Buddies Adrift on a ‘Sea of Booze’

After wrapping production on his 1986 Emmy-winning television movie about a middle-aged bachelor and his schizophrenic brother at 6:30 a.m. in a small town on an Oregon lake, James Garner wound down by eating breakfast in the local diner and discussing his next project with his partner, Peter Duchow.

Two booths away, James Woods, one of Hollywood’s hottest actors and Garner’s co-star in “Promise,” overheard that Garner-Duchow Productions was making plans to produce “My Name is Bill W.,” a TV biography of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In his typical, impetuous fashion, Woods sprang to his feet and declared: “I am Bill W.!”

“If they were doing ‘The Monty Woolley Story,’ ” Woods recalled during a break in the shooting of “Bill W.” here, “I would have said, ‘I am Monty Woolley,’ because ‘Promise’ was the most perfect 23 days of my artistic career.”

So it was that they teamed again and came here to film “My Name is Bill W.” The movie airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on ABC under the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” banner.

Watching them rehearse a scene in which Woods as Wilson and Garner as Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Dr. Bob Smith walk down a hospital corridor arm in arm, beaming soberly as they never have in their entire lives, these two actors could easily be mistaken for loving father and adoring son. They don’t look at all alike, but they seem to share that chummy, sarcastic playfulness and unconditional reverence that befits the best of friendships.

Woods calls Garner “the greatest American actor working today.” Garner, who first met his protege when Woods played one of the thugs in the first episode of “The Rockford Files” in 1974, said that he didn’t want anyone but Woods for either TV film and went so far as to promise him an Emmy and the cover of TV Guide if he agreed to do “Promise.” Woods got both.

“He’s such a bundle of energy, he’s just this far from being D.J. (the schizophrenic character he played in ‘Promise’),” Garner said of Woods. “He understands and digs so deep into character, much more than I do. I take what the writer writes and try to do that, but he gets much deeper and does his own heavy research. I love to work with him and I love to watch him work. There’s an energy that comes out of him that just eats you all up.”

“People toss around the word ‘chemistry’ so that it doesn’t mean very much, but there is a chemistry that works between me and Jim,” Woods said. “He’s very Western, solid, quiet, moment-to-moment, and I’m very East Coast, cerebral, high-energy, and the clash of those two temperments seems to be very productive. That mix is a very good, volatile mix. He frames a lot of what I do very solidly.”

Daniel Petrie, the director of Garner-Duchow’s lastest production, agreed that this clash of personalities translates into that intangible thing called “movie magic” partly because the two superstars have developed an “elder statesman/younger Turk” kind of relationship.

“Garner doesn’t have to prove anything to Jimmy Woods,” Petrie said while overseeing the filming of an elaborate party scene at an old plantation mansion perched on a hill above the sprawling Virginia countryside just outside of Richmond. “And Jimmy respects Garner enormously, both as an actor and also as a producer. So Garner’s presence on the set is a good leavening influence on Woods because he has a tendency to fly and start verbalizing every little nuance that comes into his head. Garner just keeps him focused and right on the main track.”

Woods’ seemingly innate tendency to fly into a frenzy serves him well in portraying what he called “one of the great saints in American history.” In the basement of the Virginia mansion, doubling here for the wine cellar of a Roaring ‘20s Long Island estate, Woods plunges recklessly into one of many scenes of drunken degradation. Slugging back champagne and slurping the lips, neck and thighs of a blond, patrician floozie like a can of beer, the fast-talking Woods literally bounces off the walls to depict yet another shatterring moment in this heroic “drunk’s” slide to ruin.

For the millions of AA members around the world, Bill Wilson’s transformation from what the film makers characterized as a “hopeless alcoholic, who often woke up covered in his own vomit, to one of the greatest spiritual leaders of all time” is familiar gospel. May 10, 1935, the day that Wilson, desperate for a drink, sat down to listen to the depraved story of fellow drunk Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, Ohio, is their day of salvation. For it was on that day, by realizing that they could draw strength from each other, by becoming what Dr. Bob called “buddies on the stormy sea of booze,” that they invented a way to stay sober.

Yet outside of the churches, schools, community centers and hospital meeting rooms that are home to thousands of AA meetings each day, people are more likely to know New York Met outfielder Mookie Wilson than they are Bill Wilson.

Considering the number of people in the entertainment business who have benefited from Alcoholics Anonymous, Garner found it surprising that this story hadn’t been told on film before. But he and Duchow, who said he’d been looking for a way to tell the story since the 1950s, quickly discovered that it wasn’t such an easy story to tell.

Garner said that though four professional screenwriters tried their best, they could not find a way past the trap of trying to tell the big, cumbersome, impersonal story of alcoholism or Alcoholics Anonymous, the institution. After many years of frustration, both Garner and Duchow started to doubt that they would ever get the film made.

Meanwhile, William Borchert, 55, the father of nine and a public relations man in New York who made industrial films for big corporations, had become interested in Wilson’s story when he met Wilson’s wife, Lois, 10 years ago. Borchert said he had always dreamed of being a Hollywood screenwriter and, in Bill and Lois Wilson, thought he had stumbled upon “a great untold story.”

Eight years ago, he wrote what he called a “Cecil B. DeMille epic,” chronicling every detail from their lives. But he was an unknown, untested writer.

Help turned up in the form of a friend, who told Borchert that he’d heard that Garner was trying to produce a movie about Alcoholics Anonymous and took Borchert’s script to Garner’s production office.

“This script just came in out of the blue,” Garner said. “A guy walked into our office and handed it to my secretary, and she’s not supposed to ever take any unsolicited scripts. It’s a total ‘no-no’ because you can get into legal problems. But she took it and read it and she said, ‘I think you better look at this.’ And that’s how we came up with the right approach to this thing--the love story between two people.”

“Now I believe the ‘Lana Turner in Schwab’s Drug Store’ story,” Borchert said.

Borchert said he succeeded because he focused on the roller-coaster love story between Bill, who died in 1971, and Lois, played in the film by JoBeth Williams--a love that miraculously survived the terrible abuse and debauchery of the disease.

Working with Duchow, Borchert condensed his “epic” into a two-hour TV movie, and Garner said that both Hallmark and ABC jumped at the chance to put it on the air. Lois Wilson, who founded Alanon--a self-help support group for the families and loved ones of alcoholics--gave her blessing to the final script, Borchert said, just three weeks before she passed away last October.

While it is routine for actors to brag about the sociocultural significance of their latest project, Garner and Woods, even in the midst of a harried production schedule, seemed downright giddy about “My Name is Bill W.” Each insisted that the portrayal of Bill and Lois Wilson’s lifelong crusade would have a profound impact on alcoholics everywhere.

“These people were responsible for saving more lives than Alexander Fleming (the father of penicillin), Freud and Louis Pasteur put together,” gushed Woods. “Before 1935, alcoholics had two choices: Go insane or die. I’m very happy to help pass their message on. I think this story works the way AA meetings work. It’s like being at the greatest AA meeting you ever saw.”

“They said we helped schizophrenia by 10 years with ‘Promise,’ and this should do the same for alcoholism,” Garner said. “I think that lots of people will see this film and want to get help. They will say, ‘Well, that worked for them, maybe it will work for me.’ ”