Kevin Bacon Reveals How He Got His Big Break

I'm going to start at the beginning with you because

I want you to put us in a time machine,

take us back to late 70s,

you're 18 years old, you moved to New York,

and what happens?

Yeah, it's a crazy time machine to be in

for a lot of reasons.

I was in Philly in 1976, which was the bicentennial

of the American Revolution.

Philadelphia, my hometown, was getting very excited

about this thing that was about to happen.

That Liberty Bell thing?

The Liberty Bell thing, exactly.

I had gotten out of high school in January

by doing sort of an accelerated program.

I was working in a warehouse,

packing and shipping medical books,

which was really dull work, except for the the fact that

some of the guys would say,

You got to check out this one.

There is a disgusting skin disease in this,

and you absolutely have to see.

You turn to page 335.

There would be a photograph of the most disgusting thing

that you've ever seen in your life.

That's what I was doing in order to make a couple of bucks.

I knew that I wanted to be an actor,

but I didn't really know what to do,

how to do that or what to do with my life at that point.

I got involved with a Philadelphia theater group

that was going to put on

an alternative slightly-hippy musical

about the bicentennial.

We were going to, that summer, put this show on.

I started to go to a couple of rehearsals,

and everybody else was at least in their 20s, and I was 17.

We did a lot of, I don't know, breathing and hugging,

that kind of stuff.

You were in a cult.

Yeah, it was kind of a cult.

It really, honestly, it was a little cult-y.

I got the sense that it probably wasn't going

to turn into anything really important or anything,

really profound.

I dropped out of it, and I said to my parents,

I'm gonna go to New York.

One of the sad things about Philadelphia,

which is a town that I love dearly,

is there's this giant magnet,

very very close called New York that's just sucking

the energetic creative life sometimes out of it,

and I was one of those people that just went,

I can't stay right here.

I applied to a summer program

which was The Circle and the Square,

I guess it was like high school workshop

or something like that.

I slept on my sister's couch.

My sister had been in New York for many many years.

My mother was a New Yorker.

I literally got on the train with a suitcase and a dream

and landed here and started waiting tables

and went to Circle in the Square

and had the best time enjoying

what was kind of the center of the universe

in 1976 and then beyond.

You talk about waiting tables.

One thing I did find out about you, Allstate Cafe

on the upper west side, that was your first,

which supposedly was the inspiration for Cheers?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Allstate Cafe was on 72nd Street.

It was actually my second job.

My first job was at Fiorello's Roman Cafe,

which was on 63rd.

I was a busboy,

eventually made it to waiter,

then fucked up and got shuffled back to busboy.

What was the fuck-up?

I had ...

Stolen some money?

No, didn't steal money, no.

I didn't steal money, but I,

the deal with that place was that

the service had to be done on tray.

They were very big on tray service, right?

At the Allstate, where I subsequently worked,

you could stack as many plate as you wanted up your arm.

That was no problem.

At Fiorello's, which was a fancier restaurant,

you had to put things on a tray.

I had two hamburgers and one bottle of ketchup,

and I'll never forget this,

I was walking down the aisle towards the gentlemen

to deliver the two hamburgers and one bottle of ketchup.

I saw the ketchup start to,

I hadn't learned how to finesse the tray yet, really,

and the ketchup started to go like this, blam,

hit the terracotta.

It exploded all over this dude's white suit,

and I thought to myself, Well, I can't really deal

with the suit right now.

I gotta put the hamburgers down,

but what he saw was I just completely ruined his suit

and just kept blowing right on by.

He lost his shit, and went crazy

and the manager took me down into the office

at the end of the day and said,

You know, you're not ready to be a waiter, right?

I said, You're right, Phil, I'm not ready to be a waiter,

and he said, Here's what I'm gonna do.

You're gonna go back to busboy.

We're gonna give you a couple of shifts,

one or two shifts a week to see if you're ready

to make the step.

That's what happened to me.

Eventually I left that job and ended up

at the Allstate Cafe which was, you're right.

One of the patrons of the Allstate Cafe,

which was a magical place, honestly,

this was 1977 I think, but the time I started working there,

or late '76.

