Rough-and-tumble tradition and manufactured corporate slickness were battling it out on the ice, and there was no question which side John Cusack was on.”There’s gonna be a fight!” the 30-year-old actor announced to long-time Evanston friends and co-screenwriters Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis as a couple of players from the Chicago Blackhawks and Anaheim Mighty Ducks grabbed each other’s jerseys just beneath the center-ice seats at the United Center.
But the tussling ended without bloodshed, and the old-school Hawks, who wear what Cusack considers the coolest uniforms in sports, bowed 4-3 to that four-year-old Disney-owned team named after the company’s formulaic kids-movie series.
Still, Cusack can’t get too steamed at the Disney empire these days, because he and”the Mouse” (a k a Mickey) have become teammates of sorts. The Evanston native has maintained a renegade streak in his career, avoiding blatantly commercial projects in favor of trickier roles and underground theater, yet now he’s aiming to slip his sensibility into the mainstream.
So he co-wrote, co-produced and stars in”Grosse Pointe Blank” (which opens Friday), a comedy accessible enough to lure Disney’s Hollywood Pictures to distribute it yet dark enough to appeal to Cusack’s sense of the absurd. He plays Martin Blank, a California hit man who returns to his hometown of Grosse Pointe, Mich., for his 10-year high school reunion.
Martin discovers he can’t escape the perils of his occupation by returning home, but Cusack, in town from Los Angeles for a long Easter weekend that included a night’s filming for the upcoming movie”Hellcab,” learned that lesson long ago. A picture of ruffled chic in his black blazer, untucked navy-blue shirt, patched blue jeans and navy baseball cap, the 6-foot-2-inch actor displayed well-practiced affability as he received random greetings at the United Center, even if at times you could sense his tall frame resisting the urge to shrink.
He signed hockey pucks for two vendors, directed a friendly head cock toward a beer-saturated fan who’d yelled,”Cusack,” and politely declined a Hawks representative’s invitation to participate in a live true-false quiz screened on the scoreboard video monitors. (The honor went to a telegenic woman who, when faced with the proposition”Ten is a prime number,” had to pause until the audience shouted,”False!”)
“I really think celebrity and fame are byproducts of, hopefully, good work, but they really are antithetical to your self-expression and how you create,” the soft-spoken Cusack said, noting the irony of speaking those words into a tape recorder while a man at ice level aimed a camera at him and two girls posed behind him.
After the game he, Pink and DeVincentis rode the Disney-provided limo to pick up another Evanston pal at the Four Seasons Hotel before heading to Navy Pier’s IMAX theater for a late-night showing of”Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which still elicited guffaws despite the scratched-up print. Before the movie, as Cusack walked toward the men’s room, his face appeared on a TV screen above the concessions stand in a trailer for the upcoming action flick”Con Air.”
“Surreal,” muttered DeVincentis, a friend of Cusack’s since their Evanston Township High School days.
“Con Air,” a Disney hijack thriller produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (“Crimson Tide,” “The Rock”) and starring Nicolas Cage, is indicative of Cusack’s current willingness to work within the system. ” `Con Air’ is not something I would have done five years ago,” he admitted. “I grew up watching Dustin Hoffman and Pacino and Duvall and the best of Redford and Newman and great comic actors like Woody Allen, so I always wanted to find roles with complex characters.”
With his understated demeanor, wry smile and boyish features that offset a cerebral world-weariness, Cusack is an actor who has inspired instant sympathy in such movies as Rob Reiner’s “The Sure Thing” (1985), John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out” (1988), Cameron Crowe’s “Say Anything. . .” (1989), Stephen Frears’ “The Grifters” (1990) and Woody Allen’s “Bullets over Broadway” (1994).
Yet just when he’d seem on the verge of establishing himself as a commercially viable leading man, he’d retreat, either by accepting prickly roles like the video hustler in 1988’s “Tapeheads” or by taking almost two years off after 1992’s disappointing “True Colors” to direct and produce theater for his maverick New Crime troupe in Chicago.
“I was sick of film,” Cusack said. “I was trying to avoid the celebrity of selling myself.”
“There’s no way you could be off doing big, stupid movies and be running the theater that we had at the same time,” DeVincentis said. “It would be so schizophrenic.”
Cusack had gained a reputation for being not the most cooperative cog in the Hollywood publicity machine. “If people would ask me, `What’s your girlfriend like?’ I never thought that my private life is like a commodity,” he recalled.
