Eric Roberts VIII: Shadow Boxing

We had come so far on this film - months of preparation and weeks shooting in locations all over the city and dressed sound stages that probably cost the moon. The dailies were beautiful, promising, and rumor had it that PBS had already committed to buy the finished film as the opener for a new series, American Playhouse.

During the production we'd all assumed that this project was going to get the producer, director, and all of us for that matter, an actual entree into the business. We were working day and night, pouring every bit of energy we had, and each day's work seemed to validate this effort: it looked and felt like a professional production. In these days, before the really cheap indies like Clerks or The Blair Witch Project made the $1.99 hit possible, most student films, despite the interest from development directors, looked slightly better than a home movie, with amateurish scripts, cheezy sound, and so-so acting. Miss Lonelyhearts was the Benz of student movies and had risen in its last hour to the calibre of her storied predecesors like Lucas' THX 1138, which I'd seen as part of my course study in theatre school. And speaking of course work, Lonelyhearts was my graduate thesis at free film school - I'd learned more about how every above and below-the-line department worked down to the last nitty gritty detail and I was ready to get out into the world and earn a living.

Now we had an unfinished film and no star. Eric Roberts had disappeared and no-one knew where he was. We waited well into the long, dreary afternoon on a prepped but empty set until we were all sent home. Since I carpooled with Lydia every night I was hoping for more information but at that point she was as much in the dark as the rest of us. But like the trooper she was she and Michael Dinner had decided that no matter what the film would be finished.

But how to do this? Eric was needed for some remaining key scenes. As is often the case with shooting schedules, scenes are not filmed in sequential order, instead in a pattern that best suits a variety of other considerations, including locations, actor availability, and weather. Some inter-connected scenes necessary for the story to make sense hadn't been shot. Without them the film was useless.

A day or so later Lydia called me to say that the film was on hold until they could figure out what to do next. Eric was gone. He had left Los Angeles and she thought he'd gone back to Sandy Dennis' place in Long Island but his agent was claiming only that he'd gone AWOL and was powerless to do anything to help. I'm sure Eric had a contract of some kind, I remember hearing he was getting scale wages, perhaps deferred, and perhaps sharing in the revenue after a sale. But to have principal actor disappear before finishing a film was almost unheard of, and who knows what protection the film (or AFI) had against a disaster like this. I often wondered how much those close to him knew just how volatile and unpredictable he was when they offered him up for this under-the-radar project. A student movie at this critical time in his career seemed like an odd thing but perhaps the PBS deal was in the works early on and sweetened the pot. In retrospect many unanswered questions contributed to a lot of speculation about how Eric had come to be in our film, and why the gamble hadn't paid off.

Film or no film I had to make a living.

The meager funds from my last temp job at some downtown oil company was just about gone so I had to get cracking. It was hard, though. I was in shock and not getting much satisfaction from the I-told-you-so of knowing that Eric was about to take his oars out of the water. Lydia seemed so behind the eight ball that I didn't even have the heart to tell her what I'd predicted and even though we lived only a couple of blocks apart, we went our separate ways.

My personal life had taken an interesting turn and it was a wait-and-see period. I had just started dating the boss of my roomate's boyfriend, producer Michael Varhol. He had recently completed an indie film, The Last Word, with Richard Harris but they were having trouble selling it to a distributor. He and his partner, a strange, manic guy who was later to cause me a lot of personal grief, were Industry outsiders. They had been in the photo unit of the army together a decade earlier and after their discharges teamed up to make a documentary on legendary banjo picker, Earle Scruggs. While shooting the film across the deep south they'd made a fateful connection to talent manager, Bill McEuen, whose brother, John, was a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, one of the acts featured in the documentary (in 2005 the Dirt Band won a Grammy for "Earl's Breakdown"). One of Bill's clients was a young comedian who favored balloon tricks and sight gags in his act and he opened for the Dirt Band on tour. Brown-haired, loose-limbed, this wild and crazy guy's name was Steve Martin. By the time I'd hooked up with Michael, Steve Martin was a silver-haired SNL household name and a bonafied movie star. As partners with Martin, Bill had parlayed their success into a going concern with Aspen Films, and had opened a showy, ivy-covered production office in Beverly Hills.


The thing I remember most about Michael (who was a decade older than me) when we first met were the cashmere sweaters he wore in shades of fawn and ivory, with neatly pressed jeans. He was a nice guy, kind and generous, but a bit of a brown mouse, overpowered by his Hippodrome partner who just needed a swirly black moustache and satin cape to complete his persona. Their partnership was a psychiatrist's dream, one fraught with secrets, double-entendres, and hidden jealousy. I'd disliked "Richie Rich" at first sight but, always the optimist, believed I'd landed the good guy.

Michael and I had been set up by my roomate. A blind date, not particularly memorable, had turned into a warm relationship with some promise, and I was anxious to find work in the business rather than another anonymous temp job pecking away on a Selectric. Since the rest of the crew of Miss Lonelyhearts had also been released there were a lot of us in the same position and it wasn't long before I got a couple of phone calls from some of them to work on a variety of small projects.

In the next few weeks I managed to work in a variety of production jobs in an area of the business that isn't good resume material: what we fondly call "Industrials". These are films used for educational purposes or for marketing a product at a trade show and they are as invisible as your mother's show on public access television where she shares her favorite recipies with her seven viewers at 4:00 a.m. on Tuesday night.

Neverthless I was overjoyed! I was actually working for paid money (who made up that term anyway?) in the film business. I was finally a real professional. Never mind that sometimes I was back catering again (the career I never had kept calling me over and over) I was making more and more of those connections that lead, inevitably, to the golden time when you just keep working and working because everyone knows you and thinks you're grand.

Weeks slipped without any word from the Miss Lonelyhearts team by so I was surprised to get a call from Lydia saying that they had managed to devise a plan to film the missing shots without Eric. Would I help out? I was busy then with work but wanted very much to come back and finish what I'd started.

Next: Eric's face-plant makes the news

Photo: Arthur Hill, crew member, the author, and Lydia Woodward. Author's collection.