Not Gonna Do it

By Bruce Buschel

"I've worked so hard on this movie," he says, "but you never know. . . . During Eight Men Out, John Sayles taught me that there are really three drafts to a movie--the script, the shoot, the editing. Movies can get screwed up in any of those three places. We had all the elements going into this one. . . . I used to ask my father to read scripts, but he's busy writing his own nowadays, so occasionally I consult with Joanie [big sister, big-time actress]. My agent? Well, his taste doesn't offend me. He keeps track of what's going on and provides me access. You have to throw a grenade into your agency every four months or they get lazy."

"William Morris Agency."

John Burnham, please.

"John Burnham's office."

John Burnham, please.

"John Burnham."

I'm doing a story on John Cu--

"That's kew-sack, not coo-sack."

How many scripts does John read in a month?

"I don't understand the question."

Well, does he see one script a month, or ten a month, or . . . ?

"That's ridiculous. I can't say. I won't say. He gets more offers than he accepts. He's very selective, you know. I'll tell you what question I can answer, or, better, here is the answer to the question you should be asking: Look at his career and you will see how selective he is. Starting at sixteen, he has worked with the likes of Rob Reiner and Woody Allen and Roland Joffe and Stephen Frears and a very distinguished list that goes on and on and on. That's the answer to my question."

But how many scripts, on average, does he read and reject a month?

"Look, I never turn down anything without talking to John, and if he's interested in a project, which isn't often because he's very picky, then he'll read the script. And then he usually passes."

How often does that happen?

"Maybe three times a month."

Thank you.

This piece is about morality," says Cusack, waiting for his cue inside an Italian restaurant, which has been converted into an Old World Jewish deli. "It's an attack on the menschlichkeit of the boys' club running everything. There's a murder and an investigation, and my character, the deputy mayor, peels back the onion to see the truth. It's as close to Paddy Chayefsky as you can get nowadays." (Except this script took five writers almost ten years to finish.) Harold Becker, the director, wears a Houston Astros cap, the old kind with an orange star and capital H. When he peers through the lens of the Arriflex, he sees David Paymer playing cards with a bunch of cronies at a corner table. A waiter delivers a drink. Cusack struts across the room and straight into the kitchen. Paymer stands, says something snotty, throws in his cards, and follows Cusack through the swinging doors. Cut.

"Can't get much better than that," says Becker. "Let's do it again."

And again. By now, everyone knows that Becker is a meticulous man, exacting, exhausting. It's a far cry from the last time Cusack was in New York, shooting Bullets Over Broadway.

"Woody Allen is very different. He had a six-hour workday, five days a week," says Cusack during a lighting change. "Everything was a master shot. One take. Maybe two. For an actor, that's fantastic, you get a momentum, you don't worry about too much." The downside is that Cusack's full face is not seen in close-up until 14 minutes into that film, and then not again until the 29-minute mark. His three costars and director were nominated for Oscars.

"Becker is a photographer by nature, a brilliant eye for composition, very thorough with the text--massive rehearsals, lots of coverage. If you have four or five takes, at four or five different angles, then you're shooting the same thing 20, 25 times. He can do this of course, because his films make money. That's not derogatory. Even his commercial films were literary--Sea of Love and Malice were real movie movies. The Onion Field was great."

"I wanted Cusack's character based on James Carville, so I sent him a tape of The War Room," says Becker. "Carville is from New Orleans, an honest man from unsophisticated beginnings, and something always rings true about him. That's what I saw in Cusack, an intelligence and an independence."

For an authentic accent, Cusack spent time in Louisiana, listening to regular folks and studying with a dialogue coach. Cusack approached all aspects of his character the same way: research, observe, absorb--and then don't think about it again, like a third baseman (which Cusack once dreamed of being) who takes a hundred grounders in practice, and when the game begins, turns his body over to instinct. Before shooting began, Cusack talked with a gaggle of politicos and wheeler-dealers. Meeting Rudolph Giuliani was a bittersweet event: "I asked the mayor, who was a very nice man, about shelters, health care, food programs, midnight basketball, and all he knew was that local business would take care of it--business, business. He genuinely thinks what he's doing is right, which is a compliment for a politician today.

