Watching ‘Rent-a-Pal,’ the claustrophobic, slightly surreal horror movie currently on VOD, I could not help but think of HBO’s recent Alex Winter documentary ‘Showbiz Kids.’ For ‘Rent’ stars Wil Wheaton as a 1990 videocassette host who ‘befriends’ a very lonely guy and he is one of the child stars who are in ‘Showbiz Kids.’ Watching ‘Rent’ you would never guess he was the slender 13-year-old star of Rob Reiner’s 1986 Stephen King adaptation ‘Stand By Me.’
It was that topic of Then & Now that I broached interviewing Wheaton recently. His revelations about his acting childhood took me completely by surprise. And what’s funny it coincided with my looking at Tuesday Weld – who began as a teen star of the Fifties and who, decades earlier, had a very similar arc.
WIL WHEATON: As we grow and mature, I’m 48 now, of course we change. As I discussed in Alex’s film and as I’ve written and talked about in my spaces, I didn’t want to be an actor. My mother forced me to be an actor and then gaslit me about it my whole life. She made me believe that her dream was my dream. And my father never gave a [expletive] about me, never paid attention to me. And the only time my mother paid attention to me – the only time she was happy! — was when I was going to auditions and getting jobs and getting acting work. I was raised in an environment where I believed in order to get love and affection from my parents (which was never forthcoming from my father, he withheld it for some reason), I needed to be a successful actor and everything in my life was on that track, right?
Q: ‘Stand By Me’ changed everything I imagine.
WW: ‘Stand By Me,’ the first big movie I did, was one of the biggest movies of all time in terms of cultural impact, critical reception and longevity. After that I did ‘Star Trek’ and then I was, ‘You know what? I never wanted to do this. I’m going to go live my life now. I’m 18 now.’ I quit everything and became a writer. I don’t have the overwhelming need to be an actor that makes the hustle worthwhile. It’s hard to be an actor. The amount of time you spend not working vastly exceeds the amount of time you spend working. The rejection and the audition process and the approval is all wrapped psychologically in ‘I just want my parents to love me.’ It puts a huge burden on me, I just wanted a job. I really wanted to be a writer. Now that I’m later in my life, now that I can speak honestly about the abuse I endured as a child, I’m really happy with my life. Because I’m finally living the life I wanted to always live. It’s a shame the people who were my parents didn’t support me in becoming the person I wanted to be. So they don’t get to participate in the life I finally get to live that this film is part of.
Q: Wil, I know what you’ve just revealed is awful and emotionally scarring but I can’t help but think, What an amazing story! What an amazing movie! Have you thought of dramatizing this?
WW: I actually have the first completed draft of a semi-autobiographical novel. It tells the story of a kid who grew up in the same situation I grew up in and he’s just trying to be a kid. He wants to be recognized and wants to matter. It’s a snapshot.
Q: River Phoenix is gone of course but I wonder if you keep in touch with any of the ‘Stand By Me’ company.
WW: I talk to Jerry O’Connell pretty regularly. Jerry and I know we are part of this cultural thing that’s bigger than all of us who were in the film. My ‘Star Trek’ is my family; my biological family completely failed me and I got approval, guidance, morality and a love for art and music – whatever self-esteem I have is from the love of my ‘Star Trek’ family. We’re in contact almost daily and before COVID we would get together. It’s a huge part of my life. They are the family.
If it’s Tuesday? It must be Weld!
I begin with a confession: In my movie-mad youth I was so entranced, if that’s the right word, that in the mid-1970s after a press screening I spotted and once chased Tuesday Weld through LA’s Century City parking lot to beg for an interview. Weld was polite and calm when I caught up with her.
At this point she was in her early 30s, famous for 20 years with a mystique akin to Garbo or Dietrich, the elusive entities of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She told me I should write her with a list of questions and gave me her address — in care of Mrs. Dudley Moore (she was then married to the British comedian who would soon become a box-office star with ‘10’ and ‘Arthur’). Not surprisingly, I never heard back.
Tuesday Weld had the sadly now-familiar twisted youth of a child model turned actress. One who grew up way too fast, way too soon. For survival and self-protection this famous blond became famously press shy. Weld was born in 1943. Her father died before she was four which left Tuesday as her mother’s prime obsession. Their intense, troubled relationship made the daughter the family breadwinner. This in turn led to Tuesday’s nervous breakdown at 9, alcoholism and a suicide attempt at 12 — the same year she made her film debut in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Her first starring role was the low-budget 1956 ‘Rock Rock Rock’ opposite real-life rockers like Chuck Berry with pop singer Connie Francis (‘Where the Boys Are’) dubbing her vocals. A few years later after working with her in a Hollywood biopic ‘The Five Pennies’ (‘59) Danny Kaye commented Weld was ’15 going on 27.’
