There and Back Again by Sean Astin with Joe Layden Page A

And you should do the movie anyway.”
    He paused, waited for a reaction. I offered none. Then Warren smiled, in the way that only a person who is supremely confident can smile. “Just come along … see what happens. It’ll be worth it.”
    I should have been wary, but I remember feeling something akin to awe. I loved this guy, and I loved the fact that he was, in some small way, courting me. I sat there knowing full well that I was going to be able to add my name to the long and illustrious list of people who got seduced by Warren Beatty, and instead of being conflicted by that recognition, I was excited by it. Even now, nearly a decade later, I remain curiously ambivalent about the experience. My name is proudly on that list somewhere (near the bottom, no doubt), but instead of feeling resentment, I’m grateful that Warren was able to get creatively aroused over me for a minute or two, that he recognized who I was and thus invited me into his inner circle, if only for a brief time, on the simple premise that something interesting could happen. The reason that something interesting ultimately did not happen was my limitation, not his.
    â€œOkay,” I said, “I’ll look at the script.”
    â€œGood.”
    I got up, left Warren to his business, and went off to read the script. Indeed, just as he had promised, there was no role for me, no Gary C-Span to be found anywhere. Nevertheless, I shook Warren’s hand and agreed to be part of his movie. I rationalized the decision on any number of levels. We were running out of money, the baby was coming, we had the fall semester of college to look forward to, and I was trying to figure out how to balance it all—how to pay for the house, be a new father, and keep Christine happy while we ran our production company together. I looked at the script, thought to myself, The part is not on the page; this could be trouble , and accepted the job anyway. I figured that I’d have only ten or twelve days of work during a four-month shoot, I’d learn something from working with one of the masters of cinema, and the rest of the time I’d be free to concentrate on school and family and entrepreneurial ventures.
    That proved to be an enormous miscalculation.
    â€œGreat,” Warren said as his hand enveloped mine. “Now remember, Sean, I want to hear your ideas. I want you to be writing. All the time.”
    I looked him in the eye and, with only a trace of irony, said, “Thank you, Warren. I look forward to writing and handing you pages and having you turn them down.”
    It was almost like something buried deep in my consciousness was saying it, the thing that I knew I needed to say in order to get the job. Not to be irreverent, not to be disrespectful or funny, but to let him know that I understood my place in his world, a world in which it is perfectly acceptable for the director and star to torture and humiliate his writers on a daily basis. That’s what it was like on Bulworth . Amiri Baraka, a poet and scholar and sometime actor who played the part of a character known as Rastaman, had been given the same instructions and encouragement that I’d received, and he took them to heart. Amiri showed up almost nightly on the movie with reams of paper, detailed notes on his character and how it fit into the story, only to have them dismissed out of hand. And he kept coming back for more!
    No one experienced more anguish than Jeremy Pikser, the credited cowriter (along with Warren) of the screenplay. (Little known fact: Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing , is one uncredited writer on Bulworth . Exactly what that means, I’m not sure. Did Aaron write the original draft? Did he rewrite Jeremy’s work? Who knows? I’d be the last person to try to explain how Warren Beatty concocted the idea for this strange and brilliant movie, or how he captured the imagination of somebody like Aaron Sorkin—a