Poised on the brink of mainstream stardom with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Mobsters, Hollywood's former bad boy Christian Slater isn't sure whether he's a hot adult property or still an irrepressible teen prankster.
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An agent once confided to me her personal litmus test for what makes a star a star. "It's simple," she explained.
"Do you or do you not want to fuck them?" By that standard and a few others, Christian Slater has much of Hollywood breathing hard. Ask anyone. Denise Di Novi, who produced Slater's 1989 film Heathers, lauds the "incredible intensity level that separates him from everybody else." Michael Lehmann, that film's director, asserts that "very few actors his age can play as wide a range." Almost to a person, Slater's colleagues proclaim his "sweetness," declare his promise, attest to his--well, "fuck-ability," if you will.
But don't let's all lean back on our collective pillows and light cigarettes just yet, shall we? After all, nearly every year, like a bloody ritual, yet another promising, good-looking boy-man gets sacrificed on the celluloid altar. Most often, an Eric Roberts, Maxwell Caulfield, Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, or Johnny Depp fries or fizzles. A few of these contenders fade and come back reinvented as more durable versions of their former selves. Rarely, a Tom Cruise not only survives the blast, but transcends it. At the moment, it's Slater's turn to feed the fire. Audiences will judge for themselves, after catching him as a rascally sidekick to Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in that $50-million fable, and as relentless "Lucky" Luciano in Mobsters, a $23-million kid gangster flick, whether he's got the stuff to make the leap from teen phenom to grown-up star. Hollywood, if not the world, is watching, and Slater's Pump Up the Volume director Allan Movie voices what sounds like collective industry wisdom: "He's got Nicholson's mystique and Mel Gibson's looks. How can he fail?"
Well, until just over a year ago, Christian Slater seemed hellbent on doing precisely that. He ticked off moviemakers by not showing up for work. He partied hard, alienated friends, distanced co-workers, and worked overtime to spread his rep for being bad news. He drew jail time and five years probation for two driving drunk arrests within two years. Then, self-redemption: addiction treatment and public acts of contrition in interviews. He regained his driver's license, dropped fast-lane friends, and asserted his autonomy by looking outside of his family for career direction. And he showed up for big roles.
On the day I meet Slater, he zooms into a burgers-and-grease-emporium-in-a-railroad-car on the Sunset Strip in the black Saab that two Decembers ago got close and personal with a couple of phone poles during a police chase. The car looks fine, he looks a little ragged (oh, alright, movie star ragged) in post-Brat Pack, politically correct mufti: serious black sun-glasses, a letterman jacket, showy boots, jeans. A nasty head cold puts an added layer of texture onto the rubbed-raw voice that fools some into mistaking him for older than 21. Some of the carousing shows, not unflatteringly, in his wide open face, but more in the bracing sardonic streak that cuts the boyishness.
"I pulled some wild stunts, slept through entire days," Slater tells me as we begin to talk about his recent past. "I was on a real self-destructive course, staying up all night partying or sometimes just staying up all the night-- like the time I had to loop Tucker with Francis Ford Coppola, do a wardrobe fit-ting for Heathers, finish an episode of 'L.A. Law' and missed two out of the three." Slater is the first to admit it was angry, self-destructive behavior. When he mentions a People magazine interview that quoted Winona Ryder as saying that her Heathers co-star so "scared" her that she once locked herself in her trailer, he says, "I was actually scary," and describes his non-sober self as "not the most positive guy in the world, a monster in some ways. Maybe I was born with anger, or whatever. Maybe it was the weird, scary roles I was playing. I was dealing with a lot of shit, desperately trying to find out who the real me was. When I finally just stopped trying to fight for something I wasn't, I just sat back and said: 'This is the guy I'm stuck with. I've got to be happy with it or why go on?'
"I got treated," he says, quietly, rattling the ice in his cupful of soda, "and I retired from drinking. I've been to a couple of AA meetings and it's pretty good. This last year I've gotten to know people I can respect, who have a good head on their shoulders. That's where I'd like to get to: to just enjoy myself."
