Drama: An Actor's Education

and hope that he or she will make good use of them. And as a general rule, those accidents make up your best work on film.

Dealing was not my best work on film. It was a listless caper movie, lacking both comedy and suspense. A caustic viewer might have remarked that everyone involved had smoked a little too much weed. This did not dissuade me from thinking that we had made a masterpiece, destined for blinding success. That it opened to resounding silence and disappeared without a trace was a lesson that I would learn over and over again in the years to come: when you’re shooting a movie, you really don’t know what you’re doing. The process of making a film has a way of persuading you that it’s going to be great, often against all evidence to the contrary. Work that hard on something and it just has to be good, right? Not necessarily.

With movies, you’re curiously unmoored from reality. While you’re shooting, you have no audience on hand to hold you to their demanding standards and validate your work. You’re flying blind. How else do you explain so many bad films by so many good filmmakers and so many bad performances by good actors? Of the many films I’ve done, a painfully small number have been as successful as I had expected them to be, or even as good. And the rule applies in reverse. In the mid-eighties I did five days of shooting on location in Nebraska on a film that was clearly out of control and destined for obscurity. How was I to know that it would be hands down the best film I have ever appeared in? It was called Terms of Endearment.

But if Dealing was not the second coming of Easy Rider, it delivered in other areas. I gained my sea legs on a movie set (once the paranoia wore off). I befriended a great character actor named Charlie Durning (with whom I would twice compete for an Oscar). I got myself an agent (the William Morris Agency assigned me a rookie named Rick Nicita, who would represent me for the next thirty-five years). And I got my first look at the West Coast. Because I needed to loop a couple of scenes during postproduction, I was flown out to Los Angeles by Warner Brothers. I parlayed my round-trip plane ticket into a month-long visit and ventured into yet another undreamt-of world. For the first time I beheld the sun-baked, pastel-tinted, tacky, wacky, glorious lotusland called Hollywood.

If the learning curve on the set of Dealing was steep, in Hollywood it was downright vertiginous. Not since those traumatic days as the new kid in school had I felt so disoriented and out of place. I had barely adjusted to tough, abrasive New York City, and here was a scene that was entirely different in every conceivable way — languorous, narcissistic, and cynical, with feigned sincerity raised to the level of a fine art. But if the world of Hollywood confused and unbalanced me, I didn’t dislike it. Indeed, I plunged into it with the zeal of a convert. I eagerly shook hands with my cabal of broadly smiling new William Morris agents. I sat stoned on Trancas Beach with the West Coast Dealing contingent. I drank vodka at poolside at the Sunset Marquis with all the other deracinated and paranoid visiting New York actors. I even had lunch with Brian De Palma and Raquel Welch at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel as part of Brian’s (failed) plot to get me approved for a movie he ended up not directing. Me? Playing comedy sex scenes with Raquel Welch? Had the world gone crazy? It was as if I had fallen down the rabbit hole.

I thanked my lucky stars for my sister Robin. Within a few years of her graduation from Barnard, she had married an artist named Tim Rudnick. They had settled down in Tim’s home town of Los Angeles. Robin would soon begin a teaching career there which, years later, would place her at the head of arts education throughout the vast L.A. school system. But for now she and Tim were living with their baby daughter Anya in a bungalow- style house near Venice Beach, savoring the last heady days of the hippie era. During my dreamlike sojourn in Hollywood, they opened their home to me and showed me the essential Los Angeles as only natives can. If they hadn’t been there to lend a dose of reality to those dizzying days, I would have been a goner.

My Hollywood month passed in a flash, like the sweep of a klieg light outside a movie premiere. Despite the unending stream of shallow praise and the glib promises of fame and fortune from a whole army of agents, casting directors, and studio flacks, I never got a whisper of work. This didn’t really bother me. I hadn’t expected much, and no role had appeared that I really wanted. Indeed, I would have been much more surprised if somebody had hired me. In that brief month I never got beyond the feeling that I didn’t really belong out there. Except for some wonderful times hanging out with Robin and her family, it had been an arid, desolate time, my self-respect ebbing away by the hour. I missed New York, I missed my wife, and I was ready to go home.

