Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  On the other hand, Roger Ebert, who had trashed Dead Poets Society, was much more amenable to Awakenings. He gave it four stars and called it “one of Robin Williams’ best performances, pure and uncluttered, without the ebullient distractions he sometimes adds—the shtick where none is called for.”

  The film did brisk business when it went into wide release in January and earned about $52 million. Robin received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, though the award went to Jeremy Irons for his role as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, Robin was overlooked, even as De Niro, his costar, received a nod in the Best Actor category.

  Terry Gilliam had warned Robin early on that he was likely to be neglected for Awakenings. “He was so proud of his performance in that,” Gilliam recalled. “I said, ‘But Rob, you’re not going to win. You don’t have any of the tics and twists and jerks that De Niro has. The guys with the most tics, they’re the ones that win.’”

  Robin returned to Los Angeles that winter to start filming Hook, an ambitious fantasy film that Steven Spielberg had wanted to make for several years. The director had chased the idea of a motion picture about an adult Peter Pan, one that would have starred Michael Jackson as the grown-up incarnation of the boy who could never grow up and Dustin Hoffman as his pirate nemesis, Captain James Hook. But Spielberg had abandoned the project when his son Max was born, fearing that its complex technical requirements would impose on his family time: “I wanted to be home as a dad, not a surrogate dad,” he explained.

  Spielberg came back to the Peter Pan film in 1990, at which point it had been worked on by another director and several screenwriters. Hoffman was still attached, and now so was Robin, who would play Peter Banning, a yuppie lawyer who is neglectful of his wife and children and has forgotten entirely about his youthful past as Peter Pan. “He’s very representative of a lot of people today who race headlong into the future, nodding hello and goodbye to their families,” Spielberg said of the character. “I’m part of a generation that is extremely motivated by career, and I’ve caught myself in the unenviable position of being Peter Banning from time to time.”

  Robin saw himself in the character, too, thinking back to the period of intensive emotional repair he underwent when he was breaking up with Valerie while still trying to be present for Zak. “I had a therapist say, ‘Basically the only therapy I can offer you right now is to play with your child,’ because I had been using work as a buffer,” he explained. Hook also provided Robin with his first opportunity to work with Spielberg and Hoffman (from whom he had inherited film roles in Popeye, The World According to Garp, and Dead Poets Society), as well as a supporting cast that included Julia Roberts as the fairy Tinker Bell. But those big names, and a lavish production that called for a full-scale pirate ship and sets that spread across the soundstages of two studio back lots, came at a steep cost. The budget for Hook was estimated at $35 to $50 million (some reports put it at $60 million or more), a steep figure that would have been even larger if Robin, Spielberg, and Hoffman had not agreed to forgo their upfront salaries and instead share 40 percent of the film’s gross ticket sales.

  The previous fall, Robin had been sent a tantalizing dossier of storyboards for the film, visualizing the pirate ship and a climactic battle sequence between Peter Pan and Captain Hook, among other scenes, along with a note from Bruce Cohen, an associate producer and assistant director, advising him, “We will need to measure you for your flying rig in early January, so the closer you are to your ‘flying weight’ by then the better.” By the time filming began, Robin was twenty pounds lighter than he had been during the making of The Fisher King.

  Robin spent a month between mid-February and mid-March 1991 making Hook at Universal Studios, and then another fifty-seven filming days between March and June on the Columbia lot, with blue-screen special effects work still to come. He shared his screen time with the eccentric Hoffman, who started each morning by eating a bowlful of hot onions and garlic for what he said were health reasons. Hoffman had decided to base his portrayal of Captain Hook in part on William F. Buckley Jr., whose clenched, effete voice was a longtime staple of Robin’s routine. “He’s bright and educated, but there’s something scary there,” Hoffman said of Buckley.

