I acceded to Dad’s request to give his thought some serious consideration. But I couldn’t play favorites or assume Mom was a natural for the part. I made her audition. I drove to their house nervous as a cat and fully prepared to have an awkward, let-them-down gently conversation. I had been through a version of this before, with Dad. In a couple of my films, his best scenes had hit the cutting-room floor during the final editing, and I had to break the news.
But Mom came prepared. She was immediately and undeniably excellent from a performance standpoint. There was just one problem. For the first time in her adult life, Mom looked too young to be believable. When I expressed this concern, Dad pointed out that makeup could enhance the lines in her face. Then Mom went in for the close. She popped out her false teeth, smiled wide, and said, “Don’t you think this would do the trick?”
“Okay, Mom, okay!” I said. “Put your teeth back in. You got the part.”
We put her in a wheelchair, and the hair and makeup people did fantastic work to make Mom appear convincingly frail and elderly. She nailed the scene in just a couple of takes—it’s a favorite of many Apollo 13 fans.
CLINT
Being the boy who stayed local created a different dynamic for Dad and me than it did for him and Ron. In Dad’s later years, he and I were best friends as much as we were father and son. We went to ball games together, hung out together, engaged in shoptalk. When I was cast in something, I ran the material by him and sought out his thoughts. Not his guidance, which is what he gave me when I was a kid, but any useful ideas he might have.
I didn’t always take his suggestions on board, but I treasured our ritual of discussing the work and Dad clearly appreciated that I solicited his input. And one day in 1998, he came through with a truly great piece of advice.
Just a few weeks before I turned thirty-nine, my agent called me with a strange piece of news. He told me that MTV wanted to honor me for lifetime achievement at that year’s MTV Movie Awards—the raucous, looser, sillier cousin of the network’s higher-profile MTV Video Music Awards. The statuette that they gave out to the winners was a gold-plated bucket of popcorn.
This phone call happened to come on April 1, a fact that was not lost on me. A lifetime achievement award? Me? Ha! But even after my agent persuaded me that MTV’s offer wasn’t an April Fools’ joke, I wasn’t a total idiot about their intentions. The previous two years’ winners had been Godzilla and Chewbacca, and the whole thing was tongue in cheek. I got it completely that they had picked me because I am a so-called cult actor with a funny look and a résumé of weird parts, from Balok and Eaglebauer to the psychos I played in Evilspeak and The Ice Cream Man.
So do I take this offer or not? I weighed my options. I knew that MTV wanted to have some fun at my expense, but I also saw their awards show as an opportunity for me as an actor. I was always hustling for work, and I thought to myself, This is better than sending out postcards to every casting director in town, which is what Mom did during her renaissance as an actress. With that in mind, I prepared a self-effacing speech that was basically designed to get laughs, with me as the butt of the joke.
I went over to my folks’ house and ran the speech by Dad. He listened but took exception to my approach. In his usual straightforward manner, he said, “Those jokes might get some laughs but they just won’t stick. You should take your acceptance speech seriously. Because if you take it seriously, people will remember it.”
The speech that I actually delivered on May 30, 1998—after they showed a clip montage of my work, including Balok saying, “But first: the tranya!”—was sincere and heartfelt, a genuine lifetime-achievement award speech. I thanked the fans. I thanked the people who hired me. I thanked my family.
Then I said, “You know, people come up to me all the time and they say ‘Weren’t you the little kid with the bear?’ Or they say, ‘Oh, I remember you! You were that little guy on Star Trek who drank the tranya.’ Or, ‘I know you, you’re the brother of that famous guy.’ Or ‘Wait, wait, wait, I know you, you’re that crazy guy in that horror movie.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m all those things.’ Well, maybe now people will come up to me on the street and they’ll say, ‘Hey, aren’t you that guy with the big golden bucket of popcorn?’”