Up close, chasing artery-clogging junk food with count-less Marlboros, raking back his tumbledown hair, Slater says he can feel the difference now that his career has heated up. "I've made a big mistake," he says, chin in his hand, "one I'll never do again. I used to beg my agent: 'Just keep me working or I'll go crazy.' Well, be careful what you wish for. I went straight from Robin Hood to Mobsters and right after this, I'm doing a movie in San Francisco, and I'm bushed."
And he looks it. What's more, on Mobsters, in which he co-stars with Patrick Dempsey and Richard Grieco, there's been talk of bad blood, fistfights on the set. (More about that later.) Still, you figure, he's young, he'll recover. But the more he talks the more he convinces me, now that he has aligned a CAA agent, high-powered business manager, and personal publicist to help win him stardom, that he was a happier camper when his career was a tad cooler. "I used to concentrate on one fucking project at a time," he says, earnestly, staring off. "Now, at the advice of people--damn good advice--I've done one movie after another that will really get seen by the public." He sighs. "I can't have future things on my shoulders when I'm supposed to be concentrating on one thing at the moment. I try and stay in the moment as much as possible, because, if I project too far, I fuck myself up completely. Fear gets thrown in quite a lot. I don't want to worry about being as good as I was in my last movie or knowing whether I'm being judged or on the US magazine 'In and Out' list. I've just got to take things one day at a time," he says, drawing on another cigarette. "This fucking business is brutal, pressured, so full of abuse. You could be destroyed."
Slater narrows his gaze at clouds that bitch up the sky-blue horizon, ambivalence weaving in and out of his conversation like a recurring mantra. He sounds conflicted about making the move from irrepressible teen to responsible man. On the one hand, he assures me that he is now "disgustingly safe," having been upright, sober, and accident-free for well over a year. On the other, he often just can't help letting things rip: on sighting a Jeep-ful of beauties ("Whoa, will you take a look at that?"), or, thinking he has spotted Robert Shaye, the boss of New Line, whom he blames for "screwing up" the release of Pump Up the Volume ("Hey, isn't that Shaye ambling into the retirement home?"), the imp tears out of him.
Consider his rap on making Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. At first, it's new Christian. He can't say enough about the "outta sight, amazing fun" he had working with Morgan Freeman or with Kevin Costner, "such a real guy, a warm-hearted personality who definitely has what it takes to be Robin Hood." And director Kevin Reynolds, a close friend of $8-million star Costner, is "a sweet guy, who depended a lot on the actors, which is great." But let's get earthbound here. This is a project Morgan Creek Productions and Warner Bros. rushed into production to preempt two other studios' Robin Hoods. Breakneck pre-production and a frenzy of locations in England and France helped put the show weeks over schedule and millions over budget. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the film's Maid Marian, recently described to me the shooting as "anarchy, the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing."
Perhaps noticing my eyes glaze over as he spouts the party line, Slater's reminiscences turn slightly less up-beat, slightly more, I suspect, Christian. "The fact that there were so many Robin Hoods out there, we were forced to rush right in. Four weeks [pre-production time] to do a film that massive? Suicidal. I went in saying, 'I'll play any part to be in this,' but--you know the instinct you usually get to do a project?--that really wasn't there. It was the chance to work with some really great people. I had a tough time with 'Will Scar-let.' He was never the character I wanted him to be. I wanted him to be tough, but he sort of became..." He breaks off, shrugging, waving his hand dismissively, fires up another cigarette, and takes a long drag. Slater want-ed to play jaunty like, say, Indiana Jones, while Reynolds demanded such touches as his soulfully crying, James Dean-like. Or, as one of Slater's previous directors put it: "They clearly did not get Christian--their loss."
"With a fairy tale story, you just sort of go in and try to do the best job," says Slater. "I was so out of it on the movie that, from day to day, I didn't know what was happening. On scenes where I wasn't sure what to do, I would go to [Costner's] trailer and he'd help me out. We'd walk off together and go over the scene a million different ways. [Costner] said: 'It's not an easy position to be the gay because it's all on your shoulders.' I learned that that's true. It's really your ass."
