show up on a Friday night and play Phil and on a Saturday night play Mickey. It's a dialogue-heavy play. There's a huge party scene that starts off the second act. Very often when there would be a pause, and I wouldn't know if it was me or not who was supposed to be speaking, I'd think "Who am I playing?" I'd have to look at my costume and say "Oh, I'm Phil today! It must be me. Where are we?" But for me, it was the greatest training to get thrown up on a Broadway stage, not having your name out there. It was a great way to come back to New York. And it was after that, just toward the end of the run, that I got a phone call from Mr. Nichols, and he said "What are you doing this summer?" And I said "Let me run through my imaginary calendar of events and see. Oh, I'm free!" "Well, I'm going to do a little film and I thought maybe you should come and read for it." "Well what is it?" "Well I'm just doing this little movie with Meryl and Jack." And I'm thinking, he doesn't mean that Meryl and that Jack, does he? And so he cast me and I played this mugger on a subway. On my first day of shooting my first film, it was on my birthday and I was absolutely terrified. It was shot on the subway at 42nd street. It sweltering hot and I had to wink at Meryl Streep and I couldn't do it! Mike was like "Just calm down. Just relax." We had a great experience. He's a real force in my life and a real mentor and we became friends and I hope to work with him again some day. He's a truly extraordinary man.

He's one of my favorite directors, also. In school, I took a class where we intensively studied Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Do you know the story about Virginia Woolf? Mike was doing one of the first early screenings of the film for friends, and Henry Fonda was there. At the end of the movie, Fonda comes up to him and says "That was the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen. They never give me th ese kinds of parts." Nichols' jaw dropped and he said "Are you kidding? I offered you this part for a year and your agent said you turned it down." And apparently Fonda went directly to a pay phone and called his agents, who were MCA at the time, and fired them right there over the phone! I love that story.

You have a real chameleon quality in your work. There are movies I watch where I completely forget I'm watching Kevin Spacey, whereas with conventional "movie stars," they always seem to be playing themselves continuously.
Well that's the point. You look at guys like Fonda, Stewart and Tracy, they had this incredible range, despite the fact...that Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart. I always have had the feeling that, probably because this was the way I was raised from my first beginnings as an actor, I'd read a play and say "God this is an incredible play! This part, this character is so amazing! I would love to be that person! This is a person I'm not. I wish I had that degree of courage, that degree of intelligence, I wish I was that complex!" So the idea always form early on was to serve that. That's the job. Take that idea as a sort of vessel, or spy, your job is to get that information across the border. That's why doing L.A. Confidential was, for me, a first step in a direction where I'm going to do many, many different kinds of things.

Let's talk about L.A. Confidential. I think it's some of your best work ever.
Thank you. The thing that attracted me to it was that it was really all about character. These three amazing characters. We didn't want the look of the film, or the costumes or the recreation of the time to be the main focus of the film, which is what a lot of recent films set in the past have really wound up doing. This film was really about these three people. And Jack Vincennes was this guy who was not bad, but kind of shady. And not necessarily involved in something evil, but the stuff is a little dicey. And slowly you start to realize that this guy is not particularly comfortable with where he's at. The great twist is that he actually turns out to have a conscience. But I think that the film is really going to catapault Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, and Curtis Hanson to the fame that they all deserve. Curtis and I have been trying to do something together for 12 years. He's a tremendously talented guy, a brilliant director and I think L.A. Confidential will prove that to the rest of the world, as well.

Let's talk about The Usual Suspects. Did you guys have any idea that it was going to be the phenomenon that it was?
I guess not. I was a little bit more in the dark maybe than most of the actors, because I didn't go to dailies. (Director) Bryan (Singer) and I decided early on that it would be better for him and for me not to start second-guessing what was coming across because there were too many levels of subtlety and if I started going to dailies and thinking "Oh, that didn't work" I might start pushing it in another way...and skewer the organic nature of how we were going. That was the first time I stopped going to dailies and other than my own film (Albino Alligator) I haven't gone since. I think it's dangerous because you wind up falling in love with moments that might wind up not being in the movie, and who wants to go through that frustration. So I was really protected by that process and put myself completely in Bryan's hands...I was at a place where I'd played a series of slightly more bombastic characters. And I felt that I needed, as an actor, to play something quieter. Because when they first approached me with the script, they didn't tell me what part they wanted me to do, although they'd written Verbal with me in mind, because they knew that I don't like to know that going in. I just want to focus on the story. Then if there's one particular character that I respond to, I'll let them know that and make the embarrassing mistake of choosing the character that, they tell me, Tom Hanks is playing (laughs). But no, there was no way to know. I was confused by it, but I thought it was the most brilliant screenplay. Then when I went and saw it...I was absolutely dazzled. And to give you an idea that none of us really knew what we had, Gabriel Byrne came to that screening convinced he was Kyser Söse! (laughs) I remember at the end of the screening seeing Gabriel and Bryan over in a corner having this heated argument! To me, that was what was going to make it a lasting film. It doesn't hand you anything on a silver platter. It makes you work. I feel that way about L.A. Confidential, too. So, I want to do another film with Bryan...if we can find something that really motivates both of us. He is, without question, someone who's going to be around at the top of his profession for a very long time.

Tell me about Swimming With Sharks. A lot of people view that as a training film that should be watched by all college grads heading for Hollywood.
I read that script when I was in London, working on Looking for Richard. I fell off the bed in my hotel room, while I was reading it. It was so brilliant. It's really an examination of ambition in our society. The most memorable screening I went to of that was when I took it to Washington D.C. and showed it to the White House staff, congressional aides, and senator's assistants. And there was this massive pouring of people coming at me after that screening saying "You don't understand, I work for Senator So-and-So and this is my fucking life!" (laughs) And several high-level people said to me that after seeing it they'd never treat their assistants the same again. So I'm glad we had a global effect with it (laughs). I'm very proud of that film, not only because it's so potent, but because we made it for $950,000 in 18 days, and it doesn't necessarily look that way. So, it can be done.

