“This is the pitch,” I said. “Ya ready?”
Adam said, “Sure! Lay it on me!”
I took a long drag of my Marlboro, pushed the phone closer to my cheek, gave a long exhale of tar and nicotine and pain, and began selling.
“OK,” I said. “It’s about this guy. You’d recognize him. His name is Matt and he’s about fifty years old. And he’s very very famous from doing a super beloved TV show years ago. But now, when the movie starts, we meet him and he’s got a pot belly—there are piles of empty pizza boxes in his apartment, all piled up like that totem in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you know, the one they made out of mashed potatoes … anyway, his life is a little bit of a mess. He is lost. Then, out of the blue, a distant relative of his dies and leaves him $2 billion. And he uses the money to become a superhero.”
“I love it!” says Adam.
Then he said, “Did you really inherit two billion dollars?”
Adam’s a funny guy.
“No, no!” I said. “It’s just the character who inherits the money. Does any of that spark anything with you? Because if it does, what’s our next move? You’re the big shoulders.”
“I’m not really the big shoulders,” Adam said, though we both know he is. I appreciated his modesty, but modesty won’t get you even a “fuck you” in Hollywood.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course you’re the big shoulders.…”
This was, after all, Adam McKay, the guy who directed Anchorman and Step Brothers and a bunch of other big stuff. At the time we were chatting, he was making Don’t Look Up, that movie about a giant asteroid heading toward Earth, you know, the one that stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, even Ariana Grande and Meryl Streep—amazing cast.
I was in Don’t Look Up at one point, too, and even though I was also heading to rehab in Switzerland, I nevertheless went to Boston to shoot my bit. While there, I pitched a line to Adam that he loved and which became the blow to the scene, which is what you’re always hoping for (he ended up not using the scene—shit happens; no bigs). The point being, Adam McKay and I got along really well, and here he was, loving my pitch.
At the time I was in pain from the scar tissue from the surgeries, so I needed pain meds, but I’d get addicted to them, of course, which would only cause more damage to my insides … but feeling a bit better, I was happy recently when I got a call from Adam. We were just chatting, but in Hollywood there’s no such thing as just chatting, so I figured what the hell—why is he calling me? And when he never seemed to get to his point, I seized the moment and I pitched him my idea.
“Anyway, Mr. Big Shoulders,” I said, ignoring his false modesty, “what do you think?”
You know when there’s a pause in a conversation that in hindsight you wish could have lasted forever so you don’t have to hear the rest of it?
“I don’t think you’re talking to the person you think you’re talking to,” “Adam” said.
“What? Well, who is this?” I said.
“It’s Adam McLean. We met six years ago. I’m a computer salesman.”
If you’ve seen Don’t Look Up, you’ll know that at the end … well, let’s just say that when I realized it was Adam McLean, not Adam McKay, a huge fucking asteroid smacked into my brain.
I have history in this kind of shit, too. Years earlier, Bruce Willis won the People’s Choice award for Best Actor for The Sixth Sense and asked me to present it to him. That night, backstage, I met Haley Joel Osment and M. Night Shyamalan, and spoke to both of them for about ten minutes.
Six months later, I was with some friends at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, and who should walk in but M. Night Shyamalan.
“Hey, Matthew,” he said, “long time no see! Can I sit down?”
Can he sit down? He had just written and directed The Sixth Sense. He was the next Steven Spielberg, of course he can sit down! I was a few drinks in and having a good time (this was when alcohol alone still worked for me).
Eventually my friends filtered out, and it was just M. Night and me, sitting there, kickin’ it. I remember making a mental note that we were not talking show business at all, just talking about love and loss and girls and LA and all the other stuff people chat about at bars. He seemed to be having a really good time, too—laughing at all of my dumb jokes—and I began to think, Hey, this guy likes me! He must be just a huge Friends fan or something, because he really seems super focused on everything I’m saying.
I usually never do this—I’ve been burned by this line of thinking way too many times—but I began to have wild fantasies about what this could do for my career. He told me that there was another bar that had just opened across town and asked if I wanted to go with him. Did I want to go with him? He was M. Night Fuckin’ Shyamalan! Of course I wanted to go with him.
We went to the valet, picked up our cars, and I followed him across town to this new place, all the while certain that I was going to be the star of his next, huge movie—yeah, there was going to be a new, awesome, twisty movie and the trick ending was going to be me!
My head was doing cartwheels. I can’t explain why—he just seemed like he loved me, and my work, and I was just drunk enough to think that this was going to be a life-changing night. As we took our seats at the new place, I felt comfortable [read: drunk] enough to say that we should work together sometime. All at once, a strange look came across his face, and I remember immediately regretting having said it. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, and while he was gone, someone I knew a bit came up to me asked me how my night was going.
I said, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with M. Night Shyamalan all night and I’m telling you, the guy loves me.” My buddy was impressed … that is, until M. Night returned from the bathroom.
“Matty,” my pal said, looking closely at M. Night, “could I have a word in private?”
This was weird as fuck, but drink will make almost anything plausible, so I stepped away from my magical evening with M. Night for a moment.
“Matty,” my friend whispered, “that is not M. Night Shyamalan.”
This revelation caused me to attempt to fully focus my vodka-softened eyes for a moment, and through the gloom of the dark bar I squinted hard at N. Night Shyamalan.
Not.
Even.
Close.
Turns out, “M. Night” was actually just an Indian gentleman who looked the tiniest bit like M. Night Shyamalan (maybe it was N. Night Shyamalan?), and who was, in reality, the maître d’ at Mr. Chow Beverly Hills, a hip restaurant in LA that I frequented … and that I no longer frequent, because I told its maître d’ that we should work together sometime. What kind of a night did he think he was having? I thought.