It started so innocently. I told one really dopey joke and got a little laugh. Then I told another really silly joke and people laughed a bit louder. Then another, and another, and before I knew what had happened, I was turning every line into a bad joke. As comedians say, I was doing dope.
The Dope on Leslie Nielsen’s ‘Naked Truth’
Providing the dope on dope, essentially.
Leslie Nielsen had reached the pinnacle of his profession. Although he would not receive the coveted Nobel Prize for Good Acting for several more years, his work in such pictures as Lawrence of Arabia, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Tammy and the Bachelor, Fellini’s La Besa Me Mucha, and Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, The Sleepwalker, had earned him fame, Academy Award nominations, and even a sandwich named after him at the Stage Deli. “I had it all, “ he remembers. “A woman I loved, a successful career that brought me great satisfaction, and the security that money could bring. I felt as if I were standing on top of the world. So perhaps I should have heeded the famous words of wisdom of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest, who said as he stood atop the summit, ‘It’s all downhill from here.’”
It started so innocently. I told one really dopey joke … It seemed so simple, so safe, so innocent. It was just an amusement. Nobody got hurt. When I did it, it made me feel good inside, so warm — loved, even. All my insecurities just drifted away. My inhibitions disappeared. At first, just like everyone else, I believed I could do a good line whenever I felt like it, then stop whenever I needed to. I’d heard all the horror stories. I’d heard what had happened to other people, but that was other people. It couldn’t happen to me. I was too strong, too tough. I would never become addicted to dopey jokes. No, not me.
And that is how I discovered the next in life’s series of real naked truths.
People in show business have been doing dope as long as anyone can remember. The old-time stand-up comedians used to do it down in Greenwich Village, in those smoke-filled comedy clubs. Dope was real big on the vaudeville circuit. Big stars like Smith & Wesson built their whole acts around it. Smith would walk across the stage carrying a briefcase, and when asked by Wesson where he was going, he’d reply, “I’m taking my case to court.” Moments later he returned, this time carrying his briefcase and a ladder, explaining, “Now I’m taking my case to a higher court.”
Probably one of the greatest dope lines in cinema history came from the Marx Brothers film A Night in Court, in which Groucho responded to Judge Margaret Dumont’s demand for “order in the court” by requesting, “Swiss cheese on rye, hold the mayo, please.”
Being a dope was mind-blowing, mind-expanding. The word itself probably was derived from the Old English dopey, meaning to do or say something ridiculous or foolish. Ridiculous or foolish? Perhaps, but once I’d heard that sound of laughter ringing in my ears, it became harder and harder to stop.
What was amazing to me was the discovery that so many people were doing it. Normal people, average Americans, the type of people I would never have suspected. Two nights later, for example, I strolled into what appeared to be a typical greasy diner. The counterman wiped off a place for me and asked, “What’ll you have?”
I didn’t care. “Just give me whatever’s on the menu,” I said. A few minutes later, he served me a squashed fly. It was only then I realized I’d accidentally wandered into one of the doper bars that were springing up across America.
Once I knew what to look for, I discovered that there was an entire parallel culture, the dope culture, that had been existing around me for a long time without my being aware of it. It seemed as if everyone was trying to “get groaned,” as they say. One afternoon, I remember, the maid came into my bungalow, and I asked her to make my bed. She left, then returned almost a week later dragging a poorly constructed four-poster bed frame. “You know,” she said as she wiped the sweat from her forehead, “it would have been a lot easier to buy one already made.”
Before I realized it, I was doing a couple of lines every day. I couldn’t help myself. I’d be perfectly straight, and then someone would say something to me and … and I couldn’t resist. They didn’t even have to be good lines. For example, one night I was having dinner at Chasen’s, and the waitress asked me if I wanted some converted rice with my steak. How could anyone resist that challenge? “It depends,” I told her. “What was it originally?” The waitress groaned; I loved getting groaned.
