When he started acting in the mid-`60s with an in-your-face performance troupe, actor Peter Coyote might literally have given you the shirt off his back.
It was all part of the pervading hippie Weltanschauung in San Francisco`s Haight-Ashbury district, where he lived. But standing in a camel`s-hair coat, perfectly coiffed on the Michigan Avenue Bridge, the actor looked like the picture of gentility.
Coyote was in town filming ”Keeper of the City,” a Showtime movie airing at 8 p.m. Saturday,in which he plays Frank Nordhall, an influential journalist with the fictional Chicago Herald manipulated by a mad-as-hell citizen, who is murdering mobsters in the name of justice, into writing a splashy front-page series on the killings. His co-stars are Anthony LaPaglia as the killer and Louis Gossett Jr. as a cynical detective.
”I feel a little like the Vaclav Havel of the acting world-a literate and sensitive soul in the middle of a political debacle,” says the actor, who, after a few beats, feels compelled to add, ”You know, of course, I`m saying this completely tongue in cheek.”
Of course. Coyote is nothing if not an actor who has been able to slip comfortably into a variety of mainstream roles: a kindly scientist in
”E.T.,” a lawyer in ”Jagged Edge,” a handsome con man in the TV movie
”Scorned and Swindled,” a photographer in last year`s art film
”Exposure.”
But offscreen he makes his stand outside the Hollywood system, as an actor without handlers and public-relations ”people” and as an outspoken critic of the status quo.
”Anybody who`s eating is part of the Establishment, but, certainly, my sympathies are not in the Establishment,” he explains, three pretzels in one hand, a paper cup of tea in the other.
A gust of cold wind turns his ears red as he continues. ”I don`t like the American media. It`s cowardly, lame. (In `Keeper of the City`) I`m the populist columnist egging the psychotic on. (My character) Frank makes a big mistake. He assumes something to be true without investigating it.
”I have a big ax to grind with the media. They don`t use free speech. They have fallen down on their responsibilities as naysayers and whistle-blowers. There`s really no longer . . . investigative journalism.
”For 10 years, Ronald Reagan was briefed with cartoons. Daily. Did we hear about that then? Or during Desert Storm, when everybody was talking in the first person plural, dressed in camouflage, did we get reports on children and civilians who were killed?”
Coyote found his artistic epicenter in 1965, when he became a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. As he explains, it ”was the real start, where my political impulses and aesthetic came together.”
Two years later, he joined with the Diggers, a San Francisco group of benign anarchists that gave away money and food and burned dollars in the streets and which defined improvisational theater for a generation of the disenfranchised in San Francisco.
”I`m not sentimental about the `60s,” says Coyote, who is writing a non-fiction book on the era. ”I don`t feel that my life peaked there. But it was a peak time for the U.S.
”Its cultural issues are not resolved yet: the women`s movement, peace, holistic health, whole food. I`m not a fraternity boy about it though.”
Coyote was born in Manhattan and says he was raised ”peripatetically”
by his housewife mother and his father, who changed careers from banking to cattle, moving to Pennsylvania and Texas in the process. After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, Coyote moved to the Bay Area, where he still lives. After his experimental theater experiences, the actor filmed his first movie, ”Die Laughing” (1980), which he describes dryly as ”starring Robbie Benson and a monkey.”
He has since appeared in more than 20 feature films and several made-for- TV movies, and has just returned from six months in Paris, where he filmed Roman Polanski`s new movie ”Bitter Moon.”
”It`s a gypsy life,” says the 49-year-old father of two. ”I`m a migrant laborer. I`m hired and I go to work. It`s not like I`m a Kevin Costner and I get millions of dollars a movie and I can stay at home and wait for the right role.”
Coyote still draws the line, he says, at scripts or characterizations that he finds ”morally reprehensible. I turned down something that trashed the Russians and made them look like morons and idiots.
”There`s a misperception that we as actors have that much choice (about roles). I always look for excellence first … if the characters are alive. If they`re not, secondly, I have to ask, `Do I need the money?` It`s not like I can wait three years for my next script.”
But Coyote has not forsaken his alternative ways: low on hype, high on life, a man who answers his own phone while living on top of a hill, he ponders: ”Am I an outsider? Yeah, I think I`m still an outsider. You don`t see me banking any big studio movies as a headliner.”
