Michael J. Fox: Keep it Small

By the time "Family Ties" came calling, Fox had been offered a role in a play at the Coronet Theater, a part he would've taken over the Alex Keaton role had it not been for the tax issue still hanging over his head.

"I had to do something that was gonna make me some money real fast. That, or go back to Canada, and I probably couldn't have come back to the States because I owed the IRS. Then when I went in, read for "Family Ties," Gary Goldberg hated me. He didn't want to hire me. They had Matthew Broderick in mind. I figured I blew both jobs at once. Then something, Kismet, or the aligning of the planets, or what-ever--something just pulled me back from the edge. Something just said, Alright, okay--just fuckin' with ya. Now here's all the good shit.' I was just at the edge of the cliff. My momentum was even over the cliff. In a period of three short weeks," Michael snaps his fingers, "Bing, bing, bing. I had this new apartment up in the Hollywood Hills, people liked what I was doing, I'm making a lot of money and sitting by the pool saying, 'Whoa, what the hell was that?'"

We're both staring at the new retaining wall, fashioned from gigantic square logs, the kind they use to make planter boxes in front of Polynesian restaurants and, indeed, it sullies the little paradise back here. When an attendant brings him the Pepsi he ordered-- since it's already been poured in a glass, we have no way of knowing if Elton John or Michael Jordan was in the kitchen switching it with a Coke, flouting Fox's past mega-endorsement with 'The Choice of a New Generation,"--Michael is defending a remark he made about how he hoped when his son, Sam, gets older, he'll think his dad's a fanner [the Foxes own a farm in Vermont].

"The perception of this kind of separate show business community--that feeling of inflated self-worth that supposedly comes from doing this at whatever level--that's what freaks me out. The thing that's scary about this community is that there are so many people who have the physical, and the career, and the financial components, that, put together, can make someone feel self-important, more valuable than other people. They're all here, and that stuff really scares me. I'm not interested in that and I try to distance myself from it as much as I can."

And for the most part, Fox has succeeded, trading in the storied black Ferrari and Laurel Canyon bachelor days for the American Gothic lifestyle in Vermont with a wife and a kid. Whereas his problems once centered around how to get up after a night's worth of hard partying to do Barbara Walters, he's now more concerned with making sure Sam gets the right pet turtle. "You gotta get the land ones. The water turtles can cause brain fever." Still, what Fox can't change is that as an adjunct to being a successful actor, he is compelled to become a successful salesman. With the release of each new film, Fox has to kick the Vermont peat moss from his shoes and pound the pavement to sell himself all over again, making the rounds with the usual suspects.

"You go on Arsenio, and it's probably a little more stuffy than people think. I'm always a little more comfortable in the Letterman environment. He comes around back stage and it's like, 'Hi, Mike. Hi, Dave. Can I have a soda: Okay. I'm gonna go with the brown shoes. Sounds good/ instead of 'WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!' Arsenio is very polite and engaging and interested in what you're saying, but you're sitting really far away from the audience and they're just making an incredible amount of noise while all of this is going on. You say something and it's like a big roar from the other side of this cave. WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!' I might have a little witty story to tell but I don't have the meat to feed that beast, you know what I mean? But the studios love you to do that show because the demographics are right."

When "Family Ties" rode atop the Nielsens and the first Back to the Future installment was released, Fox was invited to join the cavalcade of celebrities who've shed a tear for Barbara Walters.

"When they first came to check my place out, they hated my couch. I told them, I don't care what you do--bring in a new couch, that's fine, I had plans the night before the interview. I told them, I'm gonna be sleeping--you get all set up, you knock on my door, I'll come out and we'll do the interview. So my publicist comes, knocks on my door. 'We're ready to go--' I come out--I had a hunch of beers the night before--and it's completely surreal. I walk out of my bedroom and my living room is completely redecorated. There's flowers all over the place and Barbara Walters is sitting on a couch. They had a catering truck in the back yard. It was one of those moments where you go, 'Oh, far out.' "

Having to endure the blathering strokes of Barbara Walters or Arsenio's preposterous Topo Gigio routine must be minor annoyances compared with what both Fox and his wife have been through as a result of their celebrity status. The tabloids declared open season on their resolve to have a small, private wedding. Under the aegis of a security expert who specializes in "threat assessment," the Foxes succeeded in beating back a media blitz that included six helicopters, dozens of spies and informants, and wads of funny money the likes of which haven't been seen since Watergate. At what must've been a particularly desperate point in time, one strategy for the National Enquirer involved renting a llama suit to infiltrate the wedding grounds.

When the couple still lived in Los Angeles, it took a court order to stop a woman from sending hundreds of threatening letters to Tracy. On another occasion, one of the tabloids managed to snap a picture of Michael and Tracy leaving an evening function somewhere.

"There was this big crush of people, and we were kind of moving out of the way. A cop was there, holding people back--it was a great picture--but we looked frightened. We weren't of course--but maybe I was sneezing or whatever. We just looked that way. So they wrote a story that we were being stalked by some fan. We weren't, but that's not what mattered," says Michael, ruefully. When I suggest that it's probably the price you pay, he spills his Pepsi in the grass.