It was the real version of Cheers.

People from all walks of life walking down

into this basement kind of joint.

The upper west side was a very different place

than it is now.

It just had a vibe that was undeniable a jukebox,

and feeling of family, of home and comradery.

Jimmy Burrows, who was one of the creators of Cheers

had been a guy from the Allstate,

and he had gone to L.A.,

and I think had done some other shows at that point.

I don't really know the basis of it,

but Cheers ended up being set in Boston,

but whether or not this is confirmed, I don't know.

You must know it.

I feel like when I looked at Cheers,

I always thought to myself, Okay this has to have been

based on the Allstate.

Yeah.

There's conflicting accounts.

Oh, are there?

Well, I mean did Burrows I guess,

Burrows spend a lot of time there

and he said he got inspired by a lot.

But he says no, he based it on another place?

It was sort of a mashup.

Right.

He said he got the idea for Cliff Claven from there,

because he said every bar has a know-it-all.

It wasn't me.

(audience laughs)

You're the guy dropping ketchup on the floor.

Exactly.

You're there.

You do Animal House, right?

You're still working there when you do Animal House, right?

Yeah.

Then you do Diner which,

were you playing a version of yourself in Diner?

Sort of like a ...

I don't know.

Young, spoiled-ish kind of ...

I don't think I was young and spoiled.

But you're East Coast sort of waspy guy?

(audience laughs)

I am an East Coast, I'm definitely a wasp.

I'm definitely from the East Coast,

no doubt about those two things.

I think that in terms of the character in Diner,

I think he came from a slightly different tradition

than my family, or certainly been about how I felt myself.

He was a little more born with a silver spoon

and kind of like the family's gonna take care of everything.

Right.

Kind of guy.

That was really not my upbringing.

We had a big family.

We lived in a small house.

My father, while he was an incredibly brilliant

and, in fact, famous guy, was not a wealthy guy,

and on his side of things.

My mother came from a lot of old New York money,

but my father's side of things,

they were not really wealthy.

We were not raised in any way in a preppy kind of way.

Fenwick is a preppy sort of character.

That was not part of my experience.

That being said,

I feel like with every single character,

my concept is that you use yourself and you lose yourself,

so there were things about Fenwick

that I definitely could use and that came from me.

When I was walking in his shoes,

I don't really think I felt like I was doing me.

In fact, my whole template for wanting to act

and for any of the performances that I've done,

the best ones have been the ones where I go,

I didn't really feel like I was being me.

I felt like I was embodying somebody else.

Interesting side note about that character, just sadly,

is that he ended up being murdered.

The guy he was based on?

Yeah, the guy it was based on, yeah.

Barry based that whole movie on all of those characters

either prolifery or directly on people that he had known.

Barry Levinson, that has directed and wrote that,

and the legend of Fenwick was that he got into some

kind of shady stuff,

and was at some deal or something like that

at somebody's house and

somebody shot him,

and he went, Well now you got me mad,

and started taking his jacket off,

and the guy shot him again.

Wow.

Yeah.

Whether it's true or not, I don't know.

Let's shift gears for a second to the third movie,

the next movie after that is Footloose which

you talk about use yourself.

I'm going to ask you two questions.

The legend that it is the studio head of the time,

Sherry Lansing.

It was Dawn Steel.

Dawn Steel, excuse me, said you wouldn't work in the role

because you were not, and these are her words, not mine,

fuckable.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true?

Yeah.

(audience laughs)

Okay.

(audience laughs)

Yeah man, I ... that was it.

Did you ever say to her afterwards,

Check this out?

No, what happened was she, the director, her boss,

and the producer Daniel Melnick,

both were very big champions of me after I'd been through

all this very long arduous audition process,

and she just didn't see it.

She didn't see it, and that was, that was the thing

that she didn't get.

Was she looking at dailies or the finished?

She was looking at some audition,

I actually don't even know she'd seen anything

I'd put on tape.

I think she was looking at Diner, probably,

and looking at whatever other film they had on me.

It's a funny story, and it's a great story.

