I Blame Dennis Hopper (13 page)

The second time I saw Richard Dreyfuss in a movie was
American Graffiti
(1973) at the Middletown Drive-In. The movie had just been rereleased and was the bottom of a bill that included
The Gumball Rally
and
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

I was in the backseat watching the movie with someone older and cooler than I in the front seat. Her name was Susan. I knew my place. My place was to be her funny, compliant friend. If she needed a Coke, I would gladly run and get her a Coke. If she was sad about a recent breakup and needed me to make her laugh, I would make a joke. And I was not embarrassed. There were other kids on rungs farther down the social ladder from me who would have dreamed of getting a Coke for Susan. She was the most popular girl in school, for God's sake, and she liked me. But I knew my place.

In
American Graffiti
Richard Dreyfuss plays Curt, who is kind of a backseat friend to Ron Howard. Curt's a little younger, not cool enough to sit in the front seat. One night while driving around, Curt spots what he calls his “dream girl,” played by Suzanne Somers, who mouths “I love you” to him from a passing white convertible. No one else in the car sees this but him, and Curt wants to go look for her. His pals think he's nuts and start to make fun of him. He has no power to look for her himself because he's stuck in the backseat. Curt is short, chubby, and not the best-looking guy in the crowd, but I'll never forget his face as he internalizes his buddies' mocking. He takes it, and he just smiles to himself, because he knows that he
will
see her again. And he knows something else. He knows he is going somewhere the other guys in the car are not. It's that same brilliant on-screen thinking that I saw in
Jaws
. Watching
American Graffiti
that first time, I felt like I was reading thoughts that were so private that even I shouldn't be seeing them. He feels superior to the guys in the front seat, so he'll just be patient, because they are wrong. Curt's unwavering belief in himself touched me deeply. At the end of the movie, as he boards the plane to leave the small town—and leave his buddies behind—he does see his dream girl again. I always thought that in that movie Richard Dreyfuss paved the way for a new type of comic romantic lead. The funny, smart, schlubby guy who gets the girl despite all the odds. Who proves that even the not-best-looking guys deserve their dream girls. And even though I was not Curt, and not Richard Dreyfuss, for the first time, I saw myself in a movie, which is one of the greatest gifts a movie can give us. To see ourselves in those forty-foot images.

I, too, was a backseat friend. I was always younger than my friends, a borderline outcast, not considered very pretty, but I got by, sitting in the backseat, supporting anything the girls who sat in the front seat said. I was funny and could make smart-aleck comments for their amusement. I was a real sensitive kid with pent-up, sensitive thoughts that were often out of place with my surroundings. Sometimes we would be riding around, and I would look out the window and see something beautiful, such as a full moon, or something sad, such as the town drunk sleeping in the snow, or I'd hear a sad song that reminded me of a boy I liked, but I knew I could never share things like that. I would be laughed out of the car. Watching
American Graffiti,
I realized that I was a phony. I wasn't going to do anything about it. I wasn't going to change anything, but it made me self-aware.

When you're a kid, you look for the character in the movie you can relate to, and Richard Dreyfuss always seemed like a big kid to me. A big kid with a difference: He was the one who had a keen sense of right and wrong, of morality and injustice. He seemed like a friend you could hide behind while he questioned authority—and he questioned authority a lot. It was Richard Dreyfuss who once made a professor apologize for having criticized Marlon Brando's performance in
Julius Caesar
. Years later, when I asked Richard if this was true or just a rumor, he said with some lingering indignation, “That is correct!” He was confident, even a little cocky, but his confidence seemed to come from having accepted who he was. I didn't know who I was, but I knew I wanted to be like him. Outspoken. Confident. He knew where he was going.

There's another milestone I owe to Richard Dreyfuss. It's the '70s cult classic I was never supposed to see but did anyway. It's an obscure film called
Inserts
(1975). I didn't know anything about
Inserts
except that it starred Richard Dreyfuss, so I asked my grandmother to take me to see it. We bought our tickets, got our popcorn, and the screen comes up and it's rated X! My Italian grandmother, who was very old-fashioned, was horrified. “Hey, what the hell is this?” she said in her thick accent. “What kinda of a movie you taking me to?”

