The Last Glimmer

"Divine intervention," he says.

Divine divine?

"Divine divine. I feel like I was preparing to do this movie my entire life without knowing it," Estevez explains.

In 2000, he made a TV movie called "Rated X" with his brother Charlie Sheen, in which the two brothers play the real Mitchell brothers, who were early porn barons. To promote the movie, Charlie and Emilio did a photo shoot at the Ambassador (the empty hotel was often used to do scenes for television shows, movies, music videos, etc.). "They asked us if we wanted to go on a tour, the real tour, and they took us downstairs and there was the kitchen pantry behind padlocked doors. There was the place where Bobby fell. My whole childhood, the memories, came rushing back at me. I remember where I was when he was shot. I remember telling my father."

The Sheens were in Ohio, visiting Emilio's grandmother (the grandmother is Mary Phelan from Ireland; the grandfather is Francisco Estevez from Spain via Cuba; Sheen is made up). Soon afterward, the family went to Mexico, where Martin Sheen worked on "Catch-22," and then they drove to Los Angeles. "The first stop was the Ambassador Hotel, and I remember my father walking us all through the lobby. This is where it happened. This is where the music died. I hadn't been in the hotel since then. Until the photo shoot."

Now Estevez hits the gas, speed-talking:

"Isn't it impossible to be a child in the '60s and not be affected by it? It was the year that shook the world. 1968? The Tet Offensive. Cronkite coming back from Vietnam saying on national television the war is unwinnable. Johnson saying if I don't have Cronkite I don't have the American people. The My Lai massacre was March. The Paris riots. Johnson announces he's not going to run. King is assassinated. Bobby is assassinated. The Democratic convention in Chicago. Nixon is elected. The Prague Spring. The tanks rolling."

The napkin twisting.

You would have been 6 in 1968? He understands. He doesn't mean to imply that he remembers, specifically, the Tet Offensive. "I looked at my parents. Were your parents just as confused as everyone else was? Because mine were. There has to be something. Some explanation. But there wasn't. Our parents could offer us no comfort. It was so difficult to comprehend. Those are the formative years. So the sponge is taking everything in."

So you decide: I'm going to make a movie, a microcosm of the country, and you start with the hotel?

"Yes!" Estevez says he was thinking along the lines of the 1932 film "Grand Hotel," starring Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, a formula repeatedly used in Hollywood to crisscross plot lines. But Estevez was conscious of other influences, too.

"This is 'Towering Inferno.' This is 'Poseidon Adventure.' This is about a boat. This is about a building. This is an event that touched all of our lives whether we know it or not."