It sounds so like kind of terrifying

and a terrible thing to say,

but God bless her.

She was running a fucking studio.

That's her right to say,

the fact that that even becomes a negative against her,

to me, is almost in a way, kind of deeply sexist

because we're afraid of a woman in power

being able to actually say something like that.

I think it's cool.

In retrospect, of course I didn't like to hear it,

but in retrospect I was like, Yeah, good for you.

she didn't get it.

There's been 100,000 dudes that have cast movies and gone,

maybe they didn't put it exactly,

no she did put it in that way,

but maybe they never came out and said,

Man, I don't think so.

The thing is that she said what she felt about it,

the producer and the director of that film

decided to prove it to her, so they set up a screen test

where we did a whole bunch of scenes,

romantic scenes, dramatic scenes including sort of a weird,

it would be like an 80s almost video-type montage

where I would just walk out in different outfits

and they'd play music, and I just went ...

(audience laughs)

They did a whole crazy thing with my hair.

It was a whirlwind weekend for me.

I was actually doing a play at the time

on Broadway called Slab Boys, I'll never forget.

The play was a great experience.

I'd done a whole shit-ton of theater.

That's really where my heart was.

I was working with Sean Penn and Val Kilmer

and Jackie O'Hearly and Brian Benben.

We were doing this Scottish play,

and on this one wacky weekend, I had to do this

Footloose audition screen test.

The first thing that they showed her was not the scenes,

not the any of the dramatic or the romantic stuff.

They just showed her this montage and videos

were just exploding into our consciousness

with Michael Jackson, and all that kind of stuff.

She looked at this montage, and halfway through it,

got up and walked out and said, Okay, you can cast him.

So that was it.

Is it true you hate going to weddings

because people always play that song?

That's true.

I don't, and I'll tell you why.

(audience laughs)

I have a reason for this.

I'm tired of winning those awards.

I'm tired, that's why.

No no no, I love the movie.

I'm very happy for the movie.

Love the song, everything about it.

If I go to a wedding, I want the wedding to be

about the bride and the groom, right?

If I'm there, they gotta be people that I care about.

When they put the song on, and it usually happens

after everybody is half in the bag, right?

It's not gonna happen early on in the ceremony, right?

It's gonna happen around 10:30, 10:45.

All of a sudden, the wedding becomes about me

because people immediately look to me,

and they form a circle around me,

and they start to clap,

and they want me to start jumping around

like a trained money, and I'm thinking,

It's not about me, you know what I mean?

It's about those two people.

I find that embarrassing.

I don't like to, I'm happy to take,

look, I'm here, I'm taking the focus, that's great.

A very giant part of my life is totally fine

and, in fact, hungers on being the center of attention.

Nothing about being an actor that is about this.

At somebody else's wedding?

No.

Another true or false question about music.

Someone told me that the first gig you played

was Liz Taylor's birthday party?

Well, it's one of the early gigs that we played,

and it was a complete nightmare, oh my God.

Michael Jackson's there?

Michael Jackson was there.

Thank God my brother got a song out of it

because we put this band together,

we were playing in tiny little clubs,

we had no records, I'd written a bunch of songs,

he'd written a bunch of songs.

We were playing in 150-seat coffee houses,

and stuff like that.

Somehow this request came in for the Bacon Brothers

to play Elizabeth Taylor's, I think it was

40th birthday, 50th birthday?

I don't know, it was a birthday bash

that was gonna be seen by billions of people worldwide.

Michael Jackson was gonna be there,

and this artist and that artist,

and it was this really super over-the-top,

I actually should go back and look at it,

it was like a crazy over-the-top production.

There was a young up-and-coming country singer,

Martina McBride, which has now gone on to become

a giant start in the world of country music.

They paired us with her, and we were gonna do a song

with Martina, and it was an amazing experience for us.

They flew us out to L.A.

We had this great rehearsal with Martina.

She sang the shit out of a song that I wrote,

and I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing.

I'm standing backstage,

and right before I'm about to go out,

Rosanne Barr goes by.

