Emilio Estevez: A Triple Threat at 23

The title of his current film says it all: Emilio Estevez's career is in Maximum Overdrive. This winter the young actor- screenwriter-director unveils his precocious project, Wisdom.

Since his 1982 film debut in Tex, Emilio Estevez has been battling labels. He was born with the face of a leprechaun and the name of a matador, and it used to be easier to call him "Martin Sheen's son" than to remember "Emilio Estevez." Then, after the success of The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, it became chic to lump him with his friends and co-stars in the Brat Pack category. But Estevez is running with a new crowd these days, an elite group of performers who write, direct, and star in their own films. In the past, this bunch was limited to bonafide geniuses like Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen. In more recent years, it has come to include box-office bruiser Sly Stallone. And now it has taken in the young Turk called Estevez. The completion of his film Wisdom has made him perhaps the youngest person ever to have written a major Hollywood movie and directed himself in it. So forget the other labels; now it's Emilio Estevez, auteur.

When you're a working actor-writer-director, you naturally have a office. Estevez's is buried at the end of a maze of hallways at the Lion's Gate postproduction headquarters in an industrial area west Los Angeles. The young director's desk is furnished with an in-basket containing a dozen bottles of vitamins, the current issue of Runner magazine, a bouquet of dead flowers left over from his 24the birthday, and a large calendar filed with notations of appointments, his workout and running schedules, and the postproduction deadlines for Wisdom. The May 21 space contains only one note, written in Estevez's Parker penmanship. "12:00-interview- Moviegoer dude." You can take the boy out of Malibu, but you can't take Malibu out of the boy.

The office is only temporary, but it is well furnished. There's a television monitor and an extensive video collection, meticulously catalogued. Right next to it is a full-size movie-theater popcorn popper, with corn, cholesterol-free oil, and salt substitute all neatly lined up, ready for a fresh batch. Souvenirs of the Wisdom shoot, which ended just a month ago, lie here and there. Cartons of Evian water, in the liter bottles, are stacked against the wall. Bags of rice cookies, the Fit for Life diet book and other lifestyle indicators complete the decor. The skylight above the desk shows a May day that is dreary and overcast.

Demi Moore, Estevez's fiancee, and co-star in Wisdom arrives first, and the room brightens considerably. Just the day before, TIME magazine named Moore one of the six hottest young actresses in town. In her distinctive low scratchy voice, she apologizes for Estevez's tardiness, taking full responsibility: "I forced him to go to a screening of my movie About Last Night...." She sees the calendar notation just as Estevez is heard plowing down the hall. "Emilio," she calls, "the Moviegoer dude is here!"

Estevez enters in a burst of laughter and mild embarrassment. "Oh, wow, did you read it? I wrote it down so fast, it was like 'Okay...okay...' and then on to something eles." He might even be blushing, but it's hard to tell freshly sunburned from the post-Wisdom resort cruise he and his lady just took. "We had to do it," Moore says with a giggle. "It was so corny." Switching to a game-show host's deep voice. Estevez joins in: "A beautiful cruise for two down the intoxicating Mexican Riviera." Together since their St. Elmo's Fire screen test, they're planning a fall wedding. But their careers are ablaze, and there is little time to waste. They smooch a bit, settle some details, and exchange I-love-yous and Moore leaves.

As soon as she's out of earshot, Estevez launches a salvo of not entirely bias-free praises. "She's incredible in About Last Night... So in touch with herself and her emotions and so relaxed." Then a little directional pride shows through. "She's even better in Wisdom." he says.

Wisdom, due out early next year, underwent its modest birth a year and a half ago as a one-word title on Estevez's otherwise blank computer screen. Today he's holding the early preview that was submitted to the Cannes film festival as a foretaste of upcoming 20th Century Fox attractions. "It started as just the title. I thought it would be great visually. His hand sweeps up, demonstrating, "Just WISDOM across the screen."

Estevez has been writing since he could hold a pencil. At the ripe age of 7, he submitted a story to the TV series Night Gallery. Until Wisdom, his only produced script was last year's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's That Was Then, This Is Now, the fourth of her teen novels to be turned into films (three featuring Estevez) He moved up from a blink-of-the-eye appearance in Tex to a supporting role in The Outsiders, and then starred in That Was Then, This Is Now. "It was a flawed script." he admits. While the critics were slashing that movie Estevez sat down to write Wisdom. "I finished the first draft in three weeks." he says, his blue eyes bragging.

