The Last Glimmer
With 'Bobby,' Estevez Revisits Pivotal, Painful Moment

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 19, 2006

LOS ANGELES -- Molly Ringwald. "The Breakfast Club." The Brat Pack? That was back in the Late Cretaceous Period. Emilio Estevez sits at the luncheon table, folding a soiled napkin, unfolding, folding. His busy hands appear to have a mind of their own. He is wearing a blazer and carrying a briefcase. He looks like an agent from State Farm.

Except. Estevez is leaning forward, and his eyes, these blue ice cubes -- it's freaky. He is a ringer for his father, Martin Sheen, in "Apocalypse Now." He is Willard going upriver to find Kurtz.

Decades ago, Estevez was a cult hero as Otto in "Repo Man" and then he was a heartthrob in "St. Elmo's Fire." Now 44, Estevez confesses he is nervous.

"Your confidence takes a beating," he says. "I've been down for the last decade."

We had heard he was making wine for a living. "I did what I had to do to keep the wolves on the other side of the door," he says.

Estevez is nervous, specifically, about his new movie, "Bobby," an ensemble drama he wrote and directed (and stars in) about the day -- June 5, 1968 -- that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

No one wanted to finance the film.

"We decided not to go the studio route," Estevez says, which is Hollywood-speak for the following: "Every independent company in town had seen the script and passed on it," he explains.

Finally, a Russian businessman with a Belgian passport named Michel Litvak invested, and his girlfriend, Svetlana Metkina, got a part.

We love that it took a Russian.

"He read the script and just got it," Estevez says.

The project was shot in 37 days. The initial budget was $5.5 million, though eventually they spent close to $10 million. They were filming at the shuttered Ambassador as it was actually being demolished. The actors were paid scale, which is $2,000 a week.

And yet. The movie stars Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, Freddy Rodríguez, Harry Belafonte, Heather Graham, Laurence Fishburne, Christian Slater, Martin Sheen, Elijah Wood, Ashton Kutcher and -- hold on, hold on -- Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan and Sharon Stone.

There are 22 main characters and a dozen plot lines. No actor plays Kennedy, then 42 years old, who is spliced into the film with archived news clips and voice-overs from his inspirational oratory about hope and tolerance and compassion.

"Bobby" may turn out to be one of those love-it-or-leave-it type films. Kiss: "A passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene, overlaid with one of RFK's most stirring speeches," writes Deborah Young in Variety. Smack: "His movie ends up buried under its stifling good intentions and dire execution," says Jim Ridley of the Village Voice, who calls the result "awful."

And yet. Oscar buzz! The Los Angeles Times lists the film as a comer. Variety suggests that after its warm reception at the film festivals in Venice and Toronto it could be headed for Academy Award nominations.

That would be a comeback, considering the last major motion picture Estevez starred in was "D3: The Mighty Ducks" in 1996. There are those who say the only thing worse than starring in the first "Mighty Ducks" (a family blockbuster) is starring in the third, in which Estevez made only a brief appearance as Coach Bombay. During his decade in the wilderness, Estevez also directed a film, "The War at Home," that no one saw. "I was asking myself: What can I possibly do to make a living? Friends encouraged me to direct TV to keep my health insurance. Keep the bank from taking my house."

Seriously, the house?

In his youth, Estevez played leads in "The Outsiders," "Repo Man," "The Breakfast Club," "St. Elmo's Fire" and "Young Guns." The movies made a fortune. All gone?

"A high-profile marriage, high-profile divorce, that really cost me," he says. He was married to Paula Abdul, formerly the pop diva, currently the "American Idol" judge, from 1992 to 1994. "And those early films, I didn't make much, and the government takes half, agents get 10 percent, managers get 10 percent . . . ." He says, "No one beats you up more than yourself. You always remember the bad reviews, never the good ones. Why is that?"

He peers across the table. He is not asking the question rhetorically. "Why? Why do we gravitate to that?"

Because we secretly suspect all the bad things are true? He exhales. "My father told me you ought to thank all the people who made this so difficult. You were like Sinbad the Sailor fighting the seven monsters. I had to conquer the beasts."