Doing dope was intoxicating. People were laughing at me. It just got easier and easier. I still didn’t see anything wrong with it. As long as it didn’t affect my work, I figured, what difference did it make? I tried to convince myself that I was just a recreational doper, that I wasn’t hooked. I truly believed I could stop anytime I wanted to.
Unfortunately, by the time it began affecting my work, it was too late. I remember the night director George Roy Hill called to ask me if I’d be interested in playing opposite Paul Newman in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We discussed the film in broad terms for a while, and then George told me he was also considering Bob Redford for the part. “Why Redford?” I asked. “He’s a lightweight.”
“Maybe,” George admitted, “but I like his presence.”
I couldn’t resist. “Oh? Why, what’d he give you?”
Hill ignored that line, maybe he didn’t even get it, but as we finished this conversation a few minutes later, he asked, “Why don’t you give me a ring tomorrow?”
“But, George,” I pretended to protest, “we hardly know each other. Perhaps a small bracelet would be enough?”
He couldn’t ignore that. After a long silence, he finally asked, “Leslie, have you been smoking some pot?”
I laughed at that. “Are you kidding? You know how tough it is to get that aluminum lit?”
That was probably the first good role I lost because of my habit. It certainly wasn’t the last one. But at the time, I still didn’t believe it was possible. I knew there were a lot of producers who wanted to hire me. I was box office — my movies made money. As the handsome TV star Armand Dove reminded me one night, “In this town, money talks.”
“Oh?” I said in mock surprise. “Why? Are the Japanese manufacturing it now?”
He was right, of course. As long I showed up at work on time prepared to do my scenes, the studios would overlook my habit. One night, for example, Kirk Douglas and I snuck onto the set of Josh Logan’s musical Paint Your Wagon. And we did, we painted it in bright Day-Glo colors. But because we could make money for the studio, it was dismissed as a harmless prank.
Gradually, I got deeper and deeper into it. Everything began sounding like a straight line to me. I guess the first time my habit actually interfered with my work was on the set of young director Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical movie, the cult favorite about a husband and his pregnant wife moving into a haunted house, The Miller Place, in which I co-starred with Tippi Hedren.
In one of the first scenes we shot, Tippi and I were being shown the old house by real estate agent Myrna Loy, who was trying to play down the fact that a family of seven had been murdered there and the killer had never been found. “It’s a sweet old house,” she said earnestly. “Full of history.”
Naturally, or perhaps unnaturally as it turned out, Tippi was drawn to it. “It’s so… pretty,” she said.
My line was, “If you don’t mind sharing it with ghosts.”
“Oh, silly,” Tippi responded. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. When we fix it up, it’ll be beautiful. All it needs is some love.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But considering its history, they want a lot for it.”
Everything was going well until Tippi said her line. “What’s a lot?”
For the first time, I couldn’t stop myself. “What do you think it is? It’s a piece of land with dirt on it.”
Just about everybody laughed pleasantly at that. We reshot the scene, and the second time I read the line exactly as it had been written. I was the only one who knew what had happened — that the words seemed to have come out of my mouth without any thought, that I hadn’t been able to stop myself from doing a line of “dope.” I didn’t know where the words had come from, and I had done very well in high school anatomy. And I got scared, really scared.
It affected my performance. From that moment on, I was afraid to really get into my character. I was afraid to take a chance. I knew I had a problem and I knew I had to do something about it, but at that time society hadn’t realized how widespread the problem was, and facilities to treat it didn’t exist. People in the business were beginning to notice that something was wrong with me.
As the great American entrepreneur Henry Ford once said, “It’s good to be boss.”
I turned to the experts for help. In Easy Rider, for example, I was cast as an expert motorcycle mechanic, and Jack Nicholson drove into my place and asked, “Think maybe you can soup this up?”
I tried so hard to resist. “Are you sure you want me to ‘soup it up’?”
Jack thought I was improvising and went with me to see how far we could take it. “Sure do,” he said. “Go ahead and soup it up.”
I gulped, fighting the urge with every muscle in my head. “I mean, you really want me to actually soup it up?”
