Seven Dirty Words_ The Life and Crimes of George Carlin - James Sullivan [104]
Coincidental to the acting class, Carlin was offered a supporting role in an upcoming comedy featuring Bette Midler and Shelley Long, who was nearing the end of her five years starring on the NBC sitcom Cheers. Outrageous Fortune was directed by Hollywood veteran Arthur Hiller, who had directed Silver Streak with Pryor and, years earlier, The Out-of-Towners with Jack Lemmon, the man Carlin once suggested was his comic-acting role model. With its title plucked from the famous soliloquy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the slapstick-y movie followed the story of a pair of aspiring actresses who end up dating the same man, who turns out to be an agent for the KGB. In a flat-brimmed cowboy hat and sporting an uncharacteristic tan, Carlin played Frank Madras, an old desert drunk who convinces the women to hire him as a tracker. Comically cranky about letting himself get sucked into his new clients’ dangerous escapade, he lends them his clothes as a disguise and spends much of the movie wearing Midler’s print skirt and orange sweater. “There were projects that he really busted his ass on,” says Book. Though it proved formulaic, Outrageous Fortune was one of these.
Carlin brought a bit less desire to Justin Case, an NBC movie for which director Blake Edwards hand-picked the comic as the lead. Carlin played the ghost of a private detective trying to learn the circumstances behind his own murder at the hands of a mysterious “Lady in Black.” Dead detectives, old rascals, fading hippies, corrupt clergy-men, and sage advisors—for the rest of his career, Carlin was nearly always cast to type, usually based on the stock voices he’d been using in his act for years. Even the gratification of being the first choice of Edwards, who’d made not only the Pink Panther films but also Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and (with Lemmon starring) the dramatic Days of Wine and Roses, was not quite enough to convince Carlin that this project was more than a paycheck.
He had more fun with 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, playing Rufus, the back-from-the-future mentor to the title characters—two clueless, metal-loving dudes, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, who must pass their history exam in order to save humankind. The future, Rufus reports, is paradise: “Bowling averages are way up. Mini-golf scores are way down. And we have more excellent water slides than any other planet we communicate with.” It was a distinctly different attitude than Carlin the comedian would soon take, as his sense of humor grew progressively more apocalyptic.
A Bill & Ted’s sequel and a made-for-television quickie about two Wall Street janitors, called Working Tra$h (costarring a young Ben Stiller), provided little indication that Carlin would suddenly blossom as an actor. His breakthrough came in the 1991 film version of Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel, The Prince of Tides. Producer-director Barbra Streisand picked Carlin to play the role of Eddie Detreville, the gay neighbor of one of the movie’s main characters, calling him over to her home to audition privately. Carlin worked tirelessly to capture the role, says his acting coach. Taking walks with Book around his LA neighborhood, Carlin stayed in character as the wispy Eddie. According to Book, some of the people Carlin encountered while preparing for the role had no idea they were speaking with the famous comedian: “To this day, my neighbor wants to set him up with her brother, Doug.”
Book felt that his acting student reached a peak with his work on Prince of Tides—that he might have earned himself an Oscar nomination if he’d only been in another scene or two. The Grammys were more familiar territory. Carlin was nominated for the awards three times