"Shut up and act"

You feel comfortable where you are.

Oh yeah, what the hell: You wind up where you wind up, and as an actor, you have no idea where you're going to wind up. You really don't. And there are a lot of A-list actors today who never gave a shit about acting, so it's funny how the cookie crumbles. But I defend my position by stating that I have the best of both worlds: I can make a living and make movies that aren't going to be picked apart by a thousand chefs. When you make a movie for a couple million bucks, there are only going to be so many people involved. And usually there are much fewer than there are on the blockbusters, which makes things much simpler. You don't have the pressure to have that $20 million opening weekend. So it allows me to just be an actor, which is what I always wanted in the first place. I don't have to spend 50 percent of my time figuring out how to stay famous. I don't want to devote that much time to that. Although I do have to tour like a mutherscratcher.

The one thing I took away from your early days is that you and Sam did what many artists consumed by their craft do, which is to just go out and make whatever it is that you want to make, rather than take a class or...

Or wait for someone to discover you! That's just not the way it works. It's the old cliché of grabbing the bull by the horns, and the cool thing is that the United States is one of those few places that's conducive to such a process. You can literally go knock on someone's door, get him to invest in a movie, go make it, and then sell it around the world. It's crazy. What kills me is that there is no mystery to it, just an incredible amount of elbow grease, and most people just aren't built for that. They think it works in a different way. They think that you're just supposed to get famous, or fall into it.

Is that how you conceived of your arch-nemesis in the book, Rob Stern, a studio exec with no discernible talent or skill other than middle-management manipulation? Is that character based on someone you know?

He's based on the asshole idiot executives all actors have had to deal with at one time or another. Hollywood has this habit best demonstrated by Tom Cruise on "Oprah." He goes, "You know, Oprah, I help people. I just have a reputation for that." Reputation for that! This is what's killing me. Then I heard a comic say to me once, "Sometimes, I just take off and bust through town! I got a reputation for that!" Everyone wants a reputation for something, and again, to me, that takes away from the craft. It's like, "What are you, an editor, writer, director, actor? Then go do your fucking job!"

Seriously. There was a hilarious interview with Cruise and Spielberg in Der Spiegel recently, reporting that there was a Scientology tent on the set of "War of the Worlds," because in between shots Tom wanted to help people kick drugs and alcohol.

I can believe that. That's fine; it's sort of a way of life for Tom. It's not really a charity. It's more like his religion.

He's got a reputation for it!

Yeah, he's got a reputation for helping people. But my feeling is, "Shut up and act."

So are you worried that you're going to get any concerned calls from Gere, Nichols or Zellwegger about the book?

Nah, I haven't gotten any calls yet, although the book pretty much just hit the stands. I really hope I don't get in trouble with anyone, because I'm the dumbest guy in the book. By a country mile. Richard Gere is very calm and professional, Renée Zellwegger is really sweet, and Mike Nichols is completely reasonable. There just isn't a section that goes, "And then Renée's coke habit got totally out of control!" It's fiction. It's make-believe. They're public figures, so as long as I'm not telling things out of school, we're going to be fine. Lawyers crawl all over these kind of books, and no one's mentioned it at all.

So how does one make love the Bruce Campbell way? My condensed take on the book seems to suggest that everyone is thinking way too hard to make love at all.

Yeah, there's a lot of overanalyzing. If you're bipolar, you're bipolar forever, you know? We've come up with all these new terms, whether in medicine, relationships, whatever. And they're all labels: You're a recovering this, you're a son of that. It's horrible. I think everyone needs a clean slate.

That theory seems to be borne out in your imagined conversation with Liz Taylor about all her husbands. So is the idea -- whether expressed in that conversation, the high jinks at Forest Lawn Cemetery, the section on Tyrone Power, and others -- that your book is in part an homage to Hollywood's past?

Yeah, because those people will soon be forgotten. You mention Tyrone Power to someone in their 20s and they go, "Who?" He was a guy who I first got exposed to during the time when movies were starting to come to television. I'll take those old actors over some of the new guys, because they had so much experience. That's how you get good. That's how Spencer Tracy got so good. And most people today say, "Who's Spencer Tracy?"

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