words by Devoe Yates, photos by Robert Todd Williamson

Gosh darn it, William H. Macy is running a little late this morning. He’s just helped his daughters, ages six and eight, finish up some remaining homework from the night before. For a man who’s made an epic career out of playing the terribly sympathetic and burdened everyman in films like Fargo, Boogie Nights, and The Cooler, this does nothing but cement that image. A Teddy Roosevelt broom of a mustache hangs from his upper lip as he introduces himself with a handshake, “Bill Macy,” and apologizes for his tardiness. He is every bit the common gentleman you would surmise him to be, and enjoys losing himself in idle conversation as we lounge about the office. 

I ask him if his daughters are keen to the fact that their seemingly normal father is one of the most respected actors in Hollywood. He smiles and shakes his head, replying, “Because my wife (Felicity Huffman – Transamerica, Desperate Housewives) and I are in the biz, we’re acutely aware of finding some way to give them a normal life. So, to that end, we’ve kept them away from our business. It’s just been dawning on them in the last year or two that Felicity is on television. A couple of years ago, they started asking me, ‘Why does that guy want you to sign that DVD? Why are they taking your picture?’ They just got it that we’re famous. They don’t watch television, they just started watching videos, so we’re trying to keep a distance with that, just to see if we can keep it normal for them. It’ll be hard, but we’re dedicated to trying.” 

Macy is here to talk about the upcoming DVD release of one of his most personal projects to date, The Deal, a movie he co-wrote, executive produced, and stars in. Like State and Main, and the many roasts on moviemaking before it like The Player, Day For Night, and Living in Oblivion, it skewers the absurdity of moviemaking, but this time in a romantic comedy light. 

The tale of this yarn follows a fallen and suicidal movie producer, Charlie Berns (Macy), who turns his inner darkness towards bold jest when he decides to play the biggest prank of all, and make a $100 million dollar movie with a script he refuses to even read. The script in question is his innocent-eyed nephew’s (Jason Ritter) intellectual indie screenplay, which is set in the 19th century and serves as a character study of Benjamin Disraeli, the first and only British Prime Minister of Jewish heritage. It is this screenplay that Charlie Berns decides to mutate into a modern day action epic starring the recently-converted-to-Judaism black superstar, Bobby Mason (LL Cool J). Along the way, love does sneak its rosy head in to give Berns a new perspective on life, in the form of Deirdre Hearn (Meg Ryan), the executive producer assigned to watch over the production of Benjamin Disraeli: Freedom Fighter. Hilarity does ensue, there are kidnappings, a naughty threesome, and even Elliott Gould doing karaoke. I won’t give away too much, but let’s just say that the end result of Charlie Berns’ odyssey is both a movie he’d never thought he’d make and a mended heart that he thought was lost forever. 

Like Berns, Macy has had a long journey over the years. Asked what his first acting role was, he replies, “I think it was Mordred in Camelot my junior year in high school. I did a couple of things in high school, and then when I went to college, I did a couple more. It was all interwoven with women, too. I seem to gravitate towards women in the theater. It’s like, ‘Why do you rob banks?’ Because that’s where the money is. ‘Why do you act?’ Because that’s where the women are.” And in truth, Macy’s master plan worked, as he met Felicity doing theater in New York at the Atlantic Theater Company. 

It wasn’t until college that Macy fell in love with acting and filmmaking as a craft, thanks to a class taught by the man who went on to become his mentor, David Mamet (Glengary Glenross, The Spanish Prisoner, American Buffalo). “It was just showbiz and fun up to that point and I didn’t have any technique or a particular investment in it until Mamet. He’s as serious as a heart attack about this business. He basically said create the theater of your dreams. And he’s the first guy that I ever heard say that it’s an honorable profession and that the theater’s the place people go to hear the truth. And that’s a noble task, to find the truth. He put it in a perspective where I said, ‘Okay, that’s it, this is all I wanna do.’ And I’ve never looked back.” 

