I Blame Dennis Hopper (32 page)

Almost ten years after premiering
The Perfect Woman
at the Sundance Film Festival, I returned to the event in 2003, this time with a comedy short I had written and directed called
Devil Talk
. Standing in the back of the theater, laughing—luckily for me—was the president of the Sundance Channel, Larry Aidem. We got to talking, and he said maybe they could put together some sort of retrospective of my short films for the channel. This became the genesis of
Illeanarama
–a collection of shorts I wrote, produced, and directed, including
The Perfect Woman, Boy Crazy
,
Girl Crazier
,
Devil Talk
, and one I had just shot, called
Supermarket.
It was based on an actual incident with an ardent fan at a Ralphs market in L.A. I was shopping with a friend and fellow actor when this incredibly nice male fan approached me in the aisle. He was overwhelmed and could not believe that I was at
his
supermarket. “I can't believe this is happening,” he said. “You are my favorite actress! All my life, I wanted to meet you!”

“Thank you,” I said. “That's very sweet.”

He then began literally quoting every film and television performance he'd ever seen me in. Quizzing me, “Are you coming back on
Six Feet Under
?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why did they cancel
Action
?”

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“Wait,” he said, “I have to show you this.”

He took his wallet out, and showed me a movie ticket of
Grace of My Heart
that he carried with him. His hands were shaking as he showed it to me. I was starting to get uncomfortable at this point and wanted to move on, but he started to cry. He said, “I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the joy your work has given me. It's the inspiration you have provided that makes life seem like a wonderful adventure, and God bless you. And thank you.”

Oh, my God! My mother has never said anything that nice to me!

He was so sincere, and so sweet, that when he turned and walked away I said to my friend, “Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out I was actually
working
at the supermarket instead of
shopping
here? I'd be his humiliated checker, asking him if he needed ‘paper or plastic?,' and he would still be asking me, ‘What's the name of the movie you did with Kevin Bacon?'”

Well, the friend and fellow actor was Gary Oldman. Not only is he a genius actor; he's a genius, period. So he stopped dead in his tracks and said, “You
have
to make a movie about that.”

So I did. I wrote, directed, produced, and starred in
Supermarket
along with Daryl Hannah and Jeff Goldblum. It was the first time I played a fictionalized version of Illeana Douglas, the comic alter ego and beleaguered persona named Illeanarama. Who knew the best role I ever played would turn out to be myself?

I showed the footage to Larry Aidem, and Sundance liked the idea of
Supermarket
so much that they gave me a small budget to shoot some supplemental material—also to be shot in a supermarket—linking the shorts together in a cohesive narrative, now called
Illeanarama
. We filmed at Bel Air Foods market, in Bel Air, California. It was a kind of supermarket to the stars, because a lot of the famous folks who lived in the small and exclusive community, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Clint Eastwood, would often be seen shopping there. I myself had a chance encounter with a shopper that was pretty memorable.

It was the first day of shooting
Illeanarama
. We had started at four in the morning and wrapped around noon so that the supermarket could open to the public. The day had gone great, and Jeff's scenes were in the can. I was feeling pretty good about everything when the sound guy came up and said he needed to speak to me. We sat down at the picnic tables outside, and he basically explained he wasn't coming back the next day unless he got more money. I was shocked, because we had worked together before and he was being paid a pretty decent wage, but he meant business, and he held all of the day's sound in his hand, so I listened carefully to what he had to say.

I tried to reason with him that this was a low-budget shoot and that his salary was in line with that of a typical soundman, but he hissed, “Well, I'm sure you and Jeff Goldblum are getting thousands of dollars.” I assured him that was not the case, that I was practically working for free, and after all, weren't we friends? How could he do this?

In the background I could hear Danny Ferrington—a close friend who had a cameo in the film and who happened to have a distinct Louisiana accent—calling my name. I was just trying to ignore him, but Danny came up to us mid-argument and started tugging my arm, trying to get me to turn around.

I said, “Danny, please, I'm in the middle of something.” And Danny, with his Louisiana drawl, starts laughing and says, “I really think you should turn around, because you're really going to want to meet this guy.”

I said, “Danny, please! I have a problem! I'll be with you in a minute!”

Peripherally I saw Danny sort of throw up his hands to the person he was talking to. Meanwhile, the soundman was unyielding. Worse, he seemed to be getting satisfaction from sticking it to me, because he knew he had me over a barrel: No sound coming from Jeff Goldblum meant no show. So I had no choice but to write the soundman a personal check for double what he was paid so that he would come back the next day. People ask me what a producer does. They solve problems. I just don't take it personally anymore. The situation now under control, Danny came and sat down next to me. I was shaking my head, saying, “You know how much money that guy just cost me?”

And Danny was grinning. “You're not going to be mad in a minute, I.D.,” he said.

He was by himself, so I said, “Who was this
important
person I was supposed to be so excited to meet?

And Danny started cackling, “He's inside getting his lunch!”

Let me explain a little about Danny Ferrington. He is one of those guys who knows everyone. He was Linda Ronstadt's roommate in the '70s and '80s. He's a famous guitar-maker who's made guitars for people like George Harrison and Donovan, but he is also an excitable guy—he'd be thrilled if he ran into a session guitarist who once backed up Glen Campbell, so I wasn't expecting much and I was still steaming about the money the sound guy had cost me. Danny started to wave someone over, and I look up to see who this nobody was, and there, coming out of the Bel Air Foods market, supermarket to the stars, and walking toward our table was Albert Brooks.

