Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  At the close of the year, Robin was one of the prominent American actors to appear with the estimable British cast of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, a lavish, four-hour film adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy in which the director himself played the melancholy Prince of Denmark. The film, which harked back to the classical training that Robin had received at Juilliard (and which he often flaunted in his stand-up act), cast him as Osric, a minor character who arranges the fateful duel between Hamlet and his rival, Laertes. His great friend Billy Crystal also appeared briefly as the sardonic First Gravedigger, who reacquaints Hamlet with the skull of his old jester Yorick, “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy,” but he and Robin did not share any scenes together.

  For that opportunity, audiences would have to wait until the following spring. It was astonishing, in a sense, that the two comedians had never starred together in a film before. They were among the best known and most admired wisecrackers in the country, they were pals and confidants whose families vacationed together, they had the same management team, and they each had their own piece of the zeitgeist: Robin had his diverse range of film comedies and dramas, and Crystal had his regular gig as the smart-aleck emcee of the Academy Awards. Their annual Comic Relief specials with Whoopi Goldberg were rare opportunities to see what happened when their funny and facile minds were set against each other: usually, Robin would take a joke too far and Crystal would merrily bring it back within safe boundaries.

  Comic Relief played a crucial role in establishing the personas they played opposite each other. As Crystal described them, they were “bad boy and daddy.… He’ll look at me and say, ‘Dad, have I been bad?’ ‘Yes.’” (Robin jokingly said that explanation sounded like a phone-sex hotline.) They were their generation’s answer to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but with a twist: a double act with no straight man, where each competed to outdo the other, a give-and-take-and-give-and-take that could keep going right into the stratosphere.

  An opportunity presented itself with the 1983 French film Les Compères, about two mismatched men who team up to search for the son of a former lover, each believing that he is the boy’s father. Their remake, called Fathers’ Day, directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Crystal’s frequent collaborators Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, had been engineered for Crystal to play one of the prospective dads, a cynical lawyer, and for Robin to play the other, a suicidal writer.

  It was not a movie that Robin was eager to do, though he felt loyal to Crystal and was excited to work with him. But Robin also felt torn between the need to earn a living and the desire to work on movies that were meaningful to him. Steven Haft, his producer on Dead Poets Society, explained, “Some actors see themselves doing what they refer to as, ‘one for them, one for me.’ That place actors get where they’re stuck between the opportunity to make millions of dollars doing a commercial film, and wanting to do meaningful work, but realizing that the stuff that pays them the big bucks doesn’t get them Oscars.” In Robin’s case, Haft said, “There was always a script—always—on his desk that would have made him two to many millions at any given moment, and he didn’t always take them.”

  Often, the instances when Robin passed on those lucrative opportunities were signs of a quiet tug-of-war for control of his career. On one side stood his managers, who had been present for nearly every significant entry on his résumé going back to Mork & Mindy and who saw him principally as a commercial comedy star. On the other side was Marsha, who had become substantially intertwined in his decision-making process and who had a very different vision for her husband. Riding the momentum of Mrs. Doubtfire, she was setting up new films for Robin in which he would play less conventional, more noble characters; one of the projects she was pursuing for him would have cast Robin as Father Damien, the Catholic priest who treated lepers on Molokai.

  “He depended on her,” said their friend Lisa Birnbach. “Anything indie, basically, was something that she recommended he do. Marsha had his back in every way. It also made Marsha have to play the tough guy with everyone who wasn’t family. There were times I was a little scared of Marsha. And she was very protective.”

  Some friends of the couple said that, when push came to shove, Marsha just had better instincts than Robin’s own managers did. As Wendy Asher succinctly put it, “Every bad film he did, she told him not to do.”

