Has anyone heard about this biography??!? I found out about it
yesterday by accident!! Looks like it was published in August. I
bought it on Amazon and it should be waiting for me when I get home
today.

Christian Slater: Back From the Edge
by: Nigel Goodall
http://www.nigelgoodall.co.uk/christian%20slater.htm
(there's an excerp on the website, I'll post it below)

buy it on amazon (it says there's only 2 left):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-
/1844541371/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/102-5659152-1734543?%
5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Enjoy....



EXCERPT
Three weeks before Heathers is due to open on 31 March 1989,
Christian and Winona Ryder are about to appear at a promotional
screening at a New York adult-school film class. The mostly suburban
middle-aged audience is clearly troubled by the movie and its light-
hearted treatment of diabolical themes, and many walk out halfway
through, muttering their disapproval, shock and disdain.

Backstage, Christian and Winona are worried. She has an idea and
whispers it to Christian. When the screening ends, they come out
from behind the curtain and sit in chairs on stage, holding hands,
and announce that they just got married the previous week in Las
Vegas. Some class members applaud while others look befuddled, but
Christian and Winona never drop the act or the conceit. Calling each
other `honey', their charm overpowers the critics.

A few days later, Winona is striding briskly through Central Park
wearing Christian's leather biker jacket. The zipper won't fasten,
so her hands clasp it shut against the chilly spring breeze. She
laughingly recalls the idea of marrying Christian. `We talked about
how we were going to do all the Hollywood marriage things,' she
later remembers, `like stage fights in restaurants, be really
reclusive but then leak out everything. He'd cover my face when
photographers came near, like Sean and Madonna.'

But, when Christian later went on a talk show and proposed to her on
the air, Winona suddenly tired of the joke. `People have been
calling me about it,' she recalled. `It doesn't sound too good.
Marriage would be fun, but I don't think I'm ready for it yet.'

For Christian, though, it was no joke: he actually did fall in love
with Winona. He and the actress playing the lead Heather, Kim
Walker, had been dating since stage school. `She was a terrific
actress,' says Christian (Walker died in March 2001 from a brain
tumour at the age of thirty-two), and Winona asserts that she and
Christian `never fooled around or anything during the movie'. But
isn't it possible that they could have, given that it was during the
thirty-two-day shoot that they fell for each other? It was the first
time, after all, that Winona had become romantically involved with a
leading man, but it probably wasn't the only time. Still doing the
gossip rounds to this day are her oft-speculated flings with later
co-stars Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis on and off the sets of
Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Age of Innocence, respectively. If
there is any truth to these rumours, perhaps it wouldn't be
surprising if she and Christian did in fact have an affair during
and after the film. According to Winona, however, their relationship
didn't begin until after filming was completed and Christian had
broken up with Kim. Even if they had `fooled around' during filming,
Christian would have found it easy to explain away, marvelling
at `the great chemistry you get going on a film set. You get to say
all these things to a girl you never could normally.' Perhaps it was
during the strip-croquet scene that the crush began. When both are
lying naked, after `boning away' on the croquet set, only covered by
the clothing they had supposedly flung off during the match, to many
this scene is evidence enough that the chemistry was already
present.

As to whether or not they were actually dating, Winona continues, it
was `only for a couple of weeks, but it was too weird. When you're
really good friends with somebody, it's hard when you try to make
[it] work. It's bogus. It should just happen naturally. But he broke
my heart, or I thought he did at the time.'

Christian, on the other hand, hoped that that wasn't true. `She is a
wild woman to work with,' he still affectionately admits today. `She
has a naivety, a vulnerability almost, that makes her attractive to
be with and to watch.' She was, after all, the very reason why he
wanted to do Heathers in the first place. `I loved her since Lucas.
She was so cute, so beautiful and so natural. She was very helpful
and very professional. I could tell that she and I had some kind of
chemistry.'

Winona agrees, `We really have great on- and off-screen chemistry.
He's one of the most brilliant actors I've ever worked with.' She
can even remember the day he came in and read for the part of JD,
his character in Heathers. `A lot of guys came in and read the scene
where I'm fake hanging, and they would do the whole monologue to me.
I was just standing on this chair for two weeks and pretending I'm
hanging while the actors do the speech. Some of them just didn't get
the comedy of it, were really being very dramatic about it, and then
Christian came in and he was perfect.'

But when one journalist asked Christian about a People magazine
interview that quoted Winona as saying that he `so scared' her that
she once locked herself in her trailer, Christian admitted that,
when not particularly sober, `I was actually scary. Not the most
positive guy in the world. A monster in some ways. Maybe I was born
with anger. Maybe it was the weird, scary roles I was playing. I was
dealing with a lot of shit, desperately trying to find out who the
real me was. When I finally stopped trying to fight [to be somebody]
I wasn't, I just sat back and said, "This is the guy I'm stuck with.
I've got to be happy with it, or why go on?"'

