A LESS THAN PERFECT GUY

From 1978 to 1988 Craig Wasson had a great run. He played opposite Burt Lancaster in the Vietnam drama GO TELL THE SPARTANS and he was in an ensemble cast of young actors in another Vietnam movie that came out in 1978, the excellent THE BOYS IN COMPANY C. In 1981 he was nominated for a Golden Globe for best new star when he played the lead in Arthur Penn’s FOUR FRIENDS and John Irvin’s GHOST STORY, in which he shared the screen with Fred Astaire and John Houseman. But it’s probably his turn as Jake Scully in Brian De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE that most people remember him from. Playing a ‘disappointing kind of guy’ probably did not help his career. At the end of the eighties, Wasson went mostly into television. And by 2006 he totally disappeared from Hollywood.

You’re doing a lot of audio books these days. How did that start?

A friend of mine knew this editor who did audio books, Bob Walter. So, he brought me in to see if I could do audio books. And the first book they gave me was The Cold Six Thousand. They had me read it. James Ellroy approved it. I’m so flattered he asked me to read the other ones too. As an actor, reading an audio book is like heaven: you get to play all the parts. The only other guy in the room is the sound engineer. And sometimes the director will come through on your headphones, but he usually is in New York or LA. Other than that, you’re the guy.

Then later on, someone called me and said: Stephen wants you to do his next novel. And I was like: Stephen who? And she said: Stephen King. Didn’t you read the review? And I said: What review? Turns out Stephen King had a column in Entertainment Weekly, called The Pop of King, in which he reviews stuff from the media. And he had heard Blood’s a Rover and he really liked it. He wrote a rave review about it. Then King asked me to read 11/22/63, which is a great book. I did some other ones for King and after that he went with Matthew McConaughey. But who could blame him.

In The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover Ellroy writes in these really short, clipped sentences, creating a rhythm. Did that present a challenge for you?

No, I loved that style. I hadn’t really seen it before I was offered those books to read. Because I’m also a musician and I used to have a band – although I’m not doing much with it these days, but if you go on Spotify or YouTube you can find my albums there – I really responded to Ellroy’s style. He’s like a percussionist. Ka-boom-bam-pow-pow! He just used words. He’s great.

You got your first break in 1975 when you were cast in THE BOYS IN COMPANY C. What was life like for you at the time, as a struggling actor?

Life was good. It was interesting, the way I ended up getting that role. I had read the script and it moved me. My brother was in the service. He was not in Vietnam, but he or I could have easily been over there in that nightmare. So, I was thinking about the script and about my brother and I wrote a song, called Here I Am, which ended up in the movie. When I auditioned I brought my guitar, thinking I could maybe play that song for the director or the casting director. And I’m sitting in a room with a bunch of other guys, waiting to go into audition. There’s one guy who asks me why I brought my guitar. I said: I read the script, really loved it and I wrote a song. The guy says: Let’s hear it. At first I didn’t want to, but the guy seemed to have some authority. So, I play my song and he says: That has to be in my movie! Turns out the guy was the writer, Rick Natkin. He took me inside and introduced me to Sid Furie, the director. He said: Listen to this song. Sid listened and said: Yeah, okay. You’re in the movie. That’s how I got the part. I didn’t even have to read for it.

What were your thoughts on the Vietnam war at the time?

Most of my thoughts on the war are retrospective. At the time it was happening, I was blessed in the sense that the lottery ended in the same year I became eligible. I remember checking my number a couple of years before I became eligible and each time I came up with really low numbers. It was all chance. I was seventeen or eighteen years old and I thought: you know, if I go, I go. I’ll do whatever my country needs me to do. I would have obeyed the law. But the first year I became eligible, the lottery ended. That was the year I went to New York to pursue professional acting. So, it’s only in retrospect that I think: Wow, I could have easily been sent over there. I remember some guys who came back from Vietnam telling me how when they got off the plane in Saigon the sergeant who met them said: Welcome to Vietnam. You’re gonna die here. That’s not what you want to hear.

Like a lot of Vietnam pictures, THE BOYS IN COMPANY C was shot in the Philippines. What was that experience like?

I really enjoyed it. The people were wonderful, the food was delicious and the climate was great. But everywhere you went you had to go through checkpoints, everyone had shotguns. You had the feeling that every moment things could go bad.

