Before Mork & Mindy was canceled in 1982, we had some wonderful acclaim. In 1978 I was named one of People magazine’s most intriguing people. And in March 1979, Robin was on the cover of Time magazine. I had four of the five top programs—Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, and Angie—Three’s Company was the only series I did not produce that was in the top five rated shows consistently. But even a great show can last only so long.
When I look back on Mork & Mindy, there is one story that epitomizes for me what the show was all about and why it was such a success. I directed one of the first episodes, and we had three cameras, which was typically the number used to shoot a half-hour sitcom. One of the cameramen was an industry veteran name Sam Rosen, who was in his late seventies and had worked on all of my television shows. Sam was positioned at Camera A while other operators were at Cameras B and C. We filmed a scene of Robin entering his apartment in which he ran around the set performing dialogue from the script but also ad-libbing, as well as leaping and jumping, performing his heart out.
“Cut,” I yelled when the scene was done. Then I turned to Sam. “Did you get that?” I asked him.
“He never came by here,” said Sam, drily.
“Then you have to move the camera. Robin is such a genius!” I said, frustrated we had missed the magic.
“If he’s such a genius, he should learn to hit his marks,” said Sam.
Immediately, the other producers and I hired a fourth camera to follow Robin. It was clear our traditional camera model was not going to be enough to capture his brilliance, his ad-libs, and his physical humor. A fourth camera would be more expensive, but it was worth the money to capture all the different sides to Robin. We would save money on other things, but when Robin performed as Mork from Ork, you didn’t want to miss a beat.
Nearly thirty years after Mork & Mindy went off the air, I went to see Robin in New York City, where he was starring in a play called Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. After the show, in which he was terrific, my wife and I went backstage. When we entered his dressing room, Robin gestured toward me and announced to the others, “This is the man who gave me my first big job.” Robin always knows how to make me smile.
10. YOUNG DOCTORS IN LOVE
Directing an Outrageous Hospital Comedy as My First Movie
AT THE AGE of forty-eight I wanted to direct a movie. But you can’t really wake up one day a television producer and become a movie director the next day—particularly when you are forty-eight years old. The truth was that nobody really wanted to give me a movie to direct. Most people in Hollywood wanted me to keep producing television shows. In Hollywood if you do something well that makes money, people say, “Do it again!” They don’t say things like “experiment,” “try something new,” “see what else you are good at.” These are things that would be considered risky, and in show business to take a risk could mean to lose money. While people in general don’t want to lose money, in Hollywood that aversion is even greater because when people lose money, people lose jobs, too.
I, however, was ready to take a personal risk. Brandon Stoddard, an executive and a fan of my TV shows, had been doing Movies of the Week for ABC Television. The network asked him to start up a major motion picture division. He came to me with a complicated comedy script called Young Doctors in Love, written by two sitcom writers, Michael Elias and Rich Eustis. It was a satirical and romantic hospital comedy in the same vein as the movie Airplane! It wasn’t great, but it was mine to direct. And it was the only script I had been offered, so I jumped at the chance. Without a studio or group of executives to come out in favor of my decision, only my agent, Joel Cohen, and my wife, Barbara, encouraged me. So to help support me during my adventure in directing, I gathered a group of aspiring directors to be my support system: Rob Reiner, my ex–brother-in-law; my sister Penny; and Jim Brooks, a television producer also trying to break into movie directing. I decided that we would look at each other’s rough cuts, or rough drafts during the editing process, and offer critique and guidance.