As the film progressed, Estevez's favorite title also became his character's name: John Wisdom. The troubled Wisdom is "without a place in society." Estevez explains. "He becomes a criminal because he feels it's the only thing society has left him to do." He smiles, "I've always been attracted to the dark side of human nature." Then he adds carefully, "As an actor."

The film offers plenty of actions and ends with a bang-up chase scene, but its director insists, "This is about two people-their relationship and their discoveries. Those discoveries leave Wisdom not only wanted dead or alive in five states, but also a modern day folk hero. It's funny, no one's seen a single frame of the movie and yet it's already been compared to Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands(his father's star- maker), Bullitt, Robin Hood, and Spies Like Us. Incredible..." He sighs and shakes his head. "My favorite one is The Breakfast Club Meets the Farm Debt-whatever that's supposed to mean."

Estevez is a confident kid, but he's less scrappy than his tough onscreen persona in Wisdom would indicate. His body is strong and well toned. He darts around his small office, his face and hands in constant motion. Long, lush, sun-bleached eyelashes soften his piercing Wedgwood-blue eyes. He's anxious to show the Cannes preview, but he prefaces it with nervous warnings. "It's very choppy, you know, and the music's not right. The narration's all wrong, but it'll give you a feeling. The trailer opens with a shot of John Wisdom immersed in a bathtub, menacing music and fancy camerawork helping to set the mood. Then-just as the director envisioned-the screen goes black, and across it flashes the single word WISDOM.

It's a bright sunny afternoon in late April, and Wisdom is two days short of completion. The crew staggers into a motel parking lot to prepare the second setup of what looks like another very long day. For the pat eight weeks, the filmmakers have been turning the streets of Los Angeles and Sacramento into their equivalents in the Great Plains. The strain shows. The only thing that distinguished Estevez from his young crew is his size: he's shorter. But it's very clear who's running Wisdom. You hear his name constantly. "Where's Emilio?" "Emilio said...""Emilio asked...""Emilio wants....""Emilio needs...." A small group of teenage girls stationed nearby watch his every move. If he wanders into ear shot they too take up the call. "Emilio! Emilio! I love you, Emilio!" Always polite, he stays as far from the trainer-bra set as possible. In certain screen performances, Estevez has projected an intensity that is almost frightening. He has that quality this morning. Even his normally clear eyes have taken on a Village of the Damned glaze. Moore rubs his shoulders, and they talk over the upcoming scene. The dialogue is too wordy, and the actor-screen-writer-director is reworking his script. "Lack of pace is what destroys most films," he says. "Pace and the camera moves are what it's all about." Moore offers a suggestion, and Estevez accepts it. In monotone voice, the rehearse the dialogue, staring at the pavement, walking in little circles of concentration.

If you take the idea of a 23-year old kid with no directing experience pushing a screw of 60 through a bitch of a shooting schedule, and then add to that the fact that $6.5 million is riding on Junior's maiden voyage into moviemaking, you have enough to turn any executive producer's hair white. Unless that position is held by Oscar-winning director Robert Wise(West Side Story, The Sound of Music), whose hair is already white. So far he hasn't been disappointed. Junior brought Wisdom in a day ahead of schedule and $200,000 under budget. "Not bad for a first time out," Estevez says with a grin. "Many of the people I talked to about working on the film felt that I couldn't handle it. It took a lot of courage for Mr. Wise to say, 'Yeah, I'll stand behind you. If you fall, I'll fall with you. If you succeed, then I will too.' " It's time for rehearsal. A dozen people are crammed into a motel room. "Nothing can prepare you for this," Estevez says. "No film school, no theater training, nothing. Walking onto the set with a hundred people asking, 'Where do we stand? Where do we put the camera?' " He glances around the room about to make those two-decisions. "I sweat, I worry. I go to my trailer and wring my hands. Then I come back onto the set and make a decision. You have to assume the position of leadership, or there won't be any."