“Yeah, man, I really, really, want you to soup it up.”
I now know that you can get more mileage from clam chowder than from chicken gumbo. I ruined two engines before I gained control of myself. That night I went to see Nicholson to talk about my problem, and I found him discussing the scenes we were to shoot the next day with director Dennis Hopper. “I’ve got a problem,” I admitted for the first time, and it felt good to say it out loud. “And I need help. I was thinking maybe you guys might know what I can do.”
“We’ll be glad to try, Leslie,” Dennis said.
I took a deep breath. “How do you beat a habit?”
“Ah, man, that’s not tough,” Jack said, smiling easily.
“Basically, you just hang it on a clothesline and smack it with a broom.”
“He’s right,” Dennis agreed, “but just make sure the nun takes it off first.”
“Please, guys,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“Nice to meet you, Serious,” Nicholson replied. “I’m Jack, this is my pal Dennis.”
I pleaded with them, “How do I go straight?”
Dennis sighed. “Best way is to stay away from corners.”
“Don’t you understand? I’m hooked. I’m hooked.”
Jack shook his head. “Boy, that sounds fishy to me.”
They were all around me. Somehow I managed to get through that picture. But things quickly got worse. The Academy Awards ceremony took place during a dark time in my life: night. In emcee Bob Hope’s monologue, he mentioned that Nicholson had played a lawyer in Easy Rider, that Sidney J. Furie had just finished directing The Lawyer, and that Robert Wagner had been a lawyer in Hard Evidence, then he asked rhetorically, “Where do all these lawyers come from?”
I was no longer in control. Before I knew what I was doing, I shouted out loud, “Sioux City!”
A few members of the audience laughed nervously, but most people were stunned by my outburst. I hunched down in my seat, turning just about as red as a badly sunburned Joseph Stalin.
George Kennedy won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his work in Cool Hand Luke, but I got all the attention. After the ceremony I was mobbed by newspaper reporters and photographers. “Please, guys, gimme some room,” I begged them. “I’m impressed.”
Producers were beginning to get very nervous about hiring me. Occasionally, I did get a serious offer. The future-legendary Francis Ford Coppola thought I would be perfect for the role of adviser to the Corleone family in his film The Godfather. I got very excited about that, but Coppola tried to keep me focused. “I have to ask you this,” he said almost apologetically. “I’ve heard some stories about you, that you’re, you know, you’ve been doing dope numbers. Any truth to that?”
“You know, Francis,” I replied angrily, “I’m lying on my couch right now and I can tell you…” Clearly, I was still in the denial stage of my addiction.
“Good,” Coppola said. “But just to be sure, the bonding company wants you to take a ‘you’re in’ test so that they can insure you.”
I had to take that test. I had no choice. The test was simple. I was brought into a small, windowless room with a table in the center and a large mirror hanging on one wall. I sat down at that table opposite a man I’d never met before, a Dr. Something. “Please finish this sentence for me,” he began in a cold voice. “You’re in a bar when a man walks in with a duck on his head. The bartender tells the man, ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t serve ducks in here.’ To which the man replies…”
He looked at me and pushed his glasses up his nose. I started sweating. I tried to think of all the possible answers. I wanted to tell him, “Nothing. The man said nothing, he just left.” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t resist the dope. “He said, ‘That’s okay, I don’t eat ‘em!’”
The doctor made a notation. “Question two,” he continued impassively. “You’re in a restaurant when the man sitting next to you taps you on the shoulder and asks, ‘What’s that fly doing in my soup?’ To which you reply…”
I wanted so badly to resist that I started crying. The despair poured out of me, but I was addicted. “The back-stroke!” I screamed, and then I completely lost control. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Is that what you wanted me to say? I hope you’re happy now. I hope you’re satisfied!” I bowed my head into my hands and cried and cried.