  The making of Fathers’ Day proceeded like a comedy of contrasts for its two top-billed clowns, a real-life Odd Couple where Crystal’s fastidiousness came into frequent conflict with Robin’s unmannerly habits. Cheri Minns, Robin’s makeup artist, said that often in their trailers, “Billy would bring in some food, and put it down on the counter, and Robin would go over and pick something out with his fingers, and eat some of the food. Which was a Robin trait, but it drove Billy to distraction. Billy would go, ‘That’s my food.’ And Robin would say, ‘Oh, whatever—it’s okay, here.’ And Billy says, ‘No, I don’t want it now. You have it.’”

  While filming on the Warner Bros. studio lot, the actors would react very differently when spotted by the tour groups that whizzed by on golf carts. “If Robin saw them, he’d run out to greet the tourists and say hi and sign autographs,” Minns recalled. “Billy said, ‘Oh, crap. Now I have to go over there and talk to those people, or I’m going to look like an asshole.’” Crystal recalled the making of the movie as a frustratingly ad hoc process. “It was not a great experience, because the script was never really ready to shoot,” he said. “But because of everyone’s schedules, we had to make it at a certain time, and we were rewriting as we were going. I wasn’t sure that Ivan knew what to make of us sometimes, or how to get the best out of us.”

  To promote the film’s release in May 1997, Robin and Crystal were awkwardly shoehorned into an episode of Friends, doing shtick on a coffee-shop couch while the sitcom’s principal cast members looked on. They also made a joint appearance on The Tonight Show, where the host, Jay Leno, broke into laughter as he described the plot of Fathers’ Day to his audience. “It’s so stupid,” Leno said, before catching himself. “But it really works.” His faint praise made little difference: Fathers’ Day was slaughtered by the critics—in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern called it “a movie of implacable unfunniness”—and it ended up a box-office bomb, grossing only about $29 million.

  By that time, Robin was already on to his next project, a unique script that had taken an unusual path to reach him. For several years, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two young actors and childhood friends, had been working on a screenplay that they hoped would jump-start their careers. Drawing liberally from their upbringings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, their script, called Good Will Hunting, told the story of a disaffected young man from South Boston who, while working as a janitor in the corridors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is discovered to be a self-taught math prodigy. The novice screenwriters had always intended to star in the film themselves—Damon as Will, the title protagonist, and Affleck as his sarcastic Southie sidekick, Chuckie—but to do so, they knew they needed to include a supporting role for which they could cast a more bankable, name-brand star. For that purpose they created the character of Dr. Sean Maguire, a therapist mourning his dead wife, who comes to treat Will and, in doing so, is drawn out of his own loneliness. Though they had no specific actor in mind to play him, Affleck and Damon tried to write Maguire for a rugged A-lister like Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, or Morgan Freeman.

  Good Will Hunting was first acquired by Castle Rock Entertainment, then picked up by Miramax, the independent studio run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. There, it caught the interest of the director Gus Van Sant, who had made low-budget hits like Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and To Die For—films about drug abusers, male prostitutes, and a murderous meteorologist—and who saw Affleck and Damon’s script as possessing more mainstream appeal. Van Sant knew Robin from their abortive efforts to make The Mayor of Castro Street and thought he co
uld play the role of Dr. Maguire; Robin also got strong endorsements on the script from his CAA agents and from Marsha’s niece Jennifer, who was working as a production assistant on The Rainmaker, a legal thriller where she’d befriended Damon.

  Robin signed on to Good Will Hunting that March. He later described the screenplay as “layered and very moving, but in a very simple way,” and said that he saw the repressed Dr. Maguire, who at times gets so wound up that he threatens and even assaults Will, as a conduit for a type of rage he could not release in other roles. “It was great to tap into that anger with him and go, ‘Would I hurt him? Yeah. If you keep going,’” Robin explained. “‘You want to work? You want to really deal with who you are? Let’s talk. Or you want to sit here and spray musk all day? You can do that, but I don’t want to be around it.’ … It felt good to get the cojones to do that.”