And like Charlie Berns in The Deal, Macy’s had his low points, and it was in those moments that he began dabbling in the other sides of filmmaking, trying his skills at writing, directing, and producing. “I think everybody’s career does that. I was lucky because I had enough pluck that I always thought, okay, if it’s not going to be as an actor, it’ll be something else, so I started directing when I was in New York and I directed a whole lot of plays. And then at another point, I started writing more. I think the notion of writing was daunting to me because of David – I happen to have been taught by one of the greatest writers to come down the pike. At first it was a matter of necessity, I wanted to be a director, and it’s a logical step to write the script yourself. The directing fell away, but I grew to love the writing, it’s one of my favorite things. It’s a combination, and also the self-knowledge that I had no other marketable skills, so I gotta make money in this business or go on welfare (laughs).” 

The Deal is one of the few cases where Macy was able to demonstrate his many talented sides, and it began with penning the script along with his writing partner and the director of The Deal, Steven Schachter. “We’ve been working together since college; he (Schachter) as a director, me as an actor. We showed up in Mamet’s acting class, and we stuck with that class all the way through. Steven and I started writing together about ten years ago as a result, and we both loved Peter Lefcourt’s book that The Deal is based on. Stephen said, you know, it’d make a great romantic comedy. So we met with Peter Lefcourt and told him we wanted to turn it into a romantic comedy, he said ‘Bully for you.’ He liked our script and we were off to the races. 

Every screenwriter needs feedback, and I ask Macy if he ever showed his and Steven’s script to Mamet for his opinion. Macy laughs, “Mamet not so much. I once heard him say to someone, I’d rather loan you my house and car than read your script. And I fully understand that. My heart sinks when a relative or a neighbor asks, ‘Would you read my script?’ And some of them have the chutzpah to say, ‘Would you read it again?’ I used to suffer through it and now, because I’m an old fart, I have the wherewithal to say ‘Naa, you just stepped over the line. I read it once, that’s all you get.’ But yes, we did let people read it and we did get feedback. Felicity reads everything. I run everything by her, and she, I. She’s really smart and gives great notes. But it is hard for a writer, and important for him or her to be able to listen to people’s notes and sort out the ludicrous ideas from the good ones.” 

Once the screenplay was ready, Macy and Schachter began acquiring the funds to make their indie darling. “Many times actors have a producing credit, as have I in the past, but this time I earned it. We got a good part of the money by doing cocktail parties all around Florida, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. We talked to wealthy people and gave them a brief primer on how independent film is financed. And in that way, we got about a third of our budget. And they have been as good as gold with us,
they’ve just been fantastic.” 

From the beginning, Macy set out to stay away from the buttery duplicity that most Hollywood producers are known for. Macy takes a sip from his steaming coffee to impart, “Sometimes people in this business, their default setting is to massage the truth, or to out and out lie. And sometimes they lie when there’s no upside, I don’t understand why! (laughs)
If you gain something, I can see telling a little fib, but sometimes they don’t tell the truth and there’s nothing to be gained!
It’s just the way they operate. So at any rate, Stephen
and I decided, okay if we’re going to do this, let’s be completely transparent. Let’s tell everybody everything, no secrets. If it falls apart, well then it’s not meant to be. So from the beginning we’ve been as transparent as we possibly could. I started a newsletter for our investors – I think we’re on number 20-something now. I write to them of the progress, and when we were in South Africa shooting, I’d send back a journal of how it was going with a lot of photographs.”  But even with many investors, the actual shoot of the film was still limited by a meager budget. “In fact, because our budget was so small, and the film purports to be so big, if you stood still for a couple of minutes, you were in the movie (laughs). All the cast and crew that you see in the film, that’s our cast and crew. It was very Brechtian. It was wonderful, the crew embraced this film in ways they never had. It was a moving shoot, and not only because of that, but also because we were making a film about showbiz, something that means something to all of us, and they got the jokes. We got along like a house on fire.” 

