Who’s Buried In Grant’s Tome?

I discovered With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant in 1998, as I was walking through a Borders bookstore in a mall. The book was on the New Releases table and its cover — the grimacing face of one of my favorite actors, framed by a cardboard box — caught my eye.

I picked up the hardcover and flipped to the table of contents. It was organized (mostly) by movie, and included a chapter about my favorite bad film, Hudson Hawk. I was tempted to pick it up, but $24.95 was a little steep for me back then. I thought, “I’ll wait for it to get on the best-seller list, then pick it up on discount from Amazon.” [Remember: this is 1998, before Amazon started dropping prices on everydarnbook in stock.]

During the drive home, I thought, “You idiot! That’s book’s never going to become a best-seller! It’s the film diaries of Richard E. Grant, ferchrissakes!”

So, a few days later, I bought a copy at the Montclair Book Center (at a modest 10% discount), and proceeded not to read it for nearly a decade.

Now, it’s not as if I lay down books like bottles of wine, waiting for a maturation process before I ingest them. It’s more to do with a combination of laziness and that whole “worlds enough” business.

During this past summer (technically, it still is summer, but the 40-degree overnight temps last week have put that season to bed), we caught an installment of Higher Definition in which Robert Wilonsky interviewed Grant about his directorial debut, Wah-Wah, a semi-autobiographical take on Grant’s childhood in Swaziland during the British handover.

We thought the movie sounded good, and wanted to go see it, but discovered that it had the most eclectically limited distribution of all time. Each Friday, we’d hit the Showtimes link on its IMDB page, to discover that it was only playing in five far-flung theaters that week: Cedar Rapids, Logan, Bangor, Bismarck and Mineola. The closest it came to NY/NJ was about 3 hours’ drive away. We started to joke about just which out-of-the-way cities it was going to appear in.

As it turned out, the Higher Def episode was a rerun from a month or so earlier, and the film actually HAD shown in Jersey (Montclair, naturally) in May. We’ll wait for video.

During that interview, I mentioned to Amy that I had With Nails downstairs in the library. “Of course you do, darling. He’s your boyfriend,” she said. I didn’t try to argue. She took a break from Don Quixote and granted Grant a chance.

For the next several nights, while we read before turning in, I noticed her trying to suppress her laughter. “Anything I should know about?” I asked the first time.

“You have to read this book,” she told me.

Having recently cleared my slate of snooty-pants highbrow books, I finally read With Nails last week, and she’s right; it’s impossibly entertaining. The main reason for this is Grant’s charming naivete at being ‘Swaz Boy In Hollywood’, but there’s also something special about the era in which it begins (1985). Grant recalls numerous auditions and social occasions where he’s crisscrossing with Branagh, Nighy, Day Lewis, Oldman, Roth, That Other Grant, and other British actors who are busting out in their own careers. When he gets to Hollywood, it’s at the peak of the Guber/Peters era, as budgets first began blowing through the roof.

There are great behind-the-scenes stories of how films can go disastrously wrong (along with a pretty clear illustration of why Pret-a-Porter sucked), and then there’s the absolute epic of how messed up the Hudson Hawk shoot was (it’s the biggest chapter in the book). I can’t begin to convey the mind-blowingness of those anecdotes, which culminated in him and Sandra Bernhard clinging to each other for an island of sanity. Try to wrap yer mind around THAT concept, dear reader.

(Bonus: from his description of the accommodations during the Budapest stage of the shoot, it appears he stayed in the same place I did during my trip there two years ago. Also, from his description of the horrors of those accommodations, it appears the country made some major strides from 1990 to 2004.)

While Grant comes off as a sweet, wide-eyed guy in this book, he doesn’t pull punches with some of his characterizations. Steve Martin, for example, comes off as a good-hearted man who is All Business, contradictory as that may seem. And Grant’s Barbra Streisand story needs to be read to be believed. I mean, it’s tough to believe he’s heterosexual after that one, but hey.

He also takes name-dropping to a new level, but never in the “Saw DeNiro at NoBu last night, AGAIN: yawn” mode. He seems genuinely thrilled about meeting many of his idols, and his description of meeting Tom Waits is perfect:

Everyone else is in smatterings of designer casuals. Mistah Waits arrives straight off an old record cover in a ’64 open-topped Cadillac, with fins, with a funnel of dust trailing down the dirt road. The gravel voice gets out some howdy-doodys and his clothes and hair are crumple-sculpted to him. Doesn’t seem to have a straight bone in his bearing and kills me off with his cool by growing out a compliment for Withnail & I. Out the side of his mouth. Like we might be being spied on by the bailiffs. Him, rolling tobacco and reefer. Winona and I are “We’ve got all your recordings, Tom!!” To which he just heh-hehs.

I’m still undecided about how the arc of the book makes me feel: it covers the career that begins with Withnail & I — which gains him massive amounts of praise and launches him to Hollywood — before moving to a sequence of films directed by some of our finest directors — Altman, Coppola, and Scorsese — and ends with him shooting Spice World. Of course, it’s better than the alternative of not working.

And we do have those Wah-Wah diaries to look forward to.