The Road Wes Traveled

After Anderson briefs him on the situation, Murray seems eager to talk. It’s clear he likes the idea of a couple of guys driving into the night with a fairly absurd destination in mind. Amarillo? Why Amarillo? Because that’s where Anderson made his first stop the last time he drove to New York, and it worked. Weirdly enough, as Murray warms up to the car phone, the passenger gets the idea the actor wouldn’t mind riding shotgun on this trip.

"Is what you see with Wes what you get?" the passenger asks, looking over at the driver, who has resumed looking straight ahead.

"No, no. I don’t think what you see is what you get with Wes. You get much more," answers Murray. In the background is the excited pitch of the family pool tournament we’ve taken Murray away from. "He looks like R. Crumb’s old drawings of himself. He looks like he’s going to be outraged, like he finally sees what’s really wrong with you, and then the horror backs off and the beauty comes through."

Murray goes on to say that what made the Rushmore shoot work for him, besides the quality of the material, was Anderson’s ability to stress the positive. "Wes could find the good content in whatever you were working with. That made it easy. It freed you up to work."

His wife’s sharp cue having hastened an early departure from the action, Murray peppers the conversation with droll commentary on the tournament’s progress. It isn’t hard to place him there as Blume, off to the side in a tux, cigarette dangling from his lips, a spectator in a tournament of his own making, tossing peanuts to the family retriever in a small act of resignation and rebellion.

It is suggested to Murray that his characterization of Blume has an elegant, spiritually wasted quality that suits the actor.

"I was feeling the elegance of my own spiritual wastedness. I was feeling how all the touchstones of wealth and privilege are slippery," he says. "Those emotions are not far from anyone’s home if you’ve lived a little. Some days I came home and I felt a little sore. I felt like I’d been cooked a little."

What about Anderson? Has Murray seen something in him that might not be apparent to the casual observer, or even the 14-hour one?

"He’s very good at what he does, but don’t be afraid to ask him if he needs a Band-Aid or some change, things you generally ask of people who look like they’re in worse shape than him," Murray says in a way that makes you unsure how serious he is. "A Band-Aid, yeah, I think a Band-Aid. There’s some cuts there."

"The first night we were on the shoot, he gave me three pairs of socks," recalls Anderson, after Murray hangs up. "Two are still in my bag."

Darkness wraps around the rented Ford Explorer like a blanket as we drive into the plains of eastern New Mexico. We made it from the kiln-baked landscape of the low desert to the higher elevations of pine trees and snow on the ground and moonlight reflecting off mountain silhouettes. And back down again. The driver was right, Arizona and New Mexico are big, but at last Amarillo seems within reach. It’s not that far from Tucumcari, and Tucumcari is not that far from here. The driver is ready for the home stretch. Ever since he stopped flying two years ago, he’s used to putting these miles on a day.

"Wes won’t characterize it as a fear of flying, but more as a love of the open road," explains Owen Wilson, calling from Los Angeles. "Once my mom asked why he won’t fly, and Wes replied, ‘Nobody knows.’ That’s become the standard answer."

It’s the third or fourth time in a matter of minutes that Wilson has called. He and Anderson are in- ä volved in a minor squabble regarding some advice Anderson is giving Wilson that Wilson probably agrees with but doesn’t necessarily want to hear.

"That was the smooth-things-out conversation," Anderson says of Wilson’s latest and most conciliatory call, "which then becomes the general criticisms, the ‘Okay, I agree, but here’s your big problem.’"

Anderson is chuckling. "We’re like an old married couple. Never go to bed angry."

Outside the Explorer, the Rushmore hoopla is steamrolling. In fact, the car phone has been ringing off the hook all afternoon and into the evening with reports from the openings in Los Angeles and New York. The larger journey seems to be catching up with us.

"We had two guys who were either on hallucinogens or laughing gas," buzzes Randy Poster, the film’s music supervisor, from New York.