Leaping Between TV, Film Worlds : Dennehy No Fan of Hollywood ‘Bedlam’

Brian Dennehy strode into the swank tearoom at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, dressed in a black windbreaker and jeans. “You can’t wear jeans in the bar here after 4 p.m.,” he said with disgust as he sat down and attempted to stretch out his long legs under the small table in front of him. “That’s why I live in Santa Fe.”

Until he remarried two years ago, Dennehy had lived in Los Angeles and shared a bachelor pad with his closest friend, Michael Talbott, who played Detective Switek on “Miami Vice.”

“He is living here (at the Marina) now,” Dennehy said. “He’s trying to get another (acting) job. It’s pretty tough. Coming off a TV series is a tough deal, and you go in limbo land for a while, if not forever. Most actors go immediately to the ‘Island of Lost Actors’ and stay there. Troy Donahue is the mayor.”

Dennehy, 50, took a sip of his coffee and gazed out at the marina. The burly Vietnam veteran is one actor who’s unlikely to end up a resident on that island. Dennehy has built a solid reputation over the past 20 years, giving memorable performances in films including “10,” “Silverado,” “Cocoon,” “F/X” and “Presumed Innocent.”

He has been hearing good advance word on his latest feature film, “F/X 2: The Deadly Art of Illusion.” The sequel to the acclaimed 1986 film “F/X” opens Friday.

“It’s testing very well--which is a good thing, they tell me,” he said. “I am becoming perhaps not the king but the prince regent of the videocassette stores. More people saw “F/X” on video (than in the theaters), and ‘Best Seller,’ which Jimmy Woods and I did, was a huge hit on video.”

(“F/X” made $22.3 million domestically at the box office; over 8 million units were sold to video stores in the United States alone and the video was on the rental charts for more than six months.)

In “F/X 2,” Dennehy’s cop-turned-private-eye Leo McCarthy teams up again with movie special effects wizard Rollie Tyler (Bryan Brown), now a toy maker, after the NYPD enlists Tyler to nab a would-be killer.

“It’s not as good as the original, but it picks up,” Dennehy admitted. “Bryan Brown had been working trying to get the story right, the script right. You want to make it as good as you can. Sequels are tough.”

Dennehy, who just finished Columbia’s boxing drama, “Gladiator,” in Chicago, has turned more and more to the small screen in recent years. Over the last 18 months, he’s done several TV movies, including NBC’s “In Broad Daylight.”

He is even harboring thoughts about doing a sitcom. “I have an idea for one,” he said. “It has to be right. You have to have the right people and the right producers and writers.”

Dennehy said he’s working more and more in television because, he firmly believes, the motion picture industry really doesn’t want him. Talent, he maintains, isn’t enough. Producers only want to hire box-office draws such as Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone to star in mindless action films.

And Dennehy is angry and frustrated about the state of affairs in Hollywood.

“It’s easy for me to say what the problem is with the movie business because I am hardly in the movie business,” he said with a cackle. “The problem is that it’s all about money--and it’s not about a lot of money, it’s about huge money.

“You have to hit a home run every time you come up to the plate,” he said. “You can’t put together a couple of singles and advance the runners. You have got to get a tape measure out, because not only does it have to be a home run, you have to hit the ball out of the park and into the next country.”

Dennehy shifted anxiously in the overstuffed chair; his blue eyes blazed with anger. “I want to make a $5-million picture about human beings talking to one another, and all I hear is ‘Get out of here and go to television,’ ” he said. “One of the reasons I live in Santa Fe is that if I were living here and having this conversation five times a day, I would lose my mind. I have retired from the bedlam. The only time I get cooked up about this is when I am here. I read the papers and see the cars and the guys with expressions which end four inches from their eyes, wearing $5,000 suits, and it’s ‘Let me out of here.’ ”

Whenever possible, Dennehy does plays in Chicago. “I have done stage in Los Angeles,” he said. “It’s a waste. The audience just sits there.”

“I do theater in Chicago because I can sit down with rational people who make $50,000 a year and live in houses and have children and pay their taxes and shop at Sears,” he said. “We do a wonderful piece of theater together. People come and see it and learn something about Eugene O’Neill. . . . That’s what my life is about. Unfortunately, I have got to go to Chicago to do that and make no money. But I am prepared to make that deal. I didn’t become an actor 30 years ago because I thought I was going to get rich.”

Dennehy began to laugh. “I don’t want to sound like I had a choice in this matter and Paramount has been screaming with me to sign a multi-picture deal, because they haven’t,” he noted. “If I were confronted with the same choices as Jack Nicholson and Bruce Willis, I would make the same decision they made. I don’t want to make it sound like I am this monk who goes off to do this work in the theater.”