"Yeah, but I hate that. I mean, who's the adjudicator here? 'Here's the price you pay, and you and you,' When someone steps in front of your wife, pulls a fork from her mouth, takes a bite of her food and says, 'Here, can you sign this?' Kiss my ass, that's the price I pay? Get away from me.

"Yeah, it's gonna happen," Michael continues. "So you educate yourself, I mean I didn't want to go the bodyguard route, so we educated ourselves through a security outfit. What to do, how to recognize a high-risk situation. For example, someone comes up and says, 'Hi, I really love your movies,' or even 'Hey, I can't stand your stuff,' that's fine, too. But when someone comes up and says, 'I keep having a dream about you--then you make movies about my dreams, and that's so weird.' Then you see this person again, I had one person, I saw him in five different cities. And I thought, how in the hell does this person know where I'm gonna be? And that's when you call the security person--'Just so you know...'"

Michael is lying on his back in the grass now, as if the collective scent of the Star, the Globe, and the Enquirer have put him out. Behind us, a couple of kids splash each other in the Jacuzzi, They're either unaware of the fact that Marty McFly's lying prone on the lawn in front of them, or they have the good sense to let him be, or they've seen Michael Jackson enough times in public to be suitably jaded. Somewhere in his somnolent funk, Michael's managed to extract something positive from the whole damnable press experience, "On one level, doing an interview, it's like psychotherapy. Most of us arc not encouraged to talk about ourselves. It's considered a bad thing to spend a lot of time talking about yourself. I get to do it and people are excited about it. Everybody's happy--editors, publicists, the studio's happy and I'm ultimately a little bit healthier maybe, because I know what I think about things. Sometimes you really don't know how you feel about things a lot of times until you say it.

"What I'm not crazy about is the idea, embraced by certain elements of the press, that people who arc in show business are tainted--the idea that, sure we celebrate them, but ultimately they're really bad people who have awful illnesses and terrible marriages.

"Some guys, you gotta feel for them--they have this bad rap, or they're difficult or whatever. Others just have it tough. You eat shit for 10 or 15 years off-Broadway or here in L.A., and it's not fun to try and be an actor and not succeed. It's not like you're selling ceramic ashtrays and if people don't like it you can go make something else--Kabuki fans, whatever--you are all you got. But you go through 10 years like that, then, it's like, 'Now I get it, now I get it--you're great! Here's a bunch of money, here's a bunch of power.' How can you not feel like saying, 'Thank you very much,' "Michael points to each imaginary asshole"'Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you.' I can see that--I don't condone it, I haven't fallen into it, but I can see it. I'm probably more neurotic than people think, because I'm afraid to do what is the easiest thing to do, which is to say, Great, man, I won the race. Here I am. Perfect. Now I'm gonna have people do my bidding, and I'm gonna really wield my status and if I don't want to talk to somebody I'm gonna tell them to piss off and I know I'm so important that I can tell them to kiss my ass anyway,'"

What seems to set Michael Fox apart is that even when he finishes out of the money, his likability is able to command a huge salary ("I get more than River Phoenix and less than Bruce Willis," he kidded recently. Sources claim five million a picture as a ballpark figure) and his loyal following diminishes nominally, if at all. The usual assessment of his box-office airballs is: "The picture stank, but Michael J. Fox was great." While some might suggest that Fox could use a hit after The Hard Way's disappointing numbers (not to mention Bright Light,. Big City, Casualties of War, or Back to the Future III), it's difficult to believe that Fox, with an x-factor that puts him in a league with Magic Johnson, and his memorable equanimity in dealing with failure, can't amble along, picking his shots. And while you would think he'd back away from serious roles after the dim reviews of Bright Lights, Big City and Casualties of War, he only shrugs.

"When people say I'm trying to break new ground doing serious roles, I gotta tell ya--I just don't give it that much thought. There's enough angst in acting, when you're trying to play something and you don't buy it. You do it over and over again and you keep going hack, saying, that's bullshit, that's fucking horseshit, I can't buy it, I don't know how to play it. There was a lot of that in Casualties. I love it when they hand you a bit, tell you this was originally meant for Drew Barrymore--but we can make it work for you. Still, every time I do dramatic things, there's something about the process that I'm hooked on. In all the comedy I've done, there are certain facts, absolutes: K--sounds funny--'Crrrack. You can carry my clubs.' Any time you do things in threes they're funny. 'I'm in control--I'm perfectly in control--why would you think I'm not in control?' Threes. There are certain things that you learn in the comedy college--and they're absolutes. You can fuck around with timing, do things to make them more interesting, hut they're absolutes. And I can't find the absolutes in dramatic acting. That makes it fun, but it also makes it so painful. It's really hard, but I keep going hack to it because I like it--and not because of any journalistic catch-all phrase, like 'trying to grow as an actor.' I'd love to do a bad guy role-- I'd have to pay."

