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• Jesse Stone: Night Passage
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Tavis: I am pleased to welcome Tom Selleck to this program. The Emmy-winning actor, of course, starred for years in one of television's most popular shows and one of my favorites, "Magnum, P.I." He also starred in a number of notable films including "Three Men and a Baby,' "Mr. Baseball" and "In and Out.' His latest project, though, is the upcoming CBS movie, "Jesse Stone: Night Passage.' The film is actually a prequel to last year's "Stone Cold.' It airs Sunday night at nine p.m. Tom Selleck, nice to meet you.

Tom Selleck: Me too, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you here.

Selleck: Thanks. That's a classic Robert Parker piece of dialogue (laughter). He writes great lines.

Tavis: He is a great writer.

Selleck: Yeah.

Tavis: What attracted you to this particular project?

Selleck: Well, partly that, Robert Parker. You know, it's funny. My pal, the late Bob Urich, did "Spenser for Hire.' But before that, I was supposed to do Spenser in a movie in about 1982 in a book called "Early Autumn" and it fell through because I only had a little time off from "Magnum.' Bob used to kid me all the time because he got to do this great part. So this is kind of coming full circle. I get to do a Robert Parker character and a really good one. Jesse is probably more flawed than Spencer and I like that.

Tavis: That's an understatement.

Selleck: Yeah, he's got some problems.

Tavis: If you know Jesse, he's got some issues, yeah.

Selleck: He's got a lot of baggage and what I've always enjoyed as an actor is the challenge of - you have to want to go on the ride with him, so you have to like him. You also have to root for him and he has a tendency to go home and brood, but he's also got a sense of humor. If he feels sorry for himself, he tends to try not to and do something about it and I think that's why you root for him.

Tavis: Is it just me or have you become like really adept over the years at these television movies? I mean, you're like the television movie king.

Selleck: Well, I'm getting there. I don't mind being called that, so thank you because it might mean I get some more. I don't know. As time has gone on, we set a lot of records in cable. You know, I did this western, "Crossfire Trail,' on TNT and it still is the highest-rated movie in the history of cable television, highest-rated program really. "Monty Walsh,' I'm very proud of. That was only the highest-rated program in the history of cable on Friday night. I don't know why people watch it, but it means I get another job and, like you, I got a mortgage (laughter), so that's a good thing.

Tavis: What is this attraction - and I assume that it's an attraction just looking at the work that you've done. I assume there's an attraction that you have for westerns, given your work. What is that about?

Selleck: Well, it's about a guy who grew up watching westerns and didn't know he wanted to be an actor, didn't grow up on a ranch. I grew up in San Fernando Valley in a housing tract, you know. So I grew up watching those things. When I became an actor, they weren't making many westerns, so it took until about, oh, 1978 where I got a really good western mini-series with my pals, Sam Elliott and Ben Johnson and Glenn Ford, Slim Pickens and Jack Elam and everybody you'd ever seen in a western. It was just such a baptism, such a kind of unfulfilled dream I didn't realize I had. I was hooked, you know. They were hard to get made.

Finally I got a movie called "Quigley Down Under" made, but it had been across a lot of desks including Steve McQueen's and a few people and nobody could get it made. I had this great script for about three years and finally we got "Quigley" made which has kind of become this cult classic. It's a love of mine. Because they've been incredibly successful, I'm happy to say, I kind of always have one in development. That's not the only thing I want to do, but, you know, I'm not a cowboy, but I'd probably like to be.

Tavis: Are westerns like still - trying to find the right word here. I don't want to say relevant, but are they still doable?

Selleck: Good ones are.

Tavis: In Hollywood today?

Selleck: They're hard to get done. Hollywood makes the mistake that they got to either contemporize them or modernize them or, you know, fantasize them. I don't know what they do, but they don't get it. What I'm proud to say - you know, one of the awards we've gotten for the three westerns I did on TNT, an Elmore Leonard book, "Last Stand at Saber River,' the Louis L'Amour's "Crossfire Trail" and Jack Schaefer's "Monty Walsh,' they won the Western Heritage Award at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum. That says to me that they think we get it and that's why people tune them in.

