Slouching toward Hollywood

Luke Wilson was playing a scene in which Anthony takes time out from one of Mr. Henry's parties to phone the Hillsboro motel and talk to the great love of his life, Inez, played by Lumi Cavazos.

In the background of the shot, James Caan made inaudible small talk with another character, then exited the frame. Caan's getup for this scene looked like something Siegfried or Roy might reject as too flashy: a kimono, Birkenstocks with white athletic socks, and on his shoulder, a stuffed ocelot with bared fangs.

Between takes, Caan kept the great cat perched on his shoulder. He carried on conversations with it. Sometimes he demanded that anybody who talked to him also address the ocelot.

It was time to change camera positions, which would take half an hour. Onscreen, the scene lasted perhaps five minutes. It would require about 10 hours to shoot.

"I'm feeling pretty exhausted," Luke said. He looked it. He was in almost every scene of Bottle Rocket. The constant pressure was getting to him.

He shook the hand of a passing extra, smiling warmly. Then he stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and looked at his shoes.

"I hope this works," Luke said, to nobody in particular.
Standing over near a picture window, James Caan lit a Marlboro and talked about Bottle Rocket.

"Wanna hear my theory about the script?" he asked. "OK. Here goes. You ready? Follow me on this: everybody wants to be something they aren't. They all want something they don't have. Anthony wants true love. Bob wants to feel like he's part of something. Dignan wants to be a criminal. Mr. Henry wants to fleece these kids, but he also wants to be taken seriously as this big-shot master thief, even though when you sit down and actually look at the guy, he's completely full of bullshit.

"So what happens to them? Anthony gets a girlfriend, the maid, so he gets what he wanted. Bob gets to be part of a group of guys, which is what he wanted. Dignan ends up in prison, which is where he secretly wanted to be all along. Mr. Henry gets to have these kids around him who think he's really hot shit. So everybody gets what they want, but not in the way they expected.

"Think about the title. I first saw it--Bottle Rocket--and I thought, what kind of fuckin' title is this? And then I got it. It made sense. It was beautiful, man, just beautiful, like poetry. What's a bottle rocket? It's a firecracker that only goes so far. A bottle rocket ain't a stick of dynamite that's gonna blow everything to kingdom come and get a lot of attention, see what I'm saying? A bottle rocket is just a little fuckin' thing, right? You light it, and whoosh--it goes up maybe to the second or third floor, then it burns out and falls. It doesn't go up to the 17th floor or the 29th floor.

"But that's OK. See what I'm saying? Because that's what a bottle rocket is built to do. These guys, see, Anthony and Dignan and Bob, they're bottle rockets. They go a certain distance, then they stop. And that's OK, because they're happy."

It was March 1995, and Bob Musgrave was driving around Los Angeles with a journalist from Dallas.

"The women out here, man," he said, pointing out a slender woman in a sports bra and tights, jogging in place as she waited for a red light to change. "It's such a clichŽ, I know. You always hear people say Los Angeles has the most beautiful women in the world. I kind of wondered if it was bullshit, too. But then you move out here, and you find out it's the truth."

He laughed self-consciously, realizing how that probably sounded.
Bob had officially moved out from Dallas a couple of weeks before. He was sharing a small house in Beverly Hills with Wes, Owen, and Andrew. He was hanging out with Polly Platt, who was considering casting Bob in the next movie she produced. He was going to auditions.

And at the request of Wes and the Wilson brothers, he was trying very hard to quit smoking. They had a bet: if Bob gave in and smoked one cigarette, he would strip completely naked and run through the streets of their neighborhood at night shrieking at the top of his lungs. It was tough. Bob was wearing several nicotine patches, but he still felt the craving.

"You can't smoke out here," he said. "This is Los Angeles. They're all health nuts out here. They'll hang you. It's been really tough, man."

Bob, Owen, and Andrew were still keeping tabs on Bottle Rocket now that it had finished shooting. But for the most part, they were out of the loop.

Wes, however, was still stuck inside it. He spent several hours a day in a West Los Angeles editing room, often working six days a week.