ON THE SET BY CRISTY LYTAL
The End of the Innocence
Bobby assembles an all-star cast to evoke the hopes and dreams that died when Robert F Kennedy was assassinated.
DEMI MOORE IS PERCHED ON a blue vinyl chair, much like the type that might have graced the beauty salon at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel circa 1968. An assistant scuttles over bearing a bottle of nonalcoholic O'Doul's beer. Moore takes a swig, then closes her eyes and begins singing the classic torch song "Cry Me a River."
"Remember, I remember all that you said. .: "
After a few stanzas, she's prepared for Bobby's cameras to capture her turn as Virginia Fallon, a drunken singer who's scheduled to introduce Robert F. Kennedy at his victory party on the night of the California primary.
Sharon Stone, sporting a beautician's jacket, false bangs, and about a pound of navy-blue eye shadow, assumes her station behind the chair, and the two begin to make small talk about subjects like aging and alcoholism.
After each four-minute take, the women venture further off script.
"Do you have kids?" asks Stone.
"I don't have any. I tried. I'm just a failure, a big failure."
"You're just lovely, Virginia."
Stone kisses the top of Moore's head.
By the end of the scene, both actresses are in tears. Writer-director Emilio Estevez hurries over to distribute hugs and compliments.
When the cast breaks for lunch, Estevez, who was engaged to Moore in their 1980s Brat Pack days and who plays Virginia's long-suffering husband, assesses the women's performance. "It was gnarly! It was like there was too much estrogen in there," he says, laughing. "It's like these two titans going at it-and not in a competitive way, just like, 'I'll show you what I got!' So they were like-Boom! Boom! Slug!-truly slugging it out in an artistic way. And then last week was Harry Belafonte and Tony Hopkins, these two legends. There are times when I'm standing at the monitor, and I just start to weep."
Most likely, there were many moments during the long gestation of Bobby, Estevez's passion project-a reported $10 million drama set in the Ambassador Hotel on the day and night of RFK's assassination in June 1968-when he felt like crying in frustration. The seed was planted almost four decades ago. "My dad [Martin Sheen] campaigned for Bobby when he was running for the Senate in New York and actually took me with him on one of those days," says Estevez, 44. "I was on his shoulders, and Bobby shook my hand. I was six when Bobby was shot, and I woke my father up that morning to tell him." The following year, in 1969, Sheen took Estevez to the then-glamorous Ambassador to pay his respects to the senator's memory.
The next time that Estevez set foot
in the hotel was in the spring of 2000, when he was at a photo shoot for his fourth directorial effort, the straight-to-cable drama Rated X. (His first two writing directing ventures-1986's lovers-on-the-lam drama Wisdom and 1990's garbage-collector comedy Men at Work-generated little
critical heat, but his third stab at directing, The War at Home, which he didn't write, fared better.) "I was warned by the guys that ran the property, who said, `We don't allow anything to do with Bobby Kennedy. It keeps the conspiracy theorists at bay,' " Estevez says. Undeterred, he set to work on a script that would ultimately focus on the problems and passions of 22 characters, all fictionalized to varying degrees, present at the Ambassador in the hours leading up to the tragedy. He wrote 30 pages before coming down with a year-long case of writer's block.
"I worked on my house," he says.
"I put tiles in, and I stained floors. Charlie [Sheen, his brother] finally said, `Hey, man, you're not a carpenter. You asshole, what are you doing? This is going to change your life.'"
Craving an environment without distractions, Estevez checked into
a television-free hotel in Pismo Beach, California. There he met a desk clerk named Diane, a former Youth for Kennedy volunteer who was at the Ambassador the day of the assassination; she told
him she had wed two draftees to keep them from going to Vietnam. Estevez wrote a young couple marrying for the same reason (played by Lindsay Lohan
and Elijah Wood) into his script and began deriving other inspiration from people in his life. "My godfather was this elegant black man who was six five and worked for the post office," he says. "He was my dad's best friend growing up. He took me to see operas and classical music and the ballet. The character that Laurence Fishburne plays [the hotel's sous-chef] is my godfather. Not to sound all esoteric, but I feel in a lot of ways that I'm a vessel and channeling a lot of odd things that are just coming out of me."
