“I think you’ve been winning a little too often,” deadpans a towheaded Chris Penn after losing a poker hand to a young Charlie Sheen — fake mustache, newsboy cap, and all. Decades before “Winning!” became a catchphrase during Sheen’s epic public meltdown era, he was already playing the part on camera, long before anyone was keeping score.
The film is just one of several reels from when Sheen was a Malibu kid with a Super 8 camera, a crew of not-yet-famous friends, and a knack for turning his neighborhood into a movie set.
Unearthed for aka Charlie Sheen, Andrew Renzi’s new two-part documentary, these home movies offer a rare glimpse into the wild, imaginative world Sheen and his friends built for themselves in 1970s Malibu. Renzi’s film traces Sheen’s journey from sun-soaked childhood to breakout Hollywood star, charting his meteoric sitcom fame and the very public ups and downs that followed — all recounted by Sheen himself, with surprising and unflinching candor. And the Super 8 films are proof that Sheen’s creativity and love of performance started well before the world was watching.
“Finding out about the Super 8 footage was another moment where I knew this was the right movie to make,” Renzi says. “They showed this whole other side of his life. His childhood growing up as the child of Martin Sheen. … He was a kid with a camera trying to emulate his dad.”
Reflecting on the old reels, Renzi adds, “Everyone starts out as this innocent kid. When I saw the Super 8 movies, there’s a visual juxtaposition against the 2011 version of him in that ABC interview. That journey to me was so compelling. It’s sad and heartbreaking, but it’s also beautiful because I have been with him and know he’s OK today.”
In these films, there’s plenty of energy, humor, and the kind of rough-and-tumble storytelling that could only come from a group of kids growing up on the outskirts of Hollywood — with the Pacific in their backyard, no rules, and all the time in the world. Here’s what you’ll find in these anything-goes home movies:
The longest and most ambitious of the bunch presented here, this nearly six-minute film opens with a smoky poker game between Chris Penn’s Mr. Simpson and a mustachioed character played by Sheen, who’s accused of winning a little too often. The plot then shifts: Sheen (now sans mustache) reappears as Inspector Roberts, responding with his partner to a call about a shooting. When a witness is quickly dispatched — blood pack and all — a chase and shoot-out ensue, ending with Sheen’s character wounded and the story unresolved. Even the opening credits nod to Sheen’s early sense of showmanship. He’s billed as Charlie Sheen but the film is credited as “Written and Directed by Charlie Estevez”— proof that he was already crafting an onscreen persona.
In this quick-cut reel, bloody gunplay sequences featuring Sheen and Chris Penn bookend a baby-faced Sheen — penciled mustache, goatee, and all — hamming it up for the camera. One highlight: Sheen, barely out of grade school, in a Hawaiian shirt reading cue cards in a gravelly stoner voice. It’s pure, unfiltered childhood glee. It also features a grab-bag montage of Emilio practicing nunchucks, Charlie embodying a refrigerator-bound corpse, and the Penns and Estevezes chasing each other to stage elaborate shoot-outs. Between the action, there’s footage of the crew surfing and skateboarding the beaches and streets of Malibu, capturing the freedom of their youth.
aka Charlie Sheen is now streaming.
