We should hang out.Val Kilmer (December 31, 1959 – April 1, 2025)

We should hang out.

Val Kilmer (December 31, 1959 – April 1, 2025)

George Seminara

Apologies, it's going to take me a moment to get into this. I'm still a little shocked.

Back in the dark ages, I was taking an acting class. Our instructor knew somebody at Juilliard, and we got invited to observe several rehearsals of a play coming to Lincoln Center, a Scottish import, Slab Boys. What’s weird is I can’t remember which of many acting schools I tried, but it was at Juilliard, perhaps the most outstanding acting school in America. Thankfully, it wasn’t reciprocal because they would have laughed at how bad most of us were. What was surprising was that most of the cast was our age. It wasn’t some old actors trying to inspire us by talking about their first plays. It was a group of guys like us, but more talented, getting down to work.

I hoped to direct or do something on Broadway one day. I was desperate. I ushered. I was an audience sweetener. (I Laughed louder and longer, gasped audibly, and sobbed if needed. Two free tickets and $50.00!) Being at these rehearsals was new. This was a fly-on-the-wall view of the actual goings-on, which presents a different perspective than rehearsing a play you are in.

Slab Boys, by John Byrne, is the first part of a trilogy about a group of young men working at A. F. Stobo & Co., Carpet Manufacturers. It was the second play I witnessed where the writer was present at all the rehearsals. John Byrne also designed the production.

In my sketchbook/diary, I wrote my assessment of the cast back in 1983, when I was 22. I wrote that Kevin Bacon was the pro. He was completely prepared, open to direction, and seemingly memorized the entire play. He knew every part, and he took direction without complaint. His character was one of the two top dogs of the slab room. Sean Penn, the other top dog, was seemingly Kevin Bacon’s opposite: Unprepared and a loner. (It turns out it was all part of his process.) Jackie Earl Haley knew what he was doing, and off stage, he still had that bad-boy cool he displayed in The Bad News Bears. (He’ll never escape that.) He revealed himself as smart and funny in an overheard conversation I was too shy to jump into. He played the focus of bullying from the two top dogs. And then there was Val. I wrote one word: Beautiful—no comment about his acting or rehearsal technique. From what I have read in preparation to write this, he was good, and there were no complaints. He was the youngest person to be accepted into the Juilliard acting program. He plays the new employee, a rich kid whose dad got him a job before leaving for university.

Much of the play involves Kevin Bacon’s character, Phil, who is waiting to hear about his possible acceptance into art school. I can personally relate to this.

At the end of our second day of visiting rehearsal, I found myself talking to the beautiful one. I didn’t get to speak to the cool guy, not the guy I would love to work with one day, nor the loner. I ended up chatting with the best-looking guy I have ever seen. Strangely, he was curious about what I wanted to do. I explained that I had big plans, having just transferred my major from painting to film. I was trying out various acting programs to find a system I could apply to direct actors. That led to more discussion—coffee and then hanging out. Oh, and we laughed our asses off.

Val fancied himself an artist; though his focus currently was acting, he saw it as part of his creative identity. That’s when I hit him with my “all art and creativity come from the same source” theory, which has since become the guiding principle of my life. After that, we started planning to create an independent artist-guided production company. Strangely enough, we got inspired by Troma, where I worked a couple of times and got paid in subway tokens and canned food. The idea was to do all the work ourselves and make good films—or at least films we liked.

This was in the Dark Ages, way before cell phones. I could not do smoke signals, telegraph, and psychic messaging, but I still can’t. Most are illegal in New York City, and hanging out as often as we want because we can’t reach each other. But previews were fast approaching. Their rehearsals kept them late, and I usually waited for Val to get out. Kevin said hello, Jackie said hello, and Sean grunted in response. I went from acting student to Val’s friend. When I saw the play, I realized Sean Penn had been up to something. He was paying attention. In his surly way, he was preparing a spectacular performance that I suspect the rest of the cast wasn’t expecting. Yikes!

