Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(33)
Those were amazingly fruitful years for Steppenwolf. The New York productions helped many Steppenwolf actors break into the movies all while we continued to strengthen our theater in Chicago. We added more actors to our ensemble; our board of directors grew stronger as our growing reputation drew interest from more high-profile Chicago businesspeople; and we were able to raise more funds, increasing our ability to grow. In 1990, we realized another dream when Steppenwolf broke ground at 1650 North Halsted Street and built our own multimillion-dollar building. We designed our theater from the ground up and opened the doors not long afterward. The land of our birth had allowed us to pursue our dreams. Steppenwolf had truly arrived.
In theater, as in so many other areas of life, people’s lives intersect in unexpected, even amazing ways. Who you know can become just as important as the work you do. The Grapes of Wrath is a good example. In 1985, when I was artistic director, I asked director Frank Galati to come direct the company in a production of the 1930s Kaufman and Hart comedy You Can’t Take It with You. During rehearsals, it became clear the ensemble absolutely loved working with Frank, so I invited him to join the company. He enthusiastically accepted, and in that same meeting I asked him if he had future projects he wanted to work on. Frank told me he’d always thought that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath would make a great stage play. I loved the idea, and we went to work to get the stage rights. Three years later, in 1988, we finally opened the play in Chicago, one of the most ambitious projects we’d ever done. It was so big, that it could not be staged in our current theater, so we rented the larger Royal George down the street. The Grapes of Wrath is a long, epic novel, and Frank worked and reworked the script to get it right. It was a huge undertaking. When it first opened, each performance stretched a whopping four hours. We did eight shows a week, and on Saturdays and Sundays we did two shows each day. Those weekends we barely had time to eat between shows before we were back out onstage. After closing in Chicago, we worked on the script some more, reducing the runtime to about three hours. In the spring of 1989, we moved the show to the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego before taking it to London for two weeks, performing at the National Theatre. Reviews were strong. Due to the success in London, we attracted New York producers, and in the spring of 1990, after more reworking, we opened the show on Broadway at the Cort Theatre with a very tight two-and-a-half-hour production. The show received great reviews and won a Tony for Best Play and for Best Director for Frank Galati. At the end of its run, we performed it on PBS for American Playhouse. Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s widow, was a wonderful woman and had granted us the rights to adapt the play. She knew and loved Steppenwolf’s work, and she and I had become friends over the years.
During this same period—after closing The Grapes of Wrath in Chicago—I went back to California, and over the next few years directed television episodes of Thirtysomething and China Beach. I also acted in a bigger TV movie with James Woods and James Garner called My Name Is Bill W., about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1984, I had switched from the William Morris Agency to a high-profile New York agent at International Creative Management (ICM), Sam Cohn, who also represented Meryl Streep and director Mike Nichols. Sam really wanted me to focus on directing. By then, I’d directed some acclaimed productions—True West, Tracers, and Orphans—and picked up some TV work, acting and directing in Chicago with Michael Mann’s Crime Story. The relationships with Elaine Steinbeck and Sam Cohn became pivotal in my life. Sam ushered me into Hollywood, and Elaine was the key to two projects that turned into career-shifting opportunities.
In 1986, Sam introduced me to a Hollywood producer named David Puttnam, who came to see Orphans. He’d produced Chariots of Fire, The Mission, and The Killing Fields (Malkovich’s first movie, done right after True West), and had recently been hired by Columbia Pictures to run the studio. Sam called me and said that David wanted to offer me a directing deal in Hollywood at Columbia. David would pay me to move to California (I said “wow” to that), set me up with an assistant and an office (an actual office, not an office that you needed to climb up a ladder to reach), and pay me an actual salary for two years (I said double “wow” to that). The deal was for what they termed a “first look,” which meant my job was to look for movies I wanted to direct, and then offer anything I might find to Columbia first. If Columbia didn’t want the movie, then I would be free to do it somewhere else.
How green I was. Sam asked me, “How much do you need for two years?”
I tried to imagine what a first look deal might yield and asked, “How about sixty thousand dollars per year? Do you think that would be okay?”
Sam chuckled. He called David, then called me back and said, “David thinks you should get seventy-five thousand per year. Okay by you?”
I was speechless. Sixty thousand sounded like a fortune to me, much less seventy-five. They gave me an office on the back lot of Warner Bros., where Columbia Pictures was based at the time—the same lot, incidentally, that I’d been thrown out of a few years earlier when I’d tried so hard to see Robert Redford. At the time I made the deal I was still artistic director at Steppenwolf. I turned over the reins to Jeff Perry and Randy Arney, invited my assistant Kate Richie to come be my assistant at Columbia, and in 1987, Moira and I moved to California where we rented a little two-bedroom house in Sherman Oaks. Life was changing. I had a pay increase from what I was making at Steppenwolf and a movie deal, and wouldn’t you know it, Moira and I were pregnant within a year.