Slater got a chance to appreciate the truth of Costner's counsel on the risks of being a leading man when he landed the top dog role in Mobsters, in which he plays "Lucky" Luciano, circa 1917 to 1930. The movie, which Slater de-scribes as "souped up history," dramatizes the takeover by young-thugs-to-be Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello (acted by fellow cute guys Dempsey, Grieco, and Costas Mandylor) of the turf of deadly old capos played by Anthony Quinn, F. Murray Abraham, and Michael Gambon. Co-written by Oscar nominee Nick Kazan, featuring plumy Richard Sylbert sets and killer Ellen Mirojnick costumes, Mobsters is clearly showpiece stuff, a career maker or breaker.
"I've done my best to learn Italian and really create a character, but, every now and then I can't believe I'm playing Lucky," says Slater, who nearly didn't. Slater was reportedly to have played the conniving, brilliant Lanksy for the film's earlier director, Luis Mandoki, who exited the project after Universal kept saying "Summer movie" while he kept demanding Once Upon a Time in America-like script rewrites. Enter Michael Karbelnikoff, a director of TV commercials for Levi's 501s and 7-Up, who had never before made a feature. With weeks to go before shooting, Karbelnikoff thought he had Matt Dillon or Johnny Depp locked up to play Luciano. Both actors were apparently uneasy about the short prep time, which included crash sessions in Italian dialect with a coach. "[Producer] Steve Roth and I could have gotten other people," Karbelnikoff observes, "but we said, 'Jesus, maybe the best thing to do is get Christian,' who has no pretentious-ness, lots of self-deprecating humor, and is really just a gay." With about a week to prepare, Slater got bumped up to the lead. Patrick Dempsey, who had been in contention with such actors as Fisher Stevens, got the Lansky role instead. By such flukes are careers made. And unmade.
"These guys are really, really good actors," says Slater, toying with a fry and again taking the high road when asked how he and his ambitious co-stars are getting on. "Costas Mandylor and I just abuse each other's egos as badly as possible, so, when we shoot, we're just as relaxed as we possibly could be. That's the way I like to work." And what about the reports that he's not getting along with co-star Dempsey? "I'm not about to name names or anything," he says, quietly, "but I'm also finding out what it's like to work with somebody who's Method. If they're supposed to be angry in a scene, they're just not going to talk to you all day. There have been some interesting moments when I'd be doing a scene and this Method person would out of nowhere come up and shove me as hard as he could. I held back. It really pissed me off that I had to get an X-ray for my chest after doing that scene with him. It pissed me off that there were no apologies. I was getting pummeled. I was bruised. It still hurts and it was three weeks ago. But, I've learned acceptance is the answer to all my problems and heh-heh-heh--" he grins, pure sulfuric Nicholson, circa The Witches of Eastwick, "ya gotta remember, everybody's God's child and all that stuff. I can stop a take if I really feel that it's getting out of hand. I've learned that I don't have to hit people or any of that bullshit. Even though it was like, oh God, death in my veins."
Sounds good, but, days after Slater tells me this, reporters announce that Patrick Dempsey is off the movie for a spell to recuperate from a broken nose. Slater's handiwork, or not? I'll have to wait until my next meeting to ask him.
Luckily, Slater's been in rehearsal for the varied vicissitudes of an actor's life--the ups and downs, the trips to AA, and the rumors of fisticuffs, among other things--ever since he can remember. He grew up in New York City, the son of stage and TV soap actor Michael Hawkins and casting director Mary Jo Slater. When he was three months old, his mother, working on a stage show, hauled him onstage and hoisted him over her head to declare: "This is your life, my son!" His parents split up when he was five, but when his mom landed him, at seven, a small part on "One Life to Live" and the crew applauded, Slater recalls, "I was hooked." He attended the Professional Children's School, at which he remembers lighting up a cigarette in class, "just to get kicked out," and dropping out mere months before graduation. Often with his mother's help, he began landing movie roles. If something about him seemed to bring out the Humbert Humbert in Hollywood, Slater caught on fast. At 12, he insisted on wearing a body stocking for The Invisible Boy when the script called for him to get naked. At 14, in Twisted, "a piece of shit I did when I didn't know how to handle myself," he recalls, another character pantsed him.