At a news conference several days before the interview, Estevez described himself as "unapologetically earnest." Then he gave a little speech: "I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formalities, the death of poetry. I think it was the death of a dream." The assassination of Robert Kennedy, following the murders of his brother President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was "the last straw," he said, "and we unraveled, culturally, at that point and went into a free fall. And I don't think we've completely put the pieces back together again."

(The first question from the entertainment press? What was it like for Estevez and Demi Moore to work together -- they play an unhappily married couple in the film -- after being engaged in real life during their Brat Pack days?) Why? Why did Emilio Estevez have to make an ensemble movie about the death of RFK -- starring Moore as a lounge singer/bitter crone with a drinking problem and Ashton Kutcher as a dope dealer with a headband who goes on an acid trip -- accompanied by sitar music?

"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."

Many Hollywood directors perhaps would steer clear of comparing their work to the classic disaster films of the 1970s. But Estevez embraces it, and it is sort of poignant.

The producer behind those disaster movies was Irwin Allen, "who put Roddy McDowall and Ernest Borgnine and Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters and all the stars of the day under one roof.

"What Irwin Allen did so beautifully that studios don't do now is develop characters so that you care about them.

"When Stella Stevens dies? She's married to Ernest Borgnine, who gives that line, 'You took away the only thing I ever loved. My Linda.' You remember that?"

My Linda. Okay.

"And you wept, man."

And you cared.

"But my dilemma is that my disaster doesn't happen until the last 10 minutes of the film -- so it's the getting there. And I ask a lot of patience of the audience."

Because they know what is coming.

"It's a Passion Play, yeah."

Or better yet: "It's like a snow globe," he says "and you shake it up, and at the end of the film, you throw it against the wall."

How did Estevez persuade such an eclectic group -- the Oscar winners, fading divas, a pop starlet and a former Hobbit -- to participate in the film?

"They loved it. They supported me. I'd never painted on a canvas this big before. And I certainly wasn't chic."

Right.

"This business is so about what have you done for me lately, and my answer was, well, nothing."

But there was the longing for what Bobby Kennedy and his words represented, Estevez says. And there was the script, which has big moments for the actors to chew up some scenery.

One of the first to enlist was Hopkins, Estevez says, "and once Anthony agreed, everything feel into place."

In a telephone interview, Christian Slater recalls Estevez calling him personally "and I was like, where do I show up?" Slater says that Estevez "just had this tremendous passion for it." Demi Moore, still a friend, read the script back in 2001, and then had her now-husband Kutcher read it. "I think Emilio has been on a long journey to get this opportunity," Moore says.

And La Lohan?

"I got a call from Lindsay's agent, saying Lindsay wants to change the direction of her career, she wants to mature on film, will you sit down with her?" recalls Estevez. "Of course, I called Elijah Wood, his scenes are all with her, to join me, and we had a three-hour lunch. Looked at each other, wow, she's passionate."

He says this without the slightest trace of irony. Estevez thinks that in part, his fellow actors rallied round him because of his very obscurity. "What happened to me could happen to any actor," he says. "This business is cruel."

He adds: "Unforgiving."

And you're not even a woman.

"And here I am writing a piece that addresses that, with three roles for women over 40 and so that was also a check mark against it."

But you got Sharon Stone? Stone plays the hotel beautician who is married to William H. Macy, the hotel manager, who is having an affair with Heather Graham, the hotel operator.

During the news conference, Stone spoke of her charity work arranging for clothing for the poor children of Louisiana who, she said, must share shoes to go to school. "That's what's really happening in America today." Stone also praised Lohan for using her celebrity to "raise social consciousness," for "being powerful by example, the way Bobby Kennedy did."

Lohan asked for a tissue and dabbed her eyes.

Estevez says the actors, who each worked on the film for only two or three days, shot their scenes without time for rehearsal. "They just showed such courage, and their performances are so brave. I'm humbled every time I see this film. I'm knocked out. I weep," he says, "as if someone else had made it."