APOCALYPSE NOW was shooting there at the same time. They’d already been there for about a year when we showed up. They had access to all the military equipment. Helicopters, tanks, ammunition, planes, jets, all the gear. Sometimes we had to wait until we could use our equipment. And there were times we could see their company over on the other hill.

One of the pleasures of the movie is watching R. Lee Ermey do his drill sergeant thing, a decade before FULL METAL JACKET.

Oh, he was a really great guy. Initially another actor had been cast as the drill instructor, who is still in the movie. It’s the guy that screams at me when I get off the bus. R. Lee Ermey was our technical advisor, but then Sid Furie saw how Ermey was talking and he immediately hired him to be the drill instructor. FULL METAL JACKET basically happened because Kubrick saw Lee Ermey in our movie. The whole first half of that movie is the first half of THE BOYS IN COMPANY C. I mean, it’s close. It’s all built around Lee Ermey. In fact, he had been in a car accident over in England and Kubrick delayed the shoot for months until Ermey could do the part. That’s wild! But Lee Ermey was a great guy. He saved my bacon more than once.

In what way?

Gee, it’s a weird story. I’m not sure if I should tell it. There’s that scene at the end when we have the soccer match. Then there’s the attack and my girl gets shot. My character breaks down on the field and starts weeping. Now apparently, weeping in public is culturally unacceptable for a man in the Philippines. We had a stadium full of extras. They’re all there to supposedly watch the soccer match. All of a sudden I’m on the field on my knees, rocking back and forth with a woman in my arms. It created a kind of riot. Isn’t that nuts? They’re storming the field, trampling me. I get stabbed in the back with a little penknife. The only thing that saved me was that I started fighting back. They kind of moved away from me, probably thinking I wasn’t so bad after all. At least he’s fighting. But still, there are a lot of people upset by the fact that I did this in public. So, Lee spirits me away, puts me in the back of his car and says: Stay down! And he drives me out of there.

That’s wild.

Yeah, after that I became a little bit more careful.

Did the cast of young actors bond easily?

Yeah, we had great time together. Andrew Stevens, James Canning, Michael Lembeck and I really hit it off. With Stan Shaw not so much. He was pretty much like the character he plays in the movie, wanting to take charge. But maybe that was his method, I don’t know. He pulled it off nicely, that’s for sure.

Do you know why the movie took three years to be released?

That’s a good question. I don’t know for sure. But when we filmed it, the war was still going on. We were one of the first movies that was honest about Vietnam. It shows you what was really going on there. It wasn’t a piece of propaganda. It was more like: This is nuts. Things are going crazy over here. People are making money on the war, at the expense of American lives. So when the movie was finished, the war had ended. And I guess the studio said: This is too raw, too honest, too early. Other films came out before ours. That was too bad, because I think it could have made quite an impression in 1975. You know, the other Vietnam picture I did, GO TELL THE SPARTANS with Burt Lancaster, also got delayed.

Because of the same reason?

I think so. Also, I think that the movies that came after, like APOCALYPSE NOW, FULL METAL JACKET and PLATOON all blamed the soldiers in a way. As if they were all crazy guys over there. But that was not the case. In THE BOYS IN COMPANY C and GO TELL THE SPARTANS it’s clear that the people in charge were nuts. They were just sending young American men off to die in a meat grinder.

Incidentally, John Irvin whom you worked with on GHOST STORY, also made a great movie about that, called HAMBURGER HILL.

Yes, I read the interview you did with him. He’s a great guy. I don’t know what happened on GHOST STORY. He probably overestimated me [laughs]. He’d seen a movie that I did for free at the AFI Film Festival, called NIGHTS AT O’REARS which we filmed in 1976, I think. I played a has-been bigshot in his twenties who was still living off of his football bravado.

I actually saw NIGHTS AT O’REARS last week and that role was so unlike what I’ve come to expect of you. You’ve played a lot of sensitive, gentle guys. But this guy is anything but sensitive. In fact, he’s so out of touch with his feelings, he ends up hurting the one girl he cares about.

