I had known other Fondas. My daughter Lori went to school with Jane’s niece Bridget from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I never had the pleasure of meeting the great Henry Fonda, but I hung out with Bridget’s dad, Peter, at school events and even before that in the early days of Hollywood, when he ran with Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. I wasn’t in the movie Easy Rider, but I was in another movie around that time called Psych-Out. I played a plainclothes narcotics agent and won the role because I owned a dark suit. I got to arrest Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern.
When we started production on Georgia Rule, Jane and I both had new hips. We talked about what it was like to go through hip replacement surgery and rehabilitation. This is what happens when you get older in Hollywood. You schmooze about the replacing of body parts and which doctors you liked best. My hip was replaced by the same doctor who replaced James Brolin’s hip. My wife slept on a cot in the hospital room, and so did Barbra Streisand for James. While I was recovering at the hospital, James and my friend Jeff Wald, Streisand’s manager, sent me a pair of tap shoes to inspire me to get back up on my hip soon. It used to be that you met people at parties, nightclubs, or fancy restaurants. When you get older you meet them in orthopedic offices and doctors’ waiting rooms.
When we were filming Georgia Rule, Ted Turner came to visit Jane on the set. He was dapper and rich, just the type of man my dad wanted to be. Ted and Jane remained friends even though she’d divorced him in 2001. She liked to refer to him as her “favorite ex-husband.” The day Ted came to visit we talked about his baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, and then we gave him a good seat to watch us film a scene. Jane came over to me afterward and said that Ted was a little bored just sitting on the set, and asked if one of my assistants could take him out to lunch. I assigned someone, and they went to a nearby deli. My assistant said later he sang to her during lunch, which I thought was funny. I invited Ted to join us on the set for lunch another day, but Jane said he didn’t like craft service food. Whenever he visited, though, it put Jane in a good mood, and I liked that. Jane has had some highs and lows in her life and career, but smiling and happy is her best angle.
In terms of acting, Jane is like a pro from the early days of Hollywood. We had trouble finding footage to put in the gag reel because she never made any mistakes. She always knew her lines and exact motivation, for a scene from the script or for lines that I just wrote on the fly. She has such a strong, disciplined way of acting that nothing throws her off. The only thing that ever went wrong was that sometimes her dog, Tulea, would run onto the set and ruin a shot. So we got her in the gag reel that way, by featuring her runaway dog. To play Jane’s daughter I cast Felicity Huffman, who’d also been in Raising Helen. I told Felicity, “I killed you off in the last movie. In this movie you get to live.”
Lindsay Lohan was set to play Jane’s granddaughter and Felicity’s daughter. That was good news and that was bad news. I knew from the beginning that I would have my hands full with Lindsay, because the press was already floating reports about her being difficult. However, I felt confident that I could manage her, just as I had done with other young actors before and after rehab. Her casting was what got the movie financed, and we needed her. Her problems, however, ballooned slowly. In the beginning she would show up late so we would shoot around her until she arrived. Then she would be slow to come out of her trailer. I tried joking with her and said, “We are all taking bets on when you will come out. So if you want your friend to win the money, come out at ten fifteen A.M.” She would smile and come running out of her trailer at that exact moment. But every time we figured out a way to help and support Lindsay, things grew worse: Some days she wouldn’t show up for hours or would call in sick. The cast and crew knew that she wasn’t sick at all because we’d seen her on the news at a nightclub the evening before.
She was young and vulnerable and reminded me so much of the other young actresses I had worked with. Like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Juliette Lewis in The Other Sister, Lindsay was so talented. But unlike Julia and Juliette, Lindsay was still struggling inside to build a career and carve out her own identity. A few weeks into the movie I had to have a heart-to-heart with her.
“I see you on television sometimes and hear about you going to nightclubs,” I said.
“Are you going to yell at me? Everybody yells at me,” she said.
“No. I’m not going to yell at you. One night I’d like to go out with you and see what goes on,” I said.
She thought that was funny, so she invited me to go out on the town with her girlfriends. All they talked about was boys. We went to a fancy restaurant called Koi, and I met lots of sons and daughters of Hollywood executives, fortunately not my own children. We went to nightclubs and hung out. I thought I was hip and happening until Lindsay said, “We don’t wear Velcro shoes like you, so try to keep your feet under the table.” So much for trying to fit in with the in-crowd.
Lindsay was able to balance her work on the set with her nightlife, until her nightlife began to affect her job and cause additional delays on the set. The pressure to stay within budget was even greater on this film because a small independent company was financing us. We tried to cover for Lindsay, but eventually James Robinson had had enough. He wrote Lindsay a personal letter, scolding her for her unprofessional behavior. The letter was leaked to the press, and our set was hounded by more media attention than we knew how to handle. Lindsay and I discussed what she should do to make peace again, and I suggested that she apologize to the crew for delaying production. She told everyone she was sorry, and we got back to work. After that she would still be late sometimes, but she didn’t miss any full days of work.