Then finally something happened. Two days before my plane was scheduled to depart, William Morris called. They wanted me to meet a director for a film. They told me his name. My heart leaped. He was Terrence Malick, the brooding genius whose daring first film, Badlands, was already causing a tremendous stir, even before being released. Clearly this was a dazzling new talent for Hollywood to reckon with. But I had an even bigger reason to be excited. Terry had been a friend at Harvard and a fellow resident of Adams House, my undergraduate dorm. A taciturn Texan with a Buddha-like air and a razor-sharp mind, he studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, and taught it at MIT. Even among Harvard brainiacs, Terry had been regarded with awe verging on reverence. But despite his aura of complex brilliance, he had always been a gushing fan of my acting. I hadn’t seen him since our Harvard days, but I had heard the surprising news that he had changed gears and become a filmmaker. He was already moving on to his next film, called Days of Heaven. It would be a period piece set in the vast grain fields of the American plains. It would feature a romantic triangle of which one character was a severe, silent homesteader. Terry was looking for the right actor for this part, and he wanted to meet with me.

I showed up for my 5 p.m. appointment in the offices of William Morris breathless with anticipation. I sat in a lobby with two or three other actors (severe, silent types), waiting to meet with Terry. Having heard that I’d arrived, he suddenly bolted out of an office and greeted me with a completely uncharacteristic bear hug.

“The hell with this!” he cried. “Let’s not sit in an office! I’m housesitting for George Segal at his place in Coldwater Canyon. Come on over for a drink at, whaddya think, six-thirty? Then let’s go someplace for supper!”

The other actors looked on balefully. An assistant scribbled directions for me and set about booking a table at Scandia on Sunset Boulevard. Terry went back into the office to wrap up his interviews and I took off, avoiding eye contact with any of my dour rivals. I drove around for an hour through the leafy avenues of Beverly Hills north of Sunset, browsing the garish mansions as if they were so many baroque paintings in a museum. It was an unimaginable display of affluence. At the appointed time, I pulled up to George Segal’s Tudor-style manor and rang the bell at the massive wooden door. Terry lugged the door open and greeted me again, as warmly as the first time. He led me into a spacious, gorgeously appointed living room where a handsome German shepherd lolled on the ample sofa. Terry told me to pour myself a drink and to give him ten minutes. He was just finishing a meeting with his casting director, Lynn Stalmaster, in the next room. When he was done, he said, he would bring Lynn out and introduce us.

Lynn Stalmaster! I didn’t know much about Hollywood, but I knew about him. The dean of movie casting directors, Stalmaster’s name was attached to several of the best films the industry had produced in recent years, the closest thing there was to a superstar in his arcane field. And in a few minutes, Terrence Malick, the hottest young director in town, was going to squire him in to meet me, in the living room of George Segal’s house. I poured myself a crystal tumbler of scotch and settled into the soft cushions of the sofa, stroking the German shepherd affectionately like the lord of the manor. This was unbelievable. I had reached the sensual core of Hollywood success. I had drawn a full house. All I had to do was play my cards right.

Terry strode in. With him was Lynn Stalmaster, a slight, spiffy man in white shoes, white pants, and an aqua shirt.

“Lynn,” said Terry, “I want you to meet John Lithgow. He’s the best actor I’ve ever seen in my life.”

My heart swelled. The whiskey shot pleasurably to my brain. I goofily deflected the lavish compliment. Lynn Stalmaster was impassive.

“So what have you been doing recently?” he asked blandly.

I had heard this question forty times in the past month. It was the standard casting directors’ opening. The information requested was secondary. Mainly they just wanted to see what happened when you actually talked. It was the equivalent of a horse breeder examining the teeth of a thoroughbred. I launched into my practiced reply, exuding suavity and confidence.