Eric Roberts III: And Away We Go!

We started shooting The Shopkeeper, a pretentious piece of over-acted tripe, in an cavernous old warehouse in a scary part of South Central Los Angeles. Typical of a student movie workday (18 hours give or take) we arrived in pre-dawn gloom and left after dark. While we were there we were warned not step outside the somewhat safer confines of the building (which was an illusion since we had no security and a lot of fabulous stuff to steal) so I'm not even sure where it actually was.

My job was to be in charge of Craft Service. An odd name for a job that basically means loading up a picnic table with a lot of sodas and junk food (and some fruit in there somewhere) for the crew to snack on all day. Oh, and sweeping up the bits of cheezies and assorted crap that falls out of people's mouths as they stand around the table chowing down between takes. Yes, I was in charge all right. In charge of the broom. Me and my broom.

The craft service table is one of those strange perks film people enjoy and probably contributes to the large bellies of many of the guys who drive the trucks, sling cable and hang lights, because there are a lot of them. I should mention here that Craft Service is not a glamorous job, in fact it's pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to career choices in the industry. But at that point I wasn't hip to the way of things and was blissfully enjoying my autonomy as the snack queen, nay master of the food world and all that came with it.

In many ways I was still in a major denial about the viability of a career in the film business because I was the only intern in Hollywood who was still taking the bus. I didn't have a driver's license, certainly no car, and since location shoots can be all over the map my career would have been over before it started if I hadn't managed to find someone on the crew who lived nearby to pick me up and take me home every day (how nice was that guy!).

The student director, Bill Duke (a character actor who's big role to date had been opposite Richard Gere in American Gigolo) insisted on things like miles of dolly track, a crane, and a steadicam which sent us over budget almost immediately. We'd been shooting for less than a week when the money I'd been given to cover all the food purchases, including the catered lunch, ran out. I literally shook the little brown envelope with our lunch money in it and nothing fell out. The caterer, a Greek restaurant up the street from the warehouse, cut me off without so much as a backward glance.

"What do I do now?" I asked the harried producer who was in crisis mode about everything, including lack of funds for film stock and camera rentals. He handed me $200.00 in twenty dollar bills. "This is all the money you have left to feed the crew, " he said and I was left to figure out how to keep from being eaten alive by ravenous men with steel-toed boots and utility knives.

On the upside, I had just been promoted to Movie Caterer. With wheels and a driver to boss around.

$200.00 seemed like a fair amount of money at the time but we had two weeks left of shooting and the entire crew was working for meals and precious little else. A crew of forty hardy men and women, to be exact. It may have been a no-budget film but the number of people working on this thing had pretentions of grander proportions. So I took the truck and driver downtown to the Latino farmer's market and purchased as many bags of rice and beans as I could, with a few wilted vegetables thrown in for good measure.

Where to cook? At my apartment, of course. The kitchen was the size of your average apartment bathroom and the tiny gas stove had two working burners. I scrounged around for some giant aluminum lasagne pans (the kind you use once and throw away) which I cleaned and reused and set about cooking lunch and dinner for 40. I had no help and since I was determined not to be isolated from the film set I would dutifuly show up every morning for first call, hand out bannanas or an apple per person (strictly regulated) and then leave mid-morning with the production truck (and driver) to spend the next two hours trying to stretch a loaf of bread and one herring into a meal that would keep the troops from mutinying.

It was no easy job. I felt like a prison cook, doling out measured gobs of macaroni and cheese, beans and franks (light on the franks) and green salad with jaundiced precision. This is where I learned how to cook for large dinner parties because I got very, very good at figuring out down to the grain of rice, just how much food would make the requisite number of exact proportions, delivered hot and ready to go at the exact time they broke for lunch. The crew, a bunch of big, burly gaffers, grips, dolly pushers, camera assistants and the like grumbled and growled at the strict rations but I held my own. Eventually they learned not to cross me or try to steal an extra slice of bread. This was also in part due to the fact that after the first few days I started getting creative with my food staples and soon they were treated to the occasional gourmet surprise - perhaps a stuffed cornish hen or mushroom and chicken crepes.

