Extract: "Red Carpets and Other Banana Bowls"
CHAPTER 36: My Best Friend's Wedding
T: Teja Schwaner, 460 p., 18.95 euros, Gustav Kiepenheuer
My agent sent me the script of "My Best Friend's Wedding," after reading which I felt I was finally down. Actors can eat through a script faster than a whole termite people through a wall of cardboard. One only has to keep an eye on how many times the role name is mentioned when browsing for the first time. Then back to the beginning to get an idea of what it's all about: the first few pages, the last few pages; just stopped in somewhere in the middle. Finally, a look at the first appearance of the person for whom you have been scheduled. How is it introduced by the author? George, a middle-aged gay man, sits at the table with a glass of champagne in his hand. Würg.
Well, maybe there would be at least some brilliant lines of dialogue. None. Three sentences, and then completely written out, so that the star can deal with the pâtissier in a longer sequence.
"But you're a great cast - why, because I'm gay?"
"Have we sunk so low, Carla?" I asked my agent on the phone in London. "Honey, it's a great opportunity, a Julia Roberts movie, and directed by P. J. Hogan, with a big studio behind it." "That does not matter, that's three sentences." "But you are a great cast." Because I'm gay, that does not automatically mean that I should play that role, I was the lead actor in some great movies, Carla, I've never actually accepted such a three-movement minor role. " "At least go to the preliminary discussion."
At the time, in April 1996, I played an alien camouflaging myself as a New Zealand journalist at the Hampstead Theater Club in London. The play was called "Some Sunny Day"; my friend Martin Sherman had written it. It was the exaggerated story of some outsiders in Cairo during World War II, when the Germans were about to occupy the city. The script was very peculiar and you would have better made a movie out of it.
Director Roger Mitchell asked Uri Geller to visit us and talk about spoiling the spoon and so on, because there was a scene where I got an extra-terrestrial tantrum that caused all the spoons in the house to bend and all the clocks to suddenly go backwards , Uri was a strange bird, spiked and surprisingly easy-going. He bent a lot of spoons for us and healed my bad knee. We invited him to the premiere, and after the performance, which in my opinion had been pretty stupid, he came backstage. "I worked on all the critics during the break," he said. "The meetings will be sensational." And they did that too: a boundless hymn of praise after another. None of us could grasp it.
At the end of the play, everyone fled the city and left me alone. Before returning to my home planet, I offer a sad farewell to the human race and its follies as a bomb detonates and gypsum falls from the ceiling. Quickly I am hiding behind a cupboard, and a big green balloon, my true self, hovers jerkily and out in the ghostly light of a tracking spot on wires across the stage and out through an open window. With the best of intentions, you could not find anything good in this scene, except for the one time when the balloon caught and burst on the sill. "Mistikack, Mummy," a child's voice in the parquet peeped. "Now he can never go back to his spaceship."
"And for a short time I was De Niro and P.J. was Scorsese."
Very right! I too was miles away from home, and as fate would have it, that evening P.J. Hogan in the audience. Later at dinner he sat across the table from me like a nun pinched in the buttocks. He was one of the people who can not lie, but at the same time he was too shy to say what he really thought. No doubt he had not liked the piece, but he could not bring himself to admit it. On the other hand, we talked openly and unconditionally about the character George, and P.J. said he was already rewriting her. After dinner, we both phoned our agents in L.A. to tell them how boring we were of each other. The next morning, however, he called me and invited me to his hotel for breakfast, where he showed me the scene he had written at night. This became the famous sequence in which George sings "I Say a Little Prayer". A brilliant scene. Foolproof. No actor could fail. I was getting enthusiastic.
But P.J.hesitated. He flew back to L.A. He could not decide and asked me for test shots. I did that. Then he wanted to test again. I did not do that. You can never convince people in show business - either they see you in a role or not. I have rarely been engaged for a film that I had to take a test shot for. There was silence for about a week. Carla and my manager Marc did a great job, because it's not easy to persuade an indecisive director to use their own clients, but it's even harder to persuade this indecisive client to get engaged by the same director. They got me the role. And for a short time I was De Niro and P.J. was Scorsese.
The shooting of "My Best Friend's Wedding" gave me a great time. So much flew to me, everything was in my favor. Spontaneously, I decided to move to New York, and immediately found a pretty little house in the West Village. It was hidden behind three streets at the end of a side street amidst gardens. And who did I see kicking out of the adjoining house when I was on my way to Chicago one morning? Joe McKenna from Wardrobe D in Aldwych. We had not talked for more than ten years.