  As the film’s production spilled into late July, the costars developed a feisty working relationship full of one-upmanship and competitive taunts. When Hoffman called for a scene to be halted because he’d lost his motivation, Robin hit him with a retort that had supposedly been flung at him by Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man: “When all else fails, try acting.” So when Robin later stumbled over his own lines, Hoffman peered into the camera and asked, “What can you expect from Mork?” After nailing the next take, Robin responded, “Ishtar is on television tonight.”

  Robin’s real nemesis, however, was the harness he wore in his flying scenes, which caught him squarely in a sensitive area of his body. “It was very hard work, but when you get to fly—whew!” Robin later explained. “To be sixty feet up, flying a hundred and fifty feet over a giant pirate ship, that’s a nice day.” Pointing at his crotch, he added, “It is a little painful because of the rig,” but at least he had gained a new understanding of the Peter Pan role. “I know why a lot of women have played the part,” he said.

  This was just Robin’s day job. On the other side of the San Fernando Valley, in a collection of trailers in Glendale, Walt Disney Pictures was undergoing a renaissance. The animated movies that were once the core of the studio’s family-friendly brand had gradually lost favor to live-action features, and it produced only five cartoon films over the span of the 1980s. But in 1989, the last of these releases, The Little Mermaid, had been a bona fide smash, grossing more than $84 million and encouraging Disney to develop more of these films.

  Among the first of these follow-ups was a cartoon musical set within the Arabic folklore of One Thousand and One Nights. The studio’s chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg, had wanted a swashbuckling adventure in the vein of The Thief of Baghdad, but the film’s directors, Ron Clements and John Musker, and its lead composer, Alan Menken, were able to steer him toward a more intimate retelling of the story of Aladdin. Naturally, one of the most important characters would be the Genie, the all-powerful creature the hero releases from captivity in an oil lamp: in this version, the creative team envisioned a lovable, shape-shifting song-and-dance man modeled on the African American musicians of the Jazz Age.

  “The idea of the Genie was, he was black and had an earring,” Menken said. “We thought he could be a hipster, à la Fats Waller and Cab Calloway. Growing up, I loved playing Fats Waller songs: ‘Your feet’s too big, oh my.’ That became the vocabulary.”

  Katzenberg, however, had a different approach: he wanted the Genie to be played by a well-known Hollywood performer, and he had his eye on Robin, his protean leading man from Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society. The use of a celebrity was unusual in feature animation, where the characters, rather than the voices, were supposed to be the stars; and Katzenberg’s insistence on choosing Robin in particular ran against the traditions of his filmmakers, who did not like to hire their vocal talent sight unseen. “There was a policy that you really had to audition, or you wouldn’t be in the movie,” Clements said. But, as Musker explained, “When you’re a big-name star like Robin, you don’t audition. You have to hire them.”

  Actually, Aladdin would end up auditioning for Robin: Disney hired the artist and animator Eric Goldberg to create some test footage using vocal tracks from Robin’s stand-up comedy albums. Then Robin was brought for a visit to the studio trailers, where he was shown this footage as well as the storyboards for several of the film’s planned musical numbers, including a big, brassy set piece for the Genie called “Friend Like Me,” where he pledges his loyalty to his new master.

  Robin’s participation in Aladdin was never really in question: he was a lifelong fan of cartoons, a
nd he often cited the legendary Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones as a source of inspiration. He had also recently had a positive experience on FernGully: The Last Rainforest, an animated film with an environmentally conscious message, which had cast him as a rapping bat named Batty Koda and allowed him to freely improvise his dialogue. But what almost certainly sealed the deal for him was seeing the bits of his wild and boundary-free comedy routine turned into a bona fide cartoon. “I think what probably sold him,” Goldberg recalled, “was the one where he says, ‘Tonight, let’s talk about the serious subject of schizophrenia—No, it doesn’t!—Shut up, let him talk!’ What I did is animate the Genie growing another head to argue with himself, and Robin just laughed. He could see the potential of what the character could be. I’m sure it wasn’t the only factor, but then he signed the dotted line.”