She's dressed as Cleopatra,

and she's being carried on a giant platter

by a bunch of nubian slaves,

and they're all covered in gold, and stuff like that.

We go out, and we take our spot,

and I'm playing at that point,

and I'm very very new into playing live music.

It was really new for me.

I loved playing, but,

and I'm still not much of a guitar player,

but at this point, I was really really new into it.

Somehow my 12-string guitar got completely out of tune,

and I have a theory that somebody must have

either hit the guitar or done it just as kind of a joke.

Malcolm Forbes.

Yeah, there you go.

Now we're ready to go, and I hit a couple of strings,

and I go, Oh my God, this is the worst.

This is a nightmare.

I turn to my brother and said, Mike, I'm way our of tune.

There was no time.

The whole thing was live.

I couldn't retune it.

It ended up being terrifying, just an absolute disaster,

and we really kind of shit the bed.

(audience laughs)

It's a medical term.

Yeah, sorry.

It was a great, one of those great life lessons,

and we picked ourselves up after this terrible experience

and tried to go back into this studio

and try to fix the track a little bit,

but yeah, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson,

and Roseanne Barr.

And Roseanne Barr.

I want to go back to Footloose for a minute because

you've talked about this

in different ways at different times,

and I think that as we were talking earlier

there's life that whether one's a performer

or what one's career is, and sort of moments that happen.

After Footloose came out,

you talked about where you were in terms of this

Hollywood landscape.

You were in that teeing area with Brat Pack-y sort of

Tom Cruise-y thing.

The phrase you've used is this sort of,

then you entered your mid-career meltdown

where you self-sabotaged yourself.

I want to talk about it,

because I feel like there's something very rich there,

especially when you think of a lot of guys,

we sort of have these visions and dreams and ambitions

of what we want to achieve.

We sort of get there,

and then we dynamite it, right?

You're here now.

You've had a brilliant career,

but when you look back at that,

what was happening?

Why?

It's a good question.

I think that I had an idea about the kind of actor

that I wanted to be, and the idea was based

on a lot of stuff that I was looking at.

It was school, it was things that I was reading.

I started out because I wanted to make money, get girls,

and be a pop idol and be on the cover of Tiger Beat.

I don't think any of you remembers what Tiger Beat is,

but you can Google it.

Bobby Sherman, when I was a really little kid,

that's what I wanted, that pop success.

Girls and money and stuff.

Then, I started to act and really take it seriously

and study it, and embrace it.

I was very young when I made that transition,

probably by the time I moved to New York

when I was 17 or 18, I was, Fuck Tiger Beat.

I want to be deNiro, Pacino, Dustin Hoffman,

John Casales, John Voight, Meryl Streep, Raul Julia,

these are the people I want to be.

I'm on my way towards that goal through the theater

that I was doing through Diner,

through those kinds of things.

Then Footloose happens, and I'm Bobby Sherman again,

and I'm on the cover of Tiger Beat,

and I was 24 years old, and I was like,

This is exactly what I don't want.

yeah, I was rejecting it, and making choices that

were self-sabotaging.

If I had been a little smarter,

I would have realized that if something good is happening,

you probably better off just embracing it.

You're probably better off just working it

because chances are it's not gonna last forever.

I don't have hindsight.

I don't go, I wish if I had only, you know what I mean?

My theory is if you mess things up for yourself,

you pick it up and you find something else

and you keep looking down the road.

You've got kids now.

Two kids, yeah.

Basically at that age.

They are, yeah.

Do you ever look at them and think about

moments like this where ...

Sure.

What would you tell them?

I think about moments like this,

but I don't struggle too much with things

that I'm going to tell them.

I want them to do great and I want them to understand,

but I know that the idea that a parent sits you down one day

and says, Well kid, here's the one piece of information,

this is the one piece of information

that's gonna change your life.

That's the stuff of movies, you know?

That shit doesn't happen.

You mean movies lie?

Yeah, movies lie.

That's exactly what I mean.

I think you have to,

all I can do is communicate with them

on an ongoing basis and try to live by example,

try to have them see me and see my wife

and see what we do, but I don't ever look

at that one moment where it's all gonna come together.

