Read Online By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir by Tom Sizemore - Free Book Online

coming off big roles in Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Mississippi Burning. He was huge. I went, “Oh, man—I’m so sorry. Sit down, please.” And he just sort of stood there smiling and said, “No, I get it, you’re rude. That’s your thing. I can respect someone doing their thing. You want me to go back to my room?” I kept apologizing, and he said something along the lines of “What if I wasn’t Willem Dafoe but just another schmo?” He was being facetious and giving me shit but in a funny, unique way. I said, “If you make fun of me anymore, I’m goingto throw this bowl of rice at you.” I guess Kathryn Bigelow, who had directed him in The Loveless, had told him to look out for me on the set and showed him my picture, so that’s why he’d come up to me. Finally he sat down and said, “No wonder Kathryn likes you; she loves rude people.” We became fast friends.
    Still, I spent most of the time before I had to shoot anything working on a scene where I would be sitting on the top of a hill in a wheelchair—my character was quadriplegic—yell, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and then go flying down and smash into a bunch of wheelchairs at the bottom. I knew that Oliver wouldn’t want to have to use a stunt-man and then cut away, so I wanted to figure out a few things—like how I was going to go flying out of a wheelchair while defying my natural human instinct to protect myself by trying to break my fall with my hands. What I came up with was that I’d have to make my hands inaccessible. So I asked this other actor to tie my hands together and then to tie them to my waist with rope. The guy thought I was completely nuts, but I knew I had to get my hands in a place where I simply wouldn’t be able to move them. The other part I had to figure out was how I was going to turn my body around in midair so I’d take the blow on my shoulder while having my body remain flaccid. I knew that, as a quadriplegic, all I could move was my nose, so it was complicated as hell figuring all of this out.
    The only way I could get it right, I knew, was to practice. But it was so hot there that I couldn’t do it until the sun went down. So on ten of those twelve days before shooting, I’d be up there at sunset screaming, “Banzai, motherfucker!” and flying down the hill on my wheelchair and crashing into the others. I got pretty banged up fairly quickly. Apparently Oliver was coming home from the set at one point and saw me doing this on the makeshift hill that had been built. For about ten minutes he watched me come down and smashinto chairs and push the wheelchair back up the hill and do it again. I probably did it some six times without having a clue that he was watching. But apparently, after watching for a while, he turned to his first assistant director, Joe Reidy, and asked, “Who is that?” And Joe said, “His name’s Tom Sizemore.” Oliver asked how long I did this for, and Joe said he didn’t know but could find out. So he sent one of his guys over to me to ask. So some guy came running up to me and said, “Sizemore, how long do you do that for? Joe wants to know.” I had no idea who Joe was or why he wanted to know; I just shrugged, looked at the sun, which was almost completely gone at that point, and said, “I don’t know—till it’s completely dark. About an hour and a half, I guess.” Apparently that impressed Oliver; he liked that I wasn’t afraid. I guess it also impressed Joe—we ended up becoming friends later. Joe’s an amazing guy. He’s been the first AD not only to Oliver but also to Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. The first AD really runs the show on a movie set—he’s the one who has to say to the director, “We’re done, we’re moving on,” and have the director listen. When the director’s someone like Oliver or Marty, that’s not always easy, but they always listened to Joe.
    Finally it was my first day of working, and I knew I had to hit it out of the