A light bulb went on over my head when I saw Dennis Hopper’s turn in Apocalypse Now. I so admired his performance: he was completely over the top yet completely committed, so that you believed him within the context of his lunacy. I said to myself, I can do that.
I still had a lot of personal issues to deal with before I found my groove, though. I lasted less than a semester at Pepperdine. NBC gave Ron and me the go-ahead to write a TV movie we had pitched called Cotton Candy, about a nerdy teen who starts a high school rock band. Charlie Martin Smith played the lead, and the film ended up being the second that Ron directed. To me, this break made me think I was wasting my time sitting through courses about Kierkegaard and comparative religion. Before I withdrew, though, I used the lawn of my dormitory as my screenwriting “office,” camping out in a folding chair with a notepad, with the Pacific in glorious view. When I needed a change of scenery, I drove down to Straw Hat Pizza in Malibu’s commercial district, my writing efforts lubricated by a pitcher of beer.
As beautiful as this setup was, I concluded I had better things to do in Burbank. I was already driving back there three or four times a week to see my drug buddies and fortify my stash. So I disenrolled, thinking no further down the line than Cotton Candy and the paycheck it promised. I’m not sure I would have necessarily benefited from a college education, but I regret that I never gave college a fair shake. By the way, Cotton Candy was my first and last major screenwriting credit to date.
I did myself no favors by entering adulthood free of the regimented structure of school or series television. By the 1980s, my boozing and using were no longer the merry, consequence-free habits I had perceived them to be as a teenager. I wasn’t content merely to snort cocaine, for example. Most people had never heard the word freebasing until Richard Pryor burned his face trying to smoke vaporized coke in 1980, but when I heard about his accident, I thought, Yeah, I know exactly how that happened.
I spent the 1980s skidding along bedrock. In one particularly terrible bout of drug-induced paranoia, I pieced together some facts that, to me, irrefutably proved that I was the Antichrist: （1） I shared a birthday with Adolf Hitler; （2） When I was ten, I played a boy who predicted the end of the world in the anthology TV series Night Gallery; and （3） when I was twenty, I played an outcast cadet at a military academy who becomes possessed by Satan and murders his tormentors in the horror movie Evilspeak.
There was a period when I didn’t even have keys to Mom and Dad’s house in Toluca Lake, my childhood home, because they couldn’t trust me in my behaviorally compromised state. I can’t blame them. I scared the hell out of myself. I also scared the hell out of my neighbors. One day in 1988, I was so wigged out on speed and liquor that I literally tried to jump out of my body, my very being. In so doing, I jumped over a property wall and into the yard next door, where my unglued presence terrified the guests at what had been a sedate, pleasant gathering. They called the cops on me.
RON
I sensed something amiss with Clint as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. He had taken to arriving late for events and appointments, not his normal style. When he did this on Dad’s birthday, his voice ragged and his eyes puffy as he finally joined us for a celebratory dinner at the Smoke House, I could no longer rationalize his drug use as recreational. I had by then witnessed enough behind the scenes in show business to know that Clint couldn’t keep living the way he was if he wanted to survive into the next century. I confronted him with my concerns in 1980, when we went together to Super Bowl XIV, which was played between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Los Angeles Rams at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. “It’s one thing to use drugs and another thing to let drugs use you,” I told him.
CLINT
Ron gave me a kindhearted big-brother talk. He does those well. He always begins with the words, Now I’m going to give you some unsolicited advice.
Over the years, I have sometimes gotten irritated when Ron uttered those words. Oh, jeez, here it comes again, The Talk. But I’ve also always appreciated his efforts and loved him for trying. He’s never approached things subliminally. He’s never tried to couch what he was doing in some sort of BS parable or metaphor. He addresses the subject straight-on.