Perhaps it was having to don Maybelline and drag, at 15, for The Legend of Billie Jean that made him willing a year later, when asked to show his all playing a wenching, pint-sized Watson in a monk's cowl to Sean Connery's ecclesiastical Sherlock in The Name of the Rose. "1 pulled Sean Connery aside," he recalls, and said, 'You've done a lot of love scenes. How do I do this?' He said, 'Don't think about it, just go with it, breathe, and do it.' Here I was, sixteen and naked while this crew of Italians, French, and Germans covered that fucking scene from every angle." Upon finishing that first love scene, he tells me he went back to a more congenial pastime: playing at making love-- with his pillow. His pillow? "Oh, yes, the pillow and I really got it on many times," he recalls, laughing. "Oh, it was the greatest. I didn't even need an 8×10 or anything. I just--" he grunts in mock passion, "loved it. Before I moved on to the real thing, it was me and my pillow. I suppose now I'll have pillows sent to me in the mail. That'd be good."
With his mother (and perhaps the pillow), Slater relocated in 1987 to Los Angeles, where he began to win industry attention for his performances in a series of movies little-seen by the public: Tucker, Gleaming the Cube, The Wizard, and Personal Choice. Finally, in Heathers, Michael Lehmann's stylish offender about suicide, homicide, and the tyranny of teenage cliques, he played "Jason Dean" with almost lethally seductive charisma, and his career took on a new heat. Though he refused to peel down during a strip croquet game sequence, it didn't matter. The teenies wanted him anyway and the movie shot him to the top of the list of new guys.
About this time, Slater's wild rep came into focus. He embroiled himself romantically with his Heathers leading lady. Make that ladies. When shooting began, he and Kim Walker, who had been his steady since their New York high school days, were just breaking up. "I don't know if the director knew that, but he hired her, which was fine," says Slater of the actress Michael Lehmann cast as venal Heather Chandler. Then came Winona Ryder. "I didn't know much about Winona at the time," he says, "but we were together in every scene, every moment and we just started hanging out, enjoying each other's company." And stuff.
But Slater blanches at the mention of Ryder's having portrayed their romance, in Rolling Stone and Movieline, as one giant spoof-o-rama. "I fell in love with the girl," he says, huskily. "I really didn't know we were playing a game. We did do something once, like a couple of fucking lunatics, when we were doing a thing at Lincoln Center and got the idea to tell the whole fucking group of people we'd gotten married. And then, we were going to do it, like, that night. We went to a couple of parties and I got pretty out of it and we just lost track of what our initial plan was. That's a blessing for both of us because we were definitely way too young to be married.
"I love the girl," he continues, jamming out a cigarette, and lighting another. "I think she's a great actress. I'd work with her again in a second. She's very hot. Extremely sexy. I guess, in a way, we did sort of play some games with people. I was, like, in a fantasy world with this girl. It was real for me. I didn't take her to the Academy Awards just for the image thing of it. I wanted to be with her. I liked her. I wanted to date her. Hang with her." He cuts himself off, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand and smiling slowly. "This is starting to sound like the pitiful lover. Hey, she's young. I'm young. I think we both needed to slow down, definitely not rush into any-thing. It's great what's happening with her and Johnny Depp, that she's met somebody that's really terrific."
It is perhaps ironic that Slater and Ryder seem to have emerged as the most pursued young actors of the moment. "It'd really be fun to do a sequel to Heathers with her," he says, a slow grin playing across his face.
Say there were a Heathers II (the mind reels). Would Slater try again his by-now infamous take on Jack Nicholson, whom he calls "the best actor going"? "The character's name was 'Jason Dean' and I didn't want to fucking do that" he patiently explains. So, instead of riffing on James Dean's tortured, combustible martyr, he did Smilin' Jack, right down to the eyebrow-waggling, the manic out-bursts, and the drawling, stoned hipster's speech rhythms.
"If I make a move now, like raise my eyebrows in Young Guns II," he snarls, "some fucking critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?" But did he get any response from Nicholson after the homage? "Never, the bastard," he says. "But I called him. I was just out there one time at a party and this girl I was with happened to have his number. So I called, his maid answered the phone and I said: 'Hi, this is Christian Slater. Where's Jack?.' She went and got him and after he said 'Hello?' I went on with this whole spiel until I thought I heard the phone go 'Click!' There were all these people at the party there listening to me, you know, and I didn't want to look like a complete asshole, so I kept talking. 'Oh, yeah, let's play tennis,' and all this--just out to lunch, gone, for like ten minutes. And at the end of it, I hear his voice go: 'Uh-huh.' He never hung up and heard me say all this shit. I was really out there, so I totally wussed out and hung up on the man. I said: 'I can't go on. I'm going to kill myself now.' " Although Slater hasn't gone out of his way to either duck or seek out Nicholson since, he says that a mutual acquaintance recently told him how funny Nicholson thought the call was. "At least," he says, grinning, "I feel safe in that."
Slater continued to romance his leading ladies on Pump Up the Volume, filmmaker Allan Moyle's acerbic stinger about a shy high school misfit who reigns by night as the king of pirate radio. The relationship he developed with co-star Samantha Mathis apparently ended, however, just as soon as director Moyle yelled "Cut!" after their last love scene. Ryder? Walker? Mathis? Does Slater aim to become this generation's romancer of leading ladies as Warren Beatty was to his? "If the script is great," he explains, leaning conspiratorially over the table, "you get such great chemistry going. You get to say all those things you never would normally. Once the script isn't there anymore, it's like, 'Fuck, I'm not that character I was playing.' And the other person is like: 'What's this? Who are you now?' So, you sort of just go, 'Well that was fun, wasn't it? You go on with your life, I'll go on with mine and hope that we'll get to do this again.' "
Unlike Beatty, Slater apparently does not get every woman he sets out to conquer. For instance, there's the story that luscious actress Sharon Stone reportedly declined Slater's repeated pro-positions that they liven up a little downtime during the making of Personal Choice with a roll in the hay. Slater supposedly chided her for "missing the thrill of a lifetime." "Oh, God, this kills me," he says, turning crimson and hooting when I remind him of the rumor. "It's true," he says, looking sheepish. "But you know what? To this day, I have moments where I reflect back and regret that nothing happened. She's one of the sexiest, hottest babes around. But it all happens for a reason. I've met somebody really terrific, someone really sweet and stable." Slater says he's so happy now with 25-year-old Nina Peterson, an actress he met one night while clubbing, it causes him to reexamine his old ways. "I used to get really pissed off if someone looked at the girl I was with. I was a jealous, protective bastard. Now, if there's an argument, instead of getting out of the relationship, I stay and we work things through together. I've spent a lot of time running from things, thinking I was missing out on other things. It's interesting for me to actually not be running from something. What I've got is really good, so why screw it up for myself?"
Okay, so he's set the record straight on his rep as a hit-and-run artist, but what about the whispered rumors that he was monstrous--and loaded--while making Pump Up the Volume? Did he really demand that no one speak to him or look him in the eye? Slater shoves back a cascade of hair and expounds upon "the malarkey of the media" in reporting his so-called bad behavior on the set. "One day there was a lot of press people there and they were just told, like, 'Stay out of my way for a moment while I just go do a scene. Don't talk to me now, wait until after the shot's over.' Some-how, that sort of escalated." According to Moyle, Slater was trying to do "something magical" while set visitors were being paraded in and out a door, and merely announced: "I can't have them doing that while I'm doing this." Since the resulting performance had moments of such riveting intensity that Slater seemed in training for future revivals of Lenny or Burn This, okay, maybe he needed his space to pull it off. But what about the drinking? "A six-pack at the end of the day for a 19-year-old?" said Moyle, sounding a bit annoyed when I asked him. "I mean, people drive drunk in L.A. when they come home from dinner. What sensitive 19-year-old isn't doing a Holden Caulfield?"
Slater calls Pump Up the Volume the last movie on which he "now and then had a nip of beer, or something, while I was working." According to associates, Slater at the time was "undergoing a very public display of some pretty basic teenage stuff, all of it exponentially intensified by the spotlight." Maybe so, but most teenagers don't have to undergo breaking off professional ties with their mother. Mary Jo Slater, aside from then being a vice-president of talent at MGM, had until that time continued to advise him on his career. "It wasn't easy for either of them," remarks an associate, "but the king must die." No one's saying whether it was his mother who got him into his next career moves--which would certainly justify firing anyone--but Christian defends at least one of these strange choices. If he says nothing of being stranded in the horrifyingly silly Tales From the Dark Side, he argues that there was nothing wrong about looking horrifyingly silly plugging Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a national TV commercial.
