Hey, He’s Glad to Be Here, OK?

James Caan still has the curls on his head, just not as many. His shoulders still look like they could have played in the NFL but are in need of spare parts. His eyes can still blaze with outrage, and his tongue is tart as ever, but he seems a gentler man, as if winded from the wars and ready to live in peace.

He still talks football and baseball with a passion but has recently--one gathers, reluctantly--taken up golf. And, oh, yes, he is still making movies, but not for directors with names like Coppola, Pakula and Mann but for Christopher McQuarrie and James Gray. Sonny has gone indie.

Alan J. Pakula is dead, Francis Ford Coppola is tending his vineyard, and Michael Mann only calls with roles Caan doesn’t want. “Yeah, he talks a lot,” Caan says about Mann. “I’d love to work with him again. We did ‘Thief,’ and then he forgot me. Then he calls and wanted me to play Mike Wallace in ‘The Insider.’ I said, ‘I’m not [expletive] Rich Little, let somebody else play that.’ ”

Here in the den of his new log-cabin modern home in the high-country suburbs of Utah, each time Caan lets slip what might be considered a rueful comment about Hollywood and its decline, he is quick to correct himself in the light of the big picture. “The state of the business is not really all that wonderful for guys my age or guys who really care,” he says. “But I don’t want to sound negative. I’ve been really fortunate and critics have been good to me.”

Twenty years ago, when he directed his first and only film, the low-budget “Hide in Plain Sight,” about the witness protection program, some major critics gave him a surprising thumbs up. “And I had two strikes against me because I was Sonny Corleone, the [expletive] moron, doin’ a picture,” he says. MGM, though, fumbled the release, according to Caan. The memory still hurts enough that he says he would never direct again.

But he doesn’t want to sound negative. He turned 60 in March and is grateful for what he has, two young sons with his fourth wife, a new life in the smogless mountain air of Park City and a resuscitated career on view this fall in two movies, “The Yards” from Miramax and “The Way of the Gun” from Artisan. In both films, he has solid roles that reconnect him in earnest to the shadow world of crime in which he was so convincing as a young actor, beginning with Sonny Corleone in “The Godfather” and continuing through “Thief” into the ‘80s before he burned out. He returned to caricature those same gangsters more recently in films like “Honeymoon in Vegas” and “Mickey Blue Eyes.” His 24-year-old son, Scott, who was a top high school baseball player at Beverly Hills High, is now an actor (“Varsity Blues,” “Gone in 60 Seconds”) and even as we speak is in Texas playing Cole Younger in a film about Jesse James.

Yet life for James Caan is not as easy as it should have been by now. There is the problem of money. He has none. Or not enough. “In truth, I think I enjoy working more now than I have in a long time, but these independent films, you can’t get paid. I mean, I have a huge nut. I’ve got ex-wives, my mom, my kids. I’m just basically hangin’ on. I borrowed money from a good friend, which I have never done before, to buy this place.”

It’s a good house but modest by the standards of movie kingdom Bel-Air from whence he came. In the driveway are a late-model Volvo station wagon, an SUV and a purple 1940 Ford pickup truck. In a hallway, a framed poster for the 1975 film “Rollerball,” in which he starred as the champ of an ultra-violent sport set in the future, leans against the wall, waiting to be hung. In the room where we are seated, the wall holds a plaque announcing his Oscar nomination for “The Godfather”--his first and only nomination. On a table are three original Mickey Mantle baseball cards, mounted and laminated, from different years in the 1950s, when Caan was growing up in Queens, N.Y.

Caan points through the window to a yellow barn that marks the end of his property. “I have 4.2 acres, so eventually if I get hired again I’ll put some stables out there. It would be a nice riding place for the kids in the neighborhood.” As Caan speaks on this afternoon, he is open and offhanded, sometimes wistful, but he is also in pain, from a variety of sports injuries that include the shoulder he ripped apart while trying to move a 300-pound lineman during some special coaching he provided in the use of martial arts techniques at Stanford eight years ago.

“Feel this, they cut my deltoid four times,” he says, pulling back his shirt to reveal the surgical damage.” Suddenly he is aware of his body. “I’ve lost a lot of weight up here. . . . For some reason I’m not eating--stress. My arms have shrunk.”

Stress? In Utah? “The move. My life,” he answers, quickly shifting emotional gears. “I’d like to get back to that studio system.” He gets up to open a sliding glass door for Linda, his wife, and James, his 4-year-old son, and does so with difficulty, crouching as he makes his way across the carpet. “Can you get high on ibuprofen?” he asks. “I think I took 800 milligrams.”

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Caan credits Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock production company with rescuing him from the void after the self-described drug-addled lost years during which his name occasionally found its way from the show-biz columns to the police blotter. “Alan Horn, Rob Reiner, those guys at Castle Rock were really great to me,” he says. Reiner cast him in “Misery” as the best-selling writer taken prisoner by Kathy Bates; then he played the shady, cigar-smoking gambler in Andrew Bergman’s very funny “Honeymoon in Vegas.”