"You have to be either terribly cynical or naive to be a real Republican. What can you say about people who want to repeal the ban on assault weapons? I might respect a right-winger who said, 'I got mine and fuck all of you!' but I don't find any. I'd like Newt Gingrich to watch Hoop Dreams three times in a row with his eyelids pinned open, and then ask him about the trickle-down theory."

Paymer stands again, throws in his cards again, follows Cusack through the kitchen doors again. Cut.

"Great. Let's do it again."

The Cusack clan moved from New York to Chicago just in time to settle in before the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Mother was a teacher who quoted Joseph Campbell's "follow your bliss" credo; father, an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Philip and Daniel Berrigan, high priests of the antiwar movement. Iconoclasm and social protest were staples at the Cusack dinner table. Close friends of the family ran a theater workshop where big sisters Annie and Joan started acting, and John followed. Watching him improvise at age ten was, his acting teacher recalled, like watching a tennis prodigy at that age, all instinct and daring.

As merrily as he took to acting, Cusack disdained formal education. One day when he actually went to high school, he tried out for the lead in Hamlet. He did not get the part. He did not get any part. He refused to kiss up to the autocratic director, he says. Little has changed. Cusacks don't kowtow.

"Am I very fortunate to have the family I have? Yes," asks and answers Cusack, as if by rote. "Is it idyllic? Is it perfect? Is any family perfect? I've heard this so much, it's ludicrous. Ludicrous. Look, I was raised Irish Catholic. Does that bring along horrible shame? Yes, that brings horrible shame. Do I want to talk about this? No. I'll figure it out with my shrink." And that's that.

The influence of the clan on its fourth of five children is indelible. His favorite writer is J.D. Salinger. ("Too old to play Holden Caulfield," was his only cavil at turning 21.) His theater group, New Crime Productions, dramatized Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Ten minutes after arriving at the author's home to ask permission, Cusack was reportedly chipping golf balls off the front porch and, between gulps of whiskey, blowing them to smithereens with shotgun blasts.) He wrote an op-ed piece for the Chicago Sun-Times wherein he deemed an anti-Gulf War fracas outside a rap concert "police brutality." His conversations, no matter the topic, are sprinkled with ideas from and paraphrases of Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky? The M.I.T. linguist and soft-spoken dissident?

"When I was seventeen," recalls Cusack, "Joanie was going out with some anarchist from Madison, Wisconsin, who gave me The Chomsky Reader, this big fat thing--the most important thing I've ever read. I had my counterculture instincts, but this book validated them, gave them context, a genuinely radical way of looking at the world. I had always loved Orwell and had an interest in conspiracies, but I didn't want to be paranoid. Chomsky allowed me to understand the obfuscation of truth at the mass level and how to embrace the Big Conspiracy Theories without being too cynical."

He lights a butt as surreptitiously as possible. "Money can't be your motivation," he says. "I made $1,500 a week for Map of the Human Heart, for four months, less 10 percent, that's about . . . hmm . . . $20,000? And I had a theater company that I was supporting in Chicago at the time." Cusack started New Crime in 1986. One of its first productions, based on a Chomsky essay, was--and we quote the founder--"a hybrid of commedia dell'arte and Kabuki and the Sex Pistols." New Crime has mounted several successful plays (one by friend Tim Robbins), and now concentrates mostly on film production.

"On Fat Man and Little Boy," continues Cusack, "everyone worked for scale plus 10 percent. We worked for art. It was an attempt to take on history. The movie was radical in saying that we wanted to drop the bomb before the peace settlement could be reached. In the end, the movie didn't work real well. When you have a $25 million film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and cater to the fourteen-to- eighteen-year-old market by explaining which of the major world wars you're dealing with, you may be losing your artistic focus. But I got a chance to work with Paul Newman. I love him. He seems to be the most well-adjusted man in the world."