It was ‘The Adventures of Dobie Gillis,’ a hipster’s late Fifties sitcom, that made her famous as Thalia Menninger, Dobie’s love interest. She had the magnetism, presence, sexuality, attitude, whatever, that makes stars and was given, naturally enough, a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer. At a time when Hollywood created the Great Divide between those who made movies and those consigned to television, Weld repeatedly alternated TV with movies — even as she made headlines for her affairs with older men and a split from her mother for independent living at 16. Which is why when the great Stanley Kubrick offered her the title role in his ‘Lolita’ based on Vladimir Nabokov’s nymphet who is seduced by or seduces older men, Weld famously rejected the auteur explaining, ‘I didn’t have to play it. I was Lolita.’ She was an ideal screen mate for the Sixties King of Cool: Steve McQueen. They were paired in 2 films with ‘The Cincinnati Kid’ (’65) cementing her stardom. Around this juncture Weld became famous for what she DIDN’T do, rejecting: ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘True Grit,’ ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’ and ‘Cactus Flower,’ a triumph for Goldie Hawn.
Without hits, you can have all the talent in the world but you’re not really a bankable commodity which is what a star ultimately means — and it’s time for supporting roles. While Weld’s talent was never in doubt, from the ‘70s on she rarely starred in feature films. She did star opposite Anthony Perkins for the 2nd time with the film version of Joan Didion’s ‘Play It As It Lays’ (1972) and was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe. There was an Academy Award Best Supporting Actress nomination for Weld in Diane Keaton’s box-office hit ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar’ (‘77), an Emmy for TV’s ‘The Winter of Our Discontent’ (83), and a BAFTA Supporting Actress nomination for Sergio Leone’s gangster epic ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984). Long retired, her last significant screen appearance was in 1993 as Michael Douglas’ wife in Joel Schumacher’s ‘Falling Down.’
If you’re curious about Tuesday Weld, variously pegged as a sex kitten, dangerous teen rebel and icon, George Axelrod’s 1966 satire ‘Lord Love a Duck’ (Blu-ray. KL Studio Classics, Not Rated), now in a brand new 2K Master, is a fine place to start. Axelrod who directed, adapted and produced ‘Duck’ was revered for creating ‘The Seven Year Itch,’ a play which became a classic Marilyn Monroe-Billy Wilder vehicle. He also adapted a pair of novels for the screen that rank among the most-beloved classics of all time: ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (Axelrod’s sole Oscar nomination) and ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’ In the Sixties as Hollywood floundered trying to connect to the generational ‘youthquake,’ ‘Lord Love a Duck’ was something intentionally different, a blackly comic satire that seems especially demented today. Beginning with Roddy McDowell! A child star in the ‘40s (‘How Green Was My Valley,’ ‘Lassie Come Home’) he was born in 1928 yet despite being nearly 40 his casting as a teenage prodigy-sociopath prompts no chuckles. He’s the devious Alan Musgrave who is besotted with Weld’s Barbara Anne Greene and eager to give her anything she desires. Weld has a justly revered scene where it’s cashmere sweaters, a cascade of them, a dozen in all, in different colors, thrown her way, with each prompting orgasmic spasms (Sixties censors thought this was just fine). Alan is there to help Barbara Anne marry the guy she thinks she loves. Turns out she loves the idea of starring in the biggest beach party movie of all time. When hubby wants nothing to do with his wife making movies, Alan is all too ready to eliminate the negative. ‘Duck’ is a tale told from Alan’s jail cell. Costarring the inimitable Ruth Gordon (‘Rosemary’s Baby’) and buoyed by a Neal Hefti jazz-inflected score.
NEW DVDs:
LATE, COMMANDING KUBRICK Stanley Kubrick’s penultimate film the 1987 ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code, WB, R) suffered when it was first released from comparisons with Oliver Stone’s incendiary blockbuster ‘Platoon,’ which had triumphed a year earlier. A Vietnam War film that focused on the dehumanization of raw recruits, ‘FMJ’ is now being given its first-ever release in 4K Ultra HD. Kubrick had initially considered a Holocaust film as his next project but he had become intrigued by Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches,’ a memoir of serving in Vietnam. Then when he read Gustav Hasford’s ‘The Short Timers,’ published in ’79, it was clear – he would make a war movie set in Vietnam, adapting ‘Short Timers’ with Herr and Hasford sharing screenplay credit with him. The three were Oscar nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, the film’s sole nomination. There’s a little-known backstory to how ‘FMJ’ came to the screen. In early 1985 I interviewed Anthony Michael Hall, the goofy comic sidekick of John Hughes’ movies while he was filming Hughes’ ‘Weird Science.’ ‘I’m going to be in a Stanley Kubrick movie!’ he told me, having been tested and cast. Only Warner Bros. was disturbed at the filmmaker’s intention to emphasize how young these recruits, fodder for the war machine, were with actors under 18. Remember how they sing The Mickey Mouse Song as they march off at the end? They’re kids! Instead we have recruits who are in their 20s and
Kubrick’s major ‘discovery’ is Lee Ermey, a former Marine staff sergeant who was hired as a technical consultant and was cast as the film’s brutal Drill Instructor when Kubrick saw how he so scarily improvised a scene on camera. Ermey who died in 2018 at 74 was Golden Globe-nominated. Filming in England (yes, England as Vietnam! Kubrick was no Oliver Stone going into a jungle) was suspended for 5 months when Ermey had a near-fatal Jeep accident. Bonus material: Commentary by actors Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ermey and critic-screenwriter Jay Cocks. Plus a featurette: ‘Full Metal Jacket: Between Good and Evil.’