I think westerns, warts and all for that period, celebrate a way of life that probably isn't anymore, but it's part of our mythology as much as maybe King Arthur is, I think, in English mythology.

Tavis: I want to go back, Tom, and get something that you put out there a moment ago that I heard. I just wanted to work my way back to it. I thought I heard you - if not suggest, at the very least - intimate that finding quality scripts for you, quality roles for you, doesn't just happen automatically and there's not like a big stack of stuff on your desk. Did I hear you intimate that? That these roles are getting harder and harder for you to find?

Selleck: They are hard to find, Tavis (laughter). I have a stack of scripts, but they're bad (laughter) and I don't read much. I read a lot, but I spend most of my time reading bad stuff to find something good. More often than not lately, on some of these westerns and the Jesse Stone movies, it has amounted to finding a piece of material that isn't a script and getting a script written and exec producing and doing all that stuff. But the nicest thing in the world, you know, you mentioned "In and Out,' when a script like that just comes to you. That's just a blessing and it just doesn't happen that often. I don't think you can sit around and wait for that to happen.

More importantly, the more different kind of stuff you do, the more signals you send out to the industry that you're willing to do different kinds of parts. But that's been a hard road for me. I had a lot of financial security after "Magnum" and I had this four-picture deal at Disney. I knew they would kind of go to the well with more "Three Men and a Baby" or that type of movie, so I really wanted to experiment, but I couldn't get that signal out there. It probably took all that time to find an "In and Out,' which is seven or eight years, you know, or longer to really say I want to do ensemble work. I make good money when I do a lead, so I can work for a price and I can do less expensive movies. Gradually, especially through cable and television movies, I think I've sent that message out better than I probably did at the beginning.

Tavis: You're not just starring in a lot of this stuff these days. You're producing a lot of this stuff as well.

Selleck: Some, yeah.

Tavis: Yeah. On the producing front, does that bring along challenges or does it give you a certain kind of freedom because you're not just starring in it, but you're actually running the whole show?

Selleck: It's both.

Tavis: It's both?

Selleck: It's a lot of challenge. It's a hard job. I enjoy it, and in television, I don't think people realize that an exec producer will often take a piece of material like we have with "Night Passage" from a blank page - we had a book - hire a writer, follow the material through. Then I've got to act in it. Then I'm involved in editing and post-production and then promoting it. It's a very, very creative position. Sometimes a producer is just a title somebody gets, not on movies like this.

I've produced a couple of things that I wasn't in, but most of the time, the way I get a producing job - because I don't get paid much for it (laughter) - is if I'll act in it. They go, "Oh, yeah, you can be a producer too." Then they get a little shocked and they say, "Oh, you mean you're going to take the title seriously and exercise all those controls we gave you?" So it's been very nice, but it's always a challenge and it's a little scary, you know. There's less people to go to for advice because you're the guy they're supposed to go to for advice.

Tavis: I fell in love with you during your "Magnum, P.I." days.

Selleck: Thank you.

Tavis: But I even fell more in love with you when I read some things you had to say about what's termed in this business of Hollywood as nontraditional casting. You've been very good about engaging this notion of nontraditional casting. We should probably explain what we mean by this for the audience here.

Selleck: Well, Hollywood gets very compartmentalized on roles and who should do them and everything else. They want to break it down into a science and it's really an art form. What occurred to me very early - I did a pilot that I produced after "Magnum.' I had some commitments that I was trying to get made and I freaked the network out literally. You have to bring in your finalists for a role to read for the network because they like to - you can all it meddling or they like to contribute (laughter). Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other.

So I brought in a guy, an actress who happened to be white and an African American actress and this really bothered them. They were nice and they were polite and, after they left, they said, "We don't understand. Is this a minority role or is this. . .?" I said, "It's just a role" and they went, "Oh." This confused them. The hard part came when the best person for the job wasn't the African American actress. The other person read better under pressure and that really freaked them out. They said, "What will people say?" I said, "Well, I hope they say we cast the best person for the role."

