Director Tony Goldwyn writes about the experience of working with his longtime friend, writer Tony Spiridakis, on the movie “Ezra,” which screened at TIFF and won the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival. Bobby Cannavale stars as the father of an 11-year-old autistic son who sets off on a road trip with his son, without the permission of his son’s mother or his father, played by Robert De Niro, whose car he has “borrowed.”
The friendship began before I could shut the door of my blue ’77 Chevy Nova. I had made the two and a half hour drive from college in Boston through the heart of the Berkshire mountains to Williamstown, Mass. — ready to start my first professional job at the mecca of summer theaters, the Williamstown Theater Festival. Unsure of where to report for duty, I pulled into the driveway alongside the white, neo-Roman portico of Williamstown’s Adams Memorial Theater. As I looked around for a parking space, a mop of curly black hair in a sapphire blue baseball jacket, with a composition notebook oddly tucked into the front of his jeans, was suddenly at my window as if he’d been expecting me.
“Hi. I’m Tony.”
“So am I,”
“Ha! That’s perfect! Your a ‘Non-Eq’ too, right?”
I nodded. We were both to be part of a small group of young, non-union (Actors Equity Association) members of the company.
“Thank God you’re here! I came two days ago and have been totally alone. You can park there for now. There’s a hot girl working at Papa Charlie’s. Charlie’s Greek. Incredible guy. We had a long talk yesterday. He’s from Astoria too. The ‘Frank Langella’ is amazing. Get extra peppers.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about but I had a startling feeling that I’d just made a friend for life.
In the 42 years since, that premonition has taken shape in thousands of iterations, countless moments shared — significant ones, insignificant ones and seemingly inconsequential ones that turned out to be life-defining.
That first day, after our visit to Papa Charlie’s sandwich shop —where we deservedly struck out with the beautiful young woman behind the counter using the line, “Hi, we’re Tony!” but where the ‘Frank Langella’ lived up to it’s hype — Tony said I had to meet a young designer he was obsessed with.
“She’s a genius and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. We went for a run this morning but I didn’t have any shoes so my feet are kind of bleeding. I told her I’m from Queens and that’s how we do it. We’re going again tomorrow. Do you have an extra pair of running shoes?”
I said I did.
“Amazing. Her name is Jane.”
And there on the grass in a white “Boston University Women’s Rowing” jersey and blue shorts emblazoned with a “Navy” logo, was my future wife.
Tony and Jane agreed to meet at 7:00 a.m. the next morning. “You have to come with us.”
At 21, the idea of running at dawn sounded like water torture but I couldn’t seem to say no to this guy. I appeared as instructed with two pairs of Nikes in hand. Jane was already stretching on the dewy grass.
After a few miles charging up and down the Berkshire hills, we approached a bucolic little pond that Jane had discovered the previous day. Tony lagged behind. In fairness, my shoes were two sizes too big for him. By the time he caught up, Jane was already out of her running clothes, diving into the water.
Tony looked at me.
“You know there are living things in there? I’m staying right here. You go ahead.” And so I did.
Tony was best man at our wedding, and I at his. We are godfathers to each other’s first born. More than anything, though, our friendship has been defined by simply making stuff together. Facing the crucible of an artist’s life, we understood that we couldn’t wait around for someone else to give us an opportunity. The responsibility was ours. We made an unspoken commitment to ensure that neither of us fell down on the job.
While I was home on a break from grad school in London, Tony decided I was perfect for the lead in an upcoming Broadway play. He said he’d recently auditioned for the casting director and would get me in. I had no agent and had never read for a professional play outside of Williamstown. Tony dragged me into David Tochterman’s office.
“You have to see this guy. He’s the best young actor in New York.”
Like me, Mr. Tochterman couldn’t say no to Tony Spiridakis. So I got the audition. Alas, in his office with the director and producers a few days later, my hands shook so badly that I couldn’t read the pages they were sweatily holding. I didn’t get the part.