Exactly. I loved playing that character. In fact, when McConaughey years later did that movie [DAZED & CONFUSED] in which he goes: Alright alright alright, to me that’s the same character. My character reminded me so much of guys I had known in high school, guys who I wish I’d been at the time. But I also realized that he’s totally deluded and clueless. He shouldn’t be so proud of being an a-hole. That role was a bit of an aberration in my career, but it got me a lot of work, believe it or not. There was a screening at the AFI and it won a bunch of awards. I wasn’t there, because I wasn’t even invited. But a lot of big shots saw that movie and I got work out of it. John Irvin actually hired me based on seeing that. And then when I showed up, I was in a different kind of mode and I didn’t know what he wanted exactly.

But anyway, I loved working with those older guys, John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas, Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. They were the original greats.

Must have been very interesting, working with all that history.

It was beyond belief! I mean, when we wrapped for the day, John Houseman would ask me to walk with him from the set back to the hotel. Every day he would say to me [does a flawless John Houseman imitation]:I need to take my constitution. Will you please walk with me? And I would walk with him. Amazing guy.

You also had great rapport with Burt Lancaster on GO TELL THE SPARTANS, I believe.

Yeah. I had been shooting for a while and Burt hadn’t arrived yet, because he wasn’t in the scenes we were shooting at the beginning. When he came on, I felt so blessed to be working with him. You know, I worked with a lot of these older great actors and the bigger they were, the more gracious they were. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s the opposite of what people think. But anyway, I have my first scene with him, in which he asks me what I’m doing in Vietnam. And I’m really acting. After the first take, he says [does a flawless Burt Lancaster]: Craig, come over here. You know me, right? I say yes. You know the writer? I say yes. You know your lines? I say yes. Okay, so you don’t have to do a goddamn thing. We shot it again and I was natural. Burt was such a sweetheart.

And we were on a very low budget. Burt had raised the money himself. Because we had little money, we shot for only three weeks. To give you an idea: we shot THE BOYS IN COMPANY C in six months or some crazy amount of time. So, Burt said: If you don’t fall down in front of the camera and hit the soundman, we’re gonna print it.

This was before ATLANTIC CITY. Burt had been forgotten and ill-used for a while. He wanted to make this film because of this great script that Wendell Mayes had written. It was a reflection on what had happened in Vietnam. It was meant to show that the war was a mess from the beginning. It was always going to be mess. That’s why my character, at the end of the movie looks at the Vietcong soldier and says: I’m going home, Charlie. I wasn’t meant to be here! [Wasson tears up] Sorry, this stuff gets me emotional. Sorry.

Not a problem. In both THE BOYS IN COMPANY C and GO TELL THE SPARTANS you portray the character through whose eyes we see the insanity of war. I mean, in COMPANY C there’s this great scene where you discover that the convoy you’re protecting is full of stuff for the general’s party. Your brothers-in-arms were getting shot for party gear.

Exactly. And it’s still going on. Look at the news! It’s exponentially worse. Lives are lost for someone’s third home or a yacht.

It’s 1978 and both these Vietnam movies get released. What did that do for your career?

After those films I got a three picture deal at Paramount. The first of those was THE OUTSIDER which we shot in Ireland. It was directed by Tony Luraschi, a great guy and wonderful director. His father was Luigi Luraschi, the head of Paramount over in London. Magnificent man. There was a French producer on that film, Philippe was his name. And we were having dinner over in Dublin and we were talking about how this movie was a great opportunity for me. And I said: I know I’m only getting paid ten thousand, but it’s worth it, because I’m playing the lead. And he said: What do you mean? You’re getting a hundred thousand. I wrote the check myself. I was young and naïve enough to not think anything wrong. I just thought someone made a mistake. So, I called up my agent and I told her what I heard. There was a long pause. She said: Maybe you’d better call the casting director. Let me give you her number. Turned out I was getting the commission and they were splitting the income.

Wow.

Yeah. The good thing was that I was so naïve that I just called her and they took care of it. But I don’t know how many other times that happened in my career.

THE OUTSIDER is a great movie. It’s about how your character brings his idealism to the I.R.A., but he nearly gets destroyed because that world has no place for idealism, really.

Right on, brother. I was glad that I was always asked to play an everyman, because it’s the everyman who always gets the shaft. You know? He is expendable. He’s going over there with all these ideals, to walk in his grandfather’s footsteps, to work for a cause bigger than himself. And both sides want him to die, for their own selfish reasons. And he has no idea. That’s what usually happens when you choose to be just a cog in a machine. You become part of a huge system.