"So much flew to me, everything was in my favor"
After being fired at the theater, he became a pop singer, then a fashion stylist. One of his early fashion shoots he had made in 1985 for me with the Tatler. At first, everything was fine, until it turned out that I did not fit any garment properly, and we got terribly into the wool. After the magazine also reprinted a photo of me with Schnodder on my nose, I dug out the hatchet. Since then we had stopped the communication. When I saw him now, I backed away into my alley. I was not ready to reconcile myself yet. By now he was the most successful stylist in the world, in his plain white shirt and the black jeans worlds away from the child star who danced to Aldwych twenty years ago with his lunch box. As he disappeared around the corner, I hurried to my car and made my way to the Windy City.
In that summer of 1997 the heat was unbearable. The center of Chicago resembled a fortress of mirrored towers that had formed on the shores of Lake Michigan, and as our machine curved into the curve, mist emerged over the lake like the green emerald city of the "Wizard of Oz." The vast expanse of water shimmered in the heat, and millions of small silver fish lay dead on the banks. The film crew (and I) stayed at the Marriott Residence Inn, one of those weird new American hotels that do not have an individual character. Free coffee, creamer, and sweetener were waiting for a table at the reception, and shapeless tourists trudged past us on their way to the elevator. They had paper cups with the watery brew in their hands and looked yellowish in the neon glow of the elevator cab. The hotel was a meager tree stump in the skyscraper high forest and was as good as always in the shade, because only very rarely sent the Spiegeltürme a reflected beam of light over. It was stuffy on the road, the asphalt was melting, and it smelled delicious. Each tire squeal echoed dramatically from the walls of our glass canyon, becoming a menacing tune, accompanied by the monotonous buzzing of a million air conditioners and the roar of traffic on North Wacker Drive.
"Julia and I had a special charisma as a team on the screen"
P. J. had kept his word: There was no performance by George now, in which he did not steal the show from the others. On the first day, we filmed a scene in the taxi with Julia, male lead actor Dermot Mulroney and myself, telling Dermot that I was her fiancé. The next day, the gray eminences of Sony came to P.J. They were overjoyed. It became clear that Julia and I as a team on the screen had a special charisma. Just as two people click in real life and they understand each other for no apparent reason at first glance, so on the screen can simply tune the chemistry and an intense relationship of their own accord. This can not be guaranteed with money, nor is there any technique that could be used to achieve it. But when it comes to it, the work becomes a pleasure and you become a better actor yourself. The dialogues are just bubbling up from the lips. Every eye contact makes sparks fly. Not having to dig yourself is such a great feeling that you instantly fall in love with the other person - the filming will turn into a tempting mountain slope full of untouched powder snow that will wag its partner in the parallel slalom radiantly beautiful. Everything becomes a discovery. Julia was beautiful and slightly manic, just as befits a legendary star. Most of the time, she was a serene and pragmatic grandmother, huddled on a director's chair with knitting needles and a bag of wool.But sometimes she reared up, her windy nostrils and twisted eyes like an untamed foal scenting an invisible lasso. There was a vein on her forehead that occasionally swelled, which was a warning sign, nothing hasty or insignificant to do. She could buck and wedge and corresponded entirely to the image of the witty, beautiful and capable thoroughbred woman who suddenly can get a nervous breakdown in the bathroom.
Sometimes she took me back to New York on a Sony jet on a Friday night. Then I witnessed the Hollywood machinery being set in motion to transport an important cargo of glitter and glory from A to B. With a cocktail in the crystal glass, wrapped in a Terry bathrobe, she hopped barefoot and with wet hair from her trailer in the waiting stretch limo. She only had the flat key and her freshly chosen gay intimus on her luggage.
"A star never touches the ground"
Chattering about topics that a girl can only discuss with a man who does not have a hidden erection, we put our heads together in the backseat and sipped our drinks as we rushed through the outskirts on our way to the private airport. Gates opened like magic until we reached a huge jet standing in the middle of the empty airfield. A carpet bridge helped to cross the few meters of real world. Tiptoeing, Julia hurried over and jumped aboard. The doors closed, and at the same moment the jet was already moving. We sat with our drinks on a large double bed. Cute young girls in uniforms offered us delicious appetizers, and time literally flew by. America passed under us. It seemed unimaginably far away. For landing we lay back. At the open door of the next stretch limo stood a bodyguard with a large bouquet of flowers in his arms. Before she got out at home, she put on a pair of omaha shoes to cover the only stretch of track Hollywood could not control-the sidewalk between the limo and her front door. A star never touches the ground.
These rulers of the universe often end up in the arms of their fitness coaches, and Julia, too, had turned to her own. His name was Patrick. I was fascinated by these powerful women. Instead of becoming presidential aides, they marry their hairdressers. These fairytale princesses were trapped in the ivory tower. The only people they met were their co-stars and their staff. Like Madonna, Julia also smelled a little bit of sweat, which I found very sexy. The female superstars also have something male, otherwise it does not work. If a girl wants to survive the long journey from the broken egg to the sea, she has to develop very special "social skills" so as not to fall prey to the birds of prey lurking in the top floors of the film industry. The occupation couch is absolutely no solution for a hopeful aspirant. If she wants to survive, she has to learn to fuck the others before she gets fucked by them, making her a kind of "she-man", a beautiful woman with invisible eggs. If she had sex with a man, she would probably have to fight the desire to eat him skin and hair. In any case, the superstar woman reminds him and his ilk, with their peculiar, potent odor, as beguiling as it is scary, about who is wearing the pants. And marks the man with this fragrance as their territory.
