PORT TOWNSEND — And the special guest is (the envelope please . . .) Bruce Dern.
The veteran actor will be the guest of honor at this year’s Port Townsend Film Festival, continuing the festival’s tradition of hosting actors with a large body of work who are not necessarily in the public eye.
This year’s festival takes place Sept. 21-23, where Dern will make a series of public appearances and introduce one of his best overlooked performances in the 1975 “Smile.”
Dern’s name was announced Wednesday at the conclusion of the festival’s annual Guess the Guest contest.
“I’m excited about coming to Port Townsend,” said Dern, 76.
“It’s great that the town is putting on a festival and invited me to be a part of it, and that a town is putting its money where its mouth is in order to support the arts.”
Dern’s body of work includes more than 140 filmed performances since 1960, many of them as malevolent or twisted characters.
“I’ve been in a lot of good movies and some that were not so good,” he said.
“I’m really proud of about half of them.”
A high point was the 1978 film, “Coming Home,” where he played a Marine who returns home from Vietnam to find a world where the concept of patriotism has changed.
The movie won Oscars for its stars, Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, along with Dern’s only nomination.
Dern has seen a lot and loves to tell stories. In a phone call from his home in the Los Angeles area, he was both loquacious and profane.
“After the first screening of ‘Coming Home,’ Barbra Streisand came up to me and said, ‘Why do you always play such a [jerk],’” Dern said.
“This character wasn’t a [jerk], although people thought he was because I played him, like there is some kind of ‘Bruce Dern disease.’”
Dern said that when he came to Hollywood he was welcomed by people who are now perceived as legends.
And Dern ended up “killing” the biggest legend of them all, John Wayne, in the 1972 film, “The Cowboys.”
“John Wayne was larger than life,” Dern said.
“You can’t be larger than life today, it’s impossible.”
The two actors differed with regard to politics but shared an affinity for salty language.
“On the first day, he said, ‘I want you to do something for me, I want you to make these little bastards (the child actors on the film) scared to death of you every day,’” Dern recalled.
“’I give you permission to kick my ass every day.’”
The often repeated punch line for this story is when Wayne tells Dern that people will hate him all over the country for killing him on-screen and Dern responds “Yeah, but they are going to love me in Berkeley.”
The conflicts in “Coming Home” are masterfully resolved during its last scenes.
Voight’s character, Luke Martin, a paralyzed veteran, tells his truth about Vietnam to a stunned high school class while Dern’s character, Bob Hyde, his world shattered, swims into the ocean and commits suicide.
Fonda’s character, Sally Hyde — the woman caught between the two — enters a supermarket, and life goes on.
Dern said the original ending was quite different.
In that script, his character flashes back to Vietnam, takes hostages and is pursued by the police before jumping off an embankment and onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
Dern said that he improvised his role in the last scene, which required him to take off his clothes and swim into the ocean.
He added a few of what he called “Dern-isms,” in this case folding his uniform meticulously and wrestling with the removal of his wedding ring.
And he also dove into the surf buck naked, which the director wasn’t exactly expecting.
“A lot of times I do little things that turn out to be good,” he said.
“If they aren’t good, they just tell me to not do it again.”
Dern tells a lot of stories, with the “Coming Home” and John Wayne tales likely to be repeated during his Port Townsend appearance.
But on Monday he shared one that he had not told before.
“Hal Ashby knew what music he was going to use before he started filming,” Dern said.
“For that last scene he used that song by Tim Buckley, ‘Once I was a soldier and fought on foreign sands for you,’ and it was perfect.
“I later learned that Hal had auditioned Tim Buckley to play Woody Guthrie in ‘Bound for Glory’ but the studio made him use David Carradine.”
Like senior citizens in all walks of life, Dern will tell you that kids these days are, well, different.
“When I started acting, I had four goals: to go to New York, work in the theater, become a member of the Actor’s Studio and work for Elia Kazan,” Dern said.
“Some of the kids working now have different goals — to go to a party and get a star on the boulevard.”
Dern said younger actors aren’t necessarily lazy; they just don’t make very good choices.
“When I work with the younger actors, I make sure they understand that the business is still an art, which requires that you have the ability to look someone in the eye and talk to them from the heart.”
Dern, who said that an actor is only as good as his next movie, has a few plum roles on deck.
His next job is “Nebraska,” described in the Internet Movie Data Base as the story of “an aging, booze-addled father [who] makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes prize.”
His son is played by Will Forte from “Saturday Night Live.”
This December, Dern will appear in “Django Unchained,” a Civil War-era film directed by Quentin Tarantino.
“This movie will be exceedingly controversial but not in a negative way.
“I’m only have one scene, but trust me, you will never . . . forget it.”
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Jefferson County Reporter Charlie Bermant can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at charlie.bermant@peninsuladailynews.com.