It didn’t get released widely. That must have been crushing.

Absolutely. You know what happened? The I.R.A. got wind of the script while we were shooting in Ireland. And they threatened Paramount that they would blow up theaters if they showed it. So, it was never really released, not until very much later. It was squashed. Also, my three picture deal didn’t go any further, because by then I had found out that they were trying to give me only ten percent of my income. Can’t do that.

You again worked with a veteran actor on THE OUTSIDER. You had this great scene with Sterling Hayden, playing your grandfather.

That was great. Talk about a character. Sterling sailed the world. I loved him in DR. STRANGELOVE. He reminded me of my own grandfather, who was a great man. And we only shot one day together, in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Rest of the shoot we were in Ireland. But that’s a heavy-duty scene when Michael realizes everything was a lie.

Every time I did a movie like that, that says something profound, it got squashed, it seems like. I grew up watching movies like ON THE WATERFRONT and thinking: Thank God, somebody’s telling the truth! I moved into an era where the narrative had to be a certain thing and nobody could tell the truth. And if you tried, it got squashed. This whole idea of being cancelled, which has been going on so ubiquitously, I’ve been seeing that for decades.

Let’s talk about FOUR FRIENDS, which I love. Arthur Penn cast relatively unknown actors in this movie. Your co-star Jodi Thelen even made her debut.

She was only eighteen years old. Can you believe it? She was amazing. I was twenty-six. Penn had just come off MISSOURI BREAKS, with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. He told me he didn’t ever want to work with a star again. That’s why you’re in this movie, he said. There wasn’t a star in the whole picture and that’s the way he wanted. Apparently, Marlon Brando had made his life hell. You know that scene where Brando’s in a dress and he’s doing an Irish accent and riding backwards on his horse for some reason? That wasn’t in the script. That was Brando going [does a perfect imitation:] I got an idea how I’m gonna do this character. I’m gonna wear a dress. A nice polka dot dress, kind of a housedress, you know? Brando played with Arthur during this whole movie.

What was his process like, working with Penn?

He’s heaven. I always wanted to be in the Actor’s Studio. In fact, one day I got invited by Elia Kazan and I forgot to follow up. But Arthur was the method. He was one of those guys. I never saw another director who could direct actors the same way. He could manipulate every actor to get us exactly where he wanted us emotionally and mentally for that scene. I’m not saying it was always pleasant, but it worked. For instance, there was this really emotional scene between me and Jodi where my character Danilo gets really frustrated with Georgia, Jodi’s character. And Arthur sent Jodi to her trailer and he said: I’m going to read Jodi’s lines off camera for you. And I said: But I need Jodi! And he said: Yeah, you need her, but you’re not going to get her. So, now I’m doing the scene with Arthur and it’s driving me crazy! I wanted Jodi to be there off camera. It created a level of frustration that I probably could not have reached otherwise. He did stuff like that with everybody. He was a genius.

The writer, Steve Tesich, was also a brilliant guy. He’d written BREAKING AWAY and won an Oscar for that. He had escaped Yugoslavia under Russian rule and came to America to write great things. After FOUR FRIENDS he wanted to do a movie called WEATHER WARS, which he wanted me to star in. It was about how Russia and the U.S. were both working on manipulating the weather for political purposes. Does that ring a bell? It was an important movie, but Steve died before we went into pre-production.

[SPOILER:] When I watched FOUR FRIENDS and the wedding scene came up, and the father of the bride shoots her, I had to rewind just to see if I had missed something. I thought it must have been someone’s nightmare or daydream or something. I thought: this can’t be real.

I love you. That’s exactly right. This can’t be really happening. You know what it is? Steve Tesich came to America as a young man and although he was an immigrant, he was also living through the cultural revolution of the sixties like every other American. He said that every year was like it was a new country, a new culture. And he said to me that on November 22nd 1963, they shot the bride at the wedding. When Kennedy got shot, it was like: I gotta watch this again. This can’t be real! Isn’t that brilliant? FOUR FRIENDS is the whole decade of the sixties in America, personified by one man’s experience that represents all of us.