  That March, while Robin was immersed in the filming of Hook, Disney sent him a file full of Goldberg’s character designs for the Genie, a friendly, blue-skinned apparition of indeterminate ethnicity, with a tuft of hair, a sly goatee, and the fluidity and lightness of an Al Hirschfeld caricature. These illustrations showed him in a variety of moods and poses—making happy and sad faces, holding Aladdin by the scruff of his vest—but also taking on the physical attributes of the people and things he imitated: in a maître d’ outfit, with a ventriloquist’s dummy on his arm, becoming Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, a harem girl, a rabbit, a ghoul, an army sergeant. The limitless possibilities of the character were right there on the page.

  But not long after this, Aladdin suffered several creative setbacks. Howard Ashman, who had been Menken’s longtime librettist and had written the lyrics for songs like “Friend Like Me,” died from complications of AIDS on March 14. In April, Katzenberg rejected a storyboarded version of the film presented to him by Musker and Clements. Two additional writers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, were brought on to the film, and large sections of the story were rewritten while other scenes and musical numbers were excised entirely. Robin had yet to record any of his tracks.

  A preliminary version of the Aladdin script, from January 22 of that year, described the Genie as a “hip, hyper, mercurial Robin Williams type, full of exuberance, with a child-like vulnerability.” On the page, the character’s dialogue was written to sound like Robin, anticipating the many opportunities he might take to break character and ad-lib. As Musker explained, “We wrote the script with Robin and his shifting persona in mind”—but with the full understanding that any and all of it could go out the window when his recording sessions started later that spring. With each take, Musker said, “He performed it as we had written it, like seven or eight times, and then we’d say, ‘Okay, wing it.’ So then he’d do it another eight times, each time bringing it up even more. On that first scene, we were done after those seven or eight more takes. We said, ‘That’s great.’ He’d say, ‘Well, let me just try a few other things.’ We wound up with twenty-five different takes of his introduction.”

  Clements added, “Each take of a two-minute scene was like ten minutes long. And we thought, how the heck are we going to figure out what to use?”

  “He would be going to the stratosphere,” Musker said, “and we would be trying to find where he was.”

  A production script dated September 18 added more songs for the character, including “Prince Ali,” in which the Genie provides a razzle-dazzle introduction for Aladdin, who is disguised as a make-believe sovereign; and the film’s sweeping opening number, “Arabian Nights,” which was so vocally demanding that it had to be sung by the Broadway actor Bruce Adler. Robin, who was staying at the Los Angeles home of Barry Levinson, would come back from a long day of shooting on Hook, having had his midsection yanked around on wires and pulleys for twelve hours. Then he would spend the evening seated at a piano rehearsing his songs with Menken and David Friedman, the Aladdin musical director, or running through new dialogue with Musker and Clements.

  Meanwhile, the animators were hard at work trying to decode Robin’s auditory output and translate it for a visual medium. In one scene, Goldberg said, “One of Robin’s riffs was the Genie didn’t believe that Aladdin was going to use his third wish to set him free, so he goes, ‘Uh, yeah, right. Booo-wooop.’ John and Ron didn’t know what Booo-wooop was. So I said, ‘Well, that’s Robin’s shorthand for telling a lie. It’s Pinocchio’s nose growing. Can I turn the Genie’s head into Pinocchio? We own the character.’ And so we did!”

  Katzenberg himself devised a strategy for recording the film’s prologue, in which Robin, playing the role of an Arabian street peddler, tries to sell the audience on various worthless wares before offering up the oil lamp that sets the story in motion. He told his filmmakers, “When Robin records this, bring in a bunch of props and put a blanket over it, and then remove the blanket and he’ll never have seen them, and then he’s just going to go off on each one.” That approach—deliberately modeled on Jonathan Winters and his style of improv comedy—was exactly what the directors did when Robin recorded the scene. Among the riffs that made it into the movie were his observations on a faulty water pipe (“a combination hookah and coffee maker—it also makes julienne fries!”) and a mysterious plastic box. (“I have never seen one of these intact before. This is the famous Dead Sea Tupperware.”)

