Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(37)
While in Florida, Russ and I talked on the phone about finding a screenwriter for our film. He recommended the legendary Oscar-winner Horton Foote, who’d written the screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck and Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall. I called Horton at his home outside Wharton, Texas, and told him he’d be perfect to write our script. He wanted to know why we possibly wanted to make another version of Of Mice and Men. Considering how I might persuade him, I thought of one of my favorite films of all time: 1973’s Scarecrow, starring Al Pacino and Gene Hackman, about two misfit loners who develop an unlikely friendship. The acting is edgy, powerful, and moving, and I said to Horton, “I want to make a movie just like Scarecrow. Have you ever seen it?” He hadn’t, but I mailed him a copy; he watched it, called me back immediately, and gushed, “I love that movie! Now I understand what you’re talking about.” He signed on that day to write our script for Of Mice and Men. Russ and Horton flew up to Utah while I was filming A Midnight Clear, and in between takes we went through the first draft of the script for Of Mice and Men.
I had my family with me in Utah: Moira, Sophie, Mac, plus Moira’s older sister, Lois, and her son, Boyd. One night Moira received a phone call from her twin sister, Amy, that their mother had passed away. Moira was devastated, and the following months were very hard on her and her sisters. They’d now lost both parents, as well as their older brother.
I finished shooting, came back to California, and landed the role of the villain in a movie called Jack the Bear, featuring Danny DeVito and in a small supporting role a fifteen-year-old standout named Reese Witherspoon. MGM approved Horton’s script while I was working on Jack the Bear, so we started preproduction of Of Mice and Men while I was still filming with Danny. I got my first cell phone, a Motorola flip, and worked the phone between every take on Jack the Bear.
Our date to begin shooting Of Mice and Men was slated for September 1991. Yet we had a problem. The story is set in California, and we needed a big field of barley. Where were we going to find a big field of barley in California in September? We searched in Montana—the first time I’d been there—and although it was past harvest and we didn’t find our growing barley field, something else caught me that would impact my future. Near Great Falls, out in the middle of nowhere, I was startled every so often to see huge concrete slabs surrounded by fencing. In the center of these slabs sat a giant iron cap, and underneath that cap were housed nuclear missiles, pointed in those days at the USSR. In later years, I would play a bunch of concerts at bases in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Missouri. These bases are part of Air Force Global Strike Command, the guys who take care of our nuclear arsenals. I would always have mixed feelings when seeing nuclear weapons up close. The weapons protect us, yet they’re horrific, and we can never forget both facts of their existence. I hoped, then and now, as so many people do the world over, that they would never need to be used again.
We continued our location scout and finally found a ranch just outside the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, California, that had an old barn out back where we could build some bunkhouses and the other sets we’d need for a movie. The folks said that within six weeks they could grow us a wheat field that would work for all the barley scenes. We needed a river, so we scouted Acton, California, where an old movie ranch sits atop artesian wells. Ranch owners said they could dig down, water would come up, and they could flood the area to create a river effect. We decided to do all our interior shots on a sound stage in L.A. We cast the movie with a wonderful group of actors, including the great Ray Walston as Candy, Sherilyn Fenn as Curley’s wife, John Terry as Slim, Joe Morton as the ranch’s stable buck, Crooks, and my own dear Moira as the woman in the red dress.
We started shooting, telling the story with simple, elegant, poetic shots, letting the actors do the work in front of the camera. I hired my dad to edit the film, and during shooting we had an editing room set up in the town of Solvang, California, near where we shot. At the end of each day, I’d head over to the editing room and watch the dailies, all the film we’d shot the day before. Dad would show me the material, and I’d give him some notes. Going back and forth from directing to acting felt challenging, but I knew the project well from Steppenwolf, and I felt confident with the material. While shooting, I hardly had to look at the script. We wrapped principal photography just before Thanksgiving 1991, and for the next several months we were in postproduction at offices we’d rented at CBS Studios in Studio City, California.
Similar to what had happened with Miles from Home, the committee that selects movies for Cannes wanted to see this film for their May 1992 festival. I knew Of Mice and Men wouldn’t be a summer blockbuster, but I had high hopes that it would be well received and was thrilled when the festival called. It’s an artistic film, an acting movie, an American classic. Perfect for Cannes. They accepted it into competition. And just like last time, we edited and tweaked the movie right up to the moment we flew to France. Moira was pregnant with our third child when we went to Cannes this time, and I wondered with a chuckle what the French thought. Mon Dieu! Every time we see that Sinise fellow, his wife is pregnant.
It wasn’t all fun and games. On April 29, 1992, not too long before we left for Cannes, jurors in Simi Valley delivered the verdict in the trial of the four white policemen accused of beating motorist Rodney King, an African American. Three of the accused were acquitted, while a mistrial was declared for the fourth. Racial tensions ran very high and exploded.