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hadn’t done anything to improve it. I fretted for a while, tried to figure out how I could gracefully turn down the project a second time, and then agreed to talk with Ricardo Mesterez. I had no intention of taking the job—until he made his sales pitch.
    He began by apologizing and, as he put it, failing to recognize my “value in the marketplace.” It occurred to me then that the balance of power, at least as it pertained to this little negotiation, had shifted. But I wasn’t really prepared for what came next.
    â€œNumber one,” he said, “we’re gonna double your quote. Number two, we’ll give you complete creative control over your character. Number three” (I wasn’t sure a number three was necessary, but I wasn’t about to interrupt), “we’ll offer you a short film to direct. If we like the film, you’ll have a three-picture deal with us.”
    I realized then that it’s true that every man has his price, because mine had just been reached. My response, in effect, was, “Sold!”
    Well, the devil is in the details, isn’t it? It wasn’t really a three-picture deal. It was a three- option deal. And they had the option. In other words, if I directed the first film, and it won an Academy Award or earned a hundred million dollars, they owned me on the second film, at whatever fee they chose, right down to the minimum established by the Directors Guild of America. When I read the fine print on the contract, I asked my agents, “What are you doing?”
    Their response? “That’s a high-class problem. Deal with it if and when it happens.”
    So I did. I cut our trip short and returned to Los Angeles for a meeting with Pauly Shore, for whom Encino Man was quickly being designed as a star vehicle. I had a sense that it wasn’t really a meeting, but rather an audition, even though my agents had assured me otherwise. It was, they said, simply a casual get-together between actors about to embark on a journey.
    Wrong. I walked into Team Disney, right under Dopey’s armpit (it’s actually kind of cool, architecturally speaking—the dwarves appear to be holding up the entrance), and took a seat in a meeting room, where I was introduced to, among others, Les Mayfield, the director. I sensed right away that Les wasn’t particularly happy with me, which was understandable, really. After all, I had passed on his movie, which he probably interpreted as not only a stupid business decision on my part, but a personal affront to him as well. There was personal history, too, some of it based on reasonable assumptions, some of it based on pettiness. Les was a USC graduate, and in my mind USC was where they churned out corporate titans, as opposed to UCLA, where they specialized in the care and feeding of real artists. At the time, I wasn’t into being a corporate titan. I wanted to be an artist, and didn’t understand that it was possible to blend the two, in that artist-industrialist sort of way. I knew only that when I was approached by aspiring filmmakers from UCLA, they usually wanted to show me their storyboards; aspiring filmmakers from USC usually said something like, “Hey, I’ve got some investors lined up if you’re interested in talking.” Then they’d drive away in their Porsches or BMWs.
    So there was that between us. Then, too, I was undeniably envious of his success. Les had produced the critically acclaimed documentary Hearts of Darkness, the story of the making of Apocalypse Now, but his directorial experience was limited to a documentary on the making of The Goonies. And yet here he was, directing a Hollywood studio movie. Les had advanced under the tutelage of Spielberg, and while I didn’t exactly resent him for that, I did recognize that he had played a smarter game and elbowed his way in and set up shop. In my eyes, he was a rich kid out to have a good time. Not a bad guy,