Speaking for myself, there is often an unreal camaraderie on movie sets, it’s almost like Summer Camp for adults, where days can be grueling at times, but in the end, you make some very close friends. I ask Macy if he agreed with this sentiment and he nods, “It’s a unique and powerful experience. That’s why when people do a film, they’re bitten, they can’t let it go. Once they’ve worked for a number of months on a film, they swear, ‘You’ll be my friends for the rest of my life!’ And once you’ve been in the business for awhile, you realize, yeah, I’ll never see you again…until the next movie. But people just love it, and understandably so, it’s one of the more noble of human endeavors if you ask me. I know that sounds high falutin’, but I’ve never seen people work so hard and I’ve never seen people put in such huge numbers of hours with such good cheer.” 

But on the flip side, things aren’t always so cheery on movie sets, sometimes they do indeed go downhill. “I’ve been on one or two of those. Everybody goes into survival mode for one thing. The nitty gritty of the crew, the people who are stuck right, front, and center, they join together, dedicated to getting each other through the thing. Gallows humor starts to develop. When a film goes south, it inevitably starts at the top and then the rot works its way down. When you have producers that are bad people, disrespectful, dishonest, cruel…then everyone below them feels that they can act that way. And it just trickles down until the guys at craft services are suddenly being rude and dishonest. But by the same token, when you have real ladies and gentlemen at the top, it sets the tone all the way through.” 

With this in mind, one would wonder if it’s ever hard for Macy, who’s written and done some directing himself, to stand back and let writers and directors make bad decisions. “It’s hard. I fancy that I’m good at doing that, putting my notions of what should be aside, and making sure I do my job. I know I’ve blown that in a couple of films, where I did speak up and nobody wanted to hear it, and those experiences went badly because of it. It’s really hard when you see that the director is missing a huge laugh, or that another actor doesn’t understand what’s funny about a line, or that the property guy has come up with a briefcase that’s just so wrong. But that’s part of being a professional. Keep your mouth shut, do your job. Films always go into the tank when people start doing jobs that aren’t their jobs. If a film’s going to not be good, there’s nothing you can do to save it. So, I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping my mouth shut, and making sure I do my job.” 

In terms of Macy’s main job, acting, he gave up the method thing a long time ago. “Pretty much like everything else in my life, I went to the extreme for a period. If I was acting a scene in this room, I would’ve made up everything that’s outside the door – who lives in all the other offices around this place. I would buy a wallet and fill it with fake I.D’s. I would write a history of the character. And then one time, I said I wonder what would happen if I didn’t do that. And the answer was nothing. Nothing happens. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t hurt, but it’s exhausting. Everything you need, the writer has given you. It’s all there on the page. And I’ve been criticized for that, but I do believe if you’re going to play a surgeon, you better jolly well learn how to scrub. There’s a specific way they do that. But those are externals. Certainly for Charlie Berns, he has a suicide scene at the beginning of the film, but do I have to practice swallowing pills to act the thing? No.”

Macy further describes himself as a believer in the theory of Practical Aesthetics. “Dave Mamet made up this technique where everything depends on the objective. What does the character want, not how does the character feel. Don’t worry about how you feel, that’ll happen on its own, you can’t control it anyway. If you could control how you feel, there would be no psychiatry. It’s all based on action, what the character wants. Say a king wants to save the kingdom, you have to take another step to define what that means. You’re not really the king, you’re just pretending to be the king. And there is no kingdom, there’s a set made out of cardboard. So ‘the king wants to save the kingdom’ has to be refined to what that means to you. And it always involves the other actor, perhaps it’s to get him to…tell the truth, say. That’s something you can do in real time in front of people. It’s an action that you can do over and over again, to get him to tell the truth. That’s the essence of Practical Aesthetics – what can I do as an objective in front of people and in real time?” 