Upon my return to New York, Tony announced that we were going to start a theater company. We collected some equally unemployed buddies and decided our performance space would be the illegal loft on Crosby Street where Tony was living with his new wife Kate (this was 1984, when you could still get an illegal living space in Soho for $750 a month). We called ourselves “Dangerous Company” (not proud of it). We put on an obscure Sam Sheppard play called “Geography of a Horse Dreamer” in which my character spent the entire play handcuffed to a bed. The production got me my first agent — and broke up Tony’s first marriage.
During those early years, Tony’s talent and tenacity had yielded some major scores. After parking himself in a casting office for eight hours without an appointment, Tony talked his way into reading for a lead role in a new Stephen Bochco series called “Bay City Blues” (Bochco, of course, was the undisputed heavyweight champ of ’80’s TV). He got the part. When a British film director told Tony he had to cast an English actor to play a small role in “Deathwish 3,” Tony flew himself to London and walked into the directors office. He got the part. While in London on that job, Tony crashed an audition for Stanley Kubrick’s “Full metal Jacket.” Kubrick loved him. He got the part.
As the vicissitudes of showbiz would have it, “Bay City Blues” lasted only six episodes and Tony’s role in the Kubrick film ended up on the cutting room floor. Tony was suddenly in a bit of a skid. He returned to New York with the sinking feeling that his prospects had evaporated. Depression set in and, for several months, he rarely left his Upper West Side apartment. Jane and I were worried.
I had recently earned my SAG card with a small guest role on the TV series “St. Elsewhere.” I asked Tony if we could watch my episode together at his place. Over Chinese take-out I had the horrifying experience of seeing myself on camera for the first time. Even from the depths of the darkness that had taken hold of him, Tony was generous as ever. After some kind words about my stiff performance, Tony asked me to take a look at something he’d been working on. He tentatively proffered a wrinkled yellow legal pad with 30-plus pages of tightly scrawled handwriting.
“It’s the beginning of a screenplay about the neighborhood I grew up in.”
And so I read the first, enthralling act of “Queens Logic.” It was like seeing my friend for the first time. “Tone, you’re a writer. You need to finish this.”
He did finish. Within a year, actors started banging on his door to be involved. Six months after that, Tony had a movie in pre-production that would star John Malkovitch, Joe Mantegna, Kevin Bacon and Jamie Lee Curtis.
During the same period, I was going through my own cycle of one step forward and ten steps back. With each disappointment, each rejection, Tony kept me on track by reminding me who I was and why we had chosen the path we had. Just as his screenplay was coming to fruition, I managed to pull off my first major career breakthrough. After relentlessly harassing my agent to get me an audition, I landed the role of the yuppie villain in “Ghost.”
In a truly miraculous coincidence, during July and August of 1989 both “Queens Logic” and “Ghost” were in front of the cameras. The Tonys were on a roll.
In the decades that followed, our respective “rolls” slowed and accelerated according to the whims of fate. The dizzying alternating current that defines a career in show business settled in to become the simple ebb and flow of our lives.
We just kept making stuff together and continued to support each other’s work. Tony is always my first set of eyes on a performance I’m giving in the theater or on the cut of a film I’m directing. I am the person he sends his earliest drafts to for notes. Over the years, between marriages, holidays, kids’ birthday parties and parents’ funerals, we collaborated on many beautiful projects as writer and director — but had never quite found the right one. Until “Ezra.”
Tony has two exceptionally gifted sons, the younger of whom is autistic. Having been through quite an ordeal with Dimitri approaching adolescence — his marriage dissolving in the process — Tony decided to write a movie about the experience. Over the past decade, I read many drafts of his script, as a friend, just as I always had. Then a couple of years ago, Tony told me he had reworked the screenplay and wanted my opinion. The new version immediately took my breath away. I had lived through those difficult years with Tony and he captured the chaos, the pain and the comic absurdity of his situation with such beautiful self-awareness.
I told him I needed to direct the film. We should make it together.
In the two years it took to transform the dream into reality, I had one simple guiding principle. Making this film is a gift to Tony, an expression of our four decades of friendship. At every creative turn, every critical decision, from casting to locations to music, that has been my touchstone. Now, as we begin to share “Ezra” with the wider world, of course I hope our creation thrives. But I look at Tony and know that we have already won the game. Our friendship is in the doing.