The paparazzi, however, wouldn’t leave us alone. This was the hardest picture I ever made in terms of press attention. Photographers would be literally hiding in the trees stalking Lindsay. I hired extra security, but still we got very little relief. Sometimes I had to whisper the word action because I didn’t want them to know we were filming. Lindsay couldn’t go anywhere without it being reported in the newspapers or online. The most down-to-earth I ever saw her was the day she got a new car and locked her keys inside. One of the production assistants helped her call the car’s security support phone number and ask them to unlock the car. The technician asked to speak to the owner of the car. Lindsay said, “I’m Lindsay Lohan.” The technician didn’t believe she was the tabloids’ own Lindsay Lohan. We went back and forth getting different people on the phone to support her claim. It was very funny, and while it was happening Lindsay looked just like a regular young girl who had locked her keys in her car.
Lindsay was insecure about her hair and freckles, so we used a tanning solution to at least cover the freckles. She ended up looking so suntanned that I had to add a line about that, to admit we knew she looked tanner than everybody else in town. Freckles weren’t the only thing she was covering. The movie proved hard for her emotionally. She was trying to concentrate on her acting career while at the same time trying to live her life and be with her girlfriends. I worried that Lindsay had no support system to provide her with balance and guidance. She had a driver name Jazz who helped us keep track of her, but not much more support. On-screen her acting was wonderful. Inside I worried she was falling apart.
One day Jane tried to talk to her, actress to actress. Jane has had well-publicized struggles with eating disorders and self-esteem. She wrote about them beautifully in her memoir, My Life So Far, which my wife and I both loved. Jane warned Lindsay that if she continued on this road of late-night partying, she was going to get into trouble. Sometimes, however, you have to live and learn, and I think that’s what Lindsay was doing. There was no amount of warning or wisdom that Jane could provide that would prevent the legal battles that lay ahead for Lindsay.
With the paparazzi present wherever we went, the crew and Lindsay bonded. We had someone make a different iPod playlist each day. Felicity liked the Pointer Sisters, Jane the sound track from her movie 9
to 5, and Lindsay was partial to a band called Fisherspooner. Despite all the Lindsay drama, I had to focus on directing the movie. I didn’t have the right ending, so I had to shoot an extra scene after we had wrapped. Morgan Creek was very supportive and gave me money for the additional day. I shot a scene with Lindsay getting out of the shower with a towel around her head. Her hair was already a different color than it had been when we started the movie, but no one knew it because it was tucked under the towel. I often find towels very helpful in re-shoots.
Georgia Rule was probably the most emotional movie I ever directed, aside from The Other Sister. The problem was that moviegoers didn’t like Lindsay’s character, and worse, they didn’t like seeing press coverage of her running around partying all the time. I would ask people if they had seen my new movie, and they would say, “I don’t want to see that slutty Lindsay Lohan in anything.” That was hard for all of us to hear about a film we had worked so hard on, and about a girl we liked. We knew she had problems, but we also knew that her star power was what had gotten the movie made. It reminded me of audiences boycotting Jane Fonda’s movies because of her position on the war in Vietnam. People were slamming Lindsay for her real life, rather than letting her film work stand on its own. The movie was also difficult to market. Georgia Rule was not for teenagers, yet teens liked Lohan from her other movies. To market a film about incest starring Lindsay to adult audiences was challenging, to say the least. Also critics don’t like it when you take a risk with your career and status. I got slammed for making a movie about incest when I was famous for being Mr. Happy Days.
At the time Jane lived in both Santa Fe and Atlanta and worked on a number of charities for women’s issues. We had a big premiere for the movie in Atlanta to help raise money for her charitable causes. Ted was there, and we hosted an auction. I flew in from Los Angeles but got a terrible case of sciatica on the airplane. At the premiere Jane had to help me get into the limousine. There I was standing in between the famous Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman at the premiere, and I was in utter agony. Sometimes life just gets in the way of show business and you have to do the best you can to get through it. But I wouldn’t have missed that premiere for anything. It was exciting to see our movie on the big screen in a room filled with the movers and shakers from Atlanta.
The New York Times never lets me forget that I come from television. In his review of Georgia Rule, A. O. Scott wrote, “The man who brought us Laverne & Shirley ventures into territory better suited to Todd Solondz or Lifetime, and, as you might imagine, he has some trouble finding a consistent and appropriate tone.” It had been more than twenty years since Laverne & Shirley went off the air, and I was still getting knocked around for its success. Ultimately, the reviewer recognized that the performances of Jane and Lindsay were the biggest takeaway from the movie. Scott wrote, “The movie really belongs to Ms. Fonda and Ms. Lohan, actresses whose formidable skill is often underestimated and overshadowed by off-screen notoriety. Ms. Lohan in particular has been subjected recently to the prurient, punitive gaze of an Internet gossip culture that takes special delight in the humiliation of young women with shaky discipline and an appetite for fun.”
Lindsay has been in the press pretty much nonstop since we wrapped Georgia Rule. People say to me, “Why did you do a movie with Lindsay Lohan?” The truth is that without her there would have been no movie. Lindsay might be insecure about her hair and her freckles, but she is not one bit insecure about her acting. She knows she has talent, and she knows how to use it. I think figuring out how to live and keep herself safe is a much harder project for her.
