US-Premiere, March 1997

Though his eerie performance in Ghosts of Mississippi is giving James Woods's career a well-deserved boost, he wants you to know he's got no sympathy for the devil

James Woods is composing a personals ad. No, it's not "Intense, brilliant, nutcase actor known for playing sociopaths seeks like-minded love object." It's "Happy, successful, middle-aged guy renews his passion for his art and seeks wonderful woman to love and share his great home with."
Woods is a changed man, or so he says, and he'd like the press to recognize this fact instead of wallowing in the crazy Woods of old. The old Woods once said of a hostile journalist, "She's a fucking pile of inmitigated pus ripped from the ass of a dead dog. I'll let her hang herself by her three teats."
"Do I look like some crazy person?" he says now, smoking a midmorning cigar and gazing out over a view of smoggy, distant downtown L.A. He's dressed in brown corduroys, tan wing tips, a plaid shirt. "I'm a guy who plays golf, reads books, and does movies. I've never been arrested, I don't drink, I don't do drugs ... I'm living in one of the most beautiful houses you'll ever see in your life - and by the way, you'll notice that instead of being one of those 20.000-square-foot pimp houses you see in Beverly Hills with two feet of Lawn, it's a two-bedroom house. I go to the Good Shepherd every Sunday for Mass. What's the problem? Wake up and look at the facts. Facts are friendly."
Some of them are, some of them aren't. Certainly the house falls in the former category. It took him seven years to plan and build. As he gives you the tour, it's easy to sense his fanatical attention to detail. What he has wrought is Frank Lloyd Wright-ish, a sort of symphony of horizontals and warm wood. It also has an entertainment room, workout room, pool, Jacuzzi and patio heated from below, to keep the dinner-party guests cozy. Woe to any contractor who crossed him.
Wood's career is another friendly fact. He recently appeared in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi, playing Byron De La Beckwith, the white supremacist who was tried three times before finally being convicted of murdering civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. The part required Woods, who's 49, to age from 42 to 73. Initially, Reiner was considering someone older to play the part; he even offered it to Robert Duvall, wo turned it down. "I never was concerned about whether Jimmy could handle the attitude of the character," says Reiner. "I was just concerned that he wouldn't be able to pull off the age. And then he read for it, and he was unbelievable. I said, 'Let's do some makeup tests and see,' and then when we saw that we could, I was very comfortable with it."
How convincing was Woods? Several women on location in Mississippi who knew Beckwith looked at the actor in full makeup and asked, "Why did they let him out?" And then there was the occasion when he was introduced to Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar's widow. According to Woods, when she saw him she froze, and then started pushing up her sleeves as if she were going to bash him.
This is not the only project Woods is involved with. He's the voice of Hades, which he modeled after an oily junior William Morris agent, in Disney's next major animated feature, Hercules. He's appearing as an Atticus Finch-like lawyer in HBO's The Summer of Ben Tyler. He's currently shooting Robert Zemeckis's Contact, with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. And in the past few years he has appeard in such high-profile films as Oliver Stone's Nixon and Martin Scorsese's Casino.
To what does Woods owe all this good work after a few years of relative obscurity? Part of it is a recommitment to his craft (see his personals ad). And part of it, oddly enough, is the result of his appearance in one of the more craftless, witless movies in recent memory, a Sylvester Stallone-Sharon Stone vehicle called The Specialist. The Specialist represents a series of facts that are not friendly.
"Let me tell you why I don't put down The Specialist," says Woods, who stole the picture playing one of his trademark psychos. "After seventeen years, I was in the shithouse. It was over. Everything hit me at once. I was trying to build this house, I'd gone through a bad divorce, the work was just horrible, I was getting no representation. I was on my ass, and Jerry Weintraub offered me this part. It was a stepping-stone to get back to where I wanted to be, to where I hadn't been in a long time."
The "representation" he refers to is none other than CAA, which, he says, did him a disservice by going after good money rather than good roles. The last audition they offered him before he left the agency was for the part of a villian in Damon Wayans's Blankman, prompting the actor, says Woods, to remark, "You've got to be fuckin' kidding."
"I'm not going to play victim, like everybody else does in the 90s," he says, hurling his dead cigar butt over a nearby hedge into the street. "I allowed it to happen. Shame on me. But one day I woke up. The agent said, 'Well, you're just cold,' I said, 'Hey, you know what? You're motherfucking cold.' I was offered Reservoir Dogs by Quentin Tarantino. The agency never told me. I want that as a matter of record. I never fucking knew because they didn't want me to do a movie for 50 grand. They wanted me doing some piece of shit in Europe for 3 million something." (A CAA spokesperson insists that Wood's allegations are untrue.)
Another factor in Woods's professional slide was his chaotic personal life, which earned him a lot of bad publicity. It's a subject he'd rather not discuss, but once it comes up, he can't stop himself from talking about it. "Who cares?" he says. "You'll write about it, and half the audience won't even know what the hell you're talking about. I can't believe we talked about this. I want to shoot myself. You work so hard to wipe this shit off you."
In the late '80s, Woods and his then fiancée, Sarah Owen, were allegedly the objects of harassment by actress Sean Young, who supposedly had an affair with Woods on the set of The Boost - something that Woods and Young deny. And then Owen, after splitting up with Woods, accused him in the tabloid press of spousal abuse.
