Free There and Back Again by Sean Astin with Joe Layden Page B

drug addict in Where the Day Takes You , which was so far from who I was, and I had done Encino Man, which was a major hit for the studio, regardless of how I felt about it. Now with Rudy I had done … well, me. And I didn’t know what else I had to offer. I had played myself, or at least some idealized, amplified version of myself, and I had no idea where to go next. Christine witnessed my anxiety and was sympathetic if not bemused.
    â€œWhat is wrong with you?” she asked. “You should be proud and happy.”
    The waiting really is the hardest part—the six months or the year that passes between the time a film is wrapped and the time it comes out is agony for an actor. If the film is bad and you know it’s bad, there is dread at the prospect of having to promote it, which you are duty bound and contractually obligated to do. If it’s good or you think it’s going to be good, the experience can be different, complicated, with a daily shifting of emotions, ranging from genuine excitement over seeing the work put on display, to crippling fear that you might be wrong. And if in fact the movie is bad, there will be proof that you have not only bad judgment, but also no taste.
    I didn’t think that was the case with Rudy . I knew in my heart that it was a very good film, and that my work in it was strong. I was reasonably confident that people who get paid to recognize and comment on such things—namely, film critics—would have no trouble discerning the merits of Rudy . What I did not know, and could not know, was whether any of that would translate into the type of box-office success that can, when combined with an artistic and critical success, transform a career. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced that Rudy was going to be a hit. Hoosiers had done great, but that movie was about a championship high-school basketball team. The climactic sequence is a lengthy game featuring a buzzer-beating basket and a wild celebration on the court. Tears of sadness on one side, tears of joy on the other. As General George Patton once said, “America loves a winner.” Hoosiers was about a winner. Rudy was a different kind of winner. He was the last guy on the bench, the last guy to get in the game. His achievement was no less meaningful, but it was smaller, quieter.
    Christine and I went back to California and enrolled in community college, which had the not unpleasant effect of allowing me to pursue my longtime goal of getting a degree, while distracting me from the postproduction phase of Rudy . In retrospect, I realize that distraction, while in some sense soothing, was not a sound career strategy. I remember trusting in the back of my mind that everything would work out all right, that Hollywood was built on a system predicated upon the assumption that agents and managers wanted to make money, and to do that they had to find work for their clients. That’s the business they were in, and they’d figure out how to do that for me. They’d make the necessary phone calls, hold the necessary meetings, and devise a way to capitalize on the work I’d done, most notably Rudy. Even though the film hadn’t been released, there was, as they say, a little “buzz.”
    I was waiting for the world to knock at my door. To my agents, I said, in effect, “I was in the title role of a major studio’s picture, so do your job, and I’ll be focusing on developing myself the way I want to while waiting for the next opportunity you people present me.” That’s the way it was supposed to work, or so I thought; nevertheless, it wasn’t happening. I got the distinct impression that my agents were hedging their bets, not wanting to pick up the phone and call people, or that people were just waiting to see what would happen with Rudy. Meanwhile, I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the business of my own career. Basically, I had this complex