He waited until I calmed down, then continued, “You’re in the Pope’s bowling alley…”
‘I became somewhat of an expert on the martial arts. At 30 feet I could identify every portrait ever done of Dodge City’s Marshal Matt Dillon…’
I failed the ‘you’re in test’, but I called Coppola to beg for a chance. “All I’m asking for is a chance,” I pleaded. “I’ve got a great record. That should count for something.”
“And what’s that?” Francis wanted to know.
I couldn’t stop myself. “Elvis’s Greatest Hits,” I screamed. “The boxed three-record set on Decca.”
Coppola was forced to settle for Robert Duvall.
I couldn’t deny it any longer. I needed help. I could barely get through a simple conversation without doing a line or two. I couldn’t get a job. I pounded the pavement until my hands were bruised and bloodied, but nothing helped. Then I heard about an organization for people just like me. I called them and cried, “Help!”
They recognized my cry for help and invited me to attend their next meeting. This was one of the original 12-step programs that have subsequently become so popular. Its purpose was to bring together people with similar difficulties to discuss them openly, in front of people who would understand and offer support. This program was called Mensa, and it was a place where people went to solve their problems.
I’ll never forget the first meeting I attended. It was held in a classroom at a local public school. If anyone recognized me, no one acknowledged it. There were about 35 people there, both men and women. One of the men stood in front of us and said in a firm voice, “Hi. My name is John, and I have a problem.”
Most of the other people responded in unison: “Hi, John.”
“This is my problem. If a train leaves Indianapolis going east at one o’clock and travels at a speed of 48 miles per hour, and a second train leaves Cincinnati going west on the same track at 1:15 and travels at a speed of 38 miles per hour…” As I listened to him describe his problem, I suddenly remembered I’d heard it before. “…and they collide 1.3 miles east of the Ohio-Indiana border…”
I leapt out of my chair and shouted the answer. “They don’t bury survivors!”
John coughed nervously. Several other people shifted nervously in their seats. Then John continued, ignoring me. “At what velocity will the people in the first train travel through the air, how far will they land from the point of collision, what injuries will they suffer, and what percentage of the award will the personal-injury lawyers get to keep for themselves?”
And I thought I had a problem. But that was the beginning for me. I went back again and again until finally I could stand in front of those people and say, “My name is Leslie, and I’ve got a problem.”
Something wonderful happened when I spoke. Nothing. No matter how good my dope was, nobody laughed. For a while that made me nervous, anxious, but as soon as I got used to not being laughed at, I grew stronger. I liked it — I liked it a lot. At first I could get through only a few sentences without doing a line, but gradually those sentences became an entire paragraph, and that paragraph became a compIete statement, which became a monologue, and eventually I could get through a whole speech without doing a single line. Was I cured? No. I learned in Mensa that no one ever solves all their problems, but at least I found some answers.
The greatest difficulty I faced was that while I was struggling to get myself under control, dope behavior was becoming widespread throughout American society. The guru of dopes, Professor Irwin Corey, reminded people, “You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.”
It was all around me. I fought as hard as I could to resist it. I went to Mensa meetings almost every night. I stayed away from dope clubs — clubs that advertised “Eat Here, Get Gas” and had no gas pumps outside. When I called producers to ask for an audition and they promised, “I’ll call your agent tomorrow,” I was actually able to resist replying, “But he prefers to be called Immediately.” I don’t know that I was winning the battle, but I was waging a good fight until … until I succumbed to something far more potent than a line or two of dope — the terrible scourge of wisecrack.
Wisecracks were so much easier to do than dope lines. Wisecracking didn’t even require any thinking. I could use the same crack over and over, as cracks were adaptable to so many different situations. Within days of doing my first wisecrack, I was hooked. I couldn’t hear a single sentence without responding with a crack. I bumped into Henry Fonda one Sunday morning at Nate & Al’s and he told me, “I just finished playing Clarence Darrow at the Pasadena Playhouse.”
“Far out,” I cracked. “Who won?”