Even though I was busy for some periods of the day I was able to spend a lot of time hanging around the set and watching how things worked. Thus I was well into my free film-school education and over the next year I was to make the most of it. Although I remember a lot of open mouths and bristly moustaches covered in food bits, I don't remember most of the people who worked on this film and often wondered what became of them. But some were standouts. One in particular, a young, introspective camera assistant stood out because of his thick silvery-grey hair. He was always shyly polite but I could never get him to engage in any kind of meaningful conversation but he always seemed to be lost in profound thought and I suppose that made him all the more mysterious. Bob Richardson has gone on to become a top director of photography, shooting many of Oliver Stone's early films, and winning an Oscar in 2005 for Aviator. If you remember him at all from his acceptance speech he still had the grey hair but now it's longer and as wildly eccentric as he evidently has become (although married with several kids the only person he thanked was his mother).

The other person whom I gravitated to wasn't even on the film. She was still in her first year at AFI but she was friends with the director (evidently feathering her career nest early) and since she had no actual job we found ourselves on side-by-side apple boxes more than once. Lydia Woodword was older than most of the other film students (somewhere around 30, I think) and she chain-smoked.

Another factor was soon to bring us closer together: Shortly after Shopkeeper wrapped I moved to Santa Monica, out of the apartment I shared with Lance, to strike out on my own. Lydia lived a block away from my new place so when she got her own film to produce in her senior year she asked me to come work as the production coordinator. I still didn't drive or have a car so she offered to take me to the set every day. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

Next: Lydia gets a lot of mileage from her star-studded student film and Eric Roberts comes into our lives.

Eric Roberts II: Los Angeles on $1 a Day

The first thing that I remember about Los Angeles was the seashell palette of the architectural landscape. The adobe buildings in this low-rise world were an explosion of soft pinks, butter, creamy meringue, mint green. So delicious, like a giant confection dolloped on the gently undulating curves of a succession of green hills and mountians running along the northern edge of the city clear to the ocean. It was dazzling and so different from the dark Victorian brickwork of Toronto with its bitter winters and the steamy chestnut vendors on every street corner.

Neither Lance nor I knew how to drive so he'd convinced one of the many new friends he'd made in the months he'd been here to take him to pick me up at Union Station. It was a rattling, coughing jalopy like many of the cars on Los Angeles streets in this equal-opportunity ownership city where rust never takes out an automobile as it lives out generations of recycled lives until something finally gives way in an whisper of twine and chewing gum. We bumped along miles and miles of tile-roofed neighborhoods until we finally arrived at our West Los Angeles destination, a room in a house we were to share with an assortment of immigrant flotsam.

Greeting me were two Japanese girls attending an ESL school who giggled and bowed repeatedly until they disappeared into their room, and a reticient, taciturn guy around our age who was currently unemployed and was soon to be replaced by a succession of similar hard-luck stories. The house, four bedrooms in a compact suburban layout, was owned by a large woman whose legacy to me was an unshakeable phobia of Los Angeles tap water (don't drink it - contaminated beyond belief she said though it never proved to be true) and a lifelong hatred of flowered mumus, which she favored over all other forms of clothing. Sheila, who was divorced and living off our rent checks, was fond of bulk-bin health food, ice-cold showers and boiled celery-juice fasts followed by enemas. The first week I was there I lost eight pounds and you could count all of my ribs. Lance had two pieces of furniture in his (now our) room: a gigantic waterbed left over from the previous tenant, and an ancient vanity with a freckled mirror and two tiny drawers for all our clothes.

Given that I had no money and apparently Lance had not much more, it became evident we would both have to find work as soon as possible. The fact that we were both illegal aliens hadn't even factored into our concerns, and back it didn't seem to matter much because work history and the question of citizenship was still on the honor system. Plus we weren't Latino or planning to work in a sweat shop so the chances of our being caught were next to nil.

Since I could type I found work first - as a receptionist in a podiatrist's office. I was the proud owner of a brand-new social security card, obtained through semi-legal means with advice from the informal network of illegal Canadians living here. There's something about immigrating to a new country - you seek out everyone and anyone from your homeland and share a lot of information and tips on how to navigate the system.

My boss, Harvey, was a real piece of work and I quickly found him to be as repulsive as apparently a number of women had once they found out what a lying, cheating, hound he was. All of five feet two inches, he had thinning hair and a large blonde moustache that he like to twirl between his fingers, occasionaly licking it with enthusiasm when a particularly comely patient came in to have her feet tended to. Which wasn't very often because, friends, the podiatry business is not a pretty one. Lots of old folks with horny callouses and twisted hammertoes, and most of them with very smelly appendages requiring a good soak in the hot, soapy foot-baths Harvey kept going all day. Harvey told me that he'd once had a patient with diabetes who hadn't realized that two of his toes had gone AWOL until he pulled off the man's socks and found the toes still in them.