She grabbed me by the arm and was dragging me up the aisle, but I begged her to let me stay, insisting it must be a comedy. After all, it had Richard Dreyfuss in it. We stayed. For the record,
Inserts
is
not
a comedy.

Inserts
is about a washed-up film director, a former boy wonder, forced to make pornographic films. So thanks to Richard Dreyfuss, I saw my first X-rated film. Profoundly disturbing little movie by the way. My grandmother never forgave me.

I didn't really understand the film, but I saw the difference in his performance from
Jaws
and
American Graffiti
. It may sound like I'm kidding, but I'm not. What I understood for the first time was that the person you see on-screen is not that person, but an actor creating a character. I developed an understanding of the
craft
of acting from watching
Inserts,
because I couldn't believe that this lively funny actor whom I wanted to emulate could also do something as dark and gut-wrenching on-screen.

And then came
The Goodbye Girl
(1977). When you talk about the qualities you want to see in a romantic comedy,
The Goodbye Girl
has them all. It is the epitome of a feel-good movie: It has humor and heart and at its center it has a tour de force comedic performance by Richard Dreyfuss. He is not your typical romantic lead, but he is so charming and funny and confident that you just fall for him. I fell for him. Big time. Who didn't? Richard Dreyfuss manages to make both the mother, Paula (played by Marsha Mason), and her precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Lucy (Quinn Cummings), fall for him. He was that funny prince, that nice guy that all girls are looking for. He shows up, and he comes through. He had something in that movie that a typically handsome guy doesn't have: confidence that his inner self is as attractive as his outer self.

Dreyfuss does an interesting thing as Elliot in
The Goodbye Girl
. He chases the girl by not chasing the girl. There's a terrific scene where he is eating spaghetti with Lucy. He's being very cute and charming with her because he knows that
she
has a crush on him. All the while, he is also interacting with Paula. He also knows that
she
has a crush on him, too, but she's scared because she has had a bad history with men. Paula's acting like she's not interested in him, but he senses she is watching him, so he starts watching her back, all the while interacting with Lucy. He's innocently eating spaghetti with a twelve-year-old, but he's flirting through her to get to her mom. Remember what I said about the on-screen thinking. As the romance progresses, Paula is washing off her white “kabuki” makeup, as he calls it. She starts nervously pulling on her robe, getting all hot and bothered, because he's thinking sexy thoughts about her. You can see it on his face. What I love about the scene is that he's not overtly sexual, but he is sexually confident. His sexiness comes not from looks but from sexual know-how. He knows he's charming the pants off her, because he knows she wants it as much as he does. Maybe more.

There are scenes in
The Goodbye Girl
in which Dreyfuss actually makes Marsha Mason blush, yet they have all their clothes on. That's chemistry. That's great romantic comedy. His performance harkened back to the golden age of screwball comedies, but he brought to it a modern sensitivity. At thirty years old, he was about to become the youngest person to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor. There have only been a few times in Oscar history that an actor won in the Best Actor category for a comedy. In 1934, Clark Gable won it for
It Happened One Night
; in 1940, Jimmy Stewart for
Philadelphia Story
; in 1965, Lee Marvin for
Cat Ballou
. Now, you could argue those actors won for a variety of reasons, but anyone who has seen
The Goodbye Girl
knows Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar for his comic staccato delivery of “I sleep in the nude, au buffo” and, of course, the much repeated “… and-I-don't-like-the-panties-drying-on-the-rod.” Here was an actor who won an Oscar for being singularly funny. It hasn't happened since.

