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I cast my old friend Howie Morris from Your Show of Shows to play another character I meet on the street, and I based his character Sailor’s funeral on the real-life story of Howie’s father. Howie’s father, Hugo, dies, and Howie goes to the funeral home and pays for all of the burial expenses.
The funeral home director says, “There’s one more charge for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
Howie says, “No. I paid for everything.”
The director replies, “You had your father cremated. The urn for his ashes is one hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
Howie says, “I won’t need an urn. We’re going to scatter his ashes in the Hudson River.”
Which was Howie’s father Hugo’s final request.
So the director says, “Well, do you have a container for the loved one’s ashes?”
Lesley Ann Warren as Molly and me as the homeless billionaire Goddard Bolt, falling in love as we dance together in a rag factory.
Howie said, “Can you find a paper bag?”
The director replied, “I’m sorry, we don’t use anything like a paper bag for the loved one’s ashes.”
Howie says, “Okay, wait here. I’ll be right back.”
He runs across the street and buys a can of Medaglia d’Oro coffee. He opens it up and he dumps the coffee in the gutter. He said the grocery store owner came out and watched him dump the coffee and was puzzled by what Howie was doing. Howie runs back to the funeral home with the empty coffee can.
He gives it to the director and says, “Put Hugo’s ashes in here.”
The haughty director of the funeral home says, “Sir, you don’t want your father’s ashes in there—it absolutely reeks of espresso.”
And Howie says, “Never mind, put the ashes in there. Soon it will reek of the Hudson River!”
So they put the ashes of Howie’s father, Hugo, in the coffee can.
Howie and his mother take the can of ashes and they drive down the West Side Highway searching for a spot where they could scatter the ashes in the river. But they can’t find an easy place to get close to the river itself. Finally, around Seventy-ninth Street he gets off the highway and makes his way down to the riverbank.
Howie climbs up on a rock and looks out on the river with tears in his eyes. He says, “Goodbye, Dad. Rest peacefully in your wonderful Hudson River.” With that he opens the coffee can and hurls the ashes toward the river.
…But the blustery December wind has other ideas.
It takes the ashes and blows most of them right back into Howie’s overcoat. Unfortunately, it is a dark blue double-breasted coat with a belt in the back. （It looked like cashmere but it wasn’t.）
So for the next half hour Howie smacks his overcoat like he’s beating a rug to get some of the ashes into the river. All the while repeating, “Goodbye, Dad! Love you, Dad! Rest in Peace!” etc.
So I asked him, “Howie, where do you think your father’s final resting place is? In the river? On the banks of the river? Where?”
And he says, “I don’t know for sure, but I’ll tell you this—every time I pass Rand Cleaners on Seventy-ninth Street I break into tears!”
So that bizarre but true story worked perfectly in the goodbye-to-Sailor scene in Life Stinks.
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The aforementioned Rudy De Luca, one of the writers, played a homeless guy who was delusional in Life Stinks. He thought he was actually billionaire J. Paul Getty, and when my character tells him he’s a real billionaire living in the slums on a bet, Rudy’s character becomes incensed and insists he’s much richer. So we begin to fight. We get into a Three Stooges–type slapping scene. It’s funny as hell, but unfortunately in order to make it work we really slapped each other senseless. Talk about slapstick—we turned it into slapschtick and really went to town.
That’s one of the key things I keep in mind when making a movie: You must always strive to create an illusion of reality. Hence, the real slaps. While the actor in me was unhappy with the pain, the director in me, after looking at the monitor after the last take, was happy with the utter crazy reality of the scene.
It wasn’t easy directing myself as an actor. I always demanded the best from my actors, and I didn’t stop when I demanded it of myself. After all, this was the first and only picture that I made in which I carried the whole film as the lead. Its success hinged on my performance. Normally, in other movies, I’d nail a scene in three or four takes, but in Life Stinks sometimes I’d do up to sixteen takes to make sure that I wasn’t just phoning it in.