Celebrity True or False: Malcolm McDowell Talks Clockwork Orange, Star Trek & More

Malcolm McDowell has chimed in on The Rich Eisen Show before, but only over the phone. In person, he turned out to be exactly what you would hope: a man with a story for every era of his career, and a willingness to tell the ones that do not flatter his co-stars.

The occasion is Last Train to Fortune, in select theaters now and on digital November 6. McDowell plays a school teacher in the 1870s who sets out across the frontier "with all his books in his suitcase" and ends up hooked up with an outlaw played by James Paxton, the son of Bill Paxton.

That connection runs deeper than casting. McDowell said that 25 or 30 years ago he was handed the script, written by Michelle Rifkin, the mother of Adam Rifkin, after it won a PBS competition. McDowell loved it, and Bill Paxton was attached to do it with him. McDowell even brought it to Lindsay Anderson, the English director who put him in his first movie and who was staying with him at the time. "He liked nothing, and he actually liked this," McDowell said. Anderson had dinner with Bill Paxton and was set to direct, then went back to England and died within about six months.

So how many westerns has McDowell made? "Oh, so many," he deadpanned. "This is the only one."

That was the whole appeal. He grew up on Saturday morning pictures like Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers, but his early career was all revolutions, from a big revolution in a boy's school to A Clockwork Orange. Westerns, he said, fell out of fashion until Clint did Unforgiven, which he called "one of the great movies ever." He thinks the genre is coming back because westerns are moral tales about things happening right now. Doing his first one at 80, though, meant "crawling around in the dirt and being thrown," and getting coldcocked. As for the horse, James rode it. McDowell sat on it backwards. "Really weird to see nothing except a tail," he said.

Rich then asked how he first met Stanley Kubrick. "He called and asked to meet me," McDowell said. Simple.

The better story came later, from Kubrick's widow, Christiane. She told McDowell that Kubrick had heard all about his first film, "if....," and had Paramount send over the cans. When McDowell made his first entrance, Kubrick hit the intercom and told the projectionist to go back to the beginning. He did it four times. Then he turned to Christiane and said, "We found our Alex."

McDowell called "if...." a masterpiece that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and recalled that Lindsay Anderson told him after it, "Well, Malcolm, it's all downhill from here on." The real life change, he said, came with that first film. One minute he was doing theater and scraping by in a tiny London apartment. The next, "boom, everyone knows you," and he was being offered $100,000 to do a movie.

He is from Liverpool, which gave Rich the opening to take a shot: did McDowell ever cross paths with the Beatles? "Oh, yes," he said. A girlfriend took him to the Cavern to see her favorite group, the Silver Beatles, and he went back every Friday night. They were in leathers with DA haircuts and all the Brylcreem. Then, near the end, they showed up in suits with washed hair, and the "Silver" had been whited out on the drum. Rich guessed George Martin had gotten hold of them. McDowell corrected him: it was Brian Epstein, who had a record store around the corner where people kept asking for records by the Beatles.

McDowell will not pretend he saw world domination coming, but he did think, "wow, these guys are good. You have to dance to this." He pointed out they had two of the greatest pop singers of all time out front and probably three of the greatest songwriters, noting that George wrote Here Comes the Sun, which he called the most played Beatle song.

Liverpool, he said, is a blue collar city with a great sense of humor, a bit like Boston or Pittsburgh, divided into red and blue. McDowell has always been red. His father took him to Anfield, his boys are all Liverpool, and nobody in the family likes Manchester United. When Rich passed along word that Manchester City had been popped for cheating, McDowell was ready to collect. "We came second to them three times," he said, "and one with one point. So we'll just take those championships."

Then came Celebrity True or False. Before the first question, Rich asked whether he ever worked with Jack. Never, McDowell said, though Jack cast Mary Steenburgen, his ex-wife, in her first movie, and she is in Last Train to Fortune too. Those old dinner parties also produced a Harrison Ford story. Ford, McDowell said, was unsure about doing "another one of these Star Wars things" because he did not know the director. When McDowell heard it was Irvin Kershner, whom he knew from London, he told Ford: "Do it. He's a great guy."

The first official question: did he really have his eyes clamped open for the re-education scene in A Clockwork Orange, and scratch his cornea? True. The lid locks are used in eye operations, but normally on a patient lying flat, "not propped up watching videos, and in a straight jacket to boot." The eye was anesthetized, so when the locks slid across his cornea he could not feel it. The hands in the shot belong to a real doctor from Moorfields Eye Hospital, who had to keep the eye moist with artificial tears because, McDowell said, if you leave it 14 or 15 seconds it could dry up and you could lose your sight. His reaction when Kubrick first showed him a photo of the device: "Oh, I'm not doing that, Stanley."

Does he still get sick hearing Beethoven? "Love Beethoven." Only in the film.

Did Kubrick use a real snake to exploit a fear of reptiles? False, sort of. Kubrick asked him to take a pet python out of a drawer under his bed. McDowell said he was not keen on snakes, and Kubrick replied, "Well, neither am I." On the take, McDowell opened the drawer and found no snake. "The whole crew just bolted out the door." The python had wound up in the bed springs.

Was singing Singing in the Rain while beating everybody up improvised? True, as an homage to Gene Kelly, who was euphoric swinging around that lamppost. The production was stuck. Kubrick had not turned the camera in four days because the scene played as naturalistic and boring. Then Kubrick walked past McDowell on the stairs and asked, out of the corner of his mouth, "Can you dance?" McDowell jumped up and went straight into the song. The result, as Rich put it, is horrific and darkly funny at once. Out of his peripheral vision, McDowell saw Kubrick laughing so hard he had tears, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth.

His favorite Kubrick film outside his own is Dr. Strangelove, though he called 2001 a masterpiece too. "Before Stanley, it was basically Flash Gordon with cardboard sets," he said. "There'd be no Star Wars without Stanley."

Were he and William Shatner mobbed by Star Trek fans at a Rolling Stones concert in Las Vegas? "He was more mobbed than I was." Fans chased them to a service elevator, and Shatner kicked them out of it with the bottom of his foot. McDowell said he is very fond of Bill, who can laugh at himself.

Did fans send death threats after his character killed Kirk? True. His nephew called to tell him about a death threat on the internet, which McDowell knew nothing about at the time. "Don't they know we're actors?" he said. Retired police officers accompanied him to New York and waited in the hotel corridor.

Entourage brought the most candid answer. McDowell loved the show but said he was always butting heads with Jeremy Piven, "a ridiculous character, just too full of himself by half. Brilliant in the part." The other one he could not stand was David Caruso.

That story came via Rob Zombie, who directed McDowell in Halloween and asked him to do a TV show to get away from horror. It was CSI. Which one? "Miami. And my heart sank." Zombie met him in the parking lot to apologize in advance for Caruso. In McDowell's first scene, Caruso was texting, so McDowell stopped the take, had tape put on the camera box and the lines read off camera, and said he did not need the actor there. Caruso walked off in a huff. The next day, Zombie told McDowell to just be on the phone when Caruso came in to interrogate him. McDowell stayed on the call, told Caruso he had "a disgruntled customer," and hung up. "They kept it in the show," he said.

For those in the Los Angeles area, McDowell is also hosting a rare live screening of A Clockwork Orange in Gardena from September 25 through 27, with only a few tickets left.