Slater rationalizes the whole thing as having come about because he want-ed to get his younger brother on camera. The younger brother demurred at the last minute and Slater went ahead and shot the spot, waxing ecstatic alongside his stepbrother and stepsister. "Fuck it," he argues, "I loved that movie, and I got more fans from the commercial than I've ever had." But Christian Slater, movie star, posing as a normal guy, endorsing movies to his fans? Can this be how Clark Gable made it to the top, or for that matter, Tom Cruise? He sees the point. "I guess it comes from my not believing that I really rate, you know?"
Now, after what Mobsters director Michael Karbelnikoff calls Slater's "reincarnation, after the booze and drugs," the actor seems prepared to listen to the advice of those who would appear to know better, if anyone in Hollywood really does. "This is definitely not going to be a film where I appear to be the most attractive," he says, with appealing earnestness. "I get a scar on my face and a droopy eye. I'm doing the best I can to be somebody else." Days later, when I meet with Slater again on the Mobsters set, he's cutting a commanding figure, gang-ster hair greased back, studded with flashy rings and poured into sleek threads, as he shoots a glitzy Mobsters nightclub scene where "Lucky" ogles a hoochy-koo chorus girl number. When it's over, he struts over and hits on a stunning dancer, played by Lara Flynn Boyle.
The previous week's papers have widely reported not only the animosity between Slater and Patrick Dempsey but also the on-the-set incident during which Dempsey's nose was busted. Dempsey is off somewhere healing while Slater, looking every inch the movie star, works the room between takes like an attention-starved, happy-go-lucky kid. "Patrick and Christian have definitely had their ego battles on this movie," Karbelnikoff comments during a break, like an affable referee. "At times, it's been really helpful for the film, at other times, detrimental."
Mobsters co-star Anthony Quinn, brimming with Zorba the Greek gusto, predicts that Slater "is going to be a wonderful actor, once he gives up playing with video games that are taking him over." Quinn, who's watched a lot of flavor-of-the-month actors come and go in his career of over 250 movies, makes no effort to hide his bafflement: until he'd worked with Slater, he'd never heard of a romantic action lead of a multimillion dollar movie ducking away whenever possible to diddle with Nintendo games.
Indeed, when the company moves in for close-ups as Slater makes his moves on Boyle--a scene requiring the two to trade smart talk as he maneuvers her away from her gorillas--he seems less the grown lady-killer than the awfully nice teen kid who really would rather be racking up computer game points. Karbelnikoff wants a retake. Between set-ups, Slater tells me it isn't the first time Karbelnikoff's asked him to turn on the juice. "I don't go out to do a scene thinking, 'Boy, I'm going to be really sexy now,' " he says, looking abashed. "The other day, I knew I was in the toilet with a girl I had to do a scene with. I didn't know where I was going. I was all over the place. [Karbel-nikoff] said, 'At least look at her.' I didn't feel sexy. I didn't feel anything at all. God knows how that'll look." Although screen-writer Nick Kazan admits he "prays for the best from all the guys," it's Slater who must sizzle--or perish. (Kazan himself directed Slater as a hired killer in "The Professional Man," an episode of HBO's "The Edge.") But can a guy whom Kazan calls "basically sweet, with a mischievous streak and a devilish look" dazzle in the kind of role that has been a star-maker for actors from James Cagney to Andy Garcia?
"Want some Gatorade?" Slater asks when we duck into his trailer during another break. He wings one of the "36 frigging, uncomfortable collars" he wears in the movie across his posh trailer onto a countertop. The mobile phone scarcely stops ringing, and taped to a mirror is a list of fans dying for autographs. Favorite foods are spirited in for lunch, and a violin case with "Lucky Luciano" inscribed on a brass plate--a gift from Rick Kurtzman, his Creative Artists agent--sits displayed. Grown-up, big star trappings. On the other hand, there's plenty of plain old guy junk: boots, jeans, and a T-shirt flung to the four winds, his girlfriend's photo proudly displayed. The photo of his lady love makes me ask whether Slater's shedding his Peter Panitis. The answer comes back: Well, to a point. After sharing Hollywood Hills and Westwood bachelor digs with Winston, a mountainous Akita, toys, and Nintendo paraphernalia, Slater says he recently bought a home in the Valley, furnished, at the moment with nothing except a bed and TV. "The way I like it," he says. Anyway, he claims his work dance card is too jammed to go furniture shopping.