Though briskly efficient as the receptionist/transcriber/file clerk and part-time surgical assistant (don't ask), the queasy nature of this daily grind and the sound of callouses giving way under Harvey's sander was enough to set your teeth on edge. That, plus the white nurse uniform I was forced to wear (stockings & shoes included) took its toll on me very quickly and it wasn't long before I was desperate to get out of the rut I was sinking into fast.

So I started taking an acting class in Hollywood. By then we'd moved from our room in Sheila's house to a tiny studio apartment just off Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, a newly emerging hip, scruffy neighborhood where Lance found a job at The Soap Plant, a store featuring oddball and bizarre collections of 20-something approved nicknacks. I took the bus to my class where I had my first brush with fame (my teachers were Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange fame and his wife, Mary Steenburgen). Although Mr. McDowell said my classroom exercises were reminescent of a young Maureen O'Hara, it was a notice pinned to the bulletin board outside the school that changed my life forever.

Wanted: production assistants for a student film.

I stood in front of the paper for a long time, excitment mixed with disbelief that a career in the film business was only a phone call away but after a moment's hesitation I threw away several years of education, numerous summerstock accomplishments, and all my dreams of becoming an actress and took the other fork in the road. I resolutely tore off one of the little pieces of paper with a phone number on it and obsessed about it all the way home. American Film Institute, it read, with a guy's name below for further details. I came home excited beyond belief. Imagine, I could work on a film! No pay of course, and long hours, of course, but who cared......I was going to be in the film business!! Hooray for Hollywood!

Back then, The AFI was housed in the Greystone Mansion deep within the leafy enclave of Bevery Hills. Since I still didn't drive, I took a bus and walked the last three miles to the school where I was interviewed by a harried student producer for his film (now forgettable, alas, even in my memory) and promptly hired. He led me down a maze of dark passageways into the bowels of the former servants quarters (how apropos) and plunked me down at a long table with several busy people on phones.

My job: To call every name in the yellow pages and beg, borrow or steal anything they would give us. Got an extra dozen bottles of water? We'll take it! Got a coupon for a free sundae? We'll take it!! Got a case of ginger ale? We'll take it!!! My job was to find as many freebies we could use while making our shoestring budget, short-ends film stock, discarded film developer, 35mm movie as I could.

I took to the job with a ferocity that scared even my fellow production assistants and soon enough was summoned upstairs for a meeting with the film's production manager. He asked me if I would be able to take a month off my job and work full-time on their project. "Whaddya offering me," I asked cannily.

"Well," he said thoughtfully. "You can either be my assistant, which means anything from fetching film stock to sweeping the floors if necessary, or......." And I waited with baited breath, "You can be in charge of Craft Service." All I heard was "in charge of" and I took it. Had no idea what "Craft Service" meant but I was soon to find out.

Next: My film school education continues as I cook for 40 on a 2-burner stove.

Eric Roberts I: Just Horsing Around

I remember the day I decided to move to Los Angeles well. My college boyfriend was something of a jazz guitar wonderkind and a month before he'd announced he was moving to Las Vegas to back up a Canadian Latin/pop singer who was about to slide off the charts forever and take a lot of careers with him. Lance was working in a record store and the gig paid a lot of money so I couldn't blame him for packing up his duffel bag and leaving me with the orange crate furniture and a house full of pot-smoking Caribbean bongo players.

Yes, we were quite the hip couple. At the time I was squeezing myself into skinny black leather pants and waitressing at a college club called The Edge where two young promoters had made a name for themselves bringing bands like The Police and the B-52s into a room the size of a two-car garage. Actually the space ended up more like a one-car garage after their roadies hauled in gigantic speaker towers suitable for a venue the size of the SuperDome and aimed them at the unsuspecting tables about two feet away. I wore earplugs and stuffed a lot of tip money from dazed and deafened patrons into my apron before carousing into the night with a lot of coulda, woulda muscians who filled in between the big acts. (Sting did ask me to go to an after-party but he was shorter than the bar where I was picking up my drink orders so I passed....)