Part of `that shit', as Christian puts it, started in the same year
that Heathers was released. Between Christmas and New Year, on 29
December 1989 – coincidentally just hours after Winona collapsed in
Rome and was forced to drop out of The Godfather Part III – Los
Angeles police observed a Saab 900 being driven erratically in west
Hollywood. The driver was Christian, on his way home from a
nightclub and doing 50mph in a 35mph zone. The cops pulled the car
over and what happened next established a pattern of wildly
unpredictable behaviour that would periodically affect the next
seven years of Christian's life. Instead of simply pulling over, he
began a ludicrously short-lived car chase that ended mere seconds
after it had begun in a back alley, of all places, with Christian
crashing into two telephone poles, abandoning his vehicle,
attempting to flee over a fence and, in the scuffle – deliberately
or otherwise – kicking one of the officers in the face. `I thought I
was Batman,' he said at the time. `I had the same mentality, but
not,' he joked, `the utility belt.'

Christian was charged with evading the police, driving under the
influence of alcohol, driving with a suspended licence and assault
with a deadly weapon – specifically, his cowboy boots. And, with
another drink-driving conviction from the previous year already on
the books, Christian was sentenced to serve ten days in prison,
which he served just over six months later in July 1990. This brief
sojourn behind bars was followed by a ninety-day stint in a
voluntary rehabilitation programme, from which he discharged himself
on day seven. For the first few months of the following year, he
also attended regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. `It's hard
enough to be a parent, much less the parent of a movie star,'
laments Mary Jo. `When you love someone so much and you see that
they're falling and you're trying to stop it, you know they have to
fall because it's part of life experience.'

Part of that life experience included some court-ordered community
service, for which Christian decided to try working behind the
scenes, directing The Laughter Epidemic, a children's musical that
ran at the Westwood Playhouse in Los Angeles, raising $200,000 in
the process for the charity the Pediatric AIDS Foundation. `People
tend to ignore that,' he complained. `They like to focus on the
darker stuff. It's more interesting, I guess.'

Dan Lauria, Christian's childhood father figure and friend, agreed.
It was a period that was a particularly tough one for everyone in
Christian's life. `The reason Christian and I get along is because,
during that time, I said, "I'm here when you call,"' he
remembers. `I didn't bug him, so I always got the calls after the
fact. When he went to AA meetings, that's when I had to go, just to
get him started, until he got his sponsor.'

Although the roots of much of his wild behaviour lay in the time he
spent on film sets as a boy, Christian was still indulging in what
he called his `old-time late nights'. On one occasion, he
remembers, `It was about three in the morning and I was with this
great girl. We were drinking and having a wonderful time when she
mentioned to me that she had Jack Nicholson's telephone number. So I
was like, "Great, great. I'll give him a call." Well, I got him on
the phone and said, "Jack, this is Christian Slater. I just finished
shooting Heathers. It hasn't come out yet, but I do this tribute to
you in it." I heard a click from his end of the telephone line, but
I wanted to impress the girl, so I went into a five-minute
spiel: "Yeah, we'll play tennis sometime," and all that. I finished
and paused for a second, and this voice suddenly went, "Eh hah." He
was listening to me the whole time! I don't know if he thought I was
completely insane or trying to impress somebody or what, but I
couldn't take it, so I just hung up on him. I hung up on Jack
Nicholson. It was a moment of clarity, like, "What have I done? I've
just ruined my career."'

But the soul-searching often gave way to exuberance. `I'm very
mischievous,' he says proudly. `A couple of days ago, I ran around
and stole the doormats from my neighbours. I just wanted to stir
things up a little. I still have them.'

According to People Weekly, one of his favourite pastimes was
Nintendo, and the Westwood apartment he now shares with an 85lb
Akita named Winston could pass for a branch of US toy store FAO
Schwarz. `I spend a lot of time in toy stores,' he admits. Indeed,
his mother recalls that, after shooting the explicit love scene in
The Name of the Rose, Christian `went home and played with his Star
Wars figures'. For Christian, being a ladies' man with a boy's
psyche is just fine. `Maybe if I have time for myself, I can do
stuff like take cooking classes and grow as a person and all that
malarkey, but for now I just don't want to grow up.'

Perhaps Winona didn't, either. Back in Central Park, she took a seat
on a park bench and stared out at the boating lake where, years
later, she would film the opening scenes for Autumn in New York with
Richard Gere. But, for now, and just a few months away from meeting
her first true love, Johnny Depp, she suddenly looked tired. She had
been doing Heathers promotions for a few weeks now. Waking up at
dawn to do the Today show, for instance, seemed to indicate that,
while her fame had finally caught up with her, it was beginning to
take its toll.

In the two years prior to filming Heathers, Winona had already made
a significant mark on the big screen, from her debut as the love-
sick teenager in Lucas to a girl who enters a tender but doomed
relationship with a mentally retarded young man (played by Rob Lowe)
in Square Dance, playing supernatural comedy in Tim Burton's
Beetlejuice and starring opposite Robert Downey Jr and Kiefer
Sutherland in 1969. Born in Minnesota and raised in northern
California, one of her many goals at the time of filming Heathers
was to study literature and history at Trinity College, Ireland, and
to devote more of her off-screen time to screenwriting and film-
making.