I Blame Dennis Hopper by Illeana Douglas

Author:Illeana Douglas [Douglas, Illeana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir, Hollywood
ISBN: 9781250053879
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Happy Just to Be Alive

Welcome to set. A complete re-creation of the 1972 Andes plane crash, 12,000 feet up in the Canadian Rockies.

I was flying to Canada to start filming the movie Alive. It was based on the plane crash in the Andes of a Uruguayan rugby team. They had to resort to eating the bodies of their dead companions to survive and were finally rescued, seventy-two days after the crash, when Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa trekked for ten days through the Andes to find help. There were forty passengers and five crew members onboard, and only sixteen came out alive. It is an amazing story of the triumph of the human spirit, and one of the greatest survival stories of our time.

Looking out the window of the plane, I saw the snowy peaks of the Canadian Rockies, where we would soon be shooting. It was bittersweet. I was a working actress now, and that meant traveling from job to job, and yet everything I wanted was back in New York. Still, I hoped Alive would be like climbing a mountain and reaching the summit, finally finding that unattainable something that was missing in my life.

The previous year had been a roller coaster for me. I wrote in my journal, “My life is divided in two parts. Pre and post Cape Fear.” But there was spillover from starving actress to working actress. Cape Fear had not come out yet, and the day I was scheduled to be on my first talk show ever—David Letterman’s show—I was still selling furniture out of my apartment to pay the rent. Dave had seen Cape Fear and loved it, but aside from him, no one really knew who I was when I went on his show. When I sold my last table just days before the movie came out, I signed the bottom CAPE FEAR. That’s how sure I was that my life was about to change.

I had been invited onto Letterman because a friend of David’s, Hank Gallo, had seen me perform as a comedian at Stand Up NY and recommended me. (Stand Up NY was originally owned by Cary Hoffman, who let me perform there and actually thought I had a future as a standup.) It was quite a break to be on Letterman—it meant national exposure, and Hank had risked a lot to get me on the show, assuring the producer, Robert Morton, that I was funny and could tell a good story. I remember being called for the longest pre-interview “audition” of my life, during which I proceeded to tell the producer every even remotely funny thing that had ever happened to me.

We settled on a Zelig-like experience I had had when the Secret Service occupied my dressing room in Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C., on the night that President George H. W. Bush came to see a performance of a play I was in, called Black Eagles. The morning after seeing our play, which was about World War II, the president started the ground war against Iraq.

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