I was wisecracking all over the place. I couldn’t take anything seriously. I reached the point at which I was actually frightened to go out of my house for fear of what I might do if someone asked me to give them a hand. I couldn’t travel; I knew exactly what I would say when my travel agent asked me if I wanted to fly United. When my phone rang, I wouldn’t answer it, causing a friend to ask me one day, “Aren’t you going to answer the phone?” To which I replied, “I didn’t even hear the question.”
The fact that I’d stopped receiving offers didn’t bother me. With the money I had in the bank and my investments, I didn’t think I’d ever have to work again. And I continued to believe this until I got that fateful phone call from my business manager. As soon as I heard his first two words, I suspected something was terribly wrong. “Buenos dias,” he said.
“Where are you calling from?” I asked.
“Outta sight, man, way outta sight. Would you believe … Cape of Good Hope? Hey, go with the flow, know what I mean? Look, I’ve got some good news for you and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?”
I heard strange noises in the background. It sounded very much like chickens and war drums. I was alarmed. “You’d better give me the bad news.” He did: There had been a bumper crop of mosquitoes in the Northeast, so my breeding farm had gone out of business; almost no one considered a hearse a “fun car”; and finally, he’d made a slight mistake when I purchased the publishing rights to the National Anthem from the Key family — “I guess I forgot to include the word exclusive.”
I took a very deep breath, closed my eyes, and asked, “And the good news?”
“The good news is that you weren’t completely wiped out.” I let out that deep breath, and then he continued, “Otherwise I never would have been able to afford living down here.”
So began that time of my life that I refer to as my forgotten period I was broke, I couldn’t get a job, and yet, as long as I could wisecrack, I still didn’t care. Of course, some of the things I did during that period of my life can never be forgotten. One night, for example, when I was scraping bottom, I hooked up with Don Johnson and Alice Cooper and we tried to knock over a bank. It wouldn’t budge, so we settled for knocking over some garbage pails.
I don’t remember when I hit bottom, but I knew I was there when the only offer I received was to share a square on “The Hollywood Squares” with Chevy Chase. I knew there was only one place where I could get the help I needed — I checked myself into the Gerald Ford Clinic in Palm Springs, California. While I was there, I had a lot of time for reflection, so in addition to learning how to control my wisecracking, I also got a great tan.
‘To prepare for Ninja Gandhi, I spent weeks studying the art of meditation. It worked out very well. By the time we were ready to begin shooting, my mind was a complete blank.’
My comeback began slowly. I did some commercials, some television movies, among them the Emmy-nominated “Star Kids,” the tragic story of the children of famous entertainers who are born without any talent. Finally, Dino De Laurentiis gave me the chance to prove I could still act by starring me in his low-budget westerns made in Israel, the so-called “falafel westerns,” such as The Sheik of Laramie and The Man from Kibbutz Dodge. That eventually led to my appearance in Airplane, for which I received the Oscar as Best Actor.
As an Academy Award-winning Best Actor, I have to admit I felt a little like the proverbial 500-pound gorilla. I had an incredible craving for bananas, but I also realized that this award gave me real power in the film industry and presented me with the opportunity to do something I’d always dreamed of doing but had never dared tell anyone — it gave me the chance to direct.
Most of the important Hollywood filmmakers were anxious to work with me on my next project. My agent, John Sheldon Weisman, and I met with many of the top producers — Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Guber and Jon Peters; Mark Tarlov, Dave Winfield and Jose Canseco (who’d produced several big hits), even Tom Stimson and Jerry Bruckman-to discuss any projects that might be right for me.
As always, I wanted to do something meaningful, something that would change lives — starting with mine. When I started in the film business, producers would create projects from short stories, magazine articles, books, even original ideas. That proved to be a terribly inefficient way to run a business, as there was no way of accurately predicting which films would be profitable. In recent years, producers have been able to eliminate much of the speculation that went into making those decisions by conducting extensive audience surveys, as well as utilizing focus groups and in-depth interviews to determine exactly what elements combine to make a picture attractive to an audience — what stars, what type of story, which period. It’s sort of like a Produce a Movie by Numbers kit, and it’s the primary reason that most movies made today are financially successful. “What we’ve discovered,” Tom Stimson told me as he propped his rhinestone-covered cowboy boots up on his desk, narrowly missing his Tiffany ashtray, “is that audiences like stories about fish out of water.”
