The biggest problem we had right away was casting. We didn’t have anyone. I was told if I didn’t put together a cast quickly, the movie might not be made and our financing would go to another film. However, I never lost faith. I knew that once I attracted a few high-profile actors, I could attract more. I tried to think of an actor I could call personally and ask to be in the movie. I knew my sister had worked with Robert De Niro in Awakenings, which I considered Penny’s best movie. De Niro is such a heavy hitter I thought he might be the perfect actor to start with. I got his phone number, and on a Sunday afternoon I called him and basically said, “Come shoot with me for five days in New York and we’ll have some laughs.” He was in the mood to laugh and said “Yes.” Penny later told him the part was dramatic, but it took place in a bed, so he wouldn’t have to move around a lot.
Before his first day on the set, I asked Penny if she had any advice on directing De Niro. She said, “He doesn’t like shouting. So don’t stand at the monitor and call out to him. Whispering is better for him.” He also didn’t like pranks. I found out that 2011, the year we started New Year’s Eve, was the thirty-fifth anniversary of his movie Taxi Driver. The producers thought for the gag reel De Niro might be willing to look into the mirror of the hospital room we were shooting in and utter his famous line “You looking at me?” But he wouldn’t do it even for the gag reel. He’s a shy, introspective, serious, and dedicated actor. He is not a prankster. A few days later, however, he did two pranks for the gag reel just to show me he could.
Even with De Niro casting was coming together slowly. I heard that a deal was on the table to get the rock star Jon Bon Jovi. I was excited, but I needed to hear back from him so I could start looking for an actress to cast opposite him. Frustrated that I still hadn’t heard anything, I called Penny again for help. “Penny, you know Bon Jovi. Will you call him up and see if he’s going to say yes or no to my picture?” Penny called back in an hour to tell me she said, “Are you going to do my brother’s movie or not?” Bon Jovi said “Yes,” and then I knew how to proceed. Never underestimate the power of your sister.
With Bon Jovi in place we went after another A-list star: Halle Berry. She initially accepted the part of the ex-girlfriend chef to Bon Jovi’s rock star character. However, the day before she was supposed to come to the set, Halle called and said she couldn’t make it. She was involved in a custody case involving her daughter in California, and the judge wouldn’t let her leave the state. As luck would have it, she was free a few weeks later, so we decided to cast her in another part: the nurse opposite De Niro. Ultimately, I think it was a better part for her life and her acting talents. So file that under the heading “Sometimes the casting gods are on your side and make things come out better than expected.”
Working with Halle Berry was one of the highlights of the movie for me. She was so happy to be working and not stuck inside a courtroom. She rarely went to her trailer to hide or to rest. Instead, she preferred to hang out on the set and chat with the cast and crew. Even with all of the drama going on in her personal life, she looked beautiful, and we did our best to help her cheer up. There is a scene at the end of the movie when she gets all dressed up for New Year’s Eve and then walks through a hospital hallway. I noticed all the extras were acting pretty blasé about seeing her character walk by them, as if they saw this kind of thing every day. I said, “People! Are you crazy? A beautiful girl walks by in a great dress. You have to react!”
By the end of her time with us, Halle was so relaxed she was even up for a prank or two. We had balloons from another scene on the set, and she sucked some helium and did a funny scene with a Minnie Mouse voice. She was also a big hit in our gag reel, where we featured a few blooper scenes in which she broke down in giggles. The bottom line was that she rose to the challenge and gave 100 percent in her acting with De Niro. There is a scene in which she cries with her boyfriend, and when you watch that scene you just know that she was born to become a movie star. Also, having served in the army, I like to acknowledge our servicemen in our movies.
For years I have made it clear that I like shooting in Los Angeles. But on New Year’s Eve we saved a ton of money by shooting in New York City because they offered us many location incentives. The budget for the film was originally $67 million, but if we shot it in New York, we’d save $10 million right off the top. We shot in two museums, and the funny thing about that was how we surprised the visiting patrons with our film crew. It is not every day you go to a museum and see a Cézanne, a Monet, and a Bon Jovi.
The schedule was for a forty-eight-day shoot, and we would have complete access to Times Square, which was unprecedented for a movie. The location and how we dressed the set were essential because the night of New Year’s Eve and the gigantic ball were almost main characters in the film. I was lucky enough to get the unflappable and innovative production designer Mark Friedberg, who had last worked with me on Runaway Bride in Baltimore.
