James Caan: The Ultimate Caan Game

Her reaction was great. Just watch the movie and you'll see there's a little cut, because she screamed, 'You fuck! You lied!' and I went, 'What, I'm gonna sit here all day and listen to you two assholes argue?' And then, she laughed. I had a ball with her. She's like another 12-year-old."

Caan may have been laughing all the way, but by the time he, Sally Field and Jeff Bridges did Kiss Me Goodbye in 1982, the town had kissed him off as a box-office contender, and he would not fully reemerge until Misery came along in 1990, followed by the comedy Honeymoon In Vegas. While he stayed offscreen for five years, rumors flew that he was a cokehead. A sex junkie. A recluse. A pauper whose assets were to be attached. Worse. "I was dead broke," Caan recalls. "I owed the government $247,000. Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Bullshit. Absence makes 'em think you're dead. I lost my sister and I couldn't handle it. People say: drugs. They don't know, 'cause I'm not a go-outer. They'd have to be in my home to know what I was doing. I'm not stupid enough to go out and say, 'Here, let's snort some cocaine.' Maybe it's nothing to brag about, but in 30-plus movies I've never missed a day of work in my life. I've never been stoned or drunk a day on a set. It was a self-induced absence. I'm not a highly visible guy. I mean, I don't go to parties. My friends have always been friends not because of what they are, because of who they are. That doesn't put me in the [Hollywood] circles, you know?"

So what did he do in the years we weren't looking? "Spent time with my son, who's fantastic. Coached kids' team sports. Passion became very important in my life. The worst words in the world are 'I don't care.' It was like, 'You don't want to play basketball?' and you say, 'I don't care.' With me it's, 'You don't care, you don't play.' Or, you want to make love? If it's, 'Oh, I don't care,' then fuck you, I'll go jerk off. God, my mother will kill me if she hears that."

Does passion and its absence explain the rumor oft-told by Caan pals about how, during the years when no one would risk hiring him for a feature movie, he turned down huge offers for TV series? "Worse than that," Caan observes, laughing. "It started off as my integrity thing. You know, a guy told me he once looked that word up in the dictionary, and I surpassed the definition. Anyway, I didn't have a penny. The Japanese offered me like a million bucks so that they could come over and shoot my photo to be used on one billboard in one corner in Tokyo. It couldn't be duplicated anywhere else in the world. I said no. I didn't know the product. That's stupidity. Hey, come and ask me now, right? Anyhow, I remember one of those Tuesdays rolled around where I owed the bookmaker money. The miracle didn't happen. So, I go to the guy who was the head of my agency for awhile--a real fucking dick--to borrow $2,000. That same afternoon, they call me into the office: 'Jimmy, you've just been offered a series. Twenty-six weeks, solid, $50,000--maybe $100,000, whatever--a week to start.' 'Nah,' I said, 'can't do it.' They went nuts. 'Aren't you the guy who borrowed $2,000 this morning?' They still remember that to this day."

Integrity. Loyalty. Standing up for what he thinks is right. These themes weave in and out of Caan anecdotes. Last year, he made headlines for agreeing to be a character witness for alleged crime figure Ronald A. Lorenzo. He's my friend, Caan basically insisted to the press. But what's with Hollywood's attraction to the Mafia, anyway? "What Mafia?" Caan says, shooting me an "I-thought-you-were-hipper" look. "I don't want to get into this thing. My best friend comes from Mulberry Street. So, now my best friend is a murderer? What murder? They have an organized crime unit out here. So, they got to prove there's organized crime or they're gonna lose eleven hundred jobs. My friend is the boss of the Bonanno family? I'm loaning him one hundred dollars, two hundred dollars every day.

That's a boss? He's in jail. Am I connected with them in business? No, never in my life. I've never broken the law. And I just wanted people to back off, don't fuck with that guy."

As if on cue, the phone rings. Caan's wife is calling from a phone in another part of the house to say that Caan had just missed a phone call. From Lorenzo. Caan laughs into the receiver. "He's gonna call back? Well, he's in jail, you know. It's difficult." Caan lets out a whoop.

Whatever his drives and demons, Caan has proven to Hollywood that he cares again. And directors like Rob Reiner have fought to get him in big movies like Misery, for which Warren Beatty was originally paged.

"Misery was like a private joke Rob Reiner had," Caan asserts, grinning. "It was, 'Let's get Jimmy, the most hyper son of a bitch on the planet, and put him in bed for 15 weeks.' But it worked." Last year, in Honeymoon In Vegas, Caan played the prototypical sex-struck millionaire, a character Robert Redford would do another version of in Indecent Proposal.

