A decade ago, I helped oversee a “table read” at the HBO offices in Century City of an exciting new screenplay, "Save Ferris," a parody/sequel to the legendary John Hughes’ movie, "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off."
The organizer was an aspiring producer, Holly Wiersma ("Factory Girl," "Wonderland") who had talked almost the entire cast of the then-new “That 70’s Show” into reading. She had help: The HBO producer involved was legendary sports announcer Jim Lampley. (How do you think we got such swanky offices for a table read?)
But it was only in watching Monday’s "Two and a Half Men" that I began to realize how intertwined all of our stories had become. Because, as I recall it from that fall Saturday, 10 years ago it was Ashton Kutcher who played the young Charlie Sheen in “Ferris!” So Monday wouldn’t have been the first time Kutcher would have replaced Sheen -- but it did jog my memory.
Back to, back to...
In this case the memory begins with his father. Martin Sheen was already a legend for “Apocalypse Now” which was released the year I got out of college. I’ll never forget coming home from my first job at Newsweek only to be assaulted by my then-best friend M. George Stevenson when he broke in pretending to “dive” on a grenade to save me from the blast. The after effects of a screening of “Apocalypse.”
Several years passed but I still didn’t understand how far the Sheen family had burrowed into our national psyche: A pitcher himself growing up in Malibu, Charlie played “pitcher” to a tee in John Sayles' 1988 film “Eight Men Out” (about the Chicago White Sox’ “Black Sox” scandal) and then in numerous “Major Leagues.”
But Sheen had already hit the public’s imagination as the “bad boy” arrestee who hits on Jennifer Grey in the final scenes of “Ferris.” It was such a tour-de-force that another bad boy, Oliver Stone, cast him as the lead in his breakthrough Vietnam epic, “Platoon.”
Which is where it gets creepy.
Oliver was smart enough to “sneak” the movie for selected writers, of whom I happened to be one. As I’ve written before, having walked out of a solo screening in August 1986, I immediately called Newsweek’s esteemed critic David Ansen and told him “I’ve got our Christmas cover!” David remembers it differently, but the reality is that we spent that fall working on a Christmas cover story for Newsweek, only to be beaten out a week before by Time, which put it on their cover. Our story ended up running a week later as a “takeout” or major feature just after the New Year (Newsweek, 1/5/87).
I moved to Disney as a VP and didn’t really think about Charlie or his family for a while -- until Michael Douglas hired me as VP of production for his new Columbia Pictures’ company, Stonebridge Entertainment.