Let me try to describe coherently what that name, Albert Brooks, means to me. Brilliantly funny short films I saw on
Saturday Night Live
. Comedy albums I was still listening to up until the day I met him. Anything I did or tried to do as a filmmaker—including
Illeanarama
—was inspired by films he had made. Albert Brooks describes the comic foibles of the human condition in a way no other comedian has been able to. His films are neither too slapstick nor too sentimental but fall in the sweet spot that put them in the pantheon
. Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, Defending Your Life
. His work in those movies is akin to Edvard Munch's painting
The Scream:
You don't have to divine the meaning; it's right there. The films have become reference points in our consciousness. Trying to describe a feeling or situation, we can say, It's like that scene in
Lost in America
when Albert says, “I've seen the future! And it's a bald-headed man from New York.” Or, It's like the scene in
Modern Romance
in which the bored sound guy says, “I think you saved the picture.” Or, It's like the scene in
Defending Your Life
in which Lee Grant gets him to admit, “I was afraid.”

I recently called Danny Ferrington and asked him, “Danny, what did I look like when Albert Brooks came walking out of the supermarket?” and Danny said, “You looked like you were going to pass out.” Yes. That's accurate. The only thing that would have been more impressive would have been if Danny had managed to bring Peter Sellers back from the dead. I hadn't even changed out of my checker costume, and we're outside the supermarket where we have filmed and he has just gone shopping. It's like I was punished, in a bath of irony, because now I had to sit across from Albert Brooks while he was eating his spare ribs and drinking his Arizona Iced Tea, and try not to be the same fan who met
me
at the supermarket, quoting every single film and performance he'd ever been in, crying, and personally thanking him for all the joy his work had given me!

For an hour (and to put that in perspective, on the
Tonight Show
he never did more than fifteen minutes) I got pure Albert Brooks—hysterical, top of his game, commenting on everything from the new digital medium to the advent of reality TV, which he humbly acknowledged he may have had a hand in inventing with
Real Life
. To be in a profession where you meet an artist whose work you admire in the context of working was a pretty special moment. Danny sums it up more like this, “I knew what was going on inside your head, and I was impressed that you were able to keep it together, but you cried like a baby after he left.”

Illeanarama
played at the Aspen Comedy Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival. It caught the notice of some television networks and of producer Barry Katz, who I knew from the television series
Action
. We began pitching it as a series. In 2005, we made a pilot with New Line Television also called
Illeanarama
for the Oxygen network. I wrote the script with Teresa O'Neill and also executive-produced. The premise had changed a bit and was now about an actress who, having gone through a bad Hollywood divorce, is broke and has to take a job in a supermarket. I disagreed slightly with the premise. There were many stories about actresses leaving show business simply in search of happiness. Kristy McNichol, probably one of the most talented child actresses, said she left show business because she wanted to “see what else was out there.” Grace Kelly became a princess. Kim Novak moved to Big Sur and found happiness working with animals. Gene Tierney struggled with depression after a female fan with the measles hugged her, infecting Tierney's unborn child and eventually causing birth defects. She suffered a nervous breakdown from the possibility that her fame had caused this to happen. Doctors thought that being in a “normal” setting around “normal” people would make
her
normal, so she began quietly working at a dress shop in Kansas. So many people came in to ogle her that she wasn't able to continue working there. Eventually she ended up back in Hollywood trying to make a comeback but her heart was no longer in it.

Illeanarama
became the story of an actress who desperately wants to get out of show business but can't, because the only way she can make a living is by pawning her fame at the “Supermarket to the Stars.” The issue we all agreed upon is that we wanted to satirize reality TV. As I would later say in my Web series for IKEA,
Easy to Assemble,
“It was fun to be famous when no one was famous but now everyone is famous, and I'm obsolete.” What I meant by that is that I went into acting because I loved acting, not because I wanted to be “a celebrity.”

Toward the end of my grandfather's life, when I asked him how he thought current films compared with those of the past, he said that—leaving Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch out of it—there were more interesting directors working today. There was a through line connecting my grandfather's career, in which he worked with Robert Redford on
The Candidate,
to my working with Robert Redford on
Quiz Show
and Redford's talking to
me
about working with my grandfather. Having been through the studio system in a career that spanned more than sixty years, my grandfather always had something to teach me. When I told him that my favorite movies were “screwball comedies,” he scoffed, “That is a name made up by intellectuals.” Knowing film history was important to him, I learned the difference between Chaplin and the Marx brothers, Capra and Cukor. When that skill—that knowledge, which was ingrained in me—became less important, I found show business to be less fun.

Look, I will always be like the guy cleaning up after the elephant and saying, “What, me give up show business?” But it was an adjustment to see where and how I fit into this new landscape. In this celebrity culture, we were all famous, or just about to be. The idea that fame was the result of a craft that went back to the first guy who made a caveman laugh was thrown out of the mix, and “real folks” were in; in my opinion, art has never been the same. Here was my sea change: I was asked to be a “celebrity judge” on a reality show about “real folks” trying to become starlets. Ten girls would live in the former house of Marilyn Monroe while they followed their dreams to make it in Hollywood. The fact that a very unhappy Marilyn Monroe did not live past thirty-six was not included in the subplot. Faye Dunaway took the job I turned down. That's what's called a sea change with a twist of regret. Like come on in, the water is fine, and by the way there's Faye Dunaway swimming in it!

We were shooting the
Illeanarama
pilot back at the supermarket to the stars when, as if on cue, another one of my comedy idols showed up. We were blocking the produce aisle. There, waiting patiently for us to finish, was Gene Wilder!

Let me try to describe coherently what the name Gene Wilder means to me. (I know, here we go again.) Let's just say
Young Frankenstein
: funniest film of all time and call it a day. OK, I also owned the poster, the record, and still have the T-shirt. I'm finished.