Do you remember the reactions of people when you saw it in a theater back then?

Once again, my brother, I had some bad luck. The distributor went out of business… the same week the movie was released!

I always assumed 1981 was a good year for you. Two leading parts and a Golden Globe nomination.

That nomination was for best new star, I don’t think it was for a particular movie. But Pia Zadora won that year.

Oh… okay.

[Laughs] Yeah, what happened was: Pia Zadora’s boyfriend was a multi-millionaire who invited the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press to one of his casinos in Las Vegas. He put them up for like a week, so… There were some other good nominees that year in the same category, like Elizabeth McGovern for RAGTIME.

When you were cast as Jake Scully in BODY DOUBLE, do you know what movies Brian De Palma had seen of you?

That’s a good question. I know De Palma had seen a two-part episode of a TV series I did called Skag with Karl Malden. I played his oldest son. Like FOUR FRIENDS it’s about Serbian immigrants who are steel workers. And Karl Malden really is Serbian. It was wonderfully written by Abby Mann who also produced it. This two-part episode was about me and Karl going to Atlantic City on a break from the steel mill. While there I meet a hooker, played by Dee Wallace. Of course, my character falls in love and Karl’s like: You idiot! I’m like: She’s okay, dad. She’s a great gal. Anyway, it was so wonderful, working with Dee. She’s my favorite actress who I ever worked with. And this two-part episode is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever done. I know Brian De Palma saw this.

Just as a sidenote: Karl was the president of the Academy and he nominated me for membership. But they didn’t let me in! They rejected me.

That’s strange. What do you need to do to get in?

You’re asking me? I never got in! [Laughs] Supposedly, you give them a list of your credits and then you need two members who vouch for you. I had Michael McGuire and Karl Malden nominating me. And Karl was the president of the Academy. But I guess someone blackballed me. You can’t have anyone blackball you.

Now the same thing happened years later. In 2007 I go to Massachusetts to a film festival to honor Arthur Penn’s work. Sid Ganis was there, who produced AKEELAH AND THE BEE in which I have small part. And at that point he was the president of the Academy. And he walks up to me and says: How come you’re not a member of the Academy? I said: I’d like to be. He said: Just make a submission and I’ll make sure you become a member. And I got Sid and someone else to vouch for me. And I get rejected again!

But you know, it’s not that big of a deal, I don’t even have the clothes to go to these parties [laughs]. I’m a black T-shirt and jeans guy.

I’m nearly fifty and I never learned how to tie a tie.

[Laughs] I love you. You’re my kind of guy.

Let’s get back to De Palma. His movies are always exaggerated, even the performances in them. Did this prove a challenge for you? That scene in the tunnel for example…

No, I love De Palma. He’s an understated comedian. He’s really funny. And he’s a poet. That’s the thing people don’t know. He sees the humor in the fact that he’s supposed to do something as a filmmaker and then he does the opposite. He’s like: Why do I have to stay inside these boundaries? Yesterday I happened to be flipping the channels and SCARFACE was on, with my old buddy Steven Bauer. We used to call him Rocky Bauer. When I came to Los Angeles we used to play softball together with Andy Garcia. But I digress. The scene I was watching yesterday is the scene where those two gunmen come into the club and start shooting everybody. There’s one guy in that scene with a weird costume on and a conehead. And he’s wobbling around while he gets shot. Why is that guy even in that scene? But that’s Brian. Just throwing that guy in there.

But you did talk with him about the role of Jake Scully?

Sure. He pulled me aside and told me that this story was about mediated experience. For instance, the telescope represents television, movies, newspapers… And he said: You’re looking at something you love, that you adore, that means everything to you. And you’re seeing it’s in danger. But you don’t know what to do, what action to take. You’re frozen. Take action, Jake! Take action! Action! Right? It’s a great double entendre, with Jake being an actor. And he said: You don’t build up the courage to fight for what you love until what you love is gone and all that’s left is a bad impersonation of it. I was like: Wow, you’re blowing my mind! That’s what the movie was for him.