What I didn’t know was that this would be one of my most challenging shoots, not because of the actors or the script but because of the weather. The winter of 2011 was one of New York City’s worst. Each day I would show up to the set not knowing what we were going to shoot. I would just say, “What can we shoot?” My assistant Greg, who is religious, prayed each day for better weather, but we never got it. It rained and snowed, and it got to the point that it wasn’t a matter of whether I was going to wear a hat and gloves to work but only which color I would choose. The weather made this physically the hardest movie of my career. We had to shoot on many streets and rooftops throughout New York. Even shooting the ball was difficult because we had to climb three flights of stairs—with no elevator—to get to it. I was feeling twenty-two years old inside, but when the wind cut right through me, I felt like a tired seventy-six-year-old man who just wanted to go back to my hotel, sip soup, and watch a sitcom. Recuperating from cancer didn’t help.
However, the parade of A-list stars on the film made every day exciting. In addition to Oscar winners De Niro and Berry, we were able to cast Hilary Swank. I had never met her, and I have to say she was a delight to work with. She told me when she first moved to California she lived out of her car. She is a real person, who has worked hard to make her career what it is. Hilary was ready with some pranks of her own. One day I yelled, “Action!” and she led the cast in the theme song to Laverne & Shirley. I cracked up. She is a great actress, but on my movie she was ready not only to act but also to have a good time. She was hands down the star of our gag reel. She did gags to others and allowed them to be played on her. One of the funniest is when she was doing a serious scene and the crew threw confetti on her head.
An odd thing about Hilary is that she is one of the few movie stars who owns a pet bird and she can’t talk highly enough about birds as pets. She told us she recently took her bird to Paris and he learned to speak French. In addition to pets we talked a lot about her character and her hair. She wanted her hair to move, so we agreed on hair extensions. When we weren’t talking about her hair, we of course focused on how best to portray her character. As an actress she can switch from comedy to drama in a second. She has not only incredible magnetism but also concentration. We laughed over the fact that she is often mistaken for Jennifer Garner, a star of Valentine’s Day. Hilary said it is because they have similar lips.
Sometimes as a director you have to recognize when to step back and let an actress do her own thing. Hilary and I worked well together mapping out the comedy scenes. But when it came to the serious speeches, I took a different approach. As she prepared to give her big speech, I said to her, “This serious stuff is what you do for a living. So I’m going to get out of your way and just let you do it.” I gave her no direction because she didn’t need it. You have to know your actors and then use different tactics with them to adjust to the tone and intent of each scene.
Hilary’s character is the head of the Times Square Alliance, which oversees the dropping of the ball on New Year’s Eve.
Her character was afraid of heights, so we had a policeman, played by the wonderful Rob Nagle, carry her up and down the steps to the ball. When we were setting up the scene, I worried it would be difficult to see her face. Hilary said, “No matter how he carries me, I’ll find the lens.” She always knew where the camera was. New actors often don’t know how to find the lens or the light, but Hilary is a veteran, and it was exciting to watch her work. She can even do improvisational comedy well. She was especially good in a scene that used improvisation with Matthew Broderick.
Saying goodbye on a movie set, however, is not easy. I found it touching that both Hilary and Halle didn’t want to go home. Although the long hours and the work on a set can be hard, sometimes making a movie can be more fun than real living.
The forty-eight-day shoot on New Year’s Eve felt too long. It was not the longest shoot I ever faced in my career, but the bad weather made it a true struggle for everybody. My wife and children visited often to help keep my spirits up. When I didn’t have family in town, I used other methods to stay cheery. Years earlier Barbara and I had given money for a Central Park bench that now bears our names. When I had a day off, I would walk out of the hotel, cross the street, and sit on my park bench. It gave me some time to reflect on the movie and on my life, and how I was looking forward to wrapping and going back home, where it was warmer.
Sometimes I would sit on my bench and dream about returning to Los Angeles to be greeted by a heat wave, or going to Hawaii for a Christmas vacation, or playing softball in the broiling heat. My staff also did their best to keep me peppy. Heather would bring me good news from the outside world, especially about my grandchildren: Sam had won a baseball game, Siena had started preschool, Ethan was learning piano, and Emma had done great in her ballet recital. News of my family would lift my spirits as I stood in Times Square in the freezing cold. I vowed once and for all to become a warm-weather director. If Katherine Fugate wrote another ensemble script, I decided it would have to be about the Fourth of July or something I could shoot in Hawaii.
During a movie I don’t have time to read books for pleasure, but I could reflect on books that had influenced my career. I did this sometimes while I was sitting on my park bench preparing my shot list, which is the outline I give to the crew each day to tell them what angles I want to shoot. I remembered J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain always resonated with me: Catcher in the Rye because it reminded me of my own coming of age, and The Magic Mountain because it gave me hope that even a very sick kid, like I had been, could find love. Both inspired me to create my own stories and weave my own coming of age and love stories into the movies I directed.