How was it working on Glengarry Glen Ross with all those powerhouse actors?
It was really because of Al Pacino that I got that part. He'd seen me in this play in New York...We treated the rehearsal process very much like a play. We rehearsed for three weeks...and it was funny how we all started to take on the characteristics of our parts during the filming. I was thinking that I had no right to be there, that I was a stooge, that I was going to be found out at any moment, definitely going to be fired because, you know, there were all these fuckin' guys--Pacino, Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin--and I'm the guy they all hate! And let me tell you, it's really convincing when actors of that caliber call you a "pussy." (laughs) I was so depressed! It's such a great piece and a great story. But sometimes when you're doing a really int ense piece, it helps to have some levity on the set, so we were all playing jokes on each other. The one that was played on me, I don't know if you remember the scene where I storm out of my office and yell at Arkin to go to lunch? It was finally time for my close-up. And little did I know that Pacino had arranged for everyone in the cast and crew to, once I had gone back in my office and shut the door, leave the set! And only the camera was there rolling alone. So I storm out of the door yelling "Will you go...to..." to just total emptiness! And I yelled "You assholes!" And there was laughter just echoing from everywhere and everyone!

Walk me through Oscar night through the eyes of a nominee and then a winner.
You go through a lot of emotions. I went through a lot having to do with my family and the fact that my father had passed away very recently, before that night. My mother was able to be there with me, because without them, without my mother in particular, I don't think I would've amounted to much. There's so many things you go through because you grow up watching the Oscars, so you have a perception about it, then suddenly you find yourself on the other side of it. I remember when I did my very first talk show, and it was Johnny Carson and I did it with Johnny. And I used to go to The Tonight Show almost every night, five nights a week when I could get tickets. And watching him live every night. And then years later when I was promoting a TV movie I was doing, he had me on and then suddenly there I was, feeling...reversed! I was always used to looking at Johnny on the right, then suddenly here I was looking at him on the left! And there was this audience and these lights and much smaller than I thought. So it was a little like that, driving in a limo on the way to the ceremony, watching the pre-Oscar show on a TV in the limo and I remember saying to my mom "We used to watch this at home!"

It's a little like being Alice on the other side of the looking glass?
Completely. And just not wanting to fall down the hole! So the evening is just sort of fraught with memories and it's history, so you think "What am I doing here?!" And like on the set of Glengarry, "When are they going to discover I'm a complete fraud and escort me out of here?!" (laughs) I hadn't started to think about what I would say until the night before. I had been working on Albino every day and the night before I came up with something...then when you actually hear your name called the next night, your mind just goes completely blank. You have no memory of what you say, at all. It's a very emotional moment. Then you go out and face a phalanx of photographers and reporters and then I went right back to work the next day. I was back on the dubbing stage at 9:30 a.m. with Per Hallberg, who'd also won that night for sound design with Braveheart. We brought our Oscars, set them on the console, intimidated the mixers and said "Let's get to work." And we worked a long day that day. And that was the best way to do it.

Tell me a little about working with Mr. Eastwood.
(Imitating him) Mr. Zen Director? He is very careful about not over-intellectualizing. So there's not very much conversation about the work. There's a great deal of conversation about other things. He makes you feel like you know more about the part than he does. Any idea or feeling you have about the part, he's open to. I think he's smart enough to always leave himself room to get out if the idea doesn't work. It's the most relaxed, fast, easygoing set I've ever been on. Nobody's yelling "Quiet!" "Action!" "Cut!" "Shut up!" He doesn't say "Action!" He doesn't say "Cut!" He says "Stop" sometimes, which cracks me up. You very often don't know if you're rolling or not, which is very interesting. I think his way of making a film is very collaborative in an unannounced way. He makes every department be responsible for itself, including the actors. He fills you with confidence. He only does a few takes usually, so you'd better be ready, and that's in every department.

Albino Alligator was your first directorial effort. What's your advice for first-time directors?
There is no job and there is no book and there is nobody who can prepare you for what it will be like, I suspect because every experience is different. I was fortunate to have worked with enough directors, some of them first-timers, where I was able to observe. We have this unusual job, as actors, where we get to watch other people do what we do. And that includes if you have aspirations to direct, you get to watch directors. So I watched on a lot of film sets and took notes and observed...made notes about the kind of environment I wanted, how I wanted to treat people, how I wanted people to treat each other and the work. And I also had the opportunity to call directors that I admired who would actually take my phone calls. Sidney Lumet was one of the first calls I made. I thought "Well, here's a man whose first film took place in one room, 12 Angry Men." And we talked about differen
t ways to establish claustrophobia cinematically. He was a huge help. Gave me lots of great pointers. I wanted to start my first experience as a director on something that was small and action-driven. I had a wonderful time and was blessed with a great cast and crew. It did very well overseas, much better than it did here.

What I really liked about it was that you shot it in a very straightforward way, without pumping it up with fancy shots. I have to say I'm getting burned out on the whole MTV style of filmmaking.
I feel the same way with a lot of the films I see. I went into Albino knowing on a certain level that a lot of people might go see it because I directed it. But at a certain point, I wanted the audience to forget who directed and wanted my hands to just sort of lay off. Often I go to a film and can feel a director's hands all over it, and maybe not trusting the story or the actors. I just wanted to see as an experiment for myself if I could lay back. I'm pretty pleased because I feel that I kind of disappeared a little bit with that film.