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

park. So I went for it. When I was done, Joe came up to me and told me that Oliver wanted to see me. I went back to see Oliver and he said, “That was good, so we don’t even have to do a safety—unless you want to. Oh, hey, you want to watch the playback?” He was very casual—as if we knew each other and hung out all the time. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what the hell “playback” or “safety” even meant; I didn’t even know what a craft service table was at that point. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Um, I’ll watch playback,” I said and he played back my scene on the monitor he had right there.
    I had never seen myself on-screen at that point, and I hated it.My face looked huge on the monitor and really fucked-up. My pores seemed enormous and I had scraggly hair because I’d been told to grow my hair out, but all I could focus on were these huge pores on my nose. I must have had a horrified look on my face—I probably looked like I’d just smelled shit or something—because Oliver asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t want to tell him I was horrified, so I just mumbled something about how it was just strange because I’d never seen myself act before. And then I sort of shuffled away, saying, “So, great, I’m not going to do a safety. Thanks.”
    I was still really in my head, and just because Oliver thought I did well didn’t mean I believed it. In fact, as I was walking away, I started thinking about how in the scene I actually looked like I knew what was going to happen next. It’s a scene where a guy was threatening to kill me, and I didn’t really think I sold it; in fact I thought I looked like someone who knew he wasn’t going to get killed. As I was dwelling on this, I turned to someone on the set and asked, “Hey, what’s a safety?” And the crew guy said, “That’s when they shoot it again. Run back if you want one, kid.” So I ran back to Stone and said, “I’ve thought about it and I do want a safety.” So we did it again, and that’s when I really thought I nailed it. Oliver ultimately agreed that the second take was better.
    For the next couple of days after that we just shot innocuous stuff. Then, on my fourth day of work, we did the scene where I go careening down the hill on my wheelchair. I had gotten very good at flying through the air and taking the blow on my shoulder but giving the illusion that I was going headfirst into the ground. It went well. Then my character gets into this fight with another vet, who was played by Andrew Lauer. I had decided before we shot that I was going to spit on him even though it wasn’t in the script. Andrew ended up spittingback, and we got into this full-on spitting war, which is how Oliver got the idea to have Tom Cruise and Willem Dafoe get into a spitting war later in the movie. Because of that, and I think because he could tell just how passionate I was, Oliver wrote me two more scenes. I ended up staying for twenty-seven days even though I was originally just supposed to be there for two weeks. And while I was there I found out that I was cast in Lock Up, a Sylvester Stallone movie I had screen-tested for in Los Angeles on my way to the Philippines. It felt like my whole life was changing overnight.
    But first I had to get home, which actually proved difficult because I had to fly to Manila and then stay overnight in Manila before heading back to New York. The revolution had just started there, and I was staying in Manila with Willem, who was flying out to Poland the next day to do a movie called Triumph of the Will . Suddenly bombs started going off in the sky, and I became convinced our hotel was going to be overrun. I was terrified and kept running over to Willem’s hotel room and waking him up. But nothing happened to us, and I was able to get on a plane back to New York the next day as planned.
    Almost as soon as I got back to New York I had to go to Los Angeles. I was