Too fat to fish

I have been obsessed with Artie Lange. Google him if you want to read some fucked up shit with drugs and gambling. Anyways, he's a really funny guy (Mad TV, Dirty Work, Beer League) I read his book (Thanks Conway) and I loved it. This is a little bit that I loved and wanted to share. Its kinda long, but you'll get the idea of how he writes. The following is from the book Too Fat To Fish.

I booked a small part in Jerry Maguire and shot a scene with Tom Cruise and Kelly Preston, both of whom were total douchebags. It was the scene in which their two characters break up and she punches him in the face. It's at the NFL Draft, and I play an annoying radio guy who interrupts this moment they're having and says "Hey, Jerry, good to see you! Tom Jackson from WHDZ here. Are you going to the Big Tequila volleyball tournament later? It's gonna be great!" Then Tom Cruise gives me a fuck-off look, I pause, realize that I am being an asshole, and kind of creep away. It was funny, awkward, jokey moment in that scene that didn't make it.
It probably would have been a forgettable moment, but what I'll never forget is how fucking insanely rude Tom Cruise and Kelly Preston were. This is before he started couch jumping, but let me tell you, that guy Cruise was already nuttier than a fruitcake. He had this thing about getting his energy to the perfect place before he did a scene, and he would ramp up by jumping rope. He had some guy, who was on the payroll for the film, standing there holding his jump rope off set. Cruise would jump rope with that insane grin of his face until he was ready, then he'd signal to Cameron Crowe, toss his rope, step in the scene, Crowe would yell "Action," and Cruise would go right into it. It was incredibly distracting--and I only had two fucking lines to say to the guy! While I was standing there watching this nonsense, I kept wondering what the fuck he did to ramp up for a love scene.

Anyway, we did the scene maybe twenty times, and even though I was standing literally five feet from those two, once Cameron Crowe stopped the scene and the production guys went about moving the cameras and stuff, which would take anywhere from two to twenty minutes, neither of those fuckers would acknowledge my existence. No eye contact, nothing. I tried to make small talk, and Kelly Preston acted like she didn't hear me. And it's not like either of them was playing some difficult character where they couldn't break their focus. Please, they were reciting lines, that was it. Neither one is Laurence Olivier. I did almost punch Tom Cruise, which I probably should have-- it might have knocked some sense into that lunatic. I've always shown respect for my writers and their hard work by making sure that when I perform anything, I do the script as written. Particularly in a big-budget movie directed by a guy as cool as Cameron Crowe, I made damn sure that I had my lines memorized correctly. Now, Cruise is the kind if guy who likes to change the dialogue that morning in the makeup chair with no regard for anyone, from the director to the screenwriter to anybody else in the world, who on average are probably a lot smarter than he is. So Cruise had changed what he was going to say and how he was going to play the scene and no one had informed me. Whatever I was doing by sticking to the script was severely going against his pacing, and judging by the whole jumping-rope bullshit, pacing was a big deal to that nutjob. We did a few takes and on each one he seemed to be getting more and more steamed, but he wouldn't look me in the eye or talk to me between takes to tell me what the problem was. He'd only talk to Cameron and say things like: "Cameron, that take was off, the timing is wrong."
Finally, he just exploded. He looked at me and screamed, "Can you come in quicker, please?!" Everyone got real quiet and looked at me in disgust.
Cameron called for a break and pulled me aside.
"Listen, man, it's not you," he said. "You're doing it exactly as written. Let me go talk to him. He changed his part, so doing it according to the script is throwing him off. You're doing a great job. Just come in quicker, and it'll all be okay."
"Of course, no problem," I said. "I wish I'd known. I'm so sorry I upset him." Not too sorry to punch his fucking dumb grin into the back of his head, however.
Once Cameron got Tom back on set, we did the scene according to Tom's invisible pacing mater and that was it, I was done.
What a legendary moment in my acting career. To Cruise's credit, at the end of the take he yelled, "Thank you!" at me.
Kelly Preston wasn't any better. She chit-chatted with Tom between takes, but I might as well have been a tree with a pile of dogshit at the base of it. Her elitist attitude extended to every facet of her existence, by the way, which I'd found out the day before. I'd make friends with one of the P.A.'s, and we were playing catch outside the location. As anyone who has ever had anything to do with the production of a feature film can tell you, there is a hell of a lot of downtime. So me and this guy were tossing a baseball when this little dark-haired kid, probably about four years old, came running toward me, so I rolled the ball to him. He picked it up and was kind of staring at it and looking at us, when out of nowhere, like some kind of Aryan superhero, this insanely hot, tall blonde ran over.
"Vat are you doing?" she snapped at me. "You could have keelled him!"
"What are you talking about?" I said. "We just rolled the ball over to him. What's your problem?"
"You threw it at him!" As she was saying all of this she pulled the ball out of the kid's hand, tossed it on the ground like it was a stick of dynamite, and pick him up really fast. The kid got scared, more from her roughhousing than anything we did, and started to cry.
"See what you've done!" she said.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I said.
"We're really sorry ma'am," my friend said. "It won't happen again." He gave me a look that said, Shut up, now.
"It had better not. No one is to speak to or touch Jett." Then she turned and stormed off with the now bawling kid in her arms.
"Jett?" I said, laughing. "Who the fuck names a kid Jett?"
"John Travolta and Kelly Preston do, man," my friend said.
Apparently all of the P.A.'s had been given very strict instructions on how to interact with Jett, Kelly, and when he came to the set, John. Let me tell you, playing ball with any of them was definitely not on the rider. Treating them like outer-space royalty apparently was.
"You don't understand, man, this is really, really bad," the guy told me. "We are under strict orders not to talk to them, look at them, hand them anything. And their kid is so off-limits you have no idea. We'll be lucky if we last the day here." Turns out we were lucky.

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