And though William H. Macy has proved himself again and again as one who completely disappears into his characters, I wonder if there’s ever been a time when he felt like he wasn’t really fitting into the proverbial skin. Macy takes a moment, thinking. “Well, that’s a tricky question to answer. Another way of asking that is, ‘Have you ever been bad?’ and I think the answer is yes, but when you’re acting, there’s a lot of faith involved. I’m sure I’ve done some roles where I’ve said, ‘Yeah, I got it. I’m the guy, they couldn’t have cast it better.’ But when the film came out, I wasn’t very good, or when the play opened, everybody said, ‘He’s not the right guy for this role.’” 

So, we have digressed a bit, delving into the acting theory and what have you, but such are the throes of conversation. So let us return to the issue at hand, and find out how The Deal has been received thus far in its festival runs. It is here that Macy is happy to relate the sweet and the sour of the journey. “We flew in the face of conventional wisdom by doing this film. The unspoken rule in Hollywood is that Hollywood does not like films about Hollywood, and will not support them. We took a chance, because in my mind, this was more of a romantic comedy than a film about Hollywood. So, we took the film to Sundance, and that’s tough to get into. There are 5,000 films submitted for 17 slots, so we thought, ‘Woah! We made it!’ And then we got a chilly reception. Very chilly. The movie’s funnier than all get out, but boy they were cool in the screenings. The only two reviews that came out, from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, were ridiculously vicious. It’s despicable what they wrote, in my mind. They called the film a vanity project for me and that the only way I was going to get this role as a romantic lead was to write it…which is true, but I still hate ‘em for saying it.” 

“So, we walked away from Sundance shaken. But then we went to the Sarasota film festival, the Philadelphia film festival, about seven or eight film festivals, and we got standing ovations! You would miss lines because the laughs were so big. So I walked away from Sundance thinking, it’s a dog, it just didn’t work. Then we went out to these other film festivals and we realized we’ve got a hit on our hands. They don’t call it conventional wisdom for nothing (laughs).” 

As for what lies ahead, I ask Macy if he had plans to pen further romantic leads for himself. “I don’t think so. I’m 58-years-old and I think I’m going to be the romantic lead’s father…or older brother (laughs). No, this was a very specific opportunity. It had 30’s comedy written all over it — two opposites who cannot abide each other who fall for each other. It was a very unique opportunity and that’s why I jumped at it. No, I’m too old to be doing romances. I go to the movies with Felicity and when these old codgers lean over to kiss these young starlets, she closes her eyes and starts squealing and pounding on me. She can’t even watch it. So that’s my cue to make sure I don’t fall into that situation.” 

But, if the situation presented itself, would he be in cahoots to star in a romantic comedy with his wife? “Oh, in a New York minute. There’s this dream that when Desperate Housewives is over, which is not for another five years, by the way, maybe we’d go to New York and do a play together. “His Girl Friday” or something like that. That’d be hot…if we’re not too old for it by then.” 

From here, Macy and I venture away from the topic of film and stray into matters of hobbies. For those unaware, Macy loves to play the ukulele, rock out on his guitar, and toy with carpentry. “I’ve finally faced up to the fact that I’m the worst carpenter I’ve ever met. I do love it and I’ve got some very fancy tools. I hire people who sort of act as my assistant, but I’m actually their assistant, and I’ve made some lovely pieces of furniture. And slowly but surely I’m getting better. I built a real kick ass shop at our home in Colorado. I go in there and turn the rock and roll up really loud and if I make something, well, good. I love to turn bowls. I have a big lathe at home and I turn bowls. Mostly practical bowls, salad bowls, bowls that you can eat with.” 

And as our banter turns to more banal topics, the time comes for us to part ways, and I feel the same feeling I might’ve had if I’d struck up an interesting conversation with a friendly Joe on the subway. And as my conversational chum exits the subway as a normal man off to finish a day’s work or pick up his kids from school, Macy offers this adieu on his departure,
“Later and greater.”