Free Christian Bale by Harrison Cheung Page A

theater to train an actor’s instincts,” David recalled Duvall saying.
    â€œGood advice,” David said, “but that wouldn’t work for Christian as he’s already committed to moving to L.A.” And even if David would have allowed Christian to entertain the thought of university, there was the practical matter of where. If Christian remained in England, he would have paid regular tuition fees. In America, he would have had to pay the much higher foreign student rates.
    During the making of Newsies , cast member Michael Goorjian made a twenty-five-minute home-movie horror spoof called Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square , where “Don Knotts” systematically kills off the newsboys one by one. The short became a cult hit on YouTube and offers a peek at the high spirits on set. Goorjian went on to a successful film and TV career, winning an Emmy and a number of film festival awards for his short films. ( Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square would eventually be surpassed on YouTube by F*cking Newsies , the spoof trailer mashup of Newsies and Christian’s foul-mouthed tirade on the set of Terminator Salvation .)
    Christian told a reporter that the teeming masses on Newsies were also hormonally charged: “It was a massive production, with hundreds of extras. Apparently there were a few extra kids who were offering their services to anybody who paid, all during the time we shot there. There was even a Newsies pimp ring. They used the sets, wherever. They were using my dressing room on my days off, I heard later.”
    All Disney movies have a happy ending—an unwritten law from the early days of founder Walt Disney when he was creating American interpretations of beloved fairy tales and parables. It was part of Disney’s feeling that American optimism meant that you could wish upon a star and your dreams would come true.
    So for Newsies , the happy ending meant the newsboys’ strike against Pulitzer would be successful and that street kid Jack Kelly would give up his dreams of moving to Santa Fe and stay in New York with his love interest, Sarah. That did not sit well with Newsies fans, who openly detested Sarah as the “Destroyer of Dreams.” For a time, Ele Keats was called the most hated woman in the Balehead World—especially thanks to the “inappropriate for the time period” tonsil-tickling kiss she has with Christian at the end of the movie, his first on-screen smooch.
    How was Christian as a kisser? Keats said: “I would have to rateChristian’s kiss as a 7 or 8. We were both pretty uncomfortable, and I was going out with someone else at the time, so it was a pretty hard scene to shoot!”
    Christian was also amused at how jealous his girlfriend, Natalie, was of Keats. Christian told me that at a house party, Natalie actually starting harassing Ele so badly that Keats locked herself in the bathroom.
    Christian also argued with Ortega about the ending of Newsies . Would Jack Kelly be willing to give up everything to stay in New York in poverty? Not likely, but Ortega stuck to the script at hand.
    And, as the critics were happy to point out, in real life, the newsboys’ strike was actually a failure, and Pulitzer’s publishing empire was hardly damaged. Pulitzer Prize, anyone?
    When Newsies wrapped, David arranged for a cast party cruise to Catalina Island. (When the tenth anniversary edition of the Newsies DVD was released, David was furious when Ortega, in the DVD extras, mentions the Catalina trip but didn’t mention who had paid for it.) It had been a tough shoot but Ortega, Christian, and David were confident that Newsies would be the big Disney hit for 1992.
    By the fall of 1991, Christian had moved on to begin rehearsals in London for his next Disney picture, Swing Kids , which would shoot on location in Prague. It would be another big-budget production with dancing but luckily no singing—a drama about the rise of