Young Doctors in Love starred Sean Young and Michael McKean, with cameos from a bevy of ABC’s most popular soap opera stars, including Demi Moore from General Hospital. Sean was an up-and-coming star who had made a name for herself in the hot movie Blade Runner. Michael I knew well from his years playing Lenny in Laverne & Shirley. As it was my first film, I was hoping to be paired with a veteran producer. However, the production company signed me with a brand-new producer named Jerry Bruckheimer. I didn’t know it at first, but how lucky could I get? Jerry would go on to become one of the most successful blockbuster movie producers of all time. At the time all I knew was that he was there to support and protect me every step of the way, wearing his crisp blue jeans and tweed blazer. I also had an incredible cast of new and talented actors, many of whom went on to have big careers as well. Imagine directing your first movie with a supporting cast that included Harry Dean Stanton, Hector Elizondo, Pamela Reed, Crystal Bernard, and Michael Richards (later Kramer on Seinfeld).
I met Hector at my house, where I hosted a Saturday morning basketball game. I had also seen him in a play called Sly Fox opposite George C. Scott on Broadway. From the moment I met Hector I saw him as the world’s most versatile actor because of his range as well as his wide and varied collection of toupees. Hector was an actor with the look of everyman. He stood tall and wise like a Spaniard but was really a Puerto Rican drummer and dancer from the streets of New York. In Young Doctors in Love, I cast Hector as a gangster on the run disguised in a dress through most of the movie. Some actors wouldn’t touch a part in a dress, but Hector was fearless about his image. He would do whatever the acting job called for.
With my cast set I was excited to get behind the camera on my first feature. However, the first week of preproduction I was exhausted, and the reason was simple: I was smoking too many cigarettes and not eating enough. I had been trying to quit smoking for a long time, for my health and my family. Once a year I promised myself to stop smoking on my son’s January 17 birthday, but by January 19, I was smoking again. So as I began my first movie at the age of forty-eight, I was also losing my battle to quit smoking.
I smoked around my kids. I smoked in the backyard. I smoked in my office. I smoked in the car. I smoked before, during, and after meals. At the height of my smoking I was up to four packs a day. I would light cigarettes and then smoke a few puffs and then snub them out when they got in the way of my writing or typing or eating. I didn’t smoke them to the bone or save the butts because that was too much effort. I smoked Pall Malls and Larks with filters because they were supposed to be better for your health, as if there was such a thing. Even when I was sick I smoked, usually Newports or Kool menthols because they smelled more medicinal. I would drive my kids to school and light up at 7:30 in the morning. My five-year-old daughter Kathleen would say with a scolding tone, “Daddy, you are smoking again! You said you were going to stop!” Smoking was the bane of my existence. So after trying to quit on and off by myself, I decided to seek professional help.
The first place I went was the Schick Stop Smoking Program. I would stop smoking for a few days and then light up again. The Schick people wrote on my intake card that I was “incorrigible.” I tried herbs. I tried chewing gum. I tried hypnotism. I tried patches. I tried everything under the sun, but nothing seemed to curb my desire to remain a devoted smoker. Then one day on the set of Young Doctors in Love, I met a young actress named Carol Williard, who played a nurse in the movie. We were talking while waiting for the cinematographer to set up a shot. She mentioned that she worked part-time as a smoking therapist. I asked if she could help me. She was also working at the time with Henry Winkler and Johnny Carson, and said she would take me on as a client, too.
The first thing she made me do was carry a pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of my button-down shirt every place I went. I could smoke a cigarette at any time I wanted to, but the point was that I was choosing not to smoke. The physical addiction
eventually goes away, but the habit takes longer. When I was starting to direct my first movie seemed the worst time to quit smoking and I just couldn’t do it. But Carol and I continued to talk on the phone about how to cut down my smoking during the movie. We talked about how much I didn’t need the cigarettes and how much healthier I would be eventually without them. She acted pretty well in the movie, too.
The first location was a night shoot, and I was very nervous. We started at 10:00 P.M. and shot until 10:00 A.M. The first shot I had to complete was of a café awning held up by four posts. In the scene Sean Young is supposed to get dizzy, fall into the poles, and knock the awning to the ground, covering all of the customers. It was a tricky scene to direct and it took me a few tries, but I was able to get it right. If I had known, I never would have picked such a difficult scene to be my first, nor would I have chosen to do a night shoot on my first day. It was too grueling. But what kept me going was that my friends and family visited me throughout the night; they lifted my spirits and lowered the stress.
