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Features
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Aggrandizing an Ambassador of Hope
From running into a former Youth for Kennedy volunteer to getting advice from the screenwriter for Robert Altman’s Nashville, Bobby felt to Emilio Estevez like an artistic calling.
Monday, April 9, 2007 at 12:50 PM
By Brent Simon
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Jessie McCarthy/WireImage.com
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Estevez, at New York theatrical premiere with co-star Sharon Stone
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Settling into a chair with an oversized, fruit-based shake in one hand, Emilio Estevez apologizes in advance if he doesn’t make sense during his interview with FilmStew. Referring euphemistically to the last ten years of his life as “off the grid,” Estevez cops to the fact that he hasn’t really had to exercise his brain as an interviewee in some time, and so he worries about answering questions with aplomb, depth and clarity.
He needn’t necessarily worry, as there’s an abundance to glean from his demeanor. First off, Estevez is quiet and deliberate, but without seeming programmed. He’s also gracious without seeming ingratiating or unctuous.
Though it doesn’t seem like an act, this humility is only part of the overall bearing strikingly at odds with the brash, charismatic manner that helped make Estevez a pin-up star in the 1980s in movies like The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire and two Young Guns flicks. Though always small in stature, physically Estevez is different; he exudes a certain worn-down melancholy, perhaps the product of someone who’s seen the top and had relevance wrested away from them. It sounds harsh, but the closest physiological and emotional comparisons are a beaten dog rescued from an animal shelter, or an on-the-mend alcoholic who hasn’t shaken the shame of hurting those he loved.
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Steve Granitz/WireImage.com
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Central narrative cog Demi Moore
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More than all these things, though, Estevez is also disarmingly blunt. “Nobody stops working and expressing themselves artistically by choice,” he states with regards to his de facto hiatus. “I think that I had done probably one too many sequels, and I think that this is a very cruel and unforgiving business.”
“I also think that where we arrive on any particular given day in our lives is the sum total of our choices, all of us,” Estevez continues. “And I made some bad ones, professionally speaking. Truly, I was doing whatever I needed to do to keep the wolves on the other side of the door.”
“I cashed in my pension fund, I sold artwork — some of which had been gifted to me. I was signing trading cards with my likeness on them, just to make a house payment. So it was pretty bleak.”
If Hollywood loves to chew up and spit out its own, it also loves its comebacks, and Bobby pretty much amounted to that for Estevez. Though it grossed only $11.2 million domestically, the film garnered Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Ensemble Acting award nominations from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and SAG, respectively. With its celebrity top-heavy cast, the film should settle into a nice long rental run when it hits DVD this month through the exclusive Blockbuster-Weinstein Co. partnership.
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Steve Granitz/WireImage.com
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The rarely seen Harry Belafonte
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Written and directed with a palpably unadorned romanticism, the movie revisits the night in 1968 that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, on the eve of his presidential primary victory in California. Telling the story of workers, guests and low-level Kennedy volunteers there all that day beforehand, it’s stuffed with a star-studded ensemble cast of almost two dozen actors that includes Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, Freddy Rodriguez, Laurence Fishburne, Lindsay Lohan, Nick Cannon, Christian Slater, Ashton Kutcher, Elijah Wood and Helen Hunt, as well as Estevez himself and his father, Martin Sheen.<.p>
Estevez was only six years old when RFK was shot and killed in 1968, capping a turbulent decade of assassinations of key political and cultural figures, but he still remembers its tremendous effect on his grandmother, who broke down weeping at the news. He also remembers waking up his father and telling him, and, a year later, visiting the Ambassador Hotel with his dad, who pointed out the narrow kitchen pantry were Kennedy was slain and explained it as hallowed ground. Estevez tried to fully understand, but couldn’t.
A chance photo shoot in 2000 for his Showtime directorial effort Rated X found Estevez back at the Ambassador, and he describes the moment as akin to a key unlocking his own creative pantry. With acting jobs all but drying up, and the sort of feature films he was interested in making not a feasibility, Estevez turned to episodic television gigs (CSI: New York, Cold Case, The Guardian) to help get him through lean times, financially and creatively. All the while, he says, “I was writing Bobby and trying to get it made, and believing in it. At the time it was 162 pages and actors loved it, but studios didn’t.”
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Steve Granitz/WireImage.com
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King of the charactor actors William H. Macy
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A big breakthrough came after Estevez checked into a hotel and had a chance meeting with a female clerk who recognized him, a former Youth for Kennedy volunteer who was at the Ambassador the evening of the shooting. It was a sign, Estevez says. He then also experienced the good fortune of meeting Nashville scribe Joan Tewksbury, who gave him a few pointers on whittling the screenplay down.
Because Bobby isn’t Estevez’s first stab at dramatic reinvention, though, he knows it might not necessarily be his last. In 1996, Estevez agreed to do Mighty Ducks 3 as a tradeoff for partial financing for The War at Home, a well regarded movie about a Vietnam vet struggling to cope with memories of combat experiences and readapt to life back in the United States. “I thought [that] was going to change my career, and that people would see me as a serious actor, and a director that has something to say,” he recalls. “It was released on four screens, while Mighty Ducks 3 went on to be released on over 2,000 screens.”
Still, while Estevez wasn’t blind at the time of the interview to the hurdles faced in marketing a movie like Bobby to a generation that hasn’t known firsthand the sort of unbridled optimism that Robert Kennedy embodied and represented, he chooses to concentrate on focus only on matters he feels he can control, and hope for the best in commercial reception.
“Well, conventional wisdom tells us that this is the age group that sees movies, the numbers explain that this is the demographic that spends the most money, but why have boomers stopped going? I think that’s the bigger question,” Estevez says. “They stopped because Hollywood cranks out sh*t. Hollywood makes terrible movies, and until last year we haven’t really seen a shift.”
"Films like Good Night and Good Luck, Capote and Crash all were about something, and all rated R. I believe that it’s incumbent upon Hollywood to make better films to draw in people who really want to see them. I made a baby boomer film, a movie that I would go see, and if young people go because they’re interested, great. If they don’t, I can’t answer to that. I didn’t make the movie for them.”
“You know, I was talking to some people in their 50s last night who’d seen the movie,” Estevez adds. “And they said something that struck me: ‘We forgot we were like that in ’68.’ So if there’s no reminder to serve as an example, then what can boomer parents tell their kids?”
| Adds co-star Shia LaBeouf, also hitting theaters this week in Disturbia: “This is not a liberal movie, it’s not specifically about politics,” he asserts. “It’s about ordinary people following an extraordinary man. Here was a man with vision, who was a voice for those who were silenced. This was a great person, and that’s the gist of what the film is about. It’s about relighting that fire in people that they can have faith in each other, not in politics. It’s about hope.” | |
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