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Today, Scott Caan is starting his own mob.
Details Magazine When your father is Sonny Corleone, violence is a family value. "My dad fucked up my nose once," Scott Caan says. "We used to play this game: I'd try to hit him in the face, and he'd drill me with little jabs. Ding. Ding. Ding." Caan, 25, is reclining on the plant-laden patio of his Hollywood Hills bachelor pad, revisiting his pop's pugilistic affections. The touching, albeit unorthodox, childhood memory makes him smile. "To this day, if we arm wrestle, someone's arm is going to break - you know what I mean?" Apparently, not all child abuse is cause for alarm. "Aside from the things he did that were bad - everybody makes mistakes - he's a solid dad," Caan says, taking a deep drag off an American Spirit blue. "I was raised right. I dig who I am." So do the teenage females who coveted his bare hindquarters in Varsity Blues. Since then, Caan has been working (Boiler Room, Black and White, Gone in 60 Seconds) at a pace that recalls his father's streak in the seventies (Brian's Song, Rollerball, Godfather). In August, Caan the younger, who regularly ropes and rides horses for fun, donned a cowboy hat for the Jesse James flick American Outlaws. This month, he pops up as Helena Bonham Carter's brother in the Steve Martin vehicle Novocaine. In December, he'll play a getaway driver in Steven "awesome" Soderbergh's pathologically hyped remake of Ocean's Eleven, starring such other tough guys as George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Caan contends he was hardly intimidated by the company. "It was mellow," he says of the shoot. "I mean, what do you do in Las Vegas? You gamble - and you go to strip clubs." "Are you hungry? Let's go eat." Caan, sporting a Harley T-shirt and torn-crotch jeans, strides off his tree-house-like porch, past an antique pool/Ping-Pong table and through a pillow-strewn living room with a fireplace. Chet Baker provides atmosphere. "We'll take the muscle car," he says. "You'll be my muscle-car bitch for a couple of hours." Moments later, he's gunning his "baby," a tricked-out lemon-yellow '69 Nova (it's actually a '70, but he prefers '69, for obvious reasons) down the curvy road to West Hollywood. Caan also has a rigid Harley ("like Hopper's in Easy Rider"), which he rides in Utah (no helmet laws), and a black Cadillac DeVille DTS. "You're in a bad American machine right now," he says, suggestively slapping gleaming leather. One unnerving swerve and his hand winds up - protectively, no doubt - on my knee. "Three hundred fifty horsepower of screaming anger," he says. "We'll do a burnout at some point. You'll dig it." Driving along Sunset Boulevard, Caan considers the scenery. "I just love women," he beams, his blue-greens devouring the local color. His current woman is catalog model Kim Verbeck. "I love the smell of a woman's armpit when she's not wearing deodorant," he adds. "Sometimes I lift my girlfriend's arm up and just rest my nose in her armpit." This isn't a difficult maneuver, since he's five feet five. All actorly leering aside, Caan happens to be a serial monogamist. He'll go out of his way to maintain a healthy relationship post-breakup. He's still close to ex-girlfriend Kimberly Stewart, daughter of rocker Rod. Their parents, like most Hollywood fixtures, are acquainted. "I think my dad might have slept with her mom or something," Caan says nonchalantly, fiddling with an engraved ring Kimberly gave him (at times he fidgets so intensely, he's like a walking Ritalin ad). "A lot of people say the same thing about her that they do about me: 'God, how did you turn out so good?' Supposedly, our parents are all fucked up and retarded." Caan could have easily gone the retarded route had he wanted to. He certainly has the arrest record to prove it. Future biographers will find the following offenses among the grounds for his expulsion from six different high schools: burning classmate with glue gun; decorating bathroom with graffiti ("I didn't do that!"); and smoking dope. Caan might have inhaled back in the day, but he won't touch the stuff now. "All that shit takes time. I'd rather be working," he says. An Oedipalist might link Caan's newfound flair for work-driven sobriety to his father's oft-told lack thereof. "Without him, I'd be dead," James Caan says by way of agreeing. "He went to kill this guy who was a dope dealer. I was crying out of one eye and smiling out of the other. I feel that he loves and respects me, which is more than I deserve." Scott Caan never longed to expand the family brand. Actually, James Caan steered his son toward the less-messy world of the professional athlete. "I drove the poor kid crazy," Caan senior says via his car phone. "I'd fire balls at him for two hours a day. I thought I had front-row seats at Yankee Stadium." Disappointing his dad, Skillz (one of Scott's many nicknames) gave up a future as a ballplayer for the equally lucrative position of white rapper: From 1990 to 1994, he rhymed with the hip-hop combo known as Whooliganz, and toured in 1993 with Cypress Hill. It wasn't until he lucked into a role in the 1995 indie A Boy Called Hate that he realized he wanted to act. His mother, the actress and former model Sheila Ryan (the Caans divorced when Scott was a baby), pointed him to the L.A. repertory theatre Playhouse West. For some, this might have been enough. But Caan has yet another job: He writes. Jerry Bruckheimer recently bought his script Chasing the Party, which concerns two punks who break into the Playboy Mansion, for a reported $250,000. (His father, who says there's another $250,000 in there if and when the movie gets made, will co-star). "He's a very good writer for somebody so young," says Bruckheimer, who's know Scott since he was 3. "He's a natural. When he first walked in to read for Enemy of the State, he had all his dad's nuances. It was interesting to see that it carried over a generation." This past summer, between movie gigs, Caan wrote, directed, and starred in a play, Almost Love, at Playhouse West, where he remains an active member. Like most young writers, Caan writes about what he knows. Almost Love is about "finding the right girl when you're not really ready." Offstage, Caan admits, "the girlfriend thing" is his one major issue. "I have a beautiful woman who I love," he says, "and I still have those urges." But work sets you free, and for now, Caan, a self-professed "borderline workaholic," wants to focus. "All people talk about is, 'Oh, your father had a drug problem. Oh, you're mother had a drug problem,'" he says, furiously twisting his hair. "Who cares? Why is that interesting? Let me talk about how I dig my art, how I don't drive ten minutes without being creative, how I'm going to be in this business for the rest of my life, how I'm going to do things differently. I want to just bring the house." "I'm just happy he really enjoys what he does," father James says a few days later. "He's the pride of my life." Then, after a moment, he adds, "Do you think he loves me?"
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