Georgia Rule was released in 2007. Over the next few years I would act more, write more, and spend more time producing theater at the Falcon, including plays for children with my daughter, Lori, and her writing/directing partner Joseph Leo Bwarie. (Joe went on to great success starring as Frankie Valli in the touring production of Jersey Boys.) I also spent several years developing a Happy Days musical with composer Paul Williams, a show that eventually toured nationally and in Italy. I still read movie scripts and considered them, but I wasn’t rushing to do another one until the day I got a script called Valentine’s Day by Katherine Fugate, a writer known for her success on the television series Army Wives. When all is said and done, I am a man who believes in romance, happy endings, and people falling in love. So after I read Valentine’s Day I turned to my wife.
“Okay. I think I found my next movie,” I said.
“Does it have anything to do with an S and M island or possible incest?” Barbara asked.
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Then I think you should do it.”
24. VALENTINE’S DAY
Turning the Camera on Love and My Favorite Day of the Year
IHAVE WORKED IN Hollywood for so many years that many things don’t surprise me. I try to go with the flow. Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s wisdom. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m old. So when I was about to direct a movie called Valentine’s Day, and I read in the paper that our production company, New Line, had gone bankrupt, I thought, okay, here’s a new twist. It wasn’t, however, the end of the world. What happened was that half of the New Line people went to New York and the other half stayed in Los Angeles and merged under the Warner Bros. umbrella. New Line, led by Toby Emmerich, had just made a very popular picture called He’s Just Not That into You, so there was a good vibe about the company. The format of a romantic comedy with many stars featured in cameo parts seemed appealing to audiences. Valentine’s Day would be crafted in that vein, and I was tapped to direct. It would turn out to be one of the most memorable movie experiences of my career.
Ken Kwapis, a talented Ivy League type who happened to go to my alma mater, Northwestern, directed He’s Just Not That into You. I called Ken up and talked to him about what it was like to work with New Line. He was very positive about his production and gave me tips on juggling so many actors on the set every day. I always love connecting to a fellow Northwestern alum. Even though Ken went to Northwestern years after I did, we shared the camaraderie of people who can survive the ice-cold wind along Evanston’s lakeshore.
The New Line group was made up of young modern executives, none of whom were fat, short, or wore suits. They wore T-shirts and blue jeans and were a pleasure to work with. However, once I signed my deal I saw something odd about the list of producers and executives: There were no women. I said, “Not one female in the whole bunch? How can this be? It’s a romantic comedy. We need both sexes represented.” My regular line producer, Mario Iscovich, was busy doing another movie. Line producers are in charge of creating and maintaining the schedule and budget on a movie. New Line gave me a list of line producers, and I immediately chose Diana Pokorny.
“Have you worked with her before?” said one of the producers.
“No,” I said.
“Do you know her?” asked another male producer.
“Never heard of her. But she’s the only woman on the list, so I’m going with her,” I said.
“How can you hire someone you don’t know?” asked a producer.
“It doesn’t matter. I just need a woman in the mix,” I said.
Diana, a striking, no-nonsense single mom with two kids, turned out to be a great producer. I worked so well with her that I hired her to produce my next movie, New Year’s Eve. Also, my own executive assistant, Heather Hall, another top-notch lady, got her first associate producing credit on Valentine’s Day, and was a great help to me on the film.
Valentine’s Day, a romantic patchwork of stories about singles and couples all seeking love on Cupid’s holiday, came along at the time I was considering a movie called Senior Class with Bette Midler. Senior Class was about a couple who meet and fall in love while residing in an assisted living facility. We were trying to pair Bette with Richard Dreyfuss, Anthony Hopkins, or Jack Nicholson. I liked the script because I thought I could weave in a scene that would feature a senior softball league, like the one
I play in in Los Angeles. However, the deal for the film was moving along too slowly for the high-energy Bette. She got bored and decided to do her act in Las Vegas instead. With Senior Class on hold, I jumped at the script for Valentine’s Day because it was a done deal, ready to go with financing in place.
In my opinion the multistar movie concept did not start with He’s Just Not That Into You. The movie Love Actually was the first and most famous example of what you could achieve if you asked a bunch of big stars to work only a few days on a major motion picture. Movies can take weeks to film, so from an actor’s perspective shooting only a few days is appealing. I knew that the key to the ensemble cast was to get a few big names to commit early; then others would follow. I picked up the phone and called the biggest movie star I knew.
“Julia, will you be in Valentine’s Day? It would really help me, and it’s only for three days,” I said.
Yes was her answer. It had been ten years since our last film. She talked to her agent who later told me she had put it this way: “For someone who gave me my career, I can give him three days.” That made me smile. Before we signed Julia, many of the actors we liked turned us down. When word got out that Julia was in, suddenly actors were reconsidering their decisions. In fact, it was raining famous actors and actresses.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 27