"This woman decided to accuse me of the one thing that I find more despicable than any single thing that anybody can be accused of, which is for a man to hit a woman," he says. Not only that. He now believes that Young was completely innocent and that Owen was behind the crying-child phone calls and doorstep deliveries of baby dolls with blue lips (Owen was allegedly pregnant at the time). Owen's response: "Nothing this man can say will ever surprise anyone who knows him." "Let me say this," Woods adds, unwilling to let go. "I firmly believe - my personal opinion - that I have actually been in bed with the devil. That's just my personal opinion." Then, his voice rising: "Why am I the bad guy? Why does everybody automatically assume that the guy is the bad guy in the situation?"
Because guys are often bad, and because Woods is brilliant at playing them. This is another thing that nettles him: the public's (he says the media's) inability to separate him from the roles he's played - the cop killer in his breakthrough movie, The Onion Field; the bookie-club owner in Against All Odds; The Jewish gangster in Once Upon a Time in America. As his old friend and former studio head Dawn Steel says, "He'd be bored with a leading-man role", although at one point the conventional wisdom - in the press, anyway - was that he didn't look like a leading man, so he wasn't offered those kinds of roles. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that bad guys attract him because they are a challenge to play. A Byron De La Beckwith is "interesting".
"It's not like you're playing the bad guy in the part," Woods says. "He doesn't know he's the bad guy. He's just doing what he does. I'm more interested in what serial killers do when they need groceries. That's what makes it so interesting. Does he use two-play toilet paper?"
In his defense, Woods also points to the fact that he's played his share of good guys - the crusading attorney in Indictment: The McMartin Trial, the schizophrenic in Promise, another crusading lawyer in True Believer, a recovering alcoholic in My Name is Bill W., an obsessive cop in The Hard Way. A number of these films have also raised public awareness of social issues.
"I've twelve-stepped more people than Bill himself," Woods says, referring to the real life Bill W., who helped found Alcoholics Anonymous. "More people got sober watching that show than in the history of AA."
Somehow these good works get lost. Woods may make more issue-oriented films than anyone around, but the characters he played, and the person who plays them, still have an edge. On Face the Nation, arguing on behalf of what he characterized as a free-speech issue, Woods compared former education secretary William Bennett to the Nazi Hermann Göring. "Does that disturb you?" Woods said disingenuously to the spluttering, apoplectic Bennett. On any given subject, Woods's rhetoric is confrontational, incendiary, and that's what people remember. Take, for example, his opinions about L.A. and its women. "Everything is denial," he says. "All these girls in Hollywood walk around with these bottles of water so they won't get toxins in their system, and they're all fuckin' dying of anorexia nervosa. They're all smoking cigarettes, they're all throwing up in the toilet every night. Half of them are doing drugs. They all look like they're made of pencils. Their skin is hanging off their fucking bones. Their body image is their only image. Their self-esteem has been ripped to shit by all the horrible ramifications of the nasty parts of feminism - not the good stuff, which is important, but the nastier stuff, the male-bashing stuff."
Woods is a smart guy. He was in high school reading Molière - in the French - when Kennedy was shot. He went to M.I.T. (as a political-science major). He appeard on the New York stage (notably in Borstal Boy and Saved). An Army brat, he lost his father at an early age, and it is Onion Field author Joseph Wambough's theory that he's been looking for a substitute ever since. There's certainly something familial in some of his relationships. Wambaugh says that Woods's friendship with Harold Becker, who directed him in The Onion Field, The Black Marble, and The Boost, is like that of son and father. James Garner, who appeared with him in Promise and Bill W., and introduced him to golf, describes himself as Woods's "big brother". (Woods: "Jim Garner is such a man, at a time when being a man seems to be such a liability in this Amazonian nuthouse that we're living in, in America in the '90s.") And Woods says his relationship with Oliver Stone, who has worked on four films with him, is like that of an old married couple - right down to the homicidal bickering. Just the thought of their first film together, Salvador, which earned Woods an Oscar nomination, makes him giggle like a kid.
"We were all just nuts," he says, breaking up. "I don't know why we were nuts, but I think it was the nature of the picture. I'm playing [journalist Richard] Boyle, this lunatic, and we're riding fuckin' burros up in the woods. John Savage is a brilliant, unheralded, unappreciated nutcase great actor. Oliver is a fuckin' lunatic."
They were all at one another's throats, primarily over the script, but often over other things. Woods takes pains to point out that, despite what some people might think, these on-the-set battles are the exception rather than the rule. But the exception sure makes good copy - nowhere more so than with his famed five-kilometer walk on (or rather off) the set of Salvador after an argument with Savage. "I'm in the middle of nowhere in Mexico," he says, starting to talk a million miles an hour, like his character in the movie. "There are buzzards eating dead pigs on the side of the road, and I'm hitchhiking. None of the trucks are stopping. They stop for you in Mexico. I'm going, 'Why in the fuck aren't they stopping?' What I don't realize is that Oliver is up at the head of the road, waving down all the cars, saying, 'There's a crazy gringo with a .45. Don't pick him up because he'll shoot you. He just killed seven people.'" Woods laughs. "So finally Savage gets in one of the helicopters and flies over and says, 'I'm sorry, pal, I didn't mean to yell at you.' I go, 'Okay, fine, fuck it, let's go back.' We were so nuts. I don't know why we were nuts."
He pauses, musing. "Do you buy that I've mellowed?"
Well ...
"I have, actually," he says. "I've become more efficient in my intensity. What I don't do anymore is tie myself in a knot and spin around the room like a Tasmanian devil and get all fuckin' nutty and crazy. What I've done is learned to channel my sense of - not rage, but outrage at the injustices of life. I've learned to triage the important things in my life, so I'm not going to waste time with frivolous people who are mean-spirited and have no morals. I just fuckin' walk away - until they provoke me to the point where, when I react, I react as swiftly and as ferociously as I ever did." And for Woods, maybe that's mellow.

by John Clark