After the scene is shot the way he wants it, the director makes his way to dinner. He stops to sign autographs and pose for some snapshots with grinning strangers, who stand next to him as if he were a prize fish. The dinner gathering looks like a modern-day gypsy encampment, with the tents replaced by temperature controlled Winnebagos and a ton of technology. An electrician, guzzling milk, scoffs at the mention of any on set Hollywood temper tantrums or off-set sex and drugs. "You've got to be kidding." He stifles a yawn to overstate his point. "Emilio and Demi are so clean they squeak." That verdict seems to be unanimous. Ask Vera in makeup, Wendy in production, or Larry the van driver and they'll all echo it. And the song remains the same at Santa Monica High School, where Estevez was a member of the class of 1980. Dick Turner sounds every inch the high school vice principal as he glances through the transcript, summarizing the graduate's high school achievements. "Strong grade point average. Very visible. Athletic achievements." Most important, Turner insists, "Emilio was his own person. Because of the name difference, I don't think most of the students knew who his father was."

The father in question, Ramon Estevez. (a.k.a. Martin Sheen), was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1940, one of 10 children of an Irish mother and a Spanish father. As a struggling actor in New York during the late '50s, he found that his name was a problem. Ramon Estevez was as unlikely a name for him as, say Emilio Estevez is for his son. So, borrowing a tag from his idol, TV priest Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, he chose a surname that went on to become famous. The son inherited his father's looks, if not his last name. "Emilio Sheen sounds awful." he says and so it was that he ended up Estevez instead. In 1968, when director Mike Nichols tapped Dad for a role in Catch-22, the Sheens moved to Malibu. If life with a famous parent in a neighborhood like Malibu can be considered normal, Emilio Estevez had a fairly normal childhood. By age 8. he'd decided to join the family profession. "When I was 9 or 10 years old," he remembers, "I was making eight millimeter films with the other kids in the family or with the neighbors." As luck would have it, those neighbors included Rob and Chad Lowe and Sean and Chris Penn. "I was always writing movies, cutting them, acting in them, directing them." At 14, Estevez accompanied his father to the Philippines for the shooting of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. It was growing up time for the teenager. First off, Manila was a big switch from Malibu. Then, and much worse, his father suffered a heart attack on location. In spite of all that, the actor to be landed his first movie job as the extra in the film. He impressed Coppola enough to remember five years down the road when the director was casting The Outsiders. Back in California after that personal and professional odyssey, Estevez rejected the idea of attending one of the private schools populated by celebrity bred, children. "They're for kids who have everything but a relationship with their parents." He went to public high school instead, where he "ran track with all the black dudes." with the surfers and got grades like the brains. He was elected king of the senior prom, which he now recalls as one of the most embarrassing moments of his life.

While he was still a senior, Estevez appeared with his father in a production of Mister Roberts at the Burt Reynolds Theatre in Florida. The world of acting took him by storm, and he landed his first film job the day of his graduation. Call it the luck of the Spanish- Irish. The project was a TV youth drama called Seventeen Going on Nowhere, and Estevez followed that with another TV drama, In the Custody of Strangers. It was the last outing to date of the Sheen and Son duo. "My father's a great man, but it was time to be on my own." After eight movies, Estevez has finally freed himself from the son-of-Sheen stamp. "I still get it occasionally," he groans, shifting into his best Hoosier voice. "Hey, ain't you Martin Sheen's kid?"

These days he's more likely to hear "Hey, repo man!" As Otto the punkster in the 1984 film Repo Man, the actor became for the first time a screen presence to be reckoned with. Wearing a dangling earring and an air of dark menace somehow mixed with innocence and charm, Estevez blazed a trail into cinematic territory that none of his peers has yet visited. The tough, jagged movie about a city-sliced punk who gets involved with a sleazy car-repossession operation-not to mention-space aliens-became a cult classic. It remains Estevez's most compelling work and his personal favorite of all his films. It wasn't until he got rid of the earring and donned a letter jacket for The Breakfast Club and a bow tie for St. Elmo's Fire that Emilio Estevez became a household name-especially if the household contained a teenage girl. Both films were popular with kids if not the critics, and their young ensemble casts have cornered the publicity market-for better or worse. While the journalists were busy inventing group nicknames Estevez's That Was Then, This Is Now opened in the theaters. The critics pounced. One review in the L.A. Weekly, so angered Estevez that he wrote the newspaper a letter saying, in essence, "Hey, you guys, it takes far more courage to do than to review."