One of my favorite visitors that night was the director Francis Coppola. He came to the set and put his arm around me, which boosted my popularity with the cast and crew. I thought he was going to share some überintellectual, meaningful wisdom that only a seasoned director could give me. Instead he said these words: “Change your shoes a lot, Garry. Your feet are going to hurt. So bring a couple different pairs to the set and change them.” So his advice had less to do with art and more to do with the comfort of standing on your feet all day long. He was right. He also gave me one other piece of valuable advice. He said if I ever found that I needed something essential to my story, like a piece of equipment or even the pivotal casting of an actor, and the studio wouldn’t pay for it, then I should pay for it out of my own pocket. I honestly never heard that concept before. I never paid for anything on Happy Days out of my own pocket. I always asked Paramount, and they did it or not. I soon learned that movies were different and in many ways more personal statements than television. If you had a vision for your movie, Francis said, you had to be willing to defend it and possibly pay for it, too.
In my attempt to make everyone my friend on the set, I wore a different major league baseball jacket each day of the shoot, and then I rotated them back. I figured someone on the set would be a fan of the team each day, and I would have my secretary Diane or the set photographer take a photo of us together. I did make some new friends, but the working pace of my first movie blew me away. The crew lights a scene for an hour and then they want you to shoot it in five minutes. I didn’t quite understand that the bottom line on a movie is to stay on schedule no matter what. One day I went into my trailer, shut the door, and couldn’t come out. I wasn’t trying to cause a fuss. I was simply paralyzed, unable to continue. My secretary called my wife, who rushed over to the set. Barbara entered my trailer and found me lying on the bed.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m exhausted. I can’t think.”
“Fight through it. Do you want an ice cream sandwich or a Fudgsicle?”
Barbara knew that ice cream was and still remains my favorite treat and an easy distraction.
“I don’t want anything,” I said. “I’m too tired to even eat.”
I knew I was sounding like a child, because that was how I felt, like an overly tired kid.
“You have to get through this movie,” she said. “People are counting on you.”
My wife, forever the clinical nurse, is not a person to dwell on anything. She is from the school of the stiff upper lip: Wash your face off and get a strong cup of coffee to fix any problem, night or day.
“I’m not in the right shape,” I said. “I’m scared again all the time and I don’t have the right energy. Maybe I’m not meant to be a movie director.”
“We will decide that later, but right now get up, splash some water on your face, and get back out to your crew. They are waiting for you.”
And I did. I muddled through the picture, each day trying to stay positive and figure out the job as I went along. I had directed episodes of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, but the length of the days on a movie set was nothing like in television. I could smoke and eat candy bars and produce television shows and then go to sleep. But you can’t do that and direct a movie. You have to work harder and longer hours and spend all of your meals and waking moments on the set directing, thinking, making decisions that count and cost money. I realized very early on that in order to keep my head above water, I needed to find a mentor. I needed someone on the set I could turn to for guidance and support. I found that person in our production designer, Polly Platt, a pretty, petite woman who knew more about movies at the time than any man I had met.
Polly had been married for years to the director Peter Bogdanovich and had worked with Orson Welles. So she had career and life experience with crazy directors. She had worked on dozens of movies, including The Last Picture Show, The Bad News Bears, and A Star Is Born. She knew the movie business inside and out. She said when she met me that she thought I would make a good director because I was tall. A lot of directors are short, she said, and didn’t date well in high school. They put all of their love fantasies on the screen, and do it badly. She thought because I was tall I must have dated well in high school, and therefore would direct more appealing mainstream love stories. This is the kind of wonderful logic Polly deals in. During the movie, I would turn to her whenever I was confused and needed advice from a person wiser than myself. We soon developed a not-so-subtle shorthand. Whenever I asked her if something was working and she made a loud gagging noise, I knew I was making a mistake.