Aside from these early brushes with fame (they were a high-strung lot: most of them seemed to end up kicking holes in the upstairs bathrooms, including a major stiletto incident courtesy of Debra Harry) I was drifting along in Toronto with nary a career in sight. Before accidentally landing this sought-after job in one of the city's hot spots ( I started with the previous owners who were booking bluegrass bands on Spagetti Wednesdays), I had been taking temporary jobs as a relief receptionist in law firms and other very non-creative establishments ("my dear, that crop top just won't do, you're fired!") while I skirted around the idea of actually trying to get work as an actor. Strange, I'd made it through the rigors of a very competitive theatre school but the idea of actually auditioning was more terrifying than finding myself a virtual prostitute to my ideals and I learned just how powerful denial could be. I did manage to get jobs in a couple of 99-seat productions. One that still crops up in my nightmares was an Elizabethan farce where I continually and pathologically forgot my lines while trying to keep the cheap wig they'd provided to cover my unrurly long hair from sliding backwards under my hat. (Perhaps the fact that I was playing a man had something to do with my disconnection.) But as exciting as these opportunitites were, alas none of these acting jobs paid.....actual money. To bring home the bacon I found myself, week after week, boarding an early morning streetcar in faux-office clothing, girding my loins for yet another encounter with the business world where I felt misplaced, lonely, and a flapping, if somewhat gaudy, fish out of water.

Months after my guitar-playing companion had gone west I was still writing bad poetry in my red plastic binder and teaching dance class to early Madonna songs when I finally decided I had better get my behind out of the rut I was in or go back to school and become a lawyer or something. So I called Lance, now ensconced in a cheap motel in Hollywood because the one-shot Canadian wonder had lost his Vegas contract, and floated the idea of my coming down for a really big adventure. He seemed amenable, so I vacated the attic room in Musician Central, stashed all my worldly belongings in the basement, and took a train to L.A.

Yes, I suppose I could have flown. But a) I wanted to really experience the distance I was travelling from my grey, wet hometown to the golden city on the blue Pacific to start my new life, and b)I was nail-bitingly terrified of flying after a nasty experience in hurricane turbulence the year before on a trip to Florida.

And c) I had no money.

Back then taking the train was cheap. Flying was still a luxury for jet-setters cocooned in fur stoles and a set of nesting Samsonites. No-one except stewardesses brought actual luggage onto the plane in those days unless you were a student and had all your stuff in a nylon backpack, the kind with a sleeping bag roll on the bottom and a Canadian flag sewn somewhere prominenly so you wouldn't be mistaken for an American. Those of us who were still in the student visa mode either hitchhiked, took a bus, or bought a rail pass. I think a Eurorail Pass back then was about $50.00 a year. You could see a lot of countries in a year, and if you didn't mind the guy eating bratwurst in his underwear on the bunk above you, the sleeping accomodations weren't half bad.

It was like this on the trains in Canada and the States, too. Droves of kids were doing their post-college tours of cities along the California Zephyr and Empire Builder routes and you expected to meet a lot of new friends along the way. The soothing, rythmic confines of the train made it especially easy and since I'd already experienced the Canadian version (The Maritimes to British Columbia) I knew what to expect: We were cocooned together for four days, sleeping side by side for three nights and there would be a lot of soulful conversations, impromptu guitar concerts, and a few lucky couples who found romance nestled together between the seats (or under them). All this against the backdrop of a passing landscape of lush Kansas cornfields, a pink and grey Arizona desert, and the young, snow-capped mountains of the American West. I couldn't wait!

So on a rainy May afteroon I said goodbye to my family over lunch at a downtown Chinese restaurant and boarded an Amtrak feeder train at Toronto's Union Station with one large suitcase, Lance's extra guitar in a battered leather case, and a little over a hundred dollars in my wallet. Much like the passengers and crew of The Minnow, I was planning to set sail for a three hour tour. This was to be my big adventure in Los Angeles before coming home to Toronto and figuring out what to do with my life.

Next: How to go to Film School for free.