I also reflected on jokes and comedians who changed my career. I mentioned it earlier, but it deserves repeating that I will never forget the Jack Benny episode in which someone tried to rob him. The thief said “Your money or your life?” Jack’s character was set up as a notorious cheapskate, so he had to pause before answering. The question brought sheer silence from Benny and a roar of laughter from the audience. That joke made me want to write a character who was equally clever. Another line I liked was the opening of Albert Camus’s The Stranger: “My mother died today, or was it yesterday?” I loved it because it established the narrator’s character so well. My inspiration ranged from Jack Benny to Camus.
Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and Arthur Miller all went to my high school, DeWitt Clinton. All three men influenced my career, especially because I knew they walked through the same hallways that I had. When I first saw Chayefsky’s movie Marty, I felt as if doors were opening before my eyes. I realized that if Chayefsky could write stories from his neighborhood, then so could I. I think Marty was one of the reasons I was able to create a series like Happy Days. Chayefsky’s movie gave me the confidence to believe that my friends and my stories about them mattered.
From that point on I also never forgot a character with a quirk or flaw because I knew I could use it in my work. Many years earlier I’d worked for a team who were writing jokes for a trip by President Kennedy to Texas, well before his assassination in the same state. We wrote lots of jokes for him about putting on a big Stetson hat. But when he arrived in Texas he refused to put on any hats. He thought they made him look less dignified. So I wrote Kennedy’s aversion to hats into Ashton Kutcher’s character in New Year’s Eve. When everyone in Times Square is putting on goofy hats, Ashton says, “I don’t do hats.”
Ashton is not only very talented but very practical. When I gave him the script there was more than one character I could see him playing, so I told him to choose. He decided that he wanted to be the cartoonist stuck in an elevator because it was a character who, unlike the rest of the cast, didn’t like New Year’s Eve. Ashton also knew that by choosing that character he would rarely shoot a scene outside and could thus avoid winter in New York. A good actor, and a wise man.
I thought a lot about being a sick kid while I was directing New Year’s Eve because although I was now cancer-free, I didn’t know how long I would be. The problem was that the radiation had burned the inside of my mouth, so it was still sore when I ate. I had directed so many movies in a healthy state that I found it difficult to direct with a sore mouth. But I learned that if I ate a big breakfast in the morning and then a big dinner at the end of the day, I could tread lightly at lunch and avoid hurting my mouth. No matter how I tried, however, I started to lose weight on the set. Barbara and my assistant Heather would give me soft food to ease the pain. Usually this kind of cancer requires a feeding tube, but my wife was determined to help me avoid one. She would puree Progresso soups and kept me alive on chicken noodle and corn chowder.
Despite my problems with eating, mentally I was sharp as a tack. Every morning I would wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 and go to the set. I would be greeted by a sea of hugs from my crew members. It sounds corny, but a hug is a great thing to get in the morning, especially at 5:00 A.M. when you aren’t feeling well. The first assistant director Dave Venghaus would hug me. The script supervisor Carol DePasquale would hug me. The cinematographer Chuck Minsky would hug me. The costume designer Gary Jones would hug me. It was a hug fest. On days when I had to go to a cold sidewalk and direct and when I couldn’t eat because of my sore mouth, a hug was a simple but great gift. The actors also inspired me. You’re not going to complain about pain in front of Halle Berry and Robert De Niro.
On the weekends sometimes I wouldn’t even get dressed. I would just hang out in my hotel room with my wife or kids and grandkids until it was time to go back to the set. My spirits were high until an odd thing happened: My friends started to die. I had five friends die during the filming of New Year’s Eve. These were not just acquaintances but very close friends. My friend Mark Harris used to say that when the friends in your age group start to die it is like they are calling up your class. First was Joel Sterns from college; then Mark Smith and John Grahams from the army; my friend Bill Lowenberg, with whom we had spent countless Christmas holidays in Hawaii; and director Blake Edwards, who was married to my friend Julie Andrews. One of the things I admire most about Julie is that she always speaks so highly of her late husband. A negative word about Blake has never slipped from her lips in my presence. I try to behave the same way toward my wife.
My wife, the consummate intensive care nurse, accepts death as part of the universe. But I take it harder. In order to keep my spirits up during all the funerals, Barbara came to New York more than she would have on a movie location that was not in Los Angeles. One night we went out to dinