Lucky Man Read Online Free

a fun city for a young director on a studio expense account, I said to myself, because otherwise Caton-Jones was wasting his time. I wasn't doing Doc Hollywood . I was absolutely sure of that. . . .
    Or was I?
    Immensely charming, the sort of artist-as-human-train-wreck I seem drawn toward, Michael Caton-Jones was on his third Molson when I realized the son of a bitch was actually selling me on this project. His pitch put a completely fresh spin on the story. My Green Acres concerns vanished; half an hour in a motor home on Avenue B and Michael had convinced me that this movie could represent something important to me—that it had personal significance. Young doctor, trained as a plastic surgeon, sets out across country in his Porsche Roadster, leaving the Washington, D.C., combat zone E.R. of his residency. He's Los Angeles–bound, boob jobs, butt tucks, and big money in his future. He cracks up the car in Grady, South Carolina, and the natives, in dire need of a local doctor, conspire to trap him there. A gentle life, the girl of his dreams, and the realization that the brass ring may not be worth reaching for convince him to stay.
    My own knuckles white from hanging on to that goddamned brass ring, it sounded good to me.
    SOUTHBOUND
    Cut to an explosion of sugar-glass—followed by a glittery spray of shards from the nucleus of which emerged Charlie, completing at ferocious speed the exterior half-arc of his brief but turbulent flight through the window. From out on the street, it looked as though he was being propelled by the force of the shattering window, rather than propelled through it. Charlie hit the pavement hard, executing a perfect shoulder roll, with his head tucked, more to avoid the lens than injury. Coming suddenly to a stop, he lay facedown, motionless. As soon as the director yelled cut, Charlie lifted his head and with a modest grin, indicated that he'd lived to be pummeled another day.
    After a quick repositioning of the camera angle, I got into place, was sprinkled with pieces of broken sugar glass, and, on hearing “Action,” did my roll-in. “Cut-print . . . one more please.” As I reset for take two, I glanced up to see Michael Caton-Jones and Charlie Croughwell excitedly plotting the best way to crash Doc Hollywood's Porsche. They both knew I was in, and so did I.
    So what had happened to my resolve to take an extended break? To the litany of reasons why my time would be better spent in the bosom of my family, to my understanding that so much time spent on location was taking a toll on me? All this had dissolved in an acid bath of fear and professional insecurity.
    Actors don't become actors because they're brimming with self-confidence. Ross Jones, my junior high drama teacher, would, at a certain point in every school production, address the cast: “Remember,” he'd say, “we are all here because we're not all there .” An actor's burning ambition, when you think about it, is to spend as much time as possible pretending to be somebody else. For those of us lucky (or unstable) enough to become professional performers, the uncertainty about who we really are only increases. For many actors, this self-doubt is like a worm eating away at you and growing, incongruously, in direct proportion to your level of success. No matter how great the acceptance, adulation, and accumulation of wealth, gnawing at you always is the deep-seated belief that you're a fake, a phony. Even if you can bullshit your way through whatever job you're working on now, you'd better prepare for the likelihood that you're never going to get another one.
    In the face of all evidence to the contrary, this is exactly how I felt about my own career in 1990. Throughout the eighties I had worked incessantly, and the rewards had been enormous. Achieving that level of acceptance, getting to the top of the mountain, so to speak, had been arduous, but there were so many new highs on the way up that it