Fox mulls over the prospects of his latest theatrical effort, Doc Hollywood. In it he plays a plastic surgeon (Alex Keaton with a stethoscope) who, en route to the reconstructive nirvana of Beverly Hills, gets sidetracked by the more legitimate values of a small town.

"It always cracks me up when people get on my case about a new project: 'Talk about the movie, talk about the movie. The movie, the movie, the movie,' I mean, it's like your head shows up on a magazine rack the same time your head shows up on a movie poster and you hope somewhere along the line that somebody's gonna make the connection. But this movie's dear to my heart, yeah. This is the first time that I've ever taken an idea and found the people that could execute it in a way that I thought it should be. Really, it's the first thing that I've baby-sat all the way through. Doc Hollywood was the first time I was able to con a studio into making a movie that they really shouldn't have made. It's very low-key. There are no car chases. It's just a really sweet story about a bunch of people. It should be a three million dollar movie made with a bunch of guys over weekends over the course of a few years. And it isn't. It's a big budget Warner Bros, movie. And to me, it's an example of the right way to use clout, if you have clout. The way to do it is, Trust me on this. You get your poster with me leaning against a Porsche. And it's gonna say, MICHAEL J. FOX IS DOC HOLLYWOOD! But I get to have a movie at the end of it where I've tried to say something.' "

Warner Bros. approached Fox with the project three years ago, but back then it was a high-concept, fish-out-of-water extravaganza that failed to impress him.

"I told them if it was a little more like Local Hero, I'd be interested." But with Fox remaining noncommittal, the project languished for a few years more until Warner Bros. asked him to meet with director Michael Caton-Jones while Fox was working on The Hard Way.

"Warners said there was a guy who thought he had a handle on the story. They told me he was Michael Caton-Jones, the guy who did Scandal. I said, 'Oh, yeah. Scandal. Makes perfect sense. The guy who did Scandal would want to make this movie about a doctor in the South.' But I met him and this weird, Glaswegian rummy proceeds to lay this story out in a way that really made sense and it was exactly what I was thinking. It was like he knew exactly what I had in mind. He improved on the original concept a hundred fold... it's been a long time since I worked on a movie and everybody really loved it, where crew guys would talk about it in a bar afterwards, how a particular shot was set up, whatever. So I like this movie. It isn't as important to me as my wife or my son, but it's near and dear to my heart. It's not the latest in a long line of inflatable party favors that my company chums out, you know what I mean?"

When Michael is upright again, he levels that over-the-bifocals, gunsight stare, which settles somewhere between my shoulder and the cherub's belly in the fountain behind me.

"Wow, man, we could stand on each other's shoulders, slow-dance with Holly Hunter and look like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, huh?"

It was Michael's stature, perhaps, that ultimately shaped his future ("I feel four feet tall," he joked, accepting his first Emmy), and as one of God's most reluctant slow-dancers, I've shared my own little waltz with a downward-looking world. Growing up short, you are either constantly drawing attention to or deflecting it away from yourself; there is a natural inclination to over-compensate in either direction. Some, not surprisingly, carry it into adulthood with them. The qualitative difference between Mickey Rooney and Napoleon, judging by the former's recent tome, was one having his hand in his own shin, and the other having his up someone else's.

"I think as a kid, being short, it makes you more of a thinker, because your first recourse is not a physical one. You can't fight your way out of a situation--you think or talk your way out of it. And it makes you more premeditated in your thinking. So as you age, you acquire an ability to disarm maybe a little better.

"When you're in the public eye, every time you do something you have to send it off, unaccompanied, with a bull's-eye painted all over it, to get the shit kicked out of it. You constantly have to come back to the truth that you're just a guy with a life, like everybody else. You can recognize that you really love something like acting because it's a valuable and worthwhile craft--it's part of society, in a sense, creating a mirror for society to see its traumas--but it's not brain surgery. They're just movies--they're just little stories where people pretend to be people. So I always drop back from that when people ask me really intense questions pertaining to acting. It's like, just understand this: when you're a kid you say, okay, I'm gonna be an Indian; you're gonna be a cowboy, and that's my job--that's what I do. You can't get too nuts about it. So I'm gonna do the best work that l can do, but I'm not gonna freak out over it, I don't wanna be 55 years old and be miserable because Vincent Canby didn't like me or because USA Today said I wasn't hot anymore. I mean it just is not gonna get my kid dressed in the morning. You keep it small, you keep it happy."

We are standing next to my car, out in the driveway where, had Michael chosen the bodyguard route, the impressions of fat fingertips would be aglow under my biceps. Up the steep hill of Alta Loma Road, you can hear the Saturday traffic tiptoeing across the rampart of Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles's version of The Great Wall of China, Michael is running late for the premiere of the re-release of Spartacus. As I climb into my car, wondering if Michael J. Fox could ever pull off the Kirk Douglas role, he asks if this was my son's first game of the season.

"No, it's the second."

"Huh. So, you guys are oh-and-two then, probably." I'm glaring at his shoulder, reliving the final, agonizing inning of today's game.

"Hey, man," croaks Michael J. Fox, just a guy with a life. "Don't be so sensitive."

__________

Michael Angeli is a screenwriter living in L.A.

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