But Brian said: Nobody will ever see that. And he was right. Because he was always targeted. BODY DOUBLE came out the same week as THE TERMINATOR. That’s a great movie. It’s magnificent. But you know, it’s pretty violent. And we got criticized for being misogynistic, because one woman is murdered and you don’t even see it on screen. It’s all in your head. Well, there’s lots of movies where somebody dies. But now suddenly, Brian De Palma is a misogynist. And the critics at the time didn’t know what to make of him because he’s not a cookie-cutter kind of filmmaker.

The whole movie was also a salute to Hitchcock. Go back to Hitchcock and you can see it’s all there. I mean, Tippi Hedren’s daughter is Melanie Griffith! How on the nose can you get? De Palma asked me: Craig, can you do a Jimmy Stewart imitation? And I started answering him in my best Jimmy Stewart voice, but before I got anything out, he said: Don’t. You are Jimmy Stewart, just don’t do Jimmy Stewart.

My favorite sequence of the movie is where you follow Deborah Shelton to the Beverly Hills Mall and you’re watching her buy new underwear and you grab her old underwear out of the trashcan. There’s something humorous about that whole scene. It really lays bare Jake’s weakness.

I loved the interview you did with William Friedkin in which he says that people aren’t good or bad, they’re all in this grey area of morality. And he’s right. We’re all messed up. We can be great and horrible. So, a guy grabbing some underwear out of the trash. It’s disgusting, but at the same time you might think: I don’t know. I might do that. It’s an embarrassing human trait. You’re in love with a woman you don’t dare approach, now at least you have something. [Laughs]

Did the criticism of the movie hurt your career at the time?

It might have. People were offended by the fact that I wasn’t the typical hero. I played a less than perfect guy. A disappointing kind of guy, you know? I remember going to the premiere. Lot of big shots were there. I brought my girlfriend. My agent was sitting behind me. At first people were responding positively and I leaned over to my girlfriend, saying: I think it’s going well. But after it was over, there was no applause. Just this sort of hush. I thought: Oh, man, that’s not good. My agent was afraid to be seen with me. He walked out quickly, with his back to me. I thought: That’s not good either.

Maybe you were too successful in portraying Jake. Because it’s not only that he has a phobia, and he’s a peeper and a panty-stealer, or his inability to save Gloria. After all that he also goes undercover as a porn actor! I love that about the movie and I think your performance sells it. But watching BODY DOUBLE, you are embarrassed as a viewer. And if you don’t see the humor in this human folly, the way De Palma probably intended, then you’re not having a good time watching this.

I agree with you, brother. It’s the kind of movie people want to distance themselves from. That’s why the distance of years has made it more acceptable for some people. You could almost say: Oh, that was the eighties. But I got a secret for everyone out there… Nothing’s changed. Guys are still weird. [Laughs] And women are mostly fine with that. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Did the experience in BODY DOUBLE, doing the music video with Frankie Goes to Hollywood as a scene in the film, somehow inspire you to do a music video for Have Me Arrested?

I truly don’t remember if I did the video for Have Me Arrested before or after BODY DOUBLE. I know for a fact that I had written and recorded Have Me Arrested before the movie. The song was meant to address the news industry. It was about all these constant lies to control you through fear.

I wrote a song for the movie that De Palma actually was going to use. He had asked me to write it. He wanted something like Every Breath You Take. My song was called What You Do, I Do. But Columbia Pictures was owned by Coca-Cola at the time and they already had a deal with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But it worked out for the best, because that video is great and the song is fantastic.

If BODY DOUBLE displays the weakness of guys, then what are we to make of THE MEN’S CLUB? I saw that movie for the first time a few days ago and I thought it rather strange and disjointed. What are your thoughts on it?

I loved the movie as it was written. But what you saw is not what was written. The beginning of the movie as written was about a homosexual lawyer who represented all these guys. Originally, there were scenes with him and all his clients. These guys have nothing in their lives besides their work. Whereas all their wives have book clubs and wine clubs and everything. So, the lawyer comes up with the idea of inviting these guys up to his house to form a men’s club. He was going to introduce them to each other. But before the appointed evening of the party, the lawyer dies. All these guys initially rejected the idea of going to this guy’s house for a men’s club, because they all assumed the other guys would be gay. That’s the set-up. And it’s a great set-up, because it explains why, when they do come together to honor their dead friend, they’re all so busy trying to prove to each other they’re not gay.

So that’s why they’re behaving like animals?