He also skipped the television talk-show circuit. “Basically they want you to tell anecdotes and stories kind of like a standup comic,” he said. “If people know everything about you, if that’s where you shine, then why should they go to your movies? When I grew up, in the ’70s, you’d never see Pacino, De Niro, Duvall and all those greats on talk shows.”
But Cusack is now trying to thrive in a more competitive, box-office-driven environment. 20th Century Fox chairman Bill Mechanic said recently in The New Yorker that last year’s “City Hall,” which co-starred Cusack and Al Pacino, is the kind of medium-budget, character-driven film that no longer makes commercial sense to produce.
“It’s gotten to the point where you put three stars in a movie about garbagemen, and nobody would even check the plot or the structure,” Cusack said. “It’s so much now about the theme-park ride, that marketing event.”
Cusack and his New Crime partners–including Pink, DeVincentis and actor Jeremy Piven, all of whom have relocated to Los Angeles–had a two-year production deal with Paramount in the early ’90s, but the studio rejected all their projects. “They were making `Sliver’ and all those kind of films,” Cusack said.
Yet he figures the current climate of overpriced blockbusters helped New Crime sell Disney on the $15 million “Grosse Pointe Blank.” “We said, `Look, we’re going to make this for a price, in Hollywood standards not that much money. If you want to do the movie, let it be what it is,’ ” he recalled, adding that the studio kept its side of the bargain, allowing, among other things, their choice of director George Armitage (“Miami Blues”).
The former Evanston contingent in “Grosse Pointe Blank” includes Cusack’s older sister Joan as Martin’s secretary, Piven as a high school buddy and Pink, DeVincentis, DeVincentis’ sister Sarah and Cusack siblings Ann and Bill in smaller roles. Also featured are Minnie Driver as Martin’s jilted high school girlfriend, Alan Arkin as his fearful psychiatrist and Dan Aykroyd as a rival killer trying to unionize assassins.
The entertaining result mixes an easy-to-grasp concept–hit man attends reunion–with black comedy that reflects Cusack’s affection for Monty Python, Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and John Woo’s shoot-’em-up “The Killer.”
“It’s subversive and commercial, and that was our plan,” Cusack said. “We always thought, `Wait a minute, if we do this right, we can fly under the radar here because they can market it like all these other movies.’ They got guys shooting guns, and they got romance, and they got funny dialogue and all that stuff.”
Meanwhile, Cusack, Pink, DeVincentis and co-writer Tom Jankiewicz could slip in satirical points about professional America, as Martin remains convinced that his depression is unrelated to his occupation.
“It’s talking about values, the idea that you can separate your behavior from your self image, that you can be a killer at the office and a good Christian at home,” Cusack said. “It’s the great American male psychopathology that I think everyone’s guilty of, me included.”
Still, the actor has decided he must become more of a salesman at the office to keep doing the work he finds most rewarding. Last Friday he made his first appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” where he seemed startled by the rapturous cheers that greeted him. He even came armed with a quip.
Letterman: “Why have you never been on the show?”
Cusack: “Traffic, bad traffic.”
If he must promote himself to some extent, so be it. “Now I’m like, `All right, this is part of the deal. You want to do your movies, they’re going to pay you a lot of money, you’ve got to do this stuff because there are so many films in the marketplace.’ “
His playing a marshal in “Con Air,” which he at least considers intelligently written, followed similar logic. “I used to think I’d sell out if I would do a big action movie, but now I’m like, `Wait a minute, if I do that and it makes a lot of money, I can make three `Grosse Pointe Blanks.’ “
New Crime already has another script seeking $25 million worth of backing: a football comedy called “Hail Mary” that would star Cusack as a Jim McMahon-type maverick quarterback.
DeVincentis thinks his friend has developed a clearer picture of what he wants artistically and how to achieve it. “I think he’s a much happier person,” he said.
Cusack, whose parents still live in Evanston, credits “Grosse Pointe Blank” with forcing him to confront at least one demon: his fear of attending his 10-year Evanston High reunion in 1994, which he said he would have skipped if not for the movie. He disliked high school, and like Martin–who envisioned such chit-chat as “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How are you?”–he dreaded discussing his work.
But in the end people were just people. “There was some fascinating, vicious cat-fighting going on . . . but it was also surprisingly warm and touching, because some people had really evolved tremendously and were really happy with their lives,” he said. “It’s this whole fantastic range of what 10 years can do to you all in one room. It was kind of great and horrifying and surreal and twisted all at once.”
In Cusack’s view, that’s as good a combination as you can get.