Though Slater talks about going after roles with such directors as Peter Weir and Spielberg, for the time being he will have to con-tent himself with playing a modern-day San Franciscan in Gun for Hire (no relation to the old Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film noir|, and then The Ride-Along, a rude comedy by Nick Kazan. Now that he's looser, away from the pressures on the set, I'm itching to pop the burning questions: how badly did he hate Dempsey and how did it feel smashing his nose? But, I decide, better leave that stuff for last, in case he decides to throw me out. Instead, how about some of the other rumors people have tried out on me when they heard I was going to interview Slater? I tell Slater how several people told me they had heard that he charges a reading fee to writers who submit scripts to him.
"Is that the word?" he says, pounding his leg and cackling. "If somebody's raking in some cash here, where's my percent-age? Fuck--this is really news to me. I've stayed so out of touch with all the behind-the-scenes stuff. All I know is I get a script, read it, and if I like it, I'll do it." Alright, but how about those rumblings--the kind you hear about nearly every young actor in Hollywood these days--that his sexual tastes may be less conventional than his career advisors might like people to believe? "I know the truth," he says, looking mighty amused, "so it doesn't really matter to me what [anyone else] says. Anybody that knows me per-sonally pretty much knows that I'm very into women. I do love women. I mean, who knows, maybe I'll get struck on the head with lightning and I find that I really like guys, but I really, really doubt it. I'd really much rather have [men] as friends."
Alright, it's time. "I did not break Patrick's nose," Slater says levelly, laughing away the question. "Actually, it's gotten pretty good. Things are pretty calm, pretty mellow." So, who rearranged Dempsey's features and what exactly happened during the shoving match that broke out between them on the set? Diplomatically, Slater urges me to get the story from others. Fine. "Patrick isn't one of the boys," says Michael Karbelnikoff. "The others are guy guys. In the past, when he's come onto a project, it's always been 'the Patrick Dempsey show.' We had a scene where we were creating an argument, which Christian and Patrick were both trying to make as realistic as possible. It's a classic situation of Method player working with a non-Method player, where one guy gets all emotional. After a certain number of takes, their emotions got the best of them. [Patrick] basically incited it out of Christian. The people that got kicked and scratched were Costas and Richard [Grieco] because the scene required them to pull them apart. I just fucking lost it-- with Patrick, with Christian, with everybody, and said: 'This isn't about people getting hurt.'"
A pair of technicians who overhear this conversation take me aside a few moments later, and put it even more bluntly: "Christian didn't sock Patrick," one says. "But a lot of us would like to." "We each have our different styles of working," slater says, when I return to his trailer and tell him what I've heard. "I think with pretty much everybody, I wear my heart on my sleeve, try to be as open and honest with people as I can. You get back what you put out. If I treat somebody with respect, I expect to be treated the same way. If that's what I'm getting back, there's nothing more to say," he says, the very picture of cool and calm. A second later, he explodes in laughter: "Then again, maybe that's just Lucky talking." As he launches into an elaborate story about how he prepared for the role of Luciano, I think at first he's trying to bury the subject of the competition among the co-stars. Wrong. "One of the movies I watched was the one where Jimmy Cagney stuck the grapefruit in his girlfriend's face," he says, referring to Public Enemy, made in 1931. "Cagney was brilliant, just a ball of fire--the littlest guy nobody could mess with." He pulls himself up to his full height, and asks me, "Did you know that I'm the shortest guy on this movie?"
I want to remind him of the old Hollywood axiom, "Short guys make movie stars," but before I can, an assistant ducks his head into the trailer. "Sorry for the lack of warning, Christian, but you're needed on the set. Now." "Bummer," Slater mutters, every inch of a Valley teen, and strides toward the set.