The Goodbye Girl
formed a lot of ideas I had about how to do physical comedy. I find that I can't do a scene with physical comedy in it without thinking of Richard Dreyfuss. He packs funny. He sits and does yoga funny. He cracks his neck funny. His
Goodbye Girl
character's effeminate portrayal of Richard III in his Off Broadway debut was inspiringly funny. But he also has pathos. There's a scene in the film in which Elliot comes home drunk after he's bombed on his opening night of what is billed as the first gay portrayal of Richard III. He's crying, “I was an Elizabethan fruit fly … I was putrid. Capital P. Capital U. Capital TRID!” We are laughing at his humiliation. Then he makes an unexpected turn and we see the tears are real. I love this scene, because you never see it coming. You never see a hint of vulnerability in Elliot, underneath his confidence and bravura, until the moment he lets his guard down and shows us that his humiliation has been real. In that moment you realize that maybe Elliot's smart-ass routine has been an act all along. Maybe that cockiness hides a lot of doubt and insecurity and pain. Maybe, in that moment, we are given a glimpse inside the real Richard Dreyfuss who once said to me, “I like to play characters that are self-aware.” I knew that without his even telling me, because it reminded me of the night I saw
American Graffiti
, when I was in the backseat of someone's car and I thought, I want to be like him. Both the character and the man who is playing him. I want to be all those things that Richard Dreyfuss is: funny, confident, outspoken, sure of myself.

Not long after I first saw
The Goodbye Girl
, I made my grandmother take me to the actual location of the apartment in the movie—at 78th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in New York City. Someday I will get here myself, I thought.

Trying to emulate Richard Dreyfuss didn't just help my acting career; it also helped me in my real-life teenage world. One night, four of my friends and I were driving around our small town, doing nothing. I was in the backseat, as usual. It was too late to do anything, too early to go home. Eventually we settled on just parking our car in the town green. Pretty soon other kids in their cars started to gather, until there were about ten or fifteen cars parked on the green. Kids were sitting on the hoods of their cars, not smoking, not drinking—it was just a spontaneous gathering of kids talking, having fun, and being kids. I was just about to get up the courage to talk to a boy I had a crush on when suddenly we were surrounded by two police cars. Nobody knew what was happening. Lights were flashing. Sirens going. The police jumped out of the car, hands on guns, and the kids were just stunned. I guess they thought we were doing something illegal. What they found was just a bunch of kids doing absolutely nothing! They spent some time interrogating us, searching our cars, and then told everyone to go home or we would be arrested for what they called “illegally gathering.” Kids were getting into their cars, but I was just furious. I spoke up loudly, trying to stop kids from going home.

I said with a great sense of moral outrage, “You know we don't have to go anywhere. This is the town square, of our town where
our
parents pay the taxes. We're not doing anything illegal. We're just talking.”

And I began to rally everyone. “Do you understand the outcome of the police arresting a bunch of kids for talking to each other? We should let them arrest us. This will be front-page news. Nice kids being arrested for talking to each other in the town green. The town meeting place, going back to Colonial times!”

I had found my voice, and it sounded an awful lot like Richard Dreyfuss's. Just like Hooper, I was speaking up for my beliefs, confronting local authority.

I think I even impressed the police when I came up with, “And there isn't even a prison in our town. How would we all fit in the car? There are twenty kids here.”

I really wanted the police to arrest me, because I knew I was right, but I was so Richard Dreyfuss-y that I managed to convince the police officers that arresting us was a really bad idea, and eventually they just got into their cars and drove off. I was a hero for about an hour. It was the first time that I remember being noticed for something other than just being funny. The cute boy I had wanted to talk to came over to me. I still remember the way he kind of nodded his head at me, as if he couldn't believe I had spoken that way to a cop. What he didn't know was that I had nothing to be afraid of. I couldn't wait to shake the dust off this town and get to New York, where I would claim my destiny as an actress. Eventually one of my girlfriends told me she needed to drive me home. I still had to get in the backseat, but that night and for a long time after, I could tell the girls in the front seat thought, She's going somewhere we are not. From the quiet dark of the backseat I looked up at the moon and smiled. I had become, for a little while, Curt from
American Graffiti
.