I’ll leave it to others to unpack Val’s impressive and diverse body of work, and the awful illness that robbed him of his distinctive voice and came to define his later years. What I want to discuss is an often-overlooked aspect of Val— just how hilarious the man could be. I came to know Val at the height of his fame. Batman Forever was “in the can” but had not yet been released. I was an extremely young writer, and Val hired me to help him organize some ideas he had for movies, and to type them into treatments. This was on the set of the iconic Michael Mann film Heat. I worked in Val’s trailer in downtown Los Angeles, with the sound of machine gun blanks echoing from the epic bank heist shootout being filmed just outside. I sifted through Val’s typed up pages and floppy disks (yup, this was a while ago) and I peered at scribbled notes on legal pads; I did my best to create a synthesis, a coherence. It was a daunting task, and, truth be told, the notes were all over the place. I sometimes felt like one of those forensic historians who try to recreate East German Stasi memos by cobbling together bits of shredded documents. I did a decent enough job in organizing Val’s creative output that he invited me to co-write one of those scripts with him in Australia, while he was on the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau. A lot has been written about that film, about the wild experiment of casting Marlon Brando and Val and Nelson De La Rosa. New Line conscripted the aging, legendary director John Frankenheimer to wrangle all of it in the dense jungle of Far North Queensland when the original director Richard Stanley was fired after just a few days of filming. Hundreds of drugged-out Australian hippies called “ferals” were hired as extras. They camped near the remote set and descended out of the hills like fog when craft services got breakfast going each day— it was quite a sight. Brando confided in me that he hadn’t read the script. He said this allowed him to make more spontaneous acting choices. Mind you, we were three months into production at that point. Beyond that, I have nothing to add here except to say that everything else you’ve heard about that production is true, and it was bonkers. But most of that experience was not too funny, and I’m here to tell you about how funny Val was. So: One evening Val got really mad at me; he was yelling, in fact. I was crashing at his house in Cairns Australia, and I had gone out for a six-pack of VB beer without locking the front door. It was an oversight, as Val was paparazzi bait at the time, and it wasn’t inconceivable that someone could have tried to get in, take photos, steal stuff, whatever. I said I was sorry. Val started to cool down. As he went to grab his American Spirits, I realized with horror that earlier in the night while watching a Rugby League game on TV, I had sat on the pack of cigarettes on the couch and crushed them. But then, instead of getting madder, Val switched gears. He took out a severely bent cigarette and performed a ridiculous theatrical display. He started acting like a drunk trying to light his bent cigarette. His schtick was broad, but in the way Charlie Chaplin was broad, which is to say it was brilliant. I started laughing hysterically, and when Val saw that, he really committed to the bit, taking out his zippo and “failing” to light the bent cigarette despite several attempts. He crossed his eyes in mock drunken concentration. He burped, stumbled around, pretended to take a piss into a potted plant, leaning his head on the wall while moaning. He whispered in a weird Midwestern accent about wanting a “pork chop.” Val’s physicality and matinee idol looks only made the whole thing much funnier. Was Val performing this display because he felt bad about yelling at me, or because the bent cigarette was just too great a prop to pass up? I don’t know, but it was a comedic miracle in miniature, an entire production put on for my amusement alone, and although Val milked it, it was over much faster than I would have liked.