Kevin Spacey, Michael Caine and Denzel Washington have to sweat it out for another 38 days. For me, the wait is over.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science released its list of nominees for the 72nd annual Academy Awards on Tuesday, and for some unfathomable reason my name was not on the list.
While no one was exactly tipping me actually to win an Oscar for my motion picture debut in Ron Shelton's new boxing film Play It to the Bone, the smart money had it that I'd at least be nominated. Not that it's much consolation, but my costars - Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas - weren't nominated either.
Harrelson and Banderas play a couple of over-the-hill middleweights who are exhumed to fight each other in Las Vegas. The way the storyline goes, they are summoned to fight on the undercard of a bout between Mike Tyson and a fictitious Russian named Alexei Rustikov after the principal supporting bout falls apart at the last minute, and they speed their way across the desert from Los Angeles. Apart from the fact that Harrelson, whose head is shaven and body heavily tattooed for the role, looks an awful lot like the real-life boxer Angel Manfredy, and Banderas like Arturo Gatti-as-Zorro, the bare bones of this tale are taken from an episode which actually occurred several years back. Brought in at the last minute, the two palookas surprised everyone by putting on the Fight of the Year.
My role? I play a bearded, portly, jaded newspaperman seated at ringside. Suffice it to say the make-up girl was not overly taxed the afternoon they shot my scenes.
Director Ron Shelton, who also wrote the screenplay, is a former minor league baseball player who relied on that experience to make his breakthrough film Bull Durham a dozen years ago. Although he has made several other movies, he is best known for his work in the sports genre, having branched out into the worlds of golf (Tin Cup) and playground basketball (White Men Can't Jump), in addition to having made Cobb, a jaded portrait of the legendary 1920s baseball curmudgeon Ty Cobb.
I first met Shelton a decade ago. By chance we had been seated at ringside together at a fight at Caesars Palace, and it turned out we had formed a mutual admiration society a few months earlier, by virtue of having each contributed a story to a baseball anthology published that year.
I had written about Bill (Spaceman) Lee, the eloquently eccentric pitcher from whom Shelton had occasionally borrowed in Bull Durham, and Ron had written about Steve Dalkowski, a legendary pitcher who reputedly could throw harder than any man who ever lived, but whose near-sightedness at once terrorised minor league hitters and kept him from reaching the big time. I had greatly admired Ron's piece, and he had loved mine.
Although the main event is supposed to feature Tyson (who was paid for his appearance in the film), the fight scenes for Play It to the Bone were actually shot at the Mandalay Bay a few days before last May's Oscar De La HoyaOba Carr welterweight title fight.
In the interest of verisimilitude, several of us who make part or all of our living writing about boxing were corralled to form the ringside press section, which was then filled out by those who presumably could pass as boxing scribes. Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler, for instance, who wouldn't be caught dead at a Tyson fight, is seated in the front row, furiously taking notes.
We were about half an hour into the first day's filming when a horrified Shelton shouted "Cut!" and came scrambling out from behind the cameras to confront De La Hoya's cut-man Chuck Bodak, seated in the press section.
"Chuck, you can't be sitting there!" said the exasperated director.
"Why not?" asked Bodak, a bald-headed fellow with a white beard who is one of the more recognisable cornermen around.
"Because in the scene we shot yesterday you're working in Woody's corner," Shelton reminded him. "This is supposed to be the same fight!"
The script called for Harrelson and Banderas to start belting one another around, each hitting the deck with alarming regularity. We writer-types were supposed to "be ourselves", but Shelton liked my extemporised line - "Holy shit!", as Harrelson thudded to the floor - so much that he incorporated it, and I wound up shouting the phrase a good two dozen times through the numerous takes we shot that afternoon.
By the end of the day, my voice-box was nearly as sore as Woody's backside.
As it turned out, my line stayed in the movie, but since it is delivered with me off-camera, no one will ever match up the voice with its author. This sad fact was relayed to me several months ago after George Foreman's publicist, Bill Caplan (who plays the ringside physician in the film), viewed a screening of the finished product.
When I lamented the exclusion of my speaking role to the playwright Israel Horovitz, he reminded me by way of consolation: "There are no small parts, only small actors."
That is certainly true enough. Between the ringside fans and the guests at a pre-fight party, the roster of Bone cameo roles read like a Hollywood Who's Who: Kevin Costner, Drew Carey, Wesley Snipes, James Woods, Tony Curtis, Rod Stewart and President Clinton's reputed former mistress, Gennifer Flowers, all had roles even more brief than mine, but it did make for one hell of a cast party.
Most of my footage, alas, wound up on the cutting-room floor, a fact which may have influenced the Academy selectors who failed to nominate me for an Oscar. In fact, by my count your man in Hollywood is only on camera four times, and fleetingly at that. (Though it's easier to pick me out than it is to, say, find Steve Collins in that pub in Michael Collins.)
While Play It to the Bone didn't garner a single Oscar nomination, there is some consolation in the fact that the year's other, more heavily-hyped boxing film, The Hurricane, got only one. And it goes without saying, we had more fun making ours.