"I haven't seen Redford in the part. Was he as cute as me? So," says Caan, summing up his situation, "I'm working for, like, one-fourth the money that I did when I left. I'm working." And working well, one might add, if not always happily. He's not in love with the movies Hollywood's making these days. "Truth is, today, if it doesn't have a ball in it, I don't watch it. You read the beginning of a script or watch a movie and you know what the end is. Spielberg is a really bad storyteller, terrible, but there's always a magnificent shot. Directors really don't want anything like characters or story to distract from their directorial prowess and special effects. And so many actors you work with are such pompous assholes. They take it so seriously. I'm a clown on the set for four months. I don't give a shit. Kathy Bates on Misery would always be studying her lines the night before. I read the script once, twice, never again. I mean, if you and I are talking and what's going on is that I have a bad stomachache, that's what's important. Actors who study their lines the night before are studying answers to questions they haven't heard yet. There's a lot of actresses, you know, they put a peg in the meter. I'm only going to that level,' so, if something great happens, like a lamp topples over in the middle of the take, that can make for those one or two moments in a movie that make it great. But, no, they go, 'What the fuck was that?'" Caan laughs uproariously, shaking his head.

And where does his For the Boys co-star Bette Midler put her peg? Caan is buddies with director Mark Rydell, for whom he earlier made Cinderella Liberty and the ruinous Harry and Walter Go to New York. He blames Midler and outgoing Fox chairman Barry Diller for the final, fatal outcome of Boys. "I tried to call Mark last night. He's one of those guys that, every time he gets serious, I'll just make a total ass of him. I mean, he's doing a movie with Sharon Stone and I just love to make fun of him--he's a punching bag. I'll go to my grave saying there was a great movie in For the Boys. We shot it and Mark, the editor and I know it. The pain Mark went through on that. It was Barry Diller. Mark was just overpowered every day. Literally every day. I'd say, 'Mark, you've got a contract. You've got plenty of clout. There's such a great movie there. Just play the fucking story. And tell him to get the fuck out of there.' It's not a Bette Midler fucking, motherfucking musical. It's not for the fucking fruits in the bathhouse and the old ladies in New York. It's a story about people. A great, great, great movie was destroyed."

Speaking of alleged demolition jobs, what's Caan's take on what happened with Hide in Plain Sight, a paranoid 1980 thriller with a witness relocation background, which he directed and starred in? Although the movie disappeared overnight, rumors flew that Francis Ford Coppola had edited the whole thing. "Never touched it," Caan swears, hand over his heart. "When he saw my movie, he said, 'This is one of the 10 best pictures I've ever seen in my life.' Conversely, when he showed me Apocalypse, I said, 'You've got two movies over here. The [one] I don't like has like 15 minutes of cerebral horseshit, with nobody giving a fuck about the lead guy. I said, 'You've got to attach him to a family or something.' So that whole thing with [Brando] writing the letter was done after the movie was cut.

"Now, my movie, I want to tell you: I was well satisfied. Vincent Canby wrote one of those columns about how every year, they over-look by far the best movie of the year. This is unsolicited. The truth of the matter is that the fucking asshole that took over UA at the time--what the fuck was his name? He used to buy office furniture for them, I swear to God. Anyway, this motherfucker, they show him the movie. There's no sharks. There's no spaceships going ape-shit. So, the movie comes out to these reviews and it's like, 'Holy fuck,' and meanwhile, there's no posters even made, no nothing. I got wonderful letters, reviews like you can't believe. But I felt bad for the kids in it because they didn't get their rewards; you know? What time you got? Just curious."

I tell him the time. Caan's getting restless but he agrees that there's time enough to talk about his two new movies. Why don't we start with The Program? "It's a Disney movie," Caan shrugs, dismissing the subject. Fine. And how about Flesh & Bone, directed by Steve Kloves and co-starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid? "I was a little disappointed with the cut," Caan admits, "because Steve, who is a real good guy, wants to be so anti-Hollywood. I've never done something like this. Not that it's beneath me, but I'm in a little more than a third of it. The movie's so, like, intricate. I really got into it. I don't think it's going to be a big moneymaker. But maybe it's one you can talk about in your living rooms for awhile."

Any anecdotes about his new Hollywood compatriots? Maybe Meg Ryan, say? Craig Sheffer? Dennis Quaid (perhaps a close second to Caan in his reputation for being a tear-ass)? Or some of the others? "I won't mention names, but in my career, the most talented people invariably are the easiest and nicest to get along with. The ones that are difficult try to camouflage the fact that they haven't got shit to offer. So they complain about frilly things that really don't mean a shit, like their dressing rooms, makeup."

And what gives these days between Caan and the guy who made him a star, the guy he talked down during that hallucinogenic ambulance ride to the hospital?

"I saw Francis just recently in Miami," Caan offers. "He looks great, sensational. I'm so happy Dracula hit, so that he doesn't have to worry about money. I didn't see it, though. I mean, I got pissed off enough seeing The Godfather, Part III. That wasn't Francis," he says of the third installment of Coppola's great American crime trilogy. "I mean, hiring George Hamilton because Bobby Duvall actually wanted some money? Francis was like, 'I'll show you how to make George Hamilton look good.' But Hamilton got one line, then boom, it's over." Aha. Friend or not, Caan is a straight shooter for life.

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Stephen Rebello wrote about Hollywood's premier hairstylists for the September Movieline.

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