Yeah! But Roy Scheider’s wife, who edited the film, didn’t like that idea because she thought it was offensive to gay people. Which ruined the movie!

And your role…

Yeah, that’s another thing. All these guys get a big monologue or a backstory. I had a great monologue. And my character, Mr. Hippie Man, was the only character who truly likes women. He loved his wife. I had this story about almost once being tempted, but I couldn’t go through with it when I met the husband, who was so thin he looked like a stick man, he had a head this narrow. I just couldn’t do it to this poor guy and I couldn’t do it to my wife. That monologue was a nice contrast to all the stories these guys are telling. They cut it out!

If you would recut that movie, using the script, it would all make sense. Otherwise you’re thinking: why are these guys such a-holes? Why is there so much toxic masculinity on display here? If you know why, it’s pretty funny: they’re all trying to prove their manhood and it spirals out of control. Now, the movie makes no sense.

You’re next movie was A NIGHTMARE ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS. What was that experience like?

I had a great time. Working with Patricia Arquette was great. Everyone in that young cast was great. The gal who was the lead…

Heather Langenkamp.

Thank you. She was wonderful also. I didn’t get paid hardly anything, which makes no sense in retrospect. I read your interview with John Saxon and he talks about the fact that New Line was just a baby company when they did the first movie. And that’s true. But I also read somewhere that DREAM WARRIORS had the biggest opening weekend for an independent film ever. It’s crazy. I wish I had a piece of that. Maybe my agent did, because soon after he moved to Century City to one of those penthouse suites up there. He did very well for himself.

At the time the horror genre wasn’t very well respected. Also, this was the second sequel in a horror franchise. Did you have any misgivings at the time?

I wasn’t thinking very hard. My agent had his own agenda, God bless him. I was like: I’m not doing anything else… It’s probably the most commercially successful film I was ever in. And you’re right, the genre was looked down upon. In a way I was being like Jake: just being glad that I got a part in a horror film. [Laughs]

I remember talking to Chuck Russell and telling him: Listen, nothing on this earth can defeat Freddy. So, I want to be able to pray to God in the climax of the movie and have the power of prayer end him. Only God can beat this guy. There’s nobody bigger than God. And Chuck agreed, so in that scene I pray and Freddy is taken care of. But then came number four, and five, and six and seven! [Laughs] And I was nowhere to be seen.

In 1988 there was BUM RAP, a comedy drama about a man who learns he only has three days to live. It’s a great part. This is your movie. Can you tell me how that movie came about and what happened to it?

You watched that?

Yeah, there’s a copy on YouTube. I enjoyed it tremendously.

God bless you! That was an interesting story. The guy who made it, Danny Irom, was only about twenty years old when he made it. And the only reason nobody ever saw it, is because the poor guy, in order to raise the money, gave away a hundred percent of the points. No distributor could make a dime off of that movie. At the time he made it, he had about five other scripts that he had written. I read them all. Every one of them brilliant! Someone should look him up and make those movies. The kid’s a genius. Somebody please find him and do his scripts. Who knows how many he has written by now.

Obviously it was a no budget movie. How did you get involved?

I had a girlfriend out in the Hamptons and I was visiting her. I didn’t want to go back to LA. Suddenly, there’s a project and the director wants me for the part. I don’t even have to audition. That’s when my ego got involved. Why do I even have to go to auditions anyway? I’ve been doing this for a long time now. Haven’t they noticed I can learn my lines and hit my mark? So, Danny offered me the part. It pays nothing, but he gave me twenty percent of the points. So, I did it on spec. And I loved the part. I had started out in New York, so I knew that whole world of theatre auditions and trying to get by.

In the nineties you suddenly do a lot of television. How did you transition from movies to TV?

Danny Irom had four-walled the Loew’s Theater at Sunset and Laurel Canyon in LA, so that BUM RAP could be considered for the Academy Awards. Kevin Thomas, the lead critic of the L.A. Times loved the movie and he wrote in his review that he thought I should be nominated for an Academy Award.

