Star Wars casting was held on the Fox lot in Century City. I showed up and milled around outdoors with a couple dozen other young guys who were waiting to be called in. One of them, standing right behind me, was a dude named Mark Hamill. Then I heard my name. Go time.
Auditions get my juices flowing. They’re a form of competition and I approach them confidently, determined to be the last man standing. But Star Wars was different—not because of its genre or sweep but its timing. Luke Skywalker was a romantic male lead, most definitely an adult role, of a kind I had never played in my short life. My palms were sweaty when I entered the audition room, an office. My nervousness skyrocketed when I saw that George Lucas wasn’t the only person for whom I would be auditioning. Francis Ford Coppola, who I held in the highest esteem, sat there, smiling at me. He was helping George cast Star Wars. As was Geno Havens, assisting George as he had during the casting of American Graffiti. But no sign of George. Weird.
Francis and Geno flanked an imposing mahogany desk. Behind it was a big leather swivel chair, its back to me, obscuring its occupant. Abruptly, the chair swung around and there was George. He took a beat to give me the once-over. Then he said with a flourish, “Commander Balok! ‘The Corbomite Maneuver!’”
It totally threw me. Here I was, a young actor trying to get an adult part, and there he was, making a reference to something I did as a seven-year-old! America was only in the earliest days of the Star Trek revival, when reruns of the show were not yet widely in syndication and Trekkies were only beginning to be a thing. So I should have been flattered that George was familiar with what was then just another job on my résumé. But because I was in a slump and entering my Angry Young Man phase, what I thought in my head was, Get a fucking life, George.
I stumbled through the audition. I knew in the moment I didn’t stand a chance, reading the way I read and looking the way I did. I did not receive a callback.
Still, I learned something. George’s friendly overture represented the beginning of a phenomenon that follows me to this day: being admired for work I did as a kid. But I just wasn’t ready at sixteen to appreciate that. It seemed less like recognition and more like belittlement. It had the same ring as “Hey, where’s your bear?” I guess I had some growing up to do.
RON
I wasn’t exactly landing choice movie roles, either. One day during the third season of Happy Days, I was sitting in the Paramount commissary, reading a script over lunch. My agent had sent it to me. I thought it was terrible: a broad, zany car-chase comedy with weak jokes and cardboard characters. Its title, which will tell you everything about my reflexive revulsion, was Eat My Dust! It was depressing: this was the level of the film projects that were coming my way.
But Eat My Dust! had one thing to recommend it: it was a Roger Corman production. Corman was known as the King of the Bs, a prolific director and producer of cheaply made movies that went straight to drive-ins and regional theaters via his distribution company, New World Pictures. He had famously shot the original, 1960 version of The Little Shop of Horrors in only two days, helping to launch the career of one of its stars, Jack Nicholson. He had adapted several of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories into campy horror films, one of which, The Pit and the Pendulum, was a childhood obsession of mine thanks to its repeated airings on Million Dollar Movie.
Roger had a reputation in Hollywood. Well, several reputations. He was a shrewd, fiercely intelligent businessman who had come up with an efficient, assembly-line approach to production that turned a tidy profit. He was also an emotionally mercurial man who was charming when in a good mood and best avoided when grumpy. And he was notorious for his wildly eclectic taste, pumping out exploitation flicks but also serving as the U.S. distributor for such European arthouse directors as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Fran?ois Truffaut.
Most pertinent to my interests, Roger had an awesome track record for nurturing young filmmakers. Among those who had served apprenticeships under him were Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jonathan Demme. I yearned for a shot to join their ranks. Plus, Roger’s distribution company could potentially secure my agreement with Reg Grundy for ’Tis the Season, which was contingent on my lining up a distributor in the States.