Kirk, Michael Douglas open up in documentary

In one scene, Catherine Zeta-Jones recalls Michael Douglas using the brazen I-want-to-father-your-children pickup line when they meet at a film festival.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, I’ve read a lot about you and it’s so nice that it’s absolutely true,” she told him, before bidding him goodnight. Married since 2000, the couple has two children.

There’s a still-simmering confrontation over “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the play in which Kirk Douglas starred and which Michael Douglas produced for the screen in 1975 and turned into an Academy Award-winning picture — with Jack Nicholson in the lead role, not his father.

The clash carries over into their interview.

“That’s the picture where you destroyed me,” said Kirk Douglas.

Whether he’s joking or not, his son laughs, then replies: “Here we go again. So nice to know he forgives and forgets.”

Tackling the tough questions
Even the most deeply personal questions are faced head on.

“Was I a good father?” Kirk Douglas asks at one point in the film, drawing a kind but complicated answer from his son. The demands of stardom and a fiercely ambitious personality shaped by childhood poverty didn’t make Douglas the easiest father, as the film indicates.

But Kirk Douglas made every effort to take time for his son’s early stage appearances. “It says a lot,” said Michael Douglas, 60, whose mother, Diana, and father divorced when he was a child.

For both men, there’s drama aplenty both on- and off-screen to record.

Kirk Douglas bucked the Hollywood blacklist that kept communists and suspected communists from working, or working openly, insisting that author Dalton Trumbo get his rightful screenwriting credit for “Spartacus.”

“That could have been your career,” Douglas remarked to his father during their interview.

“You know, I’ve often thought if I were much older, I might not have done that,” Kirk Douglas said. “As you get older, you get more conservative, but I was still young enough to be a little bit impulsive. What got me was the hypocrisy.”

For Michael Douglas, winning the best-actor Oscar for “Wall Street” was his proudest career moment. In his speech, he thanked his father for “helping a son step out of a shadow.”

Among the sweetest scenes: video from a spiritually renewed Kirk Douglas’ bar mitzvah at age 83. “I’m 13 years old again and I promise, I promise to be a good boy,” he impishly tells his friends and family at the celebration.

The man sitting in his longtime Beverly Hills home, still handsome but made frail by age and with his speech hindered from a stroke a decade ago, is removed from the muscular, brash figure who dominated 1950s and ’60s movies including “Spartacus” and “Lonely Are the Brave.”

“After all, when you’ve been through a helicopter crash, a pacemaker and a stroke, it quiets you down a little bit,” Douglas said.

His son, too, claims a new perspective, comparing his present life to when he was a first-time dad (he and his former wife, Diandra, have a son, Cameron).

“I’m starting a new family now and at this point I’m certainly enjoying my two kids much more than Cameron at a time when I was overwhelmed with working,” Douglas said. “I don’t think there’s a balancing act. When you’re doing pictures, your personal life, your family life takes second position.”

In “A Father, A Son: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” family takes precedence. But the parlance is that of the family business.

“It’s just a joy to see somebody finish his last act in such a graceful way,” Michael Douglas says of his dad.

“I am a big fan,” Kirk Douglas tells his son.