The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(82)
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CLINT
One evening during the summer that Ron was filming American Graffiti, Mom abruptly announced during a Slurpee run to 7-Eleven that she and I would be taking a little road trip up north to visit Ron. I was more than game. I enjoyed going on excursions with Mom—she always spoiled me with treats and fast-food meals. Ron was surprised to see us when we arrived at his Holiday Inn. We never got to see George Lucas and gang shooting in Petaluma because of their night schedule. But we met Charlie Martin Smith, who was super nice, and Mom said it was reassuring to see Ron faring so well on his first movie shoot where he was on his own. I put two and two together, though, and figured out that the real purpose of Mom’s trip—or at least her primary motivation—was to make sure that Cheryl wasn’t shacking up with him.
RON
Mom had the right idea, but I threw her off the trail. One weekend, I so desperately missed Cheryl that I flew down to L.A. to see her for a day and a night. She told her dad that she was staying at a friend’s house, but we ended up staying at one of those airport hotels. We left its premises just once—to go see Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford.
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Time moves more slowly when you’re young, because life is still new to you, a process of discovery. Those six weeks felt more like six months, and all of us in the cast developed an extraordinary camaraderie—which was probably George’s plan all along. We rooted for each other like teammates. I took particular joy in Charlie’s scenes with Candy, whose comic chops and crazy wedding-cake bouffant wig transformed her into someone completely different from the down-to-earth person she actually was.
Part of the bonding process lay in the upside-down nature of filming all night. This required us to get our sleep during the day, so we became a strange pod of weirdos living outside the norms of conventional society. Most days, we would emerge one by one from our rooms and congregate around the Holiday Inn pool in the midafternoon. I was usually the first one there, because I was terrible at day-sleeping. Generally, I could only go from 7 to 11 A.M., which compelled me to take catnaps later in the day and night in order to keep my wits about me.
This, in turn, developed into one of my signature life skills: the ability to conk out for fifteen minutes at any given moment in any given place. It has served me well ever since in my capacity as a director-producer-executive who always has a dozen projects going at once.
As the baby of the cast, I also received an education in the ways of life and letters as they existed outside of my happy but cloistered Burbank–Toluca Lake world. Rick Dreyfuss became my intellectual mentor. He was an avid reader who was always carrying a paperback. His favorite place in the world was City Lights Books in San Francisco, where we sometimes went in our downtime.
I confided to Rick my worries about being drafted (though never about the notice in my wallet) and told him that I was leaning toward voting for President Nixon over George McGovern, because Nixon had pledged that he would get us out of the war. This was before the Watergate story broke, and I had grown up in an apolitical household where we never really identified as Democrats or Republicans.
With a wiggle of his eyebrows and a pointed “Huh-huh-hoe!” laugh, Rick said, “You have a hell of a lot to learn, Ope.” He lent me some books on politics and did his best to set me straight. At his instigation during filming, we watched some of the Democratic National Convention on a tiny, portable black-and-white TV, with Rick offering running commentary.
Some of the cast’s activities were off-limits to me because I was only eighteen and the drinking age in California was twenty-one. When the Graffiti guys went en masse to a strip bar in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, Charlie Martin Smith and I got the boot almost immediately for being underage. He and I took to passing our time instead in a dive bar in Petaluma where the manager, a friendly lesbian biker chick, let us shoot pool and play Ping-Pong for as long as we wanted. It was the beginning of a friendship—with Charlie, not the biker chick—that still endures.
Cheryl came up for the wrap party, where George showed us all a fifteen-minute working cut of a few scenes that he had put together with music. George coedited the film with his wife at the time, Marcia Lucas, and a long-tenured legend named Verna Fields, who also introduced George to Steven Spielberg. At this screening, there was a collective gasp by the cast members, even the stoic Harrison. THIS is what we are a part of? Wow! It was riveting, seeing the vision in George’s head coming to life. We still had no clue if our movie stood a chance at the box office, but we knew we had something revolutionary.
I drove home to Toluca Lake supercharged to start at USC and make as many films as I possibly could—provided that Vietnam didn’t get in the way.
18
Cruising, Boozing, Scoring
RON
Fired up, I dusted off a story that I had written for English class my junior year, based on a true series of events. I was a reporter for my high school newspaper, and one of my fellow reporters was a bright, socially awkward guy who didn’t run with the cool kids. A popular girl in our class led him on, making him think that she was into him. She lured my friend into kissing her in public, only for a bunch of the girl’s friends to run out from a hiding place and laugh, humiliating him. It turned out that the girl was rushing a sorority, and kissing a dorky guy was her initiation rite.