  Robin’s time commitment to the project was brief, just a few weeks of filming in Boston and Toronto that May and June; for the film, which was budgeted at about $16 million total, he was paid about $3 million in salary—a steep cut from his usual asking price that was offset with a portion of the movie’s profits, if it earned any. He prepared thoroughly for the role, working closely with a dialect coach to learn the nuances of the working-class South Boston Irish accent and to master the mysterious vowel sound described in his notes as “a sound half-way between the a of ‘FAT’ and the ah of ‘FATHER.’”

  When Robin first traveled to Boston to begin rehearsals, Van Sant had the now-commonplace discovery that the actor was very different from the man he had expected. “He assumed this personality, which I’m not sure wasn’t always part of him, which was very down,” the director said. “He wasn’t Mr. Stand Up and Tell a Joke. And I thought that when we were doing the film, that there would be a lot more of that.” In fact, Van Sant said Robin could be needy for his approval once shooting started, and he never allowed rampant buffoonery to overwhelm his work.

  “He would go, ‘Yeah, yeah, boss. Was that not good?’” Van Sant recalled. “And I would say, ‘No, that was great. That was really great.’ And then we’d move on. And I would never really encourage him to go beyond. I never said, ‘But Robin, I thought you were really going to let it go, like Good Morning, Vietnam—like, let it go, baby!’ Because I thought maybe that would be the wrong thing to point him towards. Because it was really working, the way he was doing it.”

  Affleck and Damon had provided the Maguire character with a couple of emotional, award-baiting monologues. In one, delivered on a bench in the Boston Public Garden, he tells Will that his book learning is no substitute for Maguire’s life experience. (“I’d ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.”) In another, set in his office, Maguire excitedly reenacts Carlton Fisk’s twelfth-inning walk-off home run from Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, only to reveal that he missed the game so he could strike up a conversation with the woman who became his wife. “I gotta see about a girl,” as he put it.

  Robin performed these scenes with gusto, and, where he could, he added his own improvisational spins. When Maguire lovingly describes to Will the idiosyncratic qualities about his late wife that he did not expect to miss, it was Robin who came up with the detail that she used to fart in her sleep. That joke drew a laugh from Damon, so of course Robin kept going with it. “At one point—it’s not in the movie, they started laughing—he said, ‘I used to have to wake up and light a match,’” Affleck said. “And then Matt said, ‘Is that how she died?’ That’s what they’re laughing at, uproariously.” The finished film used Robin’s and Damon’s authentic reactions to this ad-libbed bit, though much of the dialogue that followed was not exactly appropriate for the scene. “At a certain point we were so far afield,” Damon said. “We went on this riff about farting that just got so insane that I think we were doing ourselves a disservice by the end of the day.”

  Robin also showed an unexpected intensity in a scene where he threatens Damon’s character not to disrespect his dead wife and, in doing so, forcefully grabs him by the throat. The actors performed the sequence so many times that, in the final takes (including the one used in the film), makeup had to be applied to Damon’s neck to cover the skin left raw and bloodied from Robin’s repeated chokeholds. “Robin really got upset for this moment,” Damon said. “I don’t know what he was thinking about. But he couldn’t stop grabbing me really hard.”

  In a more serendipitous moment, Robin supplied the film with what became its final spoken line, on one of his last days of shooting in Boston. For the scene, which would precede the closing shot of Will driving off to California to pursue his girlfriend Skylar (Minnie Driver), Robin was merely supposed to open his letterbox and discover Will’s farewell note, which concludes, “I gotta see about a girl.” As Damon recalled that day’s shoot, “We must have done twenty takes. He went into the house, folded the letter up, put it back in the letterbox, shut the door. And on one of the takes, in the middle, he said, ‘Son of a bitch stole my line.’ And went back in the house. I remember grabbing Gus, like, ‘Holy shit! Fuck—what did he just—that is great!’ And then he did like ten more and he never repeated that line again.”

  Robin had a shaky start to his fall movie season in 1997, starting with the November release of Flubber, a remake of Disney’s The Absent-minded Professor in which he played the Fred MacMurray role and which he’d filmed close to home at the former Naval Station Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The reviews were pitiful, even for a children’s movie (“overproduced, mechanical and resoundingly unfunny,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote).

