Kevin Bacon: Bacon Bounces Back

Hero at Large and Only When I Laugh bring no stories to mind, and of Forty Deuce--in which he re-created his off-Broadway role as a gay hustler--Kevin says only, "I thought there was some real magical kind of poetry there."

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, though, we agree on. "Art film," Kevin says.

Quicksilver brings a sour look and a terse remark: "Not a good movie."

"White Water Summer?"

"It was supposed to be a kind of camping movie, then it became about white water. It was endless reshoots; I reshot more in that film than I have in anything else--over a year. In one scene--because of all the reshooting at all the different locations all over the world--I get hit over the head with a rock and fall off this cliff in Northern California, it cuts to a shot of me in midair in Canada, and when I land I'm in New Zealand. I swear."

"End of the Line?"

"An independent film with a small, fun part I wanted to do. I mean, these things come along where somebody says it'll take a couple of weeks and I go for it. The big draw for me was meeting Levon Helm."

"Planes, Trains, and Automobiles?"

"Cameo--no, not even that--I was an extra. I did it to do something with John Candy."

"She's Having a Baby?"

"One of my favorite movies I've ever done. I think it got the short end of the stick. It was very painful for me that it got such a critical bashing. Nobody went to see it."

"Criminal Law?"

"I played a psychotic killer. At one point, Tess Harper says, 'A woman was raped and butchered, and I'm not even sure which came first.'" He laughs.

"Nasty," I say, "but you're pretty charming in it."

"Well, I wanted to make him incredibly charming. He's a Waspy, blue-blood kinda guy. When I found out that Gary Oldman was going to play the other guy, I took it. Gary was in two of my favorite movies that year, Sid and Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears, so I was very happy to work with him."

Odd, perhaps, to bring it up at this particular moment--talking, as we are, about his playing a murdering sicko--but I ask, "Can you see how people might think you're a lot like the characters you play?"

"Okay. Here's the thing that I do. If I see a character's a nice guy, I'll create someone who, when you look in his eyes, you'll see he's darker--deeper--than just 'Mr. Nice Guy.' I look for the thing that gives them some sadness, some anger, some danger, some sort of an edge. Now, if the character is a killer or a racist or ambitious, whatever, then I'll find the nice guy."

"Oh. Then that explains why, in He Said, She Said you play a misogynist, but you almost managed to make her seem overbearing and wrong."

Bacon nods in agreement. "I had to do that. I mean, the guy's the fucking hero of the movie. That's why I like doing these smaller parts sometimes, because the pressure's off in terms of that. I mean, in JFK you don't wanna see a whole movie about that guy Willie O'Keefe." Agreed.

"The Big Picture?"

"Good movie. It was a case of art imitating life. Christopher Guest set the movie up at Columbia when David Puttnam was the head of the studio. But by the time the movie was going, Puttnam had been fired and Dawn Steel had replaced him. The exact same thing happens in The Big Picture. This guy's got this movie he wants to make and the studio executive gets fired and is replaced by a woman."

"Tremors?"

"I'm sorry, I hate to toot my own horn, but it's a very good movie. They sent me the script and I loved it. No other actors were really responding to it. I saw the movie as this fantastic, subtle comedy."

"So, what, they wanted you? How does that work? Is it usually true that filmmakers offer you parts? Or do you go after them?"

"It depends," he says. "Some things I audition for. But there's no formula. I've had 15 auditions for, like, a nothing film by some guy who hasn't done anything--then again, Oliver Stone and Rob Reiner will say, 'You like it? It's yours.' I am starting to realize a pattern: If I really gotta spend a long time waiting to hear about something, it's not gonna work out."

"Now we're up to Flatliners."

"It was the first movie I was in since Footloose that made any money. It did very well. A good career move, certainly. But it was a hard film for me to do, because I had a hard time with the character. He's honest, straightforward, decent--I wondered what the hell I was gonna play." He laughs. "Joel Schumacher's take on it was 180 degrees from mine. I thought the only way to deliver this idea of people medically committing suicide and bringing each other back was to approach it with hyperrealism. His take was to make it as gothic and fantastic as possible. But whatever he did worked."

"Queens Logic?"

