PEOPLE Riding the Rocket

owen wilson maintains that his life hasn’t changed much since making the movie Bottle Rocket, but he may just be the next hot thing in Hollywood. “I have seen a lot of movies, but I never thought I would work on one,” says Wilson, who was born and raised in Dallas. “Growing up in Texas, you feel like that is an impossible dream.”

How Wilson, 27, was catapulted into the film capital is a nearly miraculous Hollywood fairy tale. Just 23 years old, Wilson had never even taken an acting class. Suddenly he is playing the lead in a major studio production, writing lines for co-star James Caan, and working with some of Hollywood’s biggest players. Not only did Columbia Pictures give him and hiscollegefriend,director/co-writer Wes Anderson, $5 million to make a movie, the young filmmakers got to shoot their movie in Dallas-and do it their way.

“We did get an incredible break, but it was because of Jim Brooks,” says Wilson modestly. “It was a movie other people did not want to make.” Perhaps, but it was Wilson’s freshness and quirky sense of humor that caught the eye of James Brooks, the acclaimed writer-producer- director responsible for such hits as Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment, “The Simpsons,” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Says Brooks: “Wilson has character. A lot of people compare him to Dennis Hopper, but he may be an original.”

With Bottle Rocket, Wilson made the most of a rare opportunity as the oddball, manic Dignan, one of the funniest and most original film characters in recent years. As the movie opens, Dignan’s friend Anthony, played by Wilson’s brother Luke, is ready to leave his room in a mental institution, clearly free to walk out the door. But Dignan, wearing a no-nonsense crew cut and an anxious expression, is waiting outside in the bushes, frantically signaling him with a sunlit mirror, squinting into oversized binoculars, and gesticulating towards the window until Anthony resignedly knots up some bed sheets and lowers himself to the ground. Dignan s face lights up with joy and satisfaction-his absurd Hardy Boys-style escape plan is a success.

In the sunny and pleasant ranch-style home where he spent much of his childhood, Wilson roams around for a peaceful place to chat, settling on what used to be die children’s bedroom. It’s an apt choice, since the adventure book-reading and mischief-making of Wilson’s boyhood continues to inspire his screenplays. ” I did a lot of reading when I was a kid, and I always wrote short stories,” Wilson says, slumping in a comfy stuffed armchair, His looks are alternately boyish and movie-star attractive. The Bottle Rocket crew cut has grown into casually shaggy blond hair, but there are the same intelligent blue eyes, a broken nose (which gives him that resemblance to Dennis Hopper), and a mischievous smile. “I loved Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. I still like children’s books, and the titles are so funny and direct, things like James and the Giant Peach.’”

Wilson’s brand of offbeat grunge is all his own, A washed-out, short-sleeved gray polo is pulled over a long-sleeved white T-shirt and- are those black pants ? “Dark gray corduroys ! * he emphatically retorts. And the combat boots…”the real thing-military boots,” he adds. On Conan O’Brien’s show, he appeared in a rumpled dark shirt and a beige sweater half tucked into his pants. “Some people who saw it thought I should have worn a coat and tie, and looked more slick,” he says. “My friends said I looked like a slob, but my stuff was wrinkled because I was traveling.” And he adds with a mock hurt tone, “Actually, I thought I looked pretty good.”

This idiosyncratic rebelliousness is just what Hollywood has found refreshing about Owen Wilson. “I have worked on a lot of pictures, and I have never met anyone like Owen,” says Polly Piatt, who produced Bottle Rocket with Brooks, and whose other projects have included War of the Roses, Pretty Baby, The Last Picture Show, and Paper Moon. “He is fascinating to watch, and his comic timing is very good, but I do believe he’s innately shy-he is an observer and a listener.”

He’s also determined. Wilson’s life has revolved around Bottle Rocket for at least six years now. He had sketched out many of the ideas and characters for a short he and Anderson shot in 1992, but it took three years to make a feature-length production. “I expanded on some of the ideas that we had in the short and then raised the ambition level for the movie,” he says. In the process, he created the plot in which the aspiring criminal Dignan convinces his mild-mannered friend Anthony to embark on a life of crime. After several robberies, the two characters are introduced to the older and smoother mastermind Mr. Henry, played by James Caan, and launch into the climactic big heist.

It wasn’t all a smooth ride-the first responses to Bottle Rocket, based on test screenings in Los Angeles malls, were terrible. “It was brutal-the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” says Wilson of the experience. “You start to doubt your own instinct, and that’s the worst feeling-you don’t feel like writing or doing anything.” The outlook, however, changed considerably after the movie’s release, which drew enthusiastic reviews. Suddenly Wilson became a new face to watch.

Even in his parents’ kitchen, hundreds of miles from the movie stars, there are reminders of Wilson’s life in Hollywood, where he moved three years ago. A handwritten note on Ben Stiller’s letterhead sits on the dining table. Wilson tucks it away, but perks up about the director-actor-writer, creator of the hilarious Ben Stiller TV show, and Reality Bites. Stiller’s new release, The Cable Guy, starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, “should make or break Columbia,” Wilson says. He has a small part, but one he relishes. “I play a real jerk; a pompous guy,” he says. “And there’s nothing in life funnier to me than someone who is really pompous.”