“But then when you come back, you hear all the stories about ‘He’s difficult,’ this and that. The truth is, I’ve done 60 movies, I’ve never missed a day’s work, ever. And out of 60 movies, there are two directors I disliked. That’s a pretty good average.” (He declines to give the names of the two in question.)

Caan went out of his way to pursue the young writer-directors of “The Way of the Gun” and “The Yards” to land his latest roles. His authenticity appeals to young actors and directors, but his reputation can frighten them.

“I was terrified to meet him,” says McQuarrie, who won an Oscar for writing “The Usual Suspects” and wrote and directed “Gun,” a kind of violent, ironic homage to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in which Caan plays a longtime fixer and bagman for a wealthy thug. “All the things you’ve heard about Jimmy Caan or not heard about Jimmy Caan.”

Before casting him, McQuarrie called Gray, who had finished shooting “The Yards,” to ask what the experience had been like. He was reassured. “He turned out to be the most professional, most meticulous actor,” McQuarrie says. “I thought, how can somebody who’s been around that long still be that passionate?”

Caan greeted McQuarrie by saying, ‘You’re a sick [expletive],” the director recalls Caan remarking half-jokingly on the film’s unflinching plot involving two modern-day outlaws (Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe) who kidnap a nine-months pregnant surrogate mother and cart her off to Mexico to await a $15-million ransom.

When Caan makes his entrance in “Gun,” it’s one of those memorable scenes where an actor’s life and his art seem intertwined. He comes to a jail to spring the two young hoodlums and can’t help but notice they don’t take him seriously. He stands a little taller and tells them, “There’s something you need to learn, kid. The only thing you can assume about a broken-down old man is that he’s a survivor.”

“I like Chris McQuarrie a lot, I like my character,” Caan says. “Except that he cut 13 pages out of a scene I was in with Benicio that explained a lot about who this guy was. I told him, ‘Chris, that scene is why I wanted to do the film!’ There’s such scum in this picture, the only guy who has any kind of morals at all is this guy, Sarno, my character.” Before he gets too worked up about this, though, Caan leans back, smiles and says, “But you know what? All actors think the movie is about them.”

Gray (“Little Odessa”) had not thought about casting Caan in “The Yards,” his autobiographical drama about political corruption in Queens involving the competition for contracts to service New York City subways. The film stars Mark Wahlberg as a luckless working-class kid who runs afoul of the law and tries to go straight by getting a job with Caan’s train servicing company, only to discover the company itself is knee-deep in bribes and extortion. Gray’s father was a comptroller for a company much like the one in the film.

“I had written Frank based on a character my father worked with,” Gray says. “Caan’s agent got a copy of the script and called the director. He said, ‘Would you please meet with Jimmy Caan?’ My first thought was I hadn’t seen him do anything in a long time. He was completely out of my consciousness. We had lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air and he said to me, ‘You know Jimmy, I’m from Queens, I grew up not far from the yards,” Gray recalls, doing a convincing impersonation of Caan’s New Yawk accent. “He was right. He seemed to know that guy and who he was.”

It’s the Brando role in the film. Frank is a minor don in Queens, and has come up from the streets to acquire a small fortune by doing what’s necessary and expedient. But he never escapes his grimy beginnings and ultimately is in over his head. “He thinks he’s a king, but he’s a knave,” says Caan. “He’s just the king of this little kingdom. Everything he wore was makeup, even his family. It wasn’t that he was such a bad guy. He was sad.”

“I told [Caan that] Frank is a man of rage and pretension,” Gray says. “He’s a man of passion. I said, ‘That’s what you are great at.’ But I’m not sure he understands that. There’s an explosiveness about him that’s a rare quality in an actor. You might think it’s easy but it’s really hard to get anger right in a film. . . . Anger can often seem forced, over the top. But he can do it so well.”

Gray too had heard the stories. “I was a little worried. But he’s great. I found him unbelievably warm and completely emotional. And the thing that you don’t expect somehow is what a really serious nuts-and-bolts actor he is. He is the most orderly actor you can imagine: He comes to the set, unzips his briefcase, takes out his script and it’s got markings all over it. He really goes to work.”

*

Men of a certain age will probably always remember Caan from party pictures in Playboy that cemented his image as a handsome, athletic actor surrounded by concupiscent Bunnies. In fact, he lived at the mansion for a year in the late ‘70s. “I used to kind of clean up and throw bums out, people who were taking advantage or were abusive to women,” Caan recalls.

“In the ‘70s it was the greatest club in the world, with the most beautiful girls in the world. I dated a lot of them. But the truth is, I had to leave because it became too easy. I thought, where am I going with my life?”