"This film was Juliet's territory, and Cameron Diaz was the antithesis to Julia."
This film was Juliet's territory. But another superstar baby had peeled out of the egg and dared to take first steps across the beach to the sea. Cameron Diaz was the antagonist to Julia, lanky and effervescent with joie de vivre, a burschikoser wild catch with gazelle legs and, unlike Julia, confident on high heels. She loved greasy hamburgers, did not care if she messed up, and wiped her hands on her jeans afterwards. She was the girlfriend of Matt Dillon.
"Why can not Cameron relax in my presence?" Julia asked one day. In truth, Julia could not relax in Cameron's presence. Because it takes a lot of courage from a superstar to assume a role in which she loses her guy to a younger woman. It also meant that Julia was no longer taken as naive innocence. She has already run in thirty-third place among the most powerful women in Hollywood. She had survived the debacle "Mary Reilly". "My Best Friend's Wedding" should be her comeback. And suddenly there was this adorable kitten that everyone liked and that spoke of window design rather than curtains and was so natural that it seemed unnatural. It must have cost Julia nerves. Cameron grew up right under our eyes. Scene after scene, she grabbed Julia's crown, from the brilliant performance in the karaoke bar to the confrontation in the ladies' room. Maybe she was not aware of it, but Julia did not hide it.
All this, however, is completely insignificant as long as everyone does their job well.The girls did not get along? So what? The scenes between them were charged with that ominous energy that does not depend on the height of fees, but arises when art flirts with life. Julia was great as never. She could not afford anything else. She gave it all, and in my opinion she was setting standards in the genre of romantic relationship comedy that has never outdone anyone since. Their perfect timing and impeccable beauty were balanced by a touching vulnerability that raised the film qualitatively far beyond what the studios usually had to offer on tape. Meanwhile, Martin left Miami and moved to my house in the West Village.
That summer was the best time in the changeful years we spent together. Life was a firework of joy. Successful and in love with the world, I spent the weekends with Martin and Mo exploring New York. The city was unrecognizable. It had become safe, in the hands of big industry and the middle class. All danger had evaporated.
"Devious bitch that I am, I tasted these meetings to the fullest."
There was no need to worry anymore, and the song "Native New Yorker" by Odyssey had become obsolete. Now Junior Vasquez and the DJ culture were announced: a world of remixes and remakes. Miserable old TV series were suddenly declared art, and the clever movie stars flirted with the advertising. The only whores left on 42nd Street were Minnie and Mickey Mouse. But I loved the city more than ever. Sunday night came the stretch limo. I jumped in and the reverse journey took me to Julia's front door and finally to the Marriott Residence Inn after dropping Julia at the Four Seasons.
Sometimes I went with P.J. and eating Cameron or with Dermot and his wife Catherine, otherwise it was a pretty lonely summer. I was barely busy, but had to stay in Chicago in case it rained so one of my new scenes could be squeezed into the schedule. So I often sat in the Marriott observing the comings and goings during the long, hot afternoons, dreaming of a meteoric rise to the star. There was only one problem: The gay George I played left after half of the movie. I had to come up with something to get involved in the end.
In a bittersweet finale, Julia loses her dermot to Cameron, and in the first rough cut of the film she dances at the wedding party with a feisty liaison brother. This ends the movie. When the studio bosses looked at the results of the test performances, they found that all middle-class Americans were in agreement: their sweetheart should get the "gay"! Why? Because he was a funny guy.
P. J. wrote a new ending that we shot at Easter the following year. My prayers had been answered - George was on the winning side. Nothing compares to the ego trip that starts the moment you are facing Hollywood's concentrated attention. When the film had cost a hundred million dollars, I was ordered to perform a sort of triumphal procession, where I was to meet the studio bosses. Vicious bitch that I am, I tasted these meetings to the fullest. Flanked by the agent and manager and strutting through the corridors of office labyrinths under the stealthy glances of interns and assistants, and finally greeted by powerful, glossy men in crisp white shirts and ties, was as intoxicating as a catwalk parade.
Settling down in the executive office, graciously accepting coffee and compliments while being scrutinized, assessed and ranked, made a great deal of fun. I had two film ideas to recite. I wanted to play a gay James Bond and a comedy with Julia Roberts about two superstars who were married, even though he was gay. Both were bought from me.