“I see,” I said. “Outdoor pictures.”
Jerry laughed out loud. “I think I can explain what Tom means. See, what we’ve discovered is that our audience likes pictures about Indians off their reservation.”
“Oh, oh, now I see. You mean cowboy pictures.”
“Excuse me, Jer,” Tom said. “Maybe I better take this one. See, what Jer means is that the audience is fascinated by stories focusing on deer out of season and —”
Jerry interrupted, “That’s not precisely right. What we really mean to say is that people want to see movies about mothers who have never had any children.”
“That’s not what I meant at all, Jer,” Tom said pointedly. “What I said was that people will always go to see movies about carpenters without cars.”
“I don’t think that’s what you meant at all, Tom,” Jerry said emphatically. “What you meant to —”
“Okay, okay,” I said, raising my hands. “Let’s just hold it. It seems to me that what you guys are telling me is that people want to see movies about characters who are thrown into a culture far different from their own, and who must come to understand that culture and adapt to its mores in order to survive.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Tom wondered aloud.
“After you heard me say it,” Jerry corrected him.
The project they had in mind for me wedded two completely different worlds. It was the story of a man of intellect, a man deeply devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict, who eventually had to resort to physical violence to avenge a terrible crime while saving his own life. Their working title was Ninja Gandhi.
As soon as I heard them explain the plot, I knew it had real commercial potential. “It’s obviously an interesting concept,” I said coolly, “but whatever picture I do next, I want to direct as well as star in it.”
Tom didn’t even hesitate. “I don’t see that as a problem. Jer?”
“Hell, no,” Jerry agreed emphatically. “The real true fact is that with all this sophisticated equipment, as long as you have the right cinematographer, anybody can direct.”
“He’s right,” Tom continued. “Like Arsenio Hall could direct.”
“Absolutely,” Jerry said. “I’ll bet Mother Teresa could even direct.”
“Sure, of course,” Tom said firmly. “Even Dan Quayle could… well, certainly Mother Teresa.”
Jerry leaned back in his calf-embryo-leather lounger with its shimmering mother-of-pearl arms, slicked back his hair, and asked, “One question, though. You ever done any directing before?”
“Well,” I admitted, “actually, no.”
“That’s okay,” Jerry said. “You know, that’s just the way Steven Spielberg started.”
“Just one thing, though,” Jerry finished. “It’s not like the deal or anything depends on this, and I hate to ask, but what the hell — nothing ventured, nothing ventured. You think maybe one night Tom and I could sit with you at Ovitz’s table at Morton’s?”
“Just for the appetizer, we mean.” Tom said hopefully. “It’s an important statement in this town.”
I agreed to do what I could to make it happen.
We decided to go against type in casting Ninja Gandhi, primarily because we had an extremely difficult time finding a Nobel Peace Prize-winning former Indian prime minister who was also a member of the Screen Actors Guild. We even had an open call, a so-called cattle call, for which several hundred actors showed up. It was only natural that we eventually decided to offer the role to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tom pointed out that he brought something unique to the role — he was one of the very few actors who tanned easily and who spoke Hindustani with an authentic Neanderthaloid accent.
I think every actor secretly harbors a desire to direct a motion picture. While acting can be extremely rewarding, as well as making it easier to meet girls, directing seems to offer so much more creative satisfaction. The picture truly becomes your own vision. And besides, as the great American entrepreneur Henry Ford once said, “It’s good to be boss.”
Having worked with so many talented directors in my career, I knew that there were as many different philosophical approaches to directing as there were directors, ranging from the Hitchcockian “Actors are like putty, the only thing they’re good for is plugging up leaks” to Martin Scorsese’s “lazy-fare” method — “You show up; you act good; you go home to Brooklyn.”