Phil Hartman X: The Way I See It

Phil was born in Canada. He didn’t spend much time there, his parents moved to the US when he was a kid, so how much of the old country remained is debatable. But since we were both from the equivalent of small Ontario towns (mine was of the suburban variety) I always felt we shared a secret handshake or a portal to ancestral memories. The part I think of as Canadian, which is probably just a construct based on my wishful thinking about the differences between our two peoples, stems from the pleasant, lilting accent we all have. There’s something of a song in the rythmn and somehow makes us all seem fresh and just a little naive. Just a hint, perhaps of the lyrical ancestral Irish in us, maudlin, introspective, charming and romantic. But whatever it is we’ve always been underestimated for our cunning and strength. We didn’t fight for independence with broadsword and blood, we wiggled our way out of the yoke of imperialism by shuffling a lot of paper around for so many centuries that King and country were eventually bored to death and lost interest in us. And as gloriously free citizens we define Canadianism more by what we aren’t (American) than what we are, and yet as a nation of immigrants we are much more open to examining and re-defining that question than our southerly neighbors.


I don’t think it’s an accident of statistics that Canada produces so many successful, cross-border comedians per capita than any other country. Mike Myers, John Candy, Martin Short, Jim Carrey, Eugene Levy, Dan Akyroyd, Cheech Marin, Catherine O’Hara, The Kids In The Hall, Bill & Doug McKenzie, let’s talk about doughnut holes, eh? Phil may not have identified himself as Canadian but we claim him, just like we claim Alexander Bell, who invented the telephone while we was living within our borders despite what those fanatics in Boston go on about (so tiresome, really…and so wrong!). More importantly, Phil reminded me of home, in that secret language of ancestry, and we connected as innocents on the quintessentially American sandbox of Hollywood. We understood each other and it was enormously comforting. Phil’s gift was to seem both humble and outrageous all at the same time, a clever mind at work both as a social commentator and political pundit with an ego so sublimated it made his biting humor easier to swallow.

As with many comedians, Phil was alive when he was funny, but unlike Steve Martin (known as the White Rabbit to those who work with him) he was kind and sweet when he wasn’t ‘on’ so I enjoyed him either way. You always got the sense that he found his talent for mimicry hilariously entertaining and he was amusing himself as much as his friends. These were his gifts, in the most traditional sense, and he was generous with them for all our benefits.

I was driving into my job at an ad agency when I heard the news that Brynn had killed Phil and then herself in a long drawn-out saga that left their two children to live in the mess she’d exploded onto them. Phil was gone, vulnerable and naive to the very end and that seemed strangely in keeping with his character. The finality of it meant I had to let go of one of the last dreams I’d had about salvaging what was left of those glory years as a young turk in the film business. The last time I saw them at our final dinner together ten years before, I had a very bad feeling. Goodbyes were said, the door shut behind them and I fairly turned on Michael. “That’s the last time we’ll ever see Phil!” I wailed and fled into the kitchen to thrash a few dishes around in the sink. I was restless and angry, and I knew that losing Phil as a friend meant that I would have to own up to my own particular blindspots, the ones that had left me rootless and drifting, about to implode from all the dishonesty in my life.

When I saw him at the movie theatre on that night when I was disheveled and living on someone’s couch I had thrown up the pieces of my life into the wind and let them fall away. I’d given in to my fear that I would never amount to anything and was finally coming out the other side. To see Phil’s resigned face in that moment when Brynn pulled at him, to understand that all his dreams to be recognized as a comic genius had finally been realized and yet he was still not there, not truly emancipated, was one of those moments when you see the wholeness of the universe in the eye of a needle. I looked like crap and all I had was possibility at that moment, but Phil, my friend Phil, he was trapped.

This morning I watched the tape of Phil’s SNL audition, available as part of a DVD collection highlighting the contributions of some of the show’s more famous alumni. There he was, wearing the same plaid shirt I’d photographed him in at one of our parties. It was the Phil I knew, cocky beyond words, effervescent to manic in his smart-alecky way, never letting on he was nervous, laughing when he screwed up, looking for all the world like he belonged on that show. And yet, at the end when he and Jon Lovitz (whom he’d pulled up on the stage to do some rehearsed bits) made a mess of the last number, he grinned in his apologetic way, grabbed his stuff and yelled, “Next!” like he never expected for a moment that he would get the job.

Some things you can’t take away. Despite what happened to Phil that night in his house, curled up in his cartoon pyjamas, he managed to do what we all hope to do no matter how long we're around. Live on. Through his children, his family, his work, his friends, and people who loved him. Like me.