Val was hilarious, and he and I had a lot of fun dreaming and planning a utopia of making art of all types. He started hanging out with me at my first production company, P.S.I. We did a little everything from editing to computer graphics to multi-cam productions. A sampling of our, meaning me, work includes graphics for the movie Repo Man, Clive Davis’s birthday party where a barely teenaged Whitney Houston serenaded him (reduced to a ten-second clip shown countless times in countless projects. Don’t lie, you know you’ve seen it!). So many low-budget commercials they all blur into one. We designed the TV/VCR point of purchase one-piece unit, (I share a patent) and, also, my first music videos.

Val wanted to know everything, like how the video cameras work, why movies were shot on film and all that stuff that people ask. I had joined an improv group. I enjoyed performing, but not the marijuana, so I joined another one. Val loved Improv, and so we set off to start our improv group. We had a bunch of my pals, one of whom was an NYU/Stella Adler student, come down. But after several brainstorming performance workouts, he got cast in Top Secret, a Hollywood musical/comedy, and was off to learn his songs. It was his first step to stardom. And that was that.

A year later, we bumped into each other and talked for hours about his success. My success was considerably less, but I made it sound awesome. I helped create a low-budget slasher film, Splatter University, directed by Richard Haines. It had a budget below $50,000.00! “Think about what we could do?” We thought about it. Val wrote a Hitchcokian screenplay, and he would star and direct. “And I’ll shoot it and produce?” Well, after one movie, Val knew people. I was out! A month later, he tracked me down at the movie theater, wondering if I could give him my film guy’s contact number.

My film guy was two guys, a guy at Kodak and a guy at AGFA. They had a very liberal approach to the distribution of film stock. The Kodak Guy was $15.00 a 400’ roll and $20.00 for a 1000’ load. The AGFA guy was five dollars cheaper with a quantity discount. They would distribute the film to you for a sizeable discount if there was cash. Val was busy on the day we were going to buy the movie. He gave me $2,000.00 for however much Kodak 5247 that money would buy. It is a versatile and consistent film stock with no surprises or color shifts. I must have run a million feet of it through cameras in the early years of my career. I meet Val’s DP, get in his car, and drive to a six-story enclosed parking lot near the George Washington Bridge.

Sometime in the middle of making Top Secret, Val discovered that he had developed a preternatural ability to get folks to drop their drawers. He was very handsome. The first thought I saw him was that he was beautiful. Now, word was getting around. I was not alone, but I soon would be. The delivery was late, and the DP was getting nervous. “Can we get arrested for this?”

“What? Buying stolen goods?” He looked at me, hmm, what’s the word? Aghast! “Sure, it's a crime.”

“We should probably leave.”

“And not have the film for the first day of shooting?”

He was pretty nervous. Too nervous. We weren’t buying drugs, but I didn’t know how my Kodak guy was gonna react.

“Hey, remember that McDonald’s across the street?”

He did.

“Why don’t you buy us some lunch?”

He breathed that famous sigh of relief and turned to go.

“Hey! A large chocolate shake with that Big Mac.”

He was almost at the stairs.

“Gimme the car keys?”

“Why?”

“So I can open the trunk!”

He threw me the keys and missed. When I picked them up, I heard him halfway down the street. And so, I waited. Alone. Some guys didn’t have the strength of character for low-budget filmmaking.

It had a great view of the city.

Val shot for a few weeks and then left to make Real Genius.

It was time to finish his movie when he returned, but there was a problem. He had been dating his leading lady when he left, and now he was dating a new leading lady. We went to dinner to solve the problem. I thought of having him over to meet my spousal unit but decided not to. I considered him a friend, but in the animal magnetism department, I was in the wombat category while he was a lion. He had learned after Real Genius that a smile from him could cause panties to drop to the floor.

His solution was to re-shoot all the shots with the old girl and replace her with the new one. This was forty years before Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey in All The Money in The World. Also, he lost the cameraman with the nerves of steel. We talked and laughed into the wee hours. “Man, I missed this. We should hang out more often.” We would have, but he had to get ready for Top Gun.

He got married at some point, and we hung out in my edit room, discussing whether he should re-shoot his whole movie again with her. The answer was yes, but I had a deadline, and nothing could cause an entire edit facility to shut down like the appearance of a movie star. In those days, you got approval for your rough cut, called an offline, and then you conformed it to higher quality tape in your online. Due to the marketing team, your deadline was etched in stone. You didn’t blow a deadline. It could take them a week to approve the rough-cut but if the deadline was 9:00 a.m. the next morning, you worked all night. I had to kick him out. But with the promise that we’d hang out, besides, he wanted to be a dad and talk about it how and when it would happen. “Dude, if anyone knows the mechanics of making a baby, it’s you!”