SCORSESE’S VITAL LEGACY ‘Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project’ (Blu-ray + DVD, 6 discs, Criterion Collection, Not Rated and R) Six films from around the world, with a span from 1934 to 1980, are the beautifully packaged jewels here, courtesy of new, restored 4K digital transfers via Scorsese’s Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project which he founded in 2007. Scorsese offers new introductions to each of the 6 titles. There are various interviews, some new; new English subtitle translations . Plus a booklet with essays on each film by, among others, Dennis Lim, Elisa Lozano and Stephanie Dennison. The films are distinguished by their personal perspectives and their insights into the times and places where they are set:
‘Pixote’ (‘Small Child’). Hector Babenco’s prize-winning Brazilian film from 1980, is perhaps the best known film here. A scathing docu-style examination of the lawless street boys of Sao Paulo and how these delinquents are exploited by both sides, gangsters and corrupt cops. The extraordinary Fernando Ramos da Silva, who is simply astonishing as Pixote, was murdered by the Sao Paulo police a few years later. He was 19.
‘Lucia,’ Humberto Solas’ 1968 Cuban melodrama, examines 3 women – all named Lucia – at 3 moments in Cuban history,
‘Downpour,’ Iranian director Bahram Beyzaie’s 1972 examination of a late actor which is his first feature, was nearly lost – only one copy survived but in terrible condition. The Film Foundation rescued and previously restored it. Beyzaie, now 81, has left Iran to live and teach in California.
‘After the Curfew,’ a 1954 classic of Indonesian cinema, chronicles the aftermath of the country’s 1949 independence from the Dutch. Indonesian director Usmar Ismail was a former soldier which gives his protagonist, an ex-soldier looking for a job and meaning in his life, a realistic jolt.
‘Dos Monjes’ (‘Two Monks’) is from Mexico in 1934 and
‘Soleil O’ (1970) Mauritania, which was filmed over 4 years by Med Hondo to chronicle the near-impossible journey of a Black immigrant whose goal is the French capital Paris. The title is taken from a West Indian song about the pain and misery of the Black people taken to the Caribbean as slaves.
REDFORD TAKES A RISK The 1988 ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, R) is the second film directed by superstar -turned-filmmaker Robert Redford with an eclectic cast that includes Sonia Braga, Ruben Blades, Melanie Griffith, the late John Heard and Christopher Walken. Dave Grusin was given an Oscar for Best Original Score. Redford’s phenomenal debut, the 1980 ‘Ordinary People’ with Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland and Timothy Hutton, was a critical and box-office success winning 4 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Its reputation has suffered in the ensuing decades because ‘Ordinary’ beat Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’ in the Oscar Best Picture race which, as ‘Bull’ has steadily escalated in critical esteem as one of the great films of all time, has mortified some voters. ‘Milagro’ tells a classic story, almost a folk tale, of a little guy (Chick Vennera) bucking big business and corrupted state officials by illegally watering his beanfield. Redford can be praised for spotlighting the Latino-Hispanic community, emphasizing Native culture and agriculture. It’s adapted by David Ward – he scripted Redford’s Oscar-winning Best Picture hit ‘The Sting’ – and John Nichols from Nichols’ novel of the same name. Nichols was not particularly pleased with Redford’s adaptation and in 2001 had what may be the last word when he wrote ‘Night of the Living Beanfield: How an Unsuccessful Cult Novel Became an Unsuccessful Cult Film in Only Fourteen Years, Eleven Nervous Breakdowns, and $20 Million.’ Vennera and film historian Daniel Kremer offer an audio commentary.
MORE CLEESE PLEASE ‘Clockwise’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) is an obscure 1986 comedy with a first-class pedigree that’s been given a brand new 4K Master. Written by Michael Frayn, whose satire of a 4th-rate British touring company ‘Noises Off’ stands as a contemporary comedy classic, ‘Clockwise’ boasts a trio who represent some kind of pinnacle of British performance: John Cleese, Penelope Wilton (‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’) and Alison Steadman of so many Mike Leigh films. 
Cleese is ideal as the compulsive British high school headmaster who is horrified that life, fate or missed trains and confused cops will make him miss the most important appointment of his life. Special Features: An audio commentary, ‘Clockwatching’ with Cleese and composer George Fenton’s ‘Scoring Clockwise.’
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Stephen Schaefer’s Hollywood & Mine - Boston Herald
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