I never had it, as a kid.

There was never one moment really

where somebody said to me, Well here's the thing.

But there's moments like,

if you look back and say, Son, this might be a moment.

It can be a moment.

I've got some wisdom here that I'm gonna apply to you.

That's true, there can be a moment.

Here's the other thing is that

I may think it's the moment,

and they may not think that, or conversely,

my kids have come to me and said to me,

Do you remember when you said to me this thing?

or whatever, or that night when this happened,

and I have no memory of it,

but it was important to them, you know.

To try to like come up with words of wisdom

is a short-term parenting solution that doesn't apply

in I don't think any kind of reality.

Were you afraid of success at that point?

I was, yeah, because success was scary.

Fame was scary.

It's so funny because I wanted it so badly.

I wanted it from the first time

I could ever even dream of it, I wanted it.

My father was famous.

People would stop him on the street and stuff.

I remember going, I gotta be more famous than him.

I got to.

He was a city planner?

He was a city planner, yeah, in Philadelphia.

He was on the cover of Time Magazine,

which I've never actually been on.

(audience laughs)

I remember so much being so focused on that, and on fame.

Then it was there, and then I was like, I don't know.

I had a difficult time with it.

I found something you said which was

part of being a man is learning to take responsibility

for your successes and failures.

You can't be blaming others or feeling jealous.

Seeing somebody else's success as your failure

is a cancerous way to live.

Right.

I guess I'm sort of staying on this because it's such a,

for all guys or any men or women in the room,

this is where they become that moment where

you achieve something, and for reasons we don't know,

we just sort of,

I call it the Bridge of the River Kwai moment,

like you just blow it up, and there it goes, right?

Right, but I think that the main thing is

that you have, it's very hard when you,

at any point in your life, to think that there's

still five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road,

because it all feels like it's gonna happen right now.

I was 24 when Footloose came out.

I knew that I was gonna be in this for a long haul,

but I certainly didn't think to myself, Well yeah,

well in 10 years it's gonna change,

and things are gonna go up and go down.

It's very hard to picture that when you're in

the middle of it.

I think hanging in there and,

if there's something that you really love to do

or you really feel that you're good at,

or you're really is giving you some kind of satisfaction,

which acting is and was for me.

With all this other stuff,

fame, ups and downs, careers, I mean

we haven't even discussed, Footloose was a great thing,

but the years afterwards were just like many years

of what I felt were personal disasters,

I created disasters.

You have to just say, I'm looking down the road.

Something is going to get better, and in the interim,

I really love what I'm doing.

Movies like Tremors?

Yeah, Tremors, right.

You've said you were standing on the street with Kyra

and losing your shit, realizing you were making a movie

about underground worms, right?

Yeah, exactly, I was just losing my shit.

I was going, I can't believe I'm making this movie.

It's about underground worms, and I thought I was

in a different place.

That's a very good example because then we go out

and make the movie.

The movie comes out, it's a bomb.

I go, Yeah, I was right.

I never should have made this.

Now it's even worse, because not only have I made it,

but not it's a year later, it's out, and it's a bomb.

Then you think that's the end of the story.

The movie becomes one of the first VHS hits,

cult VHS hits, and people love that movie.

I don't look at my movies.

I've been trying to lobby to remake the movie

because it's the only character I've done

that I really would like to explore 25 years later.

(audience laughs)

I've been really hoping to reboot it.

Is there a script?

There's no script.

There's no interest, frankly.

Not only is there no script ...

Not even a little bit of interest?

No interest.

Chinese money somewhere?

Believe me, nobody wants to do it, not with me at least.

I went back and I looked at it.

It's really good.

I was really proud of it.

I thought it was beautifully shot, very funny.

The people that have come up to me through the years

and said, I love that movie, and it's mostly out

in the heart land, not here and it's not in L.A.

Like in the rest of that ...

People are here in L.A. They just won't say it.

They won't say it, right.

The rest of the country is honest enough to tell me

that they like the movie.

It's a funny thing.

Sometimes things come around full circle,

so that's a perfect example.

(rock music)