  Other improvised lines would remain on the cutting-room floor, like Robin’s reaction to discovering a brassiere. “He looks at it and goes, ‘Look at this, it’s a double slingshot,’” Goldberg said. “‘Look at this, it’s a double yarmulke.’ And then he turns and he goes, ‘Mmm, I should have called her.’ I took some subversive pleasure in realizing as we were working on it that nobody had ever seen this kind of humor in a Disney film before. You feel a little bit naughty: ‘Ooo, I wonder if we’re going to get away with this.’”

  By the end of the summer of 1991, Robin had finished his work on both Aladdin and Hook. As a parting gift to Spielberg, he gave the director a painting of Peter Pan by the artist Greg Hildebrandt and a book of his illustrations, and Spielberg returned the gesture with a grateful farewell letter. “Your work in HOOK is flogging brilliant!” the director wrote. “There is a consistency of character development from the bookish and selfish Peter Banning to the explosively optimistic and liberated Peter Pan that can only be described as one watches the movie. I don’t think I’ve ever met in my life any actor, producer or other director who is as dedicated, as involved, as passionate, and as hardworking as you have been on HOOK … it has been an honor working with you. MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON was no fluke—you have done nothing but grow and explode out of that comic canister into one of the best actors in America today.”

  Meanwhile, The Fisher King came out in limited release on September 20, after a delay from a planned May opening, in the hope that a later date might keep it out of competition with flashier summer entertainments and would better position it for year-end awards consideration. The reviews were largely positive, and so enthusiastically disposed to the film itself, that it was easy to miss the praise for Robin’s performance. In Newsweek, David Ansen called The Fisher King “a wild, vital stew of a movie, an attempt to translate the myth of the Holy Grail to the harsh urban realities of contemporary New York.” In passing, he mentioned that Robin “puts all his mercurial comic brilliance in the service of his character (well, almost all).” A New York Times review by Janet Maslin praised the film for being “capable of great charm whenever its taste for chaos is kept in check.” Robin, in the role of “a gentle soul who has been left homeless and driven half-mad by grief, is allowed to chatter aimlessly, cavort naked in Central Park and generally go overboard.” But when he is not “off on any of his various tangents,” she said he “brings a disarming warmth and gentleness to the fiendishly comic Parry.”

  Glenn Close, Robin’s costar from The World According to Garp and one of many celebrity visitors to the set of Hook (where she made a cameo as a pirate), wrote to Robin to tell him how moved she had been by his work in The Fish
er King. “You held my heart in the palm of your hand—broke it—and then put it back together better than before,” she said in her letter. “It is a truly healing movie … and we’re all in such desperate need for healing things.” For the first three weekends of its wider release, The Fisher King was number one at the U.S. box office.

  Robin made his last promotional appearances for the film at the end of September, and with those commitments fulfilled, he had finally earned his freedom to go home to San Francisco and assume the role he’d been wanting to play for months, as Father Man. It was just in time, too: on November 25, Marsha gave birth to their second child, a son they named Cody Alan.

  During the final weeks of Marsha’s pregnancy, Robin sat for a series of conversations with Playboy, later published in the magazine as a single interview, in which he took stock of his career to this point. He saw that he now had the leverage to pick projects that could keep him closer to home, to be nearer to his family, and to have Marsha involved in his work as deeply as possible. “She makes sure everything runs,” he said. “Not that I have a huge entourage.… I mean, she’s not an entourage. [As interviewer] ‘How many in your entourage?’ [Pompously] ‘Well, the family. Zelda, who I can write off as a roadie.’ [As the child Zelda] ‘Daddy, can’t carry bags, bags heavy.’”