Stiller, whom Wilson had admired for years, says the young actor has “some type of movie star thing” which is hard to pinpoint. “When he came in to audition he was so much in the moment trying to figure out what his character should be doing, not worrying about giving a finished performance like other actors always do,” Stiller says. “Comedy is an innate ability which he has, and he’s really good-looking in an interesting way; it’s a combination you hardly ever see.”

Maybe that elusive quality comes from Wilson s unconventional upbringing. Wilson’s entire family is a creative bunch. His father, Robert Wilson, a partner in Wilson Communications, a public relations firm, was also the former director of KERA-TV Channel 13 and a columnist for this magazine in the early ’80s. His mother, Laura Wilson, is an accomplished photographer who has published her work in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, among others. Ten years ago, when Laura worked as an assistant to famed photographer Richard Avedon, she took her sons along on photo shoots throughout the American West. “It was tremendous fun for Owen and Luke,” she says. “They had die experience of meeting different people, like going fly-fishing with a silver miner from Idaho. Dick [Avedon] was always very nice to them, and even in those long car rides, there was always lively conversation.”

Mixed with those experiences was a normal boyhood at St. Mark’s School of Texas. Well, relatively normal. The faculty considered Wilson a troublemaker, and he wasn’t a very good student. St. Mark’s expelled him in 10th grade. “They had a new headmaster and a cumulative punishment system,” recalls Wilson. “I was a real pain in the ass, ” To everyone’s surprise, Wilson went to the New Mexico Military Institute on his own volition. After graduation came a year at USC before he switched to UT Austin, where he met another bright outsider, Wes Anderson. Both middle kids from educated families, they loved the same movies-Badlands, Drugstore Cowboy, The Godfather-“and we liked each other’s sense of humor, ” recalls Anderson.

Wilson and Anderson moved to Dallas after college, rooming together in Oak Lawn as Wilson worked odd jobs to stay out of his parents’ hair, In 1990, as they had just started working on the script, Wilson was waiting tables at S&D Oyster Co. on McKinney, where he befriended veteran waiters Rudy Reece and Warren Johnson. “He was nothing but a kid, but he was pretty determined to make that movie,” says Johnson, who also helped out with Bottle Rocket by appearing in some early footage.

Even as Wilson was beginning to shoot the Bottle Rocket short, he continued to work other jobs. The next stint was in ’92 at Hinckley’s Cold Storage, a frozen foods warehouse in the Fair Park area. “I bullshitted my way into the job convincing them that I was very good at selling,” says Wilson. “That’s why it only lasted for two weeks. ” The job may not have lasted long, but Hinckley’s is forever cap-tured on film as the location of the final botched robbery. St. Mark’s also made it into Bottle Rocket. “But I didn’t have that feeling of revenge going back to St. Mark’s,” he says. “Actually, the fact is that it was a great school, with great teachers and smart kids.”

Although Bottle Rocket received a lot of praise in the press, Wilson jokingly complains that he’s really not getting that much attention. At a dinner with Timothy Hutton, girls were streaming to the table. “But for Timothy, not me!” he says. “And I guess Luke’s the heartthrob. Girls come up to me only to say ’Luke was so cute in the movie ! ’ ” he adds plaintively. But Brooks knows otherwise. “A friend of ours saw him at a party and said girls were throwing themselves at him, but he wasn’t catching any,” he says. ” He is not one of those guys that once he gets recognized, just goes nuts.” Piatt agrees. “He doesn’t go for the traditional dishy blonde; his friends continue to be regular people,” she says.

That might be less and less so, as more and more high-profile people cross his path. “I’ve always liked Winona Ryder as an actress, and wanted to talk to her about working with us,” says Wilson over the telephone after returning to the L.A. home he shares with Luke and Anderson. “Suddenly we are having lunch, and Winona says she loved our movie and saw it four times, and now she wants to work with us on a future project.”

some from Disney, which Wilson has declined. However, a part in Anaconda, an action movie starring Jon Voight and shot in the Amazon, was too lucrative to turn down. “All the movie executives talk about is how much they appreciate these artistic movies, but the most important thing to them is making money, so I would actually prefer the ones who just come out and say that ! ” he laughs. ( Filming began in April; a release date has not been set.) Money, of course, goes hand in hand with stardom, but Wilson hasn’t made any spending plans yet. “The only ostentatious thing I would get would be an incredible pool, 30 feet deep, with tunnels, and parts that you get to only by holding your breath for a minute,” he says. “An Alice in Wonderland-type pool.”

For now, he’s concentrating on writing, and thinking about a screenplay on the turbulent life of the artist Jackson Pollock. “There’s some great stuff about Pollock’s life, these incredible swings. He was a great American character like Gatsby,” says Wilson, who wants to make “Great American Movies” and doesn’t care much for European film. “Ed Harris owns the rights to one Pollock biography and I would love to write a great screenplay for Harris in which he plays the artist.” Wilson also admires Nicholas Cage, Jack Nicholson, and Sean Penn-who’s to say he won’t be working with them, too?

James Brooks doesn’t have any doubt of Wilson’s possibilities. “Owen offers so much and is so new. There’s a picture I may do where there’s a male prostitute, and I think of him for that. He said he’d consider it, as long as he didn’t have to take oft” his clothes,” he laughs. “We’ll find out about his range in the time ahead of us, but one thing he starts with, is everything comes out honest, and that’s a gift. It’s talent.”