One day I went in to pitch her a new idea. “So I think I will shoot this love scene on a lake. And while the lovers are talking, a beautiful sailboat will go by,” I said.
Polly began to make the loud gagging noise. “No,” she said. “No sailboats.”
“Why not? Don’t you think a sailboat will be pretty?” I asked.
“Who cares about pretty? It’s not practical. A sailboat takes too much time to turn around for the next take. You have to shoot it a few times,” she said very matter-of-factly.
“Then what should I do?”
“Get a motorboat,” she said. “A motorboat turns around fast!”
Polly understood what I grew to understand, too: A director has to stay on schedule, and anything that costs too much time is not worth it. Even with the guidance I got from Polly, there was just so much for me to learn. I didn’t know about rain or cover sets—backup sets to shoot a scene when another scene was compromised because of rain or illness or whatever. I didn’t know when to use a crane shot. Jerry Paris, the longtime director on Happy Days, did give me another good piece of advice: “When in doubt, take a walk.” He gave me permission to pause and leave the set whenever I needed a moment to think. He said that just a quick walk around the block could help me stop feeling overwhelmed.
One day I was feeling way out of my league. A scene was not working and I didn’t know what to do. I told the crew that I was going for a quick walk. On that walk I realized something significant: I was not going to be able to show my cast and crew what a great director I was because the reality was that I was not a great director. I was a director with the best intentions, but I was not even a good director yet. The reason the producers had hired me to direct the script was that I could make it funny.
I went back, and I told the cameraman to get me the widest lens he had in his truck. I didn’t even know the proper name of the lens yet. I just told him to get me the biggest one. Then we shot the scene I was having trouble with. Only this time I had actor Gary Friedkin, a little person who was playing a doctor, enter the scene and try to hang up a telephone bolted to the wall while regular dialogue was going on in the foreground. Gary was too short, so he had to jump and then slide a gurney along the wall to slam-dunk the phone. The scene proved to be one of the best comedy scenes in the whole movie. Taking
my walk around the block definitely gave me time to pause and re-create this scene in order to make it work. After we filmed the scene the cast and crew seemed to look at me with a hint more respect in their eyes. Even our producer Jerry Bruckheimer patted me on the back and said, “That was funny!”
After we wrapped the shooting of Young Doctors in Love, I began editing my first feature film. It was then that my exhaustion really set in. I was almost taken to the hospital one day. Another day Bruckheimer came to me with a script for the next movie he was going to produce. It was called Flashdance. I couldn’t even consider the script, however, because I was so tired. He wanted to shoot Flashdance right away, so he went with another director. (Was I sad later? Sure. Who wouldn’t have wanted to direct a hit like Flashdance? However, at the time it would have been impossible for me to move immediately on to another movie. I didn’t have the stamina or experience. That would come much later.) I returned to the editing room and started drinking nutrition shakes to try to give myself energy and boost my immune system, but nothing helped. I started to lose weight and looked thinner than I had ever been. I was basically working hours that were too long and smoking too many cigarettes. Chain smoking never gives a person the energy he needs or deserves.
To make matters worse, while I was editing Young Doctors in Love, a real-life situation came into play. My mother got sick and slipped into a coma. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for many years, but things grew worse quickly during the end of my movie. I went to visit her in the hospital while she was in the coma. I had read in a magazine that when Dustin Hoffman’s mother was in a coma, he squeezed her hand and she squeezed back, and that was how they communicated. But when I squeezed my mother’s hand, she did not squeeze back. She died that Christmas while I was on a break from the movie celebrating the holidays with my family in Hawaii. I missed her, but her mind had slipped away from us many years earlier. I lost my mother, but I always knew she would leave me with her greatest assets: her biting sense of humor and superior comic timing. She was the Lucille Ball of the Grand Concourse, and to this day whenever I write a joke or punch up a scene, I know I’m using the humor tools my mother gave to me.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 14