The pain of his first career failure was softened by his developing relationship with Demi Moore. "She's a great partner." he says. "I had this block in terms of communication. I had trouble finding out exactly what I was feeling and exploring certain ideas I had. I was afraid that I wouldn't sound intelligent or that I'd be embarrassed; those are my two great fears. She's really helped me overcome a lot of that." Their relationship flourished despite the pressure of shooting schedules that forced them to date long-distance. In 1985, Moore was in Cape Cod all winter doing About Last Night....Estevez spent the winter promoting That Was Then, This Is Now, then dashed off to North Carolina for the shooting of Maximum Overdrive. When the two of them were reunited for Wisdom, everything fell into place.

Like any artist in the midst of a project, Estevez feels certain insecurities about his creation. "I've written all the reviews in my head." he says. "The best reviews, and the worst. Because of my age and the nature of what I'm tackling, there will be those who'll say I bit off more than I could chew, no matter what the quality of the film turns out to be." He shrugs. "They'll go in prepared to hate it."

As every young celebrity learns, the press is a fickle friend. Estevez remembers a conversation with TB film critic Gene Siskel. "Five minutes into lunch, he says, 'Estevez, the press is not your friends.' I lost my appetite. I don't know why people want to put out such bad energy. It's not the way I choose to relate the human race. Everyone has this preconceived notion of how 'we' act-that we drink and carouse 23 hours a day. Does that sell magazines?" On the other hand, Estevez realizes that it was the attention and press coverage, surrounding The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire that enabled him to get the necessary backing for Wisdom from David Begelman, the former head of MGM.

Whatever the outcome of Wisdom, Estevez is optimistic about his future, on and off the screen. "I'm going to continue to grow and take chances. Because that's what I do: I take risks for a living. I've always been ambitious and competitive. I had to be the fastest or score the most points. Later this afternoon, I'm going running with my buddy Tom Cruise, and we are very, very, competitive when we are running together. It's the way for a lot of actors. It's like running this incredible race, you know, the 400-meter hurdle-and there's always going to be another hurdle" Before Estevez begins to sound just a wee bit too together, he switches gears. "Am I giving you enough information? Again, I have that fear, you know, that I'm coming across like a f---ing idiot."

His most recent director(aside from himself) is America's favorite writer, the horrific Stephen King-who, after seeing a dozen of his stories turned into films that caused even him to have nightmares, decided to direct Maximum Overdrive himself. " I wanted Springsteen for the part." King says right up front. "I needed a combination of working-class feel and box-office clout. I kept remembering Emilio from Repo Man, but I'd read the stories and didn't want any Hollywood bullshit." A King fan ever since he read The Shining at 17, Estevez says, "The script landed on my desk and I said, "Well, I'll give it a read. I'd been wanting to do an action picture for a while, and the script was wild. I saw that I'd get to shoot guns and grenade-launchers, the whole thing." Then with a burst of laughter, he adds, "And I was broke!" "I was apprehensive." King chimes in. "But 10 minutes after we started working together, I knew that I'd made the right choice." A man of many words, the author proceeds to deliver a monologue on Estevez. "We ain't seen nothing from the kid yet. The kid's going to be big. Really big." King laughs. "I still call him the kid. Well, he don't act like no kid, or think like one neither. You know all this Brat Pack bullshit? I'll tell you, I'd pay a million bucks for each of my kids if I could be guaranteed they'd turn out like Emilio."

The temperature drops as the sun makes its final attempt to burn through the clouds. Traffic on the Coast Highway is bumper-to-bumper with the rush-hour crunch. Just a few blocks away, Estevez and Cruise are stretching, limbering up for their six-mile run. Conversation is minimal. There's a time to talk and a time to run. They never have problems with fans when they're jogging, says Estevez with a grin and a little machismo. "We run too fast for anyone to spot us."

They aren't too fast for his high school track coach, however. The coach toots his horn as he drives by, calling a hello. Hearing the familiar voice, Estevez checks his pace. "Hey coach, what's happening?" Then he's back in the race. "It's some race that doesn't even exist," he pants. "But I'm in it." And he keeps running. Faster and faster. Tearing up the turf.


Article written by Michael Danahy, a.k.a. "the Moviegoer dude". Article typed by Amy for Presenting...Emilio