"Okay, here's an anecdote," he says, grinning. "We go out to this park in Queens, right under the Manhattan Bridge. It's me, Tony Spiridakis [who wrote the film], Joe Mantegna, Ken Olin and John Malkovich, and we're supposed to be skinny-dipping when some girl steals our clothes. And we have to run naked through the park and jump into the back of this convertible and drive away. 'Great,' I thought, 'this is gonna be fun.' I didn't really wanna get naked in the middle of a New York City park but, you know, it was going to be an interesting night. So the wardrobe people come up to us and say we have two options for things to wear, then we'll do a rehearsal and the director will look to see what parts of what we're wearing he actually sees on-camera, and they'll adjust and cut and double-stick. They said they'd hired a male dresser for the night because they thought it'd be weird for a girl to be doing this for us. Well, they got, like, the gayest guy in New York City to do it. Which is, you know..."

"A good job for him?"

He gives me that fifty-fifty hand gesture. "A good job for him," he agrees. "They hand us these jockstraps; one is like a flesh-colored dance belt, the other is basically a sock--I don't know what else to call it. So we all try these things on and go through rehearsal. Afterward, all of us have to go, two by two, into this trailer with this dresser. He gets on his knees, takes out a pair of scissors, and starts cutting these things off of us and double-sticking parts back on. And they got us these flowing kimono-type robes to wear. And we're covered in baby oil so we'd look wet."

"It sounds like a JFK scene, something Clay Shaw might have set up with Willie O'Keefe," I say.

"Exactly! Exactly!" he says. "I said, 'Look, this is the goofiest shoot, we're gonna be doing this all night long, you gotta get us a case of beer.' They did, and we had so much fun running around with these little socks on."

"Why couldn't you just do the scene naked?"

"Because there were cops there, and New York City law prohibits it. Our asses could be hanging out, but for some reason our dicks had to be covered."

"There's no dick permit?"

"No dick permit."

"Okay," I say. "We covered JFK. Now you've just finished A Few Good Men. Do you have a new policy for choosing movies? I mean, moving directly from JFK to A Few Good Men, from Stone to Reiner, makes for a pretty impressive doubleheader."

"Yes, it's true, I'm more choosy. Career is a part of it, but it's also because I have a family. I want to do movies that I think people are gonna see, for a change. I'm tired of doing things that only one person will tell me they've seen. If I want that, I'll do a play. I've done my turn in the independent market. After I was a big movie star, I went back to independent films because I really believe in them. But I'm fucking sick of it. I want big, mainstream movies. Quality, yes, but big, mainstream movies that people are gonna see."

"You mean--big, mainstream movies so you're a big, mainstream movie star?"

"Yeah," he says, matter-of-factly.

"How does that make you feel?"

"I dunno. I've been a movie star for so long that I don't know what it would feel like not to be one." He pushes his chair back, gets up. "I'm gonna call my old lady. Be right back."

When he returns, we're ready to leave. "Let's go play some miniature golf," I say. "Not far from here, down in Tribeca, an 18-hole mini golf course is installed in a gallery, under the title Putt-Modernism, with each hole designed by a different artist. It's open until midnight." When we get outside, it's pouring down rain, so I start to hail a cab.

"Let's walk," Kevin says, "it can't be that far." It isn't, but--what the hell. Kevin's wet again, and now so am I. He tells me as we walk that he thinks he's related to that philosopher who's accused of writing Shakespeare's plays, but probably not to that other Francis, the disagreeable British painter. Then, out of the blue, this: "You know what I hate?" he asks. "When they pun my name in headlines. Like 'Kevin Bacon Sizzles' or 'Bacon Brings it Home' or 'Kevin Bacon Fries.'"

"At least those are positive," I tell him. "I'd been thinking about calling this piece 'Kevin Bacon: What a Ham!'"

The Artists Space gallery is crowded, hot and noisy; it seems everybody in lower Manhattan wants to play golf tonight. Kevin holds the score card, penciling in our strokes at each hole. He shoots way over par at most of them--at Sandy Skoglund's green, made entirely of what looks like Cheez Doodles; at Cindy Sherman's, where we're given the choice of sinking the ball into either the vagina or mouth of a nude woman; at the Elvis shrine. He remains good-humored about the fact that I am winning.

After I get a hole-in-one at the last green, Kevin hands me the card to total our scores. He didn't get into acting to add and subtract, remember?

We step into the cool air outside. It's stopped raining. We walk to a bar on a nearby corner, and he orders us beers. "Kevin, you know, with this Woody and Mia brouhaha raging, is there something you should tell me now about your home life before it gets out of hand?"

"You mean, am I twiddling the kids?" he says, laughing, flashing that Criminal Law grin. "No. I think if you have to suddenly express your dark side, you should leave the kids alone and go on a random killing spree."

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Stephen Saban is a contributing editor at Details. This is his first article for us.

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