The Grifters did not feature any well-adjusted folk; just Roy Dillon, a good-natured, masochistic con artist caught between a desperate, amoral hustler (Annette Bening) and a desperate, amoral mother (Anjelica Huston). Jittery and disturbed, fast-talking and fatally flawed, Cusack seemed to grow up during those two hours; it's hard to remain cheery when your mother sticks her tongue in your mouth and then slits your throat. His two costars and director were nominated for Oscars. Cusack was catapulted from teen idol to serious contender. He could have done most anything at that point.

Instead, he did cameos, small roles, and the awful True Colors, which preceded the underrated Money for Nothing, a true story about a middle-class Irish kid who finds a million bucks in the middle of the street, but can't spend a penny lest he be found out. What good is money if you can't spend it? It drives him crazy. He makes unwise alliances, destroys his family, and is pushed way over the edge. Cusack played the blue-collar guy to a fare-thee-well. Maybe too-thee-well.

"This was definitely autobiographical," says Ramon Menendez, director of Money for Nothing. "This was about John's own position, with fame and wealth and guilt. It's a terrible duality--being a winner but not thinking you've earned it. You want to be happy. You want to be punished. You are totally ambivalent."

When Cusack saw the edited version of Money for Nothing, he ranted and raved and demanded a reedit and accused Menendez of cowardice, and then abandoned the film; the studio and the public did the same.

"Very depressing," remembers Cusack, shaking his head. "I knew we had a great film when the shooting was over, but the director, for some reason, in the editing room, started cutting the character and going for the plot. The truth of the story was in the behavior, how the character deals with his dream coming true, going insane, literally, not sleeping for six days, trying to figure out what to do with this money. But the director got scared of the behavior and made the character too sympathetic. Money was the reason. The producer and the director wanted the thing to sell."

Menendez, who had previously directed another true story, but one with a happy ending--Stand and Deliver--remains incredulous.

"We got along fine, before and during the shooting. John is an amazing actor--if you do fifteen takes, he will get better and better. But when he saw the rough cut, he freaked out. Freaked out! He was disappointed that it was not culturally subversive enough. John wanted to make a subversive statement about the American capitalistic system confronting the Christian work ethic. I cannot make The Battle of Algiers about a guy who finds money on the street in Philadelphia. John never asked any questions--he only accused. He thought I had caved in to studio pressure, but I battled with the studio tooth and nail."

Cusack has not spoken to Menendez since the contretemps. Nor does he plan to. His beliefs are deeply held and not given to compromise. He is starting to realize that the more control he has, the more chance he has to deliver his many messages. So he has cowritten a black comedy, Grosse Point Blank (which he will executive produce and star in), about a hit man who suffers a spiritual crisis at a high school reunion when he realizes that he can no longer separate his professional life from his personal life. "Being a killer is a metaphor for all the people who are killers in the business place, who walk all over people for money, just as countries treat other countries. This hit man is a normal, sensitive guy, talks to his shrink a lot, but it's confusing to be a guy in America in these times. Very confusing. Maybe I could lighten up a little. I should learn how to sell out, that would probably be good for me."

He's serious. He's not serious. He struggles, with contradictions, with maturation, with the possibility that gracelessness is a greater sin than greed. He is, at 28, no longer content to straddle that appealing fence between youthful bravado and adult responsibility. It's time to put up or shut up or both.

"You want to hear my brilliant strategy? I don't have one. I just see a lot of talented young actors who burn out, or get such a bad rep with their romantic-poetic-destructive bullshit that no one gives them work. They think they have to be Van Gogh and suffer enormously. They don't have the political savvy to make it through. I'm here for the long haul, directing, producing, everything. I'm developing a movie now with an ex-football player about how the team concept prepares Americans for bureaucratic company lives and how the ultimate capitalist sport is pure socialism and . . ."

Cusack is interrupted. He is needed on the set. "Excuse me," he laughs. "I have to stop talking up socialism and return to my $30 million movie."

Bruce Buschel has written for The New York Times Magazine and GQ.