LUKE PERRY R.I.P.

I met Luke Perry in Amsterdam at the beginning of this century. I was helping the director, my friend Ate de Jong, with FOGBOUND, the movie he was shooting from an idea of his that he hired me to flesh out as co-writer. It was an English language movie but shot on a sound stage in Amsterdam where Ate lived.

As I remember it, Perry's character was a writer/journalist and somewhat of an intellectual. Once shooting started Perry began skipping and changing his lines in what seemed like an attempt to make his character more like the cool characters he was famous for playing, or to comment on them. I had written a joke about LA that opened the movie, but for LA Perry kept substituting Beverly Hills (or maybe even the BH zipcode "90210"), which made the joke not work, except as a reference to his 90210 character, which had nothing to do with the movie.

Ate flew me in after this had been going on a while. I was billed as "the writer" and a fellow "American" and other things. Perry might be more willing to take my suggestions. They put me up in the same hotel Perry was staying at overlooking a canal, and when I arrived on set I was introduced to him and we chatted and talked about the script as written. Perry was about as sweet and friendly as you can imagine. Later he knocked on my hotel room to see if I wanted to hang out, and we did.

Having worked before as a writer and/or actor on movie sets where stars had a different idea of what they wanted to do with their character, or what they didn't want their character doing, I thought I  understood what was going on. Perry seemed to like me and enjoy hanging out and talking with me, and to be willing to follow my script notes. But every day on set, he did what he wanted with the character and most of what we discussed was ignored, though he'd act like he was being compliant.

I was there for two weeks or so and fell in love with Amsterdam, met Burt Reynolds who was working on a movie on a different soundstage in the same complex, and grew to really care for Luke despite his changes to the character as Ate had created him and I helped develop. We had some deep discussions about deep topics and a lot of light ones too. He was always laid back and easy to be with. And though slighter physically than I expected, his great looks were a bonus to be around.

He was way too nice to ever be, or ever stay, angry with in any way. At least that was my experience of him. And he was way too young to die.