EDITORIAL ROUTTNG 10-5-ss

TO:

ENTERTAINMENT S 7:
F
o o c

-r F

a F

Rebel actor

o 7 o o o p

Sheen surrenders and plays Lee

By Frank Lovece
Words roll out of actor Martin
Sheen like leaves whipped from trees in a hard autumn rain. The language

\ {

fr Ir fr

amputation without antiseptics or

anesthesia.

Gettysburg National Military Park was used for major film sequences, a

and the lilt are enchanting even if, as wi.th leaves, most blow- away, to

first. The 10-and-a-half-week production also utilized 5,000 Civil War reenactors history buffs who gather - with periodically homemade, authentically researched uniforms and accouterments. The huge speaking cast includes Tom Berenger as Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, Jeff

leave little substance behind. "I'm pontificating forgive me," he says

- in a Manhattan hotel, with good humor

things!"

over a lunch of steamed vegetables and rice. "I'rn such a windbag, anyway," he adds, smiling. "I say so many profound

TV moyies (in which he's very popular), or low-budget, independently produced potboilers (like the upcoming "The Killing Box" and "When the Bough Breaks") or the occasionally offered big studio picture. "I got an offer," Sheen remembers, "to do the role of the FBI guy (played by Scott Glenn) in 'The Silence of the Lambs'- and I had to say no. I had done a movie called'The Believers' (198D, about a cult who were sacrificing people. And I came home one night,

in prestige projects such as this, or

!
o

F.

!r
U o o

tr.

a
x
E

i
U.

fr

d o
o

v.
U.

c c
D l-

z o

Sheen's self-deprecating selfawareness charms away the fact he usually avoids giving direct answers.

Here is a man of tumultuous life one of America's most gifted actors, patriarch of an acting family, recovering alcoholic and perhaps the bestknown heart-attack victim in the nation. Yet when he says he is "terrified that I will become inebriated and won't know it," he's quick to say he's speaking "metaphorically."

All this, in a way, simply illustrates

how good he is in the new movie "Get-

"Go away," I didn't want this cup, "Pour some out. Make it a Iittle sweeter," But you m'ust accept the cup as offered, not altered, if you're gonna grow.'
Daniels as Union Col. Joshua
as Union Brig. Gen. John Buford, Stephen Lang as Confederate Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett, C. Thomas
Lawrence Chamberlain, Sam Elliott

'l kept telling the cup,

and the headline story in the national news was, that movie had been used as an instructional filrn for a Bmwnsville, Texas, cult. Fourteen people were murdered by them in Matamoros, Mexico. And it shattered me. I'm tellin'you. And if I had done'Silence of the [,ambs'and a fellow went out and killed a heavyset girl and made a dress out of her skin, I could not have excused myself from the responsibility of having chosen - own to do that for my ego, my own career and the money." This seems in character. Sheen, a

o
FI

c 2
N c C
\l
9) l-{

o o

n
D

F .t

o
P

E
o

a t

2 o

tysburg," an epic four-hour-and-10minute tapestry of the CMI WaCs most

famous and cataclysmic battle. As Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, Sheen,53, etches a quiet, internal man who was "a teetobaler. A shy man. He considered himself a failure. He was a nongambler, a nontheatergoer, a nonreader. He was a deeply religious, fundamenLalist man. He had a sense of history. He always deferred to the Almighty, in everything. And yet he knew consciously, emotionally, that he was committing thousands and thousands ofyoung men to their deaths.

well-known political activist who's broken bread at Sandinista camps in

Nicaragua and slept with the homeless on sidewalk grates, has a conscience as big as his filmography (over 80 frlms,

i,
P

f+

o 3 -2

TV movies and miniseries so far, in-

Howell as Union Lt. Thomas D. Chamberlain, and standout character actor Kevin Conway as an lrish-American Union career sergeant. That part, Sheen says, had been his .own first choice. But the prodircers, he recalls, insisted on him for Lee

cluding "Apocalypse Now," "Wall

Street" and "Cadence" with son Charlie Sheen, and films with sons Emilio Estevez and Ramon Estevez, daughter Renee Estevez, and brother Joe EsteveD. "We live in a culture that encourages us to melt in, to join the mainstream, to'be'somebody," he muses. "And the
nobody. You can't be a somebody until you're a nobody - until you have conquered the ego."
01993 NEWSPAPER ENTERPRJSE ASSN.

O
O)
O)

"I which he kept turning down. thought no ... no ... it's not gonna

@ o ;t\)

ts I

"They were gonna die this day," Sheen continues, contemplatively.

"He knew it. And that's a sort of madness. Someone even told me after seeing this, 'You played him a little mad."' The film, based on the Pulitzer

I could never play Lee. And the only guy I know that
happen with me.

work of the inner journey is to be a

@
O)

could have played it had already turned it down, a dear friend of mine,
and that was George C. Scott. He told me he turned it down because he did

Prize-winning novel "The Killer

not want to play angther general."

Angels" by Michael Shaara, trains a microscope on those three days in 1863, when 150,000 Union and Confederate soldiers met at a bottleneck crossroads in Pennsylvania. Nearly 50,000 died some of them on the - others field of battle, in the days and weeks afterward as they slowly succumbed to their wounds in an era of

timeless nature of "Gettysburg" wooed him. "I kept telling the cup, 'Go away,"' he says - metaphorically. "I
didn't want this cup. 'Pour some out. Make it a little sweeter.' But you must
accept the cup as offered, not altered, if you're gonna grow." Sheen does, indeed, give unusual thought to the roles he plays, whether

Eventually, Sheen says, the serious,

STAR VIEW