All I mean by opening up your mind to casting is that most roles aren't race-specific. They aren't gender-specific half the time. We benefited greatly in "Night Passage" because we were able to cast a phenomenal actress, Viola Davis, in the role of Molly who is written as an Irish Catholic mother. Well, we didn't change a line. We didn't change any dialogue. We didn't change any stage direction. We just got an actress I'm a huge fan of and a phenomenally talented actress simply and selfishly by opening up our thinking to the fact that, you know, roles very often have nothing to do with race. If it's a show about a racial issue, yeah, it does. But other than that, why do people think that way?

Tavis: All right. So I don't mean to show my naiveté by asking this question, but in the most multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic America ever, why does Hollywood not get that?

Selleck: I don't know. There's a lot of people of good will in Hollywood. I think the danger is, when you compartmentalize stuff and start dealing in percentages, you kind of feel like you did your job if you meet those goals. Look, as citizens of this country, I think we have an obligation to look beyond, you know, those kinds of parameters and just reflect the culture. We are lucky to have Viola. I think the minority community can enhance our business because I think they're under-represented just from the nature of the talent level in the community. So selfishly, it's kind of enlightened self-interest for me as a producer.

The only thing that gets a little scary is, if people want us to cast this way, they got to be prepared to hear "no" and not assume there's some strange ulterior motive behind it other than we think somebody else is the best person for the job. That's a very subjective thing. The acting business, as I learned - yeah, I was thirty-five when I "became an overnight success" - is really about failing and using that failure as a stepping stone and a learning experience to get better.

You know, you go in for a role, it's a big break. I did this a lot (laughter). You know, I screen tested for so many big parts and I didn't get any of them. You know it's a big break. The nerves are going to kill you. You're going to lose half your talent to the nerves, so you'd better be over-qualified when you go in there. You'd better go through enough failures where you learn from that and become a better actor and better able to deal with the pressures.

Sports helped me a lot in that area because I played them and it helped me deal with not only the nerves, which I wasn't too good at (laughter) early on in acting, but also failures. You've got to learn something from it and you got to take risks. You've got to go in a room and not be milquetoast. You've got to go in a room and take a risk. I had good parents. My parents taught us really early on that risk was the price you pay for opportunity; and it is.

Tavis: That's why I'm a talk show host and not an actor because my ego couldn't handle all the rejection. Seriously, I don't know how people in this business - I mean, you had a different level, but to your earlier point, you've been there before. So how does one develop the kind of constitution where you, more often than not, have to accept being told you're not quite what we're looking for for this character?

Selleck: I don't know. It's very difficult to go in a room. It's one thing to go in a room and sell a product and they didn't buy your window cleaner, you know, but the product they're rejecting is you and there is no school for that. Just as there's no school for the phenomenal success that comes if you "succeed."

The two gifts I had were all the failures I had and a sports background and the fact that I'd failed so long. I was thirty-five and a little more sane by the time I became successful. If you're seventeen and you get the kind of success that happens in this media culture, you don't go to school for that either. So you've just got to get an appetite to deal with the process and have an appetite for the path you're on and the journey as opposed to the destination.

I don't want to get too serious about - I'm not curing cancer in this business (laughter), but I've been to so many places now that I thought was getting there and you know what happened? I probably didn't even sit back and reflect. You move on to some other goal and getting there isn't the big deal. The road with all its failures and all its struggles is what's fun and that's kind of what you look back on.

Tavis: You mentioned a little bit ago that, when you became this "overnight success" on "Magnum, P.I.,' there had been struggles and failures to your point prior to that. Take me back to those "Magnum, P.I." days and tell me in retrospect what the good and the bad was, the good and the bad of hitting it so big with that series.

Selleck: Well, there is no - probably the best thing other than the sheer success of it and the fact it meant I could pay a mortgage and send my son to college and stuff like that was that I was kind of one step removed from the craziness. I was in Hawaii and that's not the media center. So I didn't know quite how successful it was until I'd go back for an award show and that's kind of heightened reality anyway. You know, everybody is yelling and screaming. Then I'd just go back to work six days a week for eighteen hours a day. I think that was a real blessing.

