Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(36)

That’s how I envisioned the movie would start.

Hold that thought.



During Miles from Home, I’d struck up a friendship with John Barry, the Oscar-winning composer who’d originally been hired to do the music. He’d recovered from his illness, and one day in 1990, while I was performing in The Grapes of Wrath on Broadway, he invited me over to a private screening of a rough cut of a new movie he’d just scored. He hadn’t told me beforehand that it was Dances with Wolves, a huge, three-hour epic, starring, produced by, and directed by Kevin Costner. The movie went on to win multiple Oscars, including one for John for Best Score, yet the thing that stunned me most was this: although Kevin had never directed before, there he was, performing three vital functions in this movie. He inspired me to do the same.

My agent, Sam, wanted me to focus on directing. But I knew I wanted to keep acting. I’d never produced a film, but I’d been around enough producers to know a little bit about it. I knew also that unless you take matters into your own hands, you can only have whatever comes to you. I’d always been a person who dreamed something up, then made it happen. So my goal became finding a project where I could produce, direct, and act.

When The Grapes of Wrath finished, I searched for what to do next. I knew I wanted to do something epic, something that moved people, and preferably another movie. But what? Then Elaine Steinbeck reentered my story. Elaine had become a real champion of Steppenwolf. She’d seen that we could take her husband’s novels and handle the stories really well. On the last day of shooting the PBS version of The Grapes of Wrath, I stood with Elaine during a break out by the theater’s back steps. I thought about the boxcar image, swallowed, sucked up my courage, and said, “Elaine, would you give me the rights to Of Mice and Men? I’d like to try to make a movie out of it.” I paused and added tentatively, “I’d need your help, too, because I don’t have any money.”

She chuckled quietly, smiled her beautiful, dignified smile, and said, “Well, honey, it’s already been a film. Three times.”

She was referring to its first adaptation in 1939 starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and Burgess Meredith as George, and its second adaptation in 1968 starring George Segal and Nicol Williamson, plus Will Geer, the grandpa from The Waltons. It had also been made into a TV movie in 1981 starring Randy Quaid and Robert Blake.

I explained to Elaine that from the time I first saw it onstage at the Guthrie Theater in high school I’d loved the story, one of the first that had excited me about acting. I hadn’t known anything about John Steinbeck then, but the story had moved me greatly, and this was exactly the type of story I wanted to tell on film. Elaine smiled again and said she’d think about it. She was so gracious. Within a short time, I was able to make a deal with the Steinbeck estate for the rights to Of Mice and Men for one year—completely free of charge. Suddenly I was a producer with a project. I could direct it and act in it. We’d already done a production at Steppenwolf where I had played George, and I knew the story forward and backward. I just needed to make a movie happen.

That’s all.

Having been focused on Steppenwolf and my work there for so long, I had made a decision that this project was going to be a new challenge for me, separate from theater. While I would end up working with a few pals from the company, unlike Miles from Home, which included several Steppenwolf company members, this project would be a distinct effort altogether. So before going forward I wanted to let my two best friends, Terry and Jeff, know that I was striking out on my own with this one. It was a difficult thing to do, but I felt it was time to try something else. This created a bit of tension and distance between us cofounders at the time. Terry had directed me in the Steppenwolf production of the play back in 1980, and Jeff had played a pivotal role in that production. But now, I was going to make the movie on my own, and because of this, we parted company for a while.

So, how do you create a movie from the ground up? Earlier, my agent had set up a dinner between Alan Ladd Jr., the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and me, and I’d worked on a couple of development projects with MGM in the past, although nothing had come of them. So I met again with Alan and explained how I wanted to make Of Mice and Men. Alan loved the idea and jumped on board. The studio made a deal with Elaine (my rights were only to pitch it; the studio still had to pay for the rights to use it), and suddenly we were in business.

I reached out to a producer buddy of mine, Russ Smith, and asked him to coproduce with me. MGM gave us $8.8 million to put the production together, a relatively small budget but definitely workable. Malkovich and I had done the play together ten years earlier, so he was the obvious choice for the role of Lennie. The fact that he’d been nominated for an Oscar for Places in the Heart was a definite plus with MGM. I signed on to play George, and Russ and I started searching for the right screenwriter.

A movie isn’t made overnight, and I couldn’t sit around and wait while things came together, so in the meantime I auditioned for a role in a small-budget World War II movie titled A Midnight Clear. The great cast included Ethan Hawke and Kevin Dillon, and I landed the role of Vance “Mother” Wilkins, my first major role in a feature film. The story is set during the Battle of the Bulge, so we needed a location with lots of snow, mountains, and trees. We ended up shooting in Park City, Utah, in winter. The character I play is very fragile, a soldier experiencing shell shock who’s been in the fight for some time, so I needed to lose some weight for the role. Just before shooting began, Moira and I visited her mother in Florida. I spent much of my time running on the beach, drinking SlimFast shakes, trying to get myself to look thin and gaunt.