The primary thing I’d learned while observing directors through the years was the importance of preparation. When a good director walks onto the set in the morning, he knows precisely what he intends to accomplish that day and exactly how he intends to do it. Some directors actually “storyboard” every shot they want to make, literally drawing the entire movie before they start filming. I had neither the time nor the budget to do that, so to prepare for Ninja Gandhi, I spent several weeks attending yoga classes and studying the art of meditation. It worked out very well. By the time we were ready to begin shooting, my mind was a complete blank.
I became somewhat of an expert on the martial arts. At 30 feet I could identify every portrait ever done of Dodge City’s Marshal Matt Dillon, even the quite unusual and highly praised Western series of Peter Max finger paintings.
We had a good script, we had a terrific crew, and we had the unusually talented Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was certainly the best movie I ever directed. Working with Arnie was one of the great pleasures of my life, although admittedly at times it got very complicated. Because of the specialized nature of the martial-arts scenes, we were forced to use an experienced martial artist to perform all the fight scenes for Schwarzenegger. And because our bonding company felt Arnold was too valuable a corporation to risk, we also had to use several stunt doubles to do all the stunt work for him. Naturally, this was in addition to the body double we used in the nude scenes, the Gandhi double who did all the religious scenes in the Hindu temple, the professional dancing double we used for the dance number at the date festival, the jazz double who played the sax in the smoky nightclub scenes, the hand model we used in all hand close-ups, the special-effects double who stood in for him in the climactic scene that required him to rapidly age 1,000 years, and the Schwarzenegger impersonator whose voice was dubbed in for Arnie’s during postproduction. Overall, I honestly believe that this was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s finest performance.
I had wanted to direct in the worst way, and fortunately this motion picture gave me the opportunity to do just that. Arnie was very easy to work with — I’d simply point to the spot where I wanted him to stand and command, “Arnie, go there. Speak word.” Arnie would nod and go to that spot and get his word right every time.
Directing myself was far more complicated, perhaps because as an actor I wasn’t my first choice for the part. My performance wasn’t as strong as I wanted it to be as the director. Even now I’m not certain if it was my lack-luster performance that hurt my work as a director or my somewhat insecure directing that hurt my work as an actor. Perhaps if I’d been a stronger director, my acting would have been better and my direction would have improved.
Looking back, the most difficult part of the process was editing the film. After working as long and as hard as I had on Ninja Gandhi, every frame was like gold to me, and cutting out a scene was like cutting out my own liver with a nail clipper. But even I knew that at five hours and 22 minutes, the film played too long. Cutting out the first 82 minutes was relatively simple. We simply deleted that entire “How To Make a Polar-Bear Meat Loaf” scene. But after that it got tough, very tough. Could the story afford to lose Aunt Blossom and Uncle Ernie lighting the candles? Or did I want to cut out the fight on the roof of the World Trade Center? Sometimes there were no quick answers, and I’d have to do what I’d learned in my meditation studies — close my eyes and cut.
The editing was made even more difficult by those things that had to be left in due to contractual obligations. The opening credits, for example, ran more than 11 minutes, and there was nothing I could do to shorten them. In the old days, films were made by producers and financed by studios. Today each film is an independent corporation, and the financing to make the film comes from a wide variety of sources, each of which has to be acknowledged in the credits. And almost everyone who works on a film demands a “full card,” meaning that their name appears on-screen by itself for a certain number of seconds.