But the big blessing for "Magnum" was the fact that - I remember I went to an agent when I was about thirty-three. This guy was big (laughter) and I begged him to represent me. Well, he called me after "Magnum" came on the air, rather shamelessly, and said, "I think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread. I want to represent you. Your agent isn't doing a good job for you." I said, "Well, he got me this show and don't you remember? I was in your office about three years ago and you said you couldn't do a thing for me?" But you've got to remember that stuff and I don't know what you do if you're sixteen or seventeen and you get lucky your first time out. It's hard. So I'm kind of drifting away from your question.

The worst thing about it is the loss of privacy. The worst thing about it is that I had a period that I got a little melancholy because I had been around long enough to know my life was going to change. When I had done seven or eight episodes and they hadn't come on the air, you start to wonder, do I really want this? It's going to happen either way. Now the show may not be a success, but millions of people are going to start recognizing you.

I've always been kind of a private person and, you know, that was not an easy time for me. I'd split up with my wife about a year and a half before that, so I'd worked for something all my life and really had nobody to share it with and I was confronting this idea that you're going to go on the air and your life is going to change and you don't like talking about your private life. What's this going to be like? So it was a pretty interesting time.

Tavis: Let me shift gears somewhat dramatically in the few minutes I have left. Earlier in this conversation, you also said something else that got my attention. You used this phrase, "as citizens of the country.' You've not been - what word do I want - you've not been shy about your politics in this city. I want to ask you a question - I'm sorry -

Selleck: - No, no. I think my politics probably are a little bit out of whatever somebody considers the norm for this town, so I've always been asked a lot of questions. I've always tried - you know, on movie junkets, when you're on somebody else's nickel, you really don't want to go off and toot your horn about some issue that'll hurt your movie. You don't want to get half the country angry at you for no reason, but I'm not shy about what I believe in. I just try not to abuse my access to the media, but ask me what you were going to ask me.

Tavis: My question, though, is - and I appreciate that. The question simply is what you make of this country right about now. I'm deliberately asking a broad question, giving you this canvas, politically, socially, economically, culturally. What do you make of this place we call America these days?

Selleck: Well, I love it, warts and all. We've got our problems. We still are a culture that seems to think - we aren't cynical enough yet to think we can't solve our problems and I think that's a wonderful thing and we're wonderfully self-critical. That being said, you know, the political debate on all sides is disturbing to me. We have a country, if you really look at it, at its best and, if you really get lucky with your political agenda, at best you're going to get half a loaf.

What's implied in that is, you know, reasonable people can and should disagree and they're going to come up with different solutions to our social problems. Our debates seem to be reduced now to that we don't really have debates. We have this, if you disagree with me, you're evil. We have candidates who imply that - they act like Chicken Little. They say the sky will fall if this other person gets in. No, it won't.

You know, most people want to do something and we are all aware about similar issues and we want to solve them. We may differ. We may want to show our love or compassion in tougher ways, but this debate on all sides that's going on, trying to say somebody's a bad person because they disagree with your political agenda, implies you have all the answers. I don't think the people who wrote those great documents we got thought they had all the answers and I don't think anybody does.

We can't really try anything new because you kind of get demonized. Oh, you're against these programs? Well, the war on poverty hasn't worked so well. You know, it was well-meaning. We don't try anything new anymore and we're supposed to be a country of risk-takers. I don't think we try anything new because people get shouted down and called names if they suggest things that are outside what is perceived as the mainstream. It's not the mainstream. It's just the status quo.

Tavis: Speaking of trying something new, Sunday night, CBS, nine p.m., Tom Selleck trying something new. It's called "Jesse Stone: Night Passage.' Be sure to check it out. An honor to talk to you. We could do this for hours if we had the time. Nice to have you on the program.

Selleck: Pleasure to talk to you. Enjoyed it. Love your show.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.