The Story of O
He got kicked out of an exclusive prep school in Dallas. He didn’t even graduate from UT. His first movie was a commercial disaster. (And that nose!) So why is everyone in Hollywood trying to be buddy-buddy with Owen Wilson?
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In 1991 Owen left UT a couple classes shy of his English degree—he says he needed a break—and moved into a small apartment with his brothers on Throckmorton Street in Dallas. Soon Wes moved in, and he and Owen continued work on Bottle Rocket a screenplay they’d started in Austin about a group of young guys with a hopelessly unrealistic dream to rob banks. They showed some film they’d shot to Texas filmmaker L. M. Kit Carson, an acquaintace of Bob Wilson’s, and with his encouragement, and about $7,000 he was able to round up, produced what Owen describes now as a “thirteen-minute, black and white, guerilla-style” short. They took it to the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, where it became the movie to see, even though it wasn’t in the festival competition. Then James L. Brooks, a true Hollywood don who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi and developed The Simpsons, saw the short and was sufficiently impressed to secure a feature-film deal with Sony Entertainment allowing Wes to direct and the Wilsons to star.
Bottle Rocket, shot in Dallas, was finished in 1994. At first look it is a strange film, a caper flick with characters who spend their time talking about their life of crime rather than getting on with it; they don’t even seem clear on what a life of crime is. In the movie’s final scene, the group’s ringleader, Dignan, played by a handcuffed Owen, gives his comrades a no-worries smile and a two-handed wave from inside a prison yard, as if the fact that he got caught means he’s finally arrived. Test audiences didn’t make it that far into the movie; they left in droves, and early. When it was released, reviews were mixed, and it died at the box office. Owen started talking about getting into advertising or the military.
But the passage of time was kind. When Bottle Rocket was released on video, it developed a strong cult following. It became a favorite movie for high school and college guys to get together and watch with a case of beer, just as Night Shift and Spinal Tap had been when the Wilsons were growing up. Hollywood took note and gave Owen and Wes a second chance. Their 1998 follow-up, the flawless prep-school daydream Rushmore, made even fewer concessions to the audience than Bottle Rocket but received universal critical praise and established Wes as a director. In the meantime, Owen began making a name for himself as an actor, finding ways to steal entire films with small parts. Some of the roles were in movies that were begging to be stolen, like 1997’s J-Lo-meets-Ice-Cube-meets-great-big-snake debacle, Anaconda, and 1998’s Bruce-Willis-meets-asteroid-so-asteroid-doesn’t-meet-earth schlockbuster, Armageddon, but others were films expected to stand on their own, like Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy, in 1996, and Ben Stiller’s Meet the Parents four years later.
By 2001, when he was handpicked by Gene Hackman to be rescued from Kosovo in the military action film Behind Enemy Lines, Owen was at the top of the marquee. At Christmas of that year, Owen and Wes’ Salinger-like family soap opera, The Royal Tenenbaums, came out, and critics who had dismissed Owen’s hilarious but light sidekick turns in Shanghai Noon and Zoolander had to pay their respects when the Tenenbaums script received an Academy award nomination. Now, he has put his writing on hold while he picks his roles as he pleases, like last year’s I Spy, with Eddie Murphy, and this year’s Shanghai follow-up, with Jackie Chan. John Moore, who directed Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines, summed up Owen’s progress: “He can get movies made. I’ve been in meetings and heard people say, ‘Well, if we get Owen, we’re set.’ And they’ll pay him ten million dollars for it. That’s the judge of it these days.”
Owen measures things differently. For him, the critical reexamination that accompanied Bottle Rocket’s cult popularity—Martin Scorsese, among others, called it one of the ten best movies of the nineties—is all the achievement he needs: “It’s always gratifying when people come up and recognize me from a movie, but the one that means the most is Bottle Rocket. It was the first one, it’s me and my brothers, my friend Wes directed it, and we wrote it together.”
A WEEK AFTER VISITING OWEN in Los Angeles, he and I began exchanging e-mails, trying to come up with this article’s opening scene. It wasn’t so easy after all. He’d just started filming Starsky and Hutch with Ben Stiller and had plenty of other things to think about, like starring in an $80 million movie. I was in my office, sifting through photocopies of literary criticism. We agreed to begin with his thoughts on moonshine, but to get to the punch line, we had to find another writer and anecdote. Owen was full of ideas. “What about Finnegans Wake?” he wrote from his trailer on the set. “We talked about that. We had a long conversation about how much we liked Joyce or really just the idea of Joyce, since I haven’t read that either.”
This view of Owen at work was more than I’d hoped for. If there is any real mystery to Owen, it’s in the way he writes with Wes. Brooks, who followed the two through Bottle Rocket, couldn’t explain it, nor could Owen’s brothers, nor even Bob Wilson, who has turned rooms in his office and home over to the two when they are working on scripts. Conventional wisdom puts Wes at a keyboard, getting down the detail and much of the story, with Owen on the other side of the room, feet up on a table, throwing out lines. But Owen was vague when the subject came up. “We both kind of respond to certain characters and try to spin a story around a character or relationship,” he said. “And, yeah, I don’t know how to type, so Wes is at the keyboard.”
Our e-mails were turning into that kind of collaboration, except that the characters were us, and I’m not Wes Anderson. I’d spend half an hour typing out a laundry list of suggestions, and as soon as it was gone, I’d get a one-line response from Owen, who was watching out for the big picture and the punch lines. “Explain what we get with that other story,” he wrote, righting our course. “I like the idea of talking excitedly about a book for a long time, and at the end we realize that both of us haven’t read it.” When we stalled, he’d throw out encouragement: “Let’s take this as a challenge. I, for one, think we can come up with something great. But you know me, I’m a bluesky artist.”
“‘Bluesky’?” I replied.
“It’s ‘blue sky,’” wrote Owen, “like Pollyanna. I think I left out a space.”
Finally, on Good Friday I e-mailed him a rough draft of a new opening scene. He mulled it over for a couple of days and on Easter Sunday sent his revisions. They were pure Owen, random musings you could imagine from almost any of his characters, and significantly funnier than his comments in the car. “I like this stuff,” he said when he called to read through it. “I kind of want to save some of it for a movie.” But he said to leave it in. Our new scene was complete.
THE STORY OF O IS not, contrary to a recent Details cover line, the story of a nose. Owen’s appeal has less to do with his oft-broken snoot (at least two times, confirmed) than with a demographic, specifically, guys between the ages of twenty and forty. Carson claims that Owen has “given a voice to his generation,” an exaggerated characterization if you’re looking to Owen’s oeuvre for a grand statement. But it’s dead-on when you consider that much of what he says sounds like it could come from any guy near his age. Owen is like a buddy from college, a guy’s guy, someone it was more fun to stand by the keg and comment on a party with than to actually join in. Although Owen now dates rock stars—a highly publicized romance with Sheryl Crow ended last year—he’s never lost that familiar quality. When guys see Jackie Chan try to coax Owen into some ridiculous Crouching Tiger acrobatics in Shanghai Knights and Owen throws up his hands and says, “What in our history makes you think I’m capable of something like that?” he might as well be sitting in the theater next to them.
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