Once again, not much to report here from the set of The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth. As my Sensei said—in public—shooting a movie with Netflix is “like playing with the casino’s money… there’s no limit.” Hundreds of millions of dollars, top talent in front of and behind the camera, hey man, nice shot. I just hope the dude directs another movie of his own. My Sensei has occupied himself with his writing and family, not a bad excuse, but I’d like to see his final film before the decade turns. Otherwise, the 2020s will be the first decade since the 1980s without a film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. My Director is also very much that dude, and he did direct Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, and Gone Girl, but those were adapted from books or written by heavy duty Hollywood screenwriters. My Director is upfront about the fact that he “doesn’t generate material”—he’s more interested in coming up with interesting shots and ways to make actors feel even less real than cattle. But I do love working with him very much.
I remember, just about 25 years ago, going to a big fancy Hollywood premiere with my old friends—yes, they were my friends—Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. Their son Chet had taken me on as a parttime pet, but I was really supposed to look after him; he was, to quote someone in the situation, if not the family, “troubled.” Whatever that meant. I had a great time with Chet, cutting it up and playing cards between bong hits and endless runs of Resident Evil 2. His dad had a new movie coming, as always, and we were invited to the premiere as a matter of course. Chet wanted to bail, but I wasn’t prepared to skip such a swank event for another bum night hanging out with burnouts and true hangers-on who wouldn’t know talent if it bit them in the ass. I couldn’t save Chet, but I could have a good time at the premiere of Cast Away.
To that point, I’d never worked with Robert Zemeckis, at least as far as I know. Maybe he composited me into the background of something, using my likeness from one of the many Classic Hollywood films I appeared in, but even if I were in his pictures, you couldn’t tell, I’d be just another bird, and, as time went on, just another clump of pixels. Cast Away was heavily processed and filled with computer graphics, but it told a real if fantastical story about a FedEx manager stranded on a remote island for four years. There was a weird atmosphere at the premiere, as if everyone had already seen it, and later I found out they had, in a way: the trailer for Cast Away showed the Tom Hanks character reunited with his woman, Helen Hunt. Now, I didn’t see this trailer, so I thought we were watching some kind of high-budget snuff film. The whole “Wilson” thing made me really uncomfortable—why was I being made to feel regret, loss, and love in relationship to a branded volleyball? Never mind that it was covered in Hanks’ blood. If it were me on that island, I never would’ve taken that fucking volleyball out of its packaging. That thing would’ve been in the ocean sooner than you could say GOOOOOOOAL!
Cast Away made millions of dollars, a huge hit by any standard, but Zemeckis and Hanks were already preoccupied with the Forrest Gump sequel, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise at the after-party. I was fixated on what the character ate on the island—just crab? And coconut? That’s a little suspect. And how could he one-shot a salmon with so little muscle mass? I was asking these questions long before anyone had ever said the phrase “last night was a movie,” maybe because nobody knew what movies were made of until they went away for a bit. Ultimately, none of my questions mattered, nor anyone else’s, because the money was flowing, and there were no signs it would ever stop. If we were playing with the casino’s money then, we didn’t know it. We felt like winners, honest through and through, living the American Dream and playing to win every single day.
And I think about this while I sit in my heated trailer awaiting instructions from My Director and the inevitable rewrites from My Sensei. Life finds a way, just as the movies do. Are they taking the money and running at the expense of cinema’s health, history, and future? Perhaps. But the same questions were asked when CGI started infiltrating Hollywood in the early-1990s. Was a movie like Contact worth it? Definitely. Cast Away? Sure. The Polar Express? I thought lessons were learned there, but apparently not. The rote musician biopic has come back, but people aren’t biting. It’s gotta be about Bob Dylan, and it’s gotta star that dude that looks like Billie Joe Armstrong with a glandular problem; otherwise, no one’s gonna come. Besides that, the Springsteen movie just looks terrible. The trailer doesn’t have to give anything away, we know what happened: he struggled briefly and then succeeded, and continued to succeed to this very day. Not a very interesting story, even if it is “true.”
Tom Hanks was never stranded on a remote island. Cast Away isn’t based on a true story. But it’s more real than anything else out now. And that’s on bird, your favorite bird, Bennington, a whiz in the biz and the host with the most when you come to my trailer bearing the Cuervo. Come drink with me, friend—we have stories to tell.
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