  Good Will Hunting, which received a limited release in December and opened nationally the following January, was greeted with mixed responses, both wildly enthusiastic and negative, sometimes in the same review. Though critical attention focused largely on Damon and Affleck, the photogenic young stars making a capable screenwriting debut, there was often blame as well as praise for Robin that followed. The Associated Press wrote that the film “isn’t terrible,” and that Robin “isn’t at his best when he tries to be sincere,” dismissing the Maguire character as “just a saltier version of the do-gooders Williams played in Awakenings and Dead Poets Society.” In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote that Affleck and Damon “lack the craft” to give Maguire “speeches that aren’t so fake-sensitive it’s amazing Will doesn’t laugh the healer out of the room.” Robin, the critic wrote, “has played a conventionally understanding if eccentric mentor so often that his presence in a film like this has become a tip-off that it’s going to be unremittingly middle of the road. The practice has made Williams better at the part, but his is still the most stodgy and unconvincing aspect of an otherwise lively film.”

  Then there were publications like the New York Times, where Janet Maslin wrote that Damon and Affleck had crafted themselves “a smart and touching screenplay, then seen it directed with style, shrewdness and clarity” by Van Sant; in doing so, they had created for Robin “the rare serious role that takes full advantage of his talents,” one in which he was “wonderfully strong and substantial.” Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal said flat-out that it was “the finest performance” of Robin’s career. Billy Crystal personally regarded it as his favorite of all of Robin’s screen roles. “I don’t see him in that part—I just see that guy, Maguire,” Crystal said. “Robin, for all of his joy, had this built-in loneliness about him at the same time that made him so appealing in parts like that. That strength, with a little bit of weakness underneath it.”

  For a time that winter, there were three different movies featuring Robin (the last was Deconstructing Harry, which opened the week after Good Will Hunting) all competing for audiences’ attention—no easy feat when the James Cameron juggernaut Titanic was dominating the box office. Yet even at a significantly smaller scale than that legendary ocean liner, Good Will Hunting proved to be a sturdy, stalwart vehicle. From its first weekend in wi
de release, Good Will Hunting would spend two months in the number two, three, or four slot at the box office, taking in more than $50 million by the end of January and $100 million by the end of March. It concluded its run in the spring of 1998 having sold more than $133 million in tickets, which meant that Robin, with his profit participation in the movie, was likely to earn as much as $15 million to $20 million from it.

  Very quickly, the film and Robin’s performance emerged as formidable contenders for several prestigious awards. At the end of December, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, though he lost to Burt Reynolds, who played the ornery father figure to a menagerie of porn-movie stars in Boogie Nights. (Robin still managed a memorable appearance at the Golden Globe ceremony when Christine Lahti, a winner for the TV series Chicago Hope, was in the bathroom when her name was called, so he crashed the stage and began to riff in mock-Spanish.) In February, Good Will Hunting was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture; one for Van Sant as director; one for Affleck and Damon’s screenplay; one for Damon as Best Actor; and one for Robin as Best Supporting Actor, the first time he’d been nominated in that category. Then in March, two weeks before the Oscars ceremony, Robin won the Screen Actors Guild Award, and odds-makers believed the Academy Award race was a neck-and-neck competition between Reynolds and him.

  On March 23, 1998, the night of the Oscars ceremony, Robin was seated two rows from the stage of the Shrine Auditorium, on the aisle, with Marsha to his right and his mother, Laurie, one seat to the right of her. Crystal, hosting the program for his sixth time, gave Robin a musical shout-out in an opening song that poked fun at Damon and Affleck’s youth (“You’re a hit, it’s clear to see / and you haven’t yet hit puberty”), but Robin barely reacted; his face was frozen in a thin smile of geniality and nervousness as he waited to hear whether he’d prevail on his fourth nomination in ten years.