So the opening credits for Ninja Gandhi read something like this: “Screen Star Partners and the Omni-bus Entertainment Group, in association with Cinema Enterprises, A Five Star Group Ltd., present a Tom Stimson and Jerry Bruckman/Paramount Pictures production of a film by Leslie Nielsen. Released by Major Domo, Inc., and distributed by American Good Film Distributors: The Stimson-Bruckman Partners and What’s-His-Name Productions presentation of the Leslie Nielsen film Ninja Gandhi. Created and developed by Tom Stimson and Jerry Bruckman from a story by Richard A. Woodley. Based on a concept by Alex Langsam of an idea by Ira Berkow and James Kaplan and an afterthought by Michael Seeherman, suggested by a mutter of Stephen King, Inc. A film by Leslie Nielsen, starring (in alphabetical order) Arnold Schwarzenegger. Co-starring Leslie Nielsen, Anna Marie Klunk, Mickey Freeman, and Rabbi Nathan Edelman as himself. Introducing (in no particular order) Courtney ChandeI, Catherine Carlen, Mighty Joe Young, Jr., Jordan Burnett, Buck Fisher. Produced by Tom Stimson and Jerry Bruckman in association with the Enigma Group and Big Bucks Entertainment. Executive producer, Joseph Caracciolo, Jr. Executive producer, Wendy Friedman. King of producers, Juan Carlos III. Co-executive producers, George Kaufman and Barry Cooper. Director of producers, Geri Simon. Executive producer of directors, Tom Klutznick. Co-executive director of producers, Richard Soll. Executive director of producers’ credits, Ronal Luciano. Producers’ referee, Andrew Fox. Co-executive producer director of directing producers, Louis DiGiaimo, Jr. Producers’ promise to credit in exchange for sexual favors, Linda O’Boy. Utility producer, Bobby Zarem. Split end, Mark Bavaro. Ninja Gandhi. Soon to be a videocassette.”
My Best Actor Oscar and the subsequent popularity of Ninja had made me a powerful man in the film industry. I had become “bankable.” Packages could be built around me. I was a “key element.” I was being offered as much as $3,500,000 a picture, getting up into the so-called Nicholsonland. Women I hadn’t met called me up and asked me for dates. “Inside Edition” searched through my garbage. I was permitted to sit at Mike Ovitz’s table during Morton’s early seating. My invitation to Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party arrived six months before the Academy Awards. “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” wanted to send me to San Diego. The prestigious Lagos Film Festival wanted to hold a gala retrospective of my oeuvre. I owned all the accoutrements of success. And yet, truthfully, I wasn’t happy. And I couldn’t figure out why.
I realized that something was missing from my life. I mean, besides a Ferrari Testosterone. Although I had so much, I felt completely lost, adrift. Material things just didn’t matter to me anymore. I could afford whatever I wanted, but I needed immaterial things. What was missing was some meaning to my life, something deep inside that allowed me to thoroughly enjoy everything on the surface outside. And so I began my search for spiritual fulfilment. I tried est, channeling, transcendental meditation, primal-scream therapy, and, finally, yodeling.
Nothing provided the answer for which I’d been searching. But I did begin to understand the real, unabashed, no-kidding-this-time, naked truth. And that is, no matter how far or long we search for serenity, the only place it can be found is inside ourselves. And that’s the naked truth. I learned so much from my long quest, but certainly the most important thing I came to understand is that it is not what you are that matters, but rather who you are. Or, for people in the entertainment industry, who you’re supposed to be.
Sometimes those of us in the film colony get so caught up in the glamour and the adulation and the financial rewards that we forget who we really are. And at those times, times when I was so confused or anxious or egotistical that I forgot who I really was, I was fortunate enough to be able to go outside and read my license plate — and I knew that I was [dope joke] LSLE NLSN!
As with many words in the English language, the word “dope” has gone through a variety of meanings over the years. Being a dope probably preceded doing dope, which had to be a couple of decades before being dope. In that span, then the transition became complete – from being a bad thing to being a good thing. You may not believe it, but there was a time in our history when to “trump” someone in an argument meant to have a winning point of view, disproving the alternate one. Seriously. It had nothing to do with belittling, insulting, or generally berating someone for simply having a different point of view or (sadly) a different physical stature. … On the upside, we can now clearly say that the dope Leslie Nielson had a truly dope career, although we cannot speak from personal experience as to whether he did dope.
As a final hint for life, the next time you want to assess someone’s potential as a dear friend, just say, “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