At the same time, a gal who had been an assistant at an agency that had represented me called me up. You know how you can spot some people who are always on top of it and they’re doing everybody else’s job and not getting any credit for it? She was like that. Well, she started her own management company and she remembered me, God bless her. She said: You’re getting great reviews for BUM RAP. You’re hot right now. Why don’t you sign with me? And I did. Now, because she was just starting out, she didn’t have the oomph to get me into movies, but she did get me a lot of television parts, based on my film reputation. During that period I was working almost every day: TV movies, guest spots, everything. I went to Australia and Europe. She was great. Eventually, she outgrew me and went to Endeavor. She couldn’t take me, because they already had John Heard. So, I got dumped.

Why couldn’t they take you if they had John Heard?

Because we would be competing for the same parts. You know, for a while there I had the greatest agents working for me. I had Bob Gersch who’s just magnificent. They treated me so well. But then when I was married, my wife got a call from a guy called Fred Specktor at CAA. There’s a perfect name for this guy. He wanted to meet me. I didn’t want to go, because I was happy with Gersch. But then my wife was like: You’ve gotta get up to the big time. Day after day she kept saying this. So, like an idiot I go meet this guy. And like an idiot I sign with this guy… And they put me on ice for a year, so their clients can go back to work. Because I wasn’t getting paid as much as some of their other clients. Anyway, this sounds like sour grapes… and it is! [Laughs]

One of the last movies you did is PUERTO VALLARTA SQUEEZE and that’s a pretty good one. Again, you play a guy with a great weakness.

It’s an interesting story. By that time, I had given up Los Angeles to be with this woman in Florida, but it turned out she was with another guy. So, I went to Idaho, where I still owned a house. It had been sitting there since 1978. I didn’t know what I was going to do for income. My agents weren’t talking to me, because I was never available. I was always down in Florida. All of a sudden, I get a call from my old high school mentor, a great director and drama teacher named Ed Raggozino. Turns out there was this gal who owned a news station in Eugene, Oregon. She was quite a character and she wanted to get into producing movies. She had asked Ed, who was the local drama guy, for advice. Did he know somebody in the movies? So, Ed called me. And I asked Ed what movie she wanted to make. He told me she’d bought the rights to Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, which was a good novel. So, I offered to put her in touch with a producer-director whom I had worked with a couple of times, if she would let me play the lead part. Initially, she said no. She wanted a star. But why would I want to put her in touch with that producer-director if she wasn’t going to give me a job? So, in the end it all worked out. That’s how the movie got made.

Somewhere around that time, you called it quits.

I never called it quits. Someone else called it quits. The people who were hiring.

I always assumed you just retired.

Well, in a way I did. I came back to LA once in a while to do a movie. I had the latest agent, who was nice enough to send me out to auditions. She didn’t know me at all. A young gal who was breaking into the business. She sent me over to an audition, I won’t say where. It was a little nothing movie. I go in and the casting director is on the phone. I’ve memorized my lines and while she’s still on the phone she whispers: Go ahead, start. So, I start my lines and she keeps talking. I stop for a second and ask her: Should I wait until you’re done? And she says: No, no, keep going. Finally, I stop and I wait until she’s done. And I say: Can I do my lines now you’re done with your call? And she says: Don’t be rude with me. So, I just stand up and leave. I was thinking that old cliché: Before you were born, I was making movies. And now you can’t get off the phone to hear me read? That was the last straw. I never went back to LA...

You were fed up with the whole Hollywood thing.

Yeah, and that’s a really spoiled way to be, I know that. Apparently, the value of my stock was so low, that I might as well not even have been there. Which is fine, because I had a great run. I had a great life, a wonderful time. I had the opportunity to make a living as an actor and I retired comfortably. When I talk about that experience and how it lead to me leaving LA, I’m being honest. It’s the way I remember it. But I don’t want that honesty to sound bitter or like a sob story. I feel like the luckiest guy who ever lived. I love everybody I ever worked with. I have good memories. And God was in control over it. Like meeting Rick Natkin that day and playing him my song and him giving me the job on that movie. That was like a miracle.

BUM RAP is on YouTube for free.

NIGHTS AT O’REARS is on YouTube for free as well, in an old VHS rip.

The music video of Craig Wasson’s song Have Me Arrested is also on YouTube.

Here’s a link to the column Stephen King wrote on Craig Wasson’s audio book Blood’s a Rover.

Here’s a link to the audio books narrated by Craig Wasson.

Related talks:

• John Irvin

• Dee Wallace

• John Saxon

• William Friedkin