The movie Charlie Sheen wants to delete from history: “A piece of shit that I wished didn’t exist”
There are more than a few things that Charlie Sheen wishes he could have done differently during his career, but there’s only one movie that he wanted to completely erase from the history books.
At least two generations have grown up knowing the actor more for his off-camera antics than anything he did in front of it, and some of them may even find it hard to believe that he was once singled out as one of, if not the most promising up-and-coming star in the industry.
Far from a talentless nepo baby, although his first two film appearances did come in Badlands and Apocalypse Now, which starred his father, Sheen mounted an impressive charge toward stepping out of his father’s shadow. By the end of the 1980s, he was basically his own man, but it didn’t last long.
He followed his first major role in John Milius’ cult hit, Red Dawn, with a memorable cameo appearance in John Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, played the leading role in Oliver Stone’s ‘Best Picture’ winner, Platoon, took second billing behind Michael Douglas in Wall Street, with Young Guns and Major League adding more hits to his filmography.
Not every one of them was a winner, though, and there’s a particular picture that’s always stuck in his craw. Sandwiched in between another two flops, Peter Werner’s No Man’s Land and John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, the road-trip comedy Three for the Road ended Sheen’s stellar 1987 on a bum note.
Cast as a college student and intern to a United States senator, Sheen starred opposite Alan Ruck and Kerri Green, who rounded out the central triumvirate as his roommate and the politician’s wild-child daughter, respectively. It’s as predictable as it is interminable, and hardly anyone even noticed its release.
The film was a box office disaster, and did a stellar job of casting Ruck into the wilderness and bringing the axe down on Green’s mainstream career. Sheen may have survived, but he loathed the end result. “Three for the Road was a piece of shit that I wished I didn’t exist and that I was terrible in,” was how he described it, and he wasn’t too wide of the mark on either count.
There’s nothing memorable about the movie whatsoever, and Sheen would support that account, with the only memorable thing that happened to him along any step of the way coming when he claimed that Bill Clinton, who was then serving as the governor of Arkansas, tried hitting on his then-girlfriend, Dolly Fox.
“I was answering a reporter’s question when Ruck overheard Clinton whisper to one of his aides, ‘Find out what you can about the brunette,'” he wrote in his memoir, The Book of Sheen. “The brunette was Dolly.” Three for the Road may have been a disaster, but Sheen did manage to get one hell of an anecdote out of it.