Estevez finished the script a week before 9/11 and sold it in 2002 to a company that then lost its funding. Even so, the first two actors he approached-Wood and Freddy Rodriguez-remained committed to the project. "We met for breakfast one day," recalls Rodriguez, whose busboy character kneels next to Kennedy's body in a reenactment of the famous photograph from that tragic night. "We had huevos rancheros. So we see how far the film has gone, and we always say, `All this over huevos rancheros,' you know?"
In 2005, Estevez found new backing from Belgian billionaire Michael Litvak of Bold Films. Then Anthony Hopkins, who
costarred with Estevez in 1992's Freejack, signed on to play the hotel's retired doorman, and a host of other stars followed, including Christian Slater, William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, Heather Graham, and Ashton Kutcher. "From the phrase `Sir Anthony Hopkins' on, I couldn't hear a word they said," says Macy, who plays the hotel manager, who's cheating on his wife (Stone) with a switchboard operator (Graham). "I just said, `Yes, I'll do it,' because there'd be scenes with him."
Still, all did not go smoothly, at least according to a May article in Esquire written by an anonymous "entertainmentindustry insider," which claimed that the film's budget spiraled out of control; that Litvak demanded a sizable role for his Russian wife, Svetlana Metkina; and that Estevez responded to requests to
shorten his 162-page script by faking nervous breakdowns and heart attacks.
"[Talking] about me faking heart attacks was particularly shitty given the fact that my family takes that very seriously," Estevez says. "My father had a heart attack at 37. That's not something that I fake. [That piece] was written by somebody who was on our production who had a personal bone to pick with me. The guy's a gutless turd."
Then there was the news that the Ambassador, which closed its doors in 1989, was being torn down to make room for a school for underprivileged children. The production had to move fast-capturing
a few exterior shots; buying hotel remnants such as writing pads, pens, crown molding, furniture, and even the switchboard; and re-creating its 1920s interiors on a soundstage. One of the few scenes shot at the hotel before its demolition was the climactic restaging of the assassination.
Estevez admits that it was hard to give his large cast equal time and attention, and
apparently the shoot was not without its tensions. "There were some phenomenal divas, and it makes the day really long and boring," says Macy. "I mean, lateness and attitude and the kind of thing
that just makes you wish that you had been a veterinarian. Some of these women showed up two and a half hours late with nary an apology. And I blame the producers. What should happen is they should fire their sorry asses, and that would send a message out. But on the other hand, I got to do this scene with Heather Graham, who was a complete delight. And Tony Hopkins, absolutely crackerjack, and Christian Slater-just consummate professionals."
In March, before a first cut was completed, the Weinstein Company bought the film for an undisclosed amount.
"I think people know that I wear my politics on my sleeve and that Bobby Kennedy was somebody that I idolized," says Harvey Weinstein, who encouraged Estevez to incorporate more 1960s documentary footage, including Vietnam war scenes and Kennedy speeches. "When you see it," he adds, "you're instantly reminded that there
was an edge and that the politics were so sharp and courageous that no one was being nostalgic in loving this guy."
Estevez says it "was not my original intention" to include so much documentary. "But I think [Weinstein]
is absolutely right that you have to set the table for who this guy was." Although older cast members, like Hopkins, remember the assassination well ("I was doing a television play in London,"
the Oscar winner recalls. "I thought, God, it's all gone mad. And the world seemed to buckle for a time"), the 25-year-old Wood notes that he grew up "not really knowing Bobby's story. In school, generally JFK's assassination and significance tended to overshadow Bobby's."
Still, despite the title, the real-life footage, and the poignant memories and good intentions of all concerned,
Bobby is not the RFK story. Estevez never intended it to be; he doesn't fancy himself another Oliver Stone. "In terms of filmmakers that I admire, he's the historian, and that's his territory," he says. "The movie that I wanted to make is about our broken heart that we never recovered from. Bobby was the third strike-it was Jack, it was Martin, it was Bobby, and then nobody came after that. Nobody stood up and said, `Let's make a difference,' because the message was that if you did, you'd be killed. That night was when the music died as far as American politics. We're still grieving."