I don’t know what happened to his movie.

He told me there was enough to make two of me at the Doors' opening. This meant I got fat, but thankfully, he did not mention the lack of greenery on my head. He's sensitive, real sensitive. “Here’s my guy. Give him your number, and we’ll hang out.”

By now, he was a full-fledged Movie Star, a leading man, and first on the call sheet.

And that’s how it went: a moment here and there, a meal, a phone call at three in the morning. Sometimes, it sounded like he was out of it, and I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I’d ask about the kids, and he’d focus and talk about them with a pride he rarely had for anything else. He always ended every conversation we should get together.

All was not perfect for him. He made some great films and some great performances. Tombstone and Heat are the best that come to mind. Batman was a mistake, and Joel Schumacher made no bones about his dislike for Val. I shared an apartment in Los Angeles with John Frankenheimer’s assistant while making the Island of Dr. Moreau. They complained about Val. I couldn’t believe it. I got to talk with Marlon Brando, and he felt Val was difficult. What!?! The king of difficult thought Val Kilmer was difficult! This is from an actor who painted himself white and put a waste paper basket on his head for no reason in the film. (I still liked it.) Check the movie out.

I didn’t see or hear much of Val during the ensuing years. He changed his number a few times, and I was constantly updated. After Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, I wasn’t. He got divorced, and his roles got spotty. He was still doing good work, even in just okay films. But he started taking jobs for a check—sucky movies beneath his talents.

Sometimes, Public Relations and rumors can be utilized in Hollywood to build a career and sometimes to destroy them. Harvey Weinstein's crimes were made worse by his drive for vengeance and ruining women’s careers by claiming they were very hard to work with. The Blake Lively nonsense is just the current story.

I last saw Val at the Guillermo del Toro show in Los Angeles. He was with his daughter, Mercedes, and I was with some friends. (Unwritten rule: leave people alone when they are with their kids.) He looked a little wan but not anywhere near as bad as I read in the newspapers. He wanted my numbers so we could hang out. He wanted to show me his artist’s lab and gallery he was setting up with a buddy from high school, something we had discussed decades before. I gave him my card with the promise of hanging out.

After fighting it for years, I finally made a website to showcase my talents, whatever they may be. The first email I got was from Val. If I’m being honest, the only email I got that first year was from Val. We had lunch at a Vegetarian Restaurant in the East Village. He said it was a favorite. I was annoyed that he was hanging around my patch, and this was the first I’d heard from him in years. He had a son, Jack, and I had a son, Jackson, who was born a year later. Val was got a divorce. He was cheating on her and got caught, which opened a can of worms that led to divorce court, and I was losing my house due to bank shenanigans brilliantly delineated in Adam McKay’s film The Big Short. There were some laughs, but it was a heavy meal.

Everybody says we should hang out in LA, but it's a lie. In retrospect, I think life just got in our way because sometimes we did hang out. Sometimes. If you can hang out with a friend you care about, you should make it happen. I’m most upset that it’s an impossibility now. I’ll never get to see the artist space called the HellMell studio. After all he went through, he was still moving forward as an artist. Some guy offered me $500.00 for one of his two “Slim volumes of poetry.” That ain’t happening. It’s not great, but he was a hard worker and intelligent, and he would only get better, as the second slim volume proved.

If you read any of my film essays or blog posts, you know I take every opportunity to stick it to Tom Cruise. It’s childish, but I’m Sicilian, and we have been known to hold a grudge. However, Tom stood fast when the studio tried dissuading him from bringing Ice Man back for Top Gun 2. They were afraid that he wouldn’t make it through the production. The studio feared they couldn’t get a completion bond for Val’s appearance. As a producer explained, Tom agreed to pay for the reshooting if Val couldn’t complete his scenes. An incredible act of kindness, unexpected as it was from Mr. Cruise. It was not only Val’s last appearance on film, but it was also an opportunity for all his fans to say goodbye, and for that, it was beautiful.

I cannot bring myself to watch the documentary Val.