Steve Guttenberg explains how 'Tales From the Guttenberg Bible' helps him grieve his late father: 'When I perform this play, I'm talking to my dad'

Steve Guttenberg lost his father, Stanley, to kidney failure a year ago. But the star of '80s favorites like Diner and Police Academy gets to talk to his dad again every time that the actor performs Tales From the Guttenberg Bible, the autobiographical play that Guttenberg adapted from his 2012 memoir, The Guttenberg Bible. "It helps a lot," Guttenberg, 64, tells Yahoo Entertainment in an emotional conversation. "My dad and I were very close — he's the reason that I became everything that I am. In the end, I wanted this play to be all about him and I."

And it's not a one-sided conversation between father and son onstage. Rather than adopt the "one-man show" approach so common with staged versions of celebrity memoirs — think Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays, for example — Guttenberg surrounds himself with three actors who play all of the major and minor figures from his life and career. The quick-changing trio of Dan Domingues, Carine Montbertrand and Arnie Burton are tasked with portraying everyone from former college pals and ex-agents to famous co-stars like Laurence Olivier and Tom Selleck.

It's Burton who shoulders the heavy emotional burden of being Stanley Guttenberg, a Long Island family man depicted in the play as being alternately baffled, bemused and bedazzled by his son's rapid rise through the Hollywood ranks. According to his offspring, that's definitely a case of art imitating life. "I'm sure when Picasso told his father, 'I want to be a painter,' his dad said, 'How are you going to make money?'" Guttenberg says, chuckling. "Acting sounds like a crazy way to make a living!" [This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.]

Guttenberg started the years-long process of turning his memoir into a play while his father was still alive and remembers sitting next to him as his illness advanced, talking through scenes. "We had 300 pages of the play at one point," he recalls. "My dad said, 'I don't think it should be this long. This is not Nicholas Nickleby!' But he also always said, 'This is going to be a great play; it's going to get to Broadway one day.' And I believe it will."

Tales From the Guttenberg Bible had its world premiere in April at New Jersey's George Street Playhouse, and will return for a second production August 1-20 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y. The entire cast of the original production is back for that run, although Burton will alternate his role(s) with Steven DeRosa. "I swear to you, when I perform this play I'm talking to my dad," Guttenberg says, visibly tearing up. "And when I hug Arnie, I'm hugging my dad. It's extraordinary — I go back in time, which is such a luxury after losing my dad last year. That's why I want to keep doing it: my grief is extremely heavy, and this feels so good to me."

"But the play also isn't just about me and my dad," Guttenberg adds. "I wanted our relationship to be a metaphor for everyone in the audience who has lost someone that they loved so much that it's painful. It's about you and the person who told you could become a teacher or a writer or an actor. That person who said, 'You can do it.'"

The way that Guttenberg did it certainly seems impossible to fathom now. After graduating high school in 1976, the 18-year-old headed west with the outsized ambition of getting into the film business during the weeks-long gap that separated his senior year at Plainedge High School with his freshman year at the University of Albany. Crashing with his godfather, voiceover star Michael Bell, Guttenberg snuck onto studio lots and otherwise hustled his way into appearances in Kentucky Fried Chicken commercials and a one-line role in the 1977 disaster movie Rollercoaster — an experience that was near-disastrous for the novice thespian.

Those moments of youthful hubris are recreated in Tales From the Guttenberg Bible, with Guttenberg inviting audiences to laugh at his own naïveté while also nodding appreciatively at his ingenuity, which paid off when early performances in '70s films like The Chicken Chronicles and The Boys From Brazil paved the way for his '80s run of era-defining hits, from Cocoon to Three Men and a Baby. The actor acknowledges that his specific path isn't replicable in present day Hollywood, but that doesn't mean that nobodies can't use creative means to become somebodies.

"Ambition and action is what it's all about," opines Guttenberg. "It can't be done in the same way, but if you're ambitious and you want to be an actor, producer or director, there's a way to slip under the door. You just have to be really dedicated and really lucky. My dad always said, 'Play the game and don't walk away. Stick it out until you have the opening.'"

One aspect of Guttenberg's superstar days that's largely left out of Tales From the Guttenberg Bible are the sexual escapades that can accompany being an A-list celebrity. In his 2012 memoir, the actor candidly described some of his liaisons — including an on-again, off-again relationship with a stalker-ish fan and a one-night stand with a woman posing as a journalist at a film festival — in a way that was both amusing and, at times, apologetic. But in adapting the book to the stage, Guttenberg felt those portions of his life didn't "further the story" that he wanted to tell.

"When you read it, your face cringes up a little," he admits. "Talking about failed marriages or failed romantic experiences or the dessert experiences of being famous is tough. But that's the game, man. When you're not famous anymore, you're just another good-looking guy. I can throw a stick in Malibu and hit 20 of us!" (Guttenberg was previously married to model Denise Bixler from 1988 to 1992 and wed his second wife, Emily Smith, in 2019.)

As dramatized in the play, Guttenberg developed his own complicated relationship with fame as the spotlight on him burned brighter and brighter. Tales From the Guttenberg Bible ends with the production of Three Men and a Baby — which holds the record of being the highest-grossing movie of 1987 and of Guttenberg's entire career — at which point the actor consciously steps back from Hollywood in search of a calmer place to live. To this day, he splits his time between various cities outside of the L.A. area.

Guttenberg says that choice was in large part motivated by his frustration at having to follow the unspoken, but strictly enforced "rules" of Hollywood. "Say you're at a party and you want to say 'hi' to someone," he says as an example. "There are certain people that you're not allowed to say 'hi' to unless you're credentialed. I can't tell you how many parties I attended where I wanted to say hello to someone I knew, and gatekeeper would come up to me and say, 'Can you wait a little while?'"

"The other rule is that you're going to get screwed over," Guttenberg continues. "And you're going to screw over somebody else. And you can't get angry about it. You'll think you have a role and then you find out that they gave it to another actor. You'll say, 'But you told me I had the part!' And they'll go, 'I know we did. I hope you understand.' Those are the rules of Hollywood."

Despite his distaste for those rules, Guttenberg says he isn't ready to give up on the game he fought so hard to be part of. In recent years, he has achieved character actor status, popping up in roles on popular TV shows like Community, The Goldbergs and, most memorably, one of the best-ever episodes of Party Down. "The business has been a little better than terrific to me," he says. "It's given my family experiences that we can only dream of, and financial security that we never would have had otherwise. The best part of being famous is sharing it. If you don't share it, you die alone on a yacht with nobody else there. It's a funny game, and you have to be a certain person with the stomach for this game."

And there's one more game that Guttenberg still thinks about playing. Despite his strong bond with his late father, the actor never became a dad himself. And re-living his life through Tales From the Guttenberg Bible has put that absence top of mind. "I think I'd be a great dad," Guttenberg says. "It's still a dream of mine. I'm a very young-minded guy, and very fit. But I don't know if I could stay in show business and be a dad. I might have to step away."

In other words, don't expect Guttenberg to raise a "nepo baby," a term he chuckles at when it's defined for him. "I don't know that I'd want to bring my kids up in the business," he says. "It's worked out well for some actors, but not others. It can be weird when you have a family member that's famous — freaking weird!"

Tales From the Guttenberg Bible runs Aug. 1-20 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y.