He didn’t go anywhere much in the ‘80s that he wants to revisit other than “Thief” (1981), in which he played an elite safecracker at odds with the head of a crime syndicate. He made a forgettable fantasy with Sally Field, “Kiss Me Goodbye,” and the flawed drama “Gardens of Stone” with his old friend Coppola, but mainly a combination of cocaine abuse and professional ennui wiped him from the public screen.

Peter Biskind, in his 1998 book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” lumps Caan with a peer group of ‘70s male stars including Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ryan O’Neal, George Segal and Elliott Gould, whose careers all disappeared over a cliff in the ‘80s for various reasons.

“I quit when I was on top,” Caan says. Which is one way to look at it.

He suffered the loss of his sister to leukemia, then discovered that his accountant had lost all his money. “And that was when I had what I thought was a lot of money, which was a lot of money. [He] pissed it all away, stealing and mismanagement. I go to sleep some nights, I want to kill him.” When he says this he doesn’t sound like Sonny exactly, but if you were his accountant you might not be measuring his voice for nuance.

“I coached Little League, I coached my son. I just got into this whole thing of not doing anything unless you’re passionate about it. And then I woke up one morning and I owed the government $247,000.”

He ducks out on the patio to smoke a cigarette, and when he returns, he eases himself down onto the couch and says, “This hurts so bad,” feeling his back, which he injured during a round of golf this morning. Humble enough to compare himself to the fantasist Walter Mitty in describing his athletic hubris, Caan says, “To this day I don’t accept my age. I compete with 20-year-olds on the basketball court and this and that, it’s just the way I am.”

In 1971, when he was cast as the doomed Brian Piccolo in the made-for-television movie “Brian’s Song,” about Piccolo’s friendship with fellow Chicago Bears rookie running back Gale Sayers, he not only welcomed the chance to work out with the real Bears but thought he might make the team. “In my sick brain I really thought I could get a contract! I was still young enough and they didn’t have a running back worth a damn.”

The first time Dick Butkus hit him, he changed his mind.

“I think he’s a complete sensualist,” says Gray. “He’s brimming with life. He’s a very vibrant guy. And I think I know now where the stories come from. He does not suffer fools gladly. If he thinks you’re lost, he gets angry. He expects to play off the other actors, and if there’s an actor who is not reactive enough, he gets very frustrated.”

Caan returns the compliment to Gray, calling him “as talented a director as I’ve ever worked with.”

“And the kids were just great, wonderful,” he says, referring to Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron, who make up the central cast along with veterans Faye Dunaway and Ellen Burstyn.

The sound of dinner being prepared wafts in from the kitchen. His youngest son, Jake, 2, toddles in and gives his father a hug. “There are times when I wonder, ‘What am I doing here?’ But other times when I watch the kids--that’s the main reason we’re here. When I leave the house, I can be wherever I need to be in L.A. in three hours, door to door.”

Linda comes in to collect Jake. She is petite, blond and considerably younger than Caan. They met 12 years ago, then encountered one another seven years later after she had been married and divorced and he divorced for the third time.

“Actors are [expletive] nuts,” Caan says, discussing what makes a movie star. He chooses Marlon Brando as Example A. “It’s the unpredictability. That’s what Brando had. The ability to surprise you with whatever he would do. From moment to moment you never knew. But it always made sense.”

He contrasts Brando with the familiar mannered styles of matinee idols of yore like Clark Gable and John Wayne, whom he describes as “personalities, not actors. Sure, I love to watch some of those guys,” he says, “but it’s a different thing what they do.”

His “Godfather” cast mate Robert Duvall remains his favorite actor of his generation. There are vague plans to do a two-character film with Duvall for Mark Rydell, who directed him way back when in “Cinderella Liberty.”

About Caan’s prospects, Gray says, “The kind of movies being made today are very different than they were in the ‘70s, and you wonder what’s going to happen to Jimmy and those other guys like him. They can be very picky and not work that much or work in things they don’t really like.”

Of the two new pictures, “The Yards” seems most likely to attract the kind of critical attention Caan needs to get back in the game, even though it picked up a couple of negative trade reviews at Cannes in May. (The film is due out in mid-October; “Way of the Gun” opened Friday.) Other early reaction has been positive, but it remains to be seen whether Miramax Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein will decide to promote the film the way he promoted “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Cider House Rules.”

Says Caan with a characteristic honesty all too rare in Hollywood, “It’s a chancy movie because it’s such a downer, man. It’s a modern classical opera, a classical tragedy. Nobody wants to go see that.”

Not that he doesn’t hope he’s wrong. But if he’s not, there’s always sports. “My golf handicap? I have a bad back and I’m Jewish,” he says, comfortable with the joke. “I just started playing. I finally looked at my birth certificate and I thought, it’s time I played this game.”

He used to play tennis. Which brings up another story. “Tennis. I was fairly good. Until I hurt myself--another one of my ingenious moves. I went after somebody”--and here he smacks one hand into another. “I punched this guy in my stupid dope-filled days.”

He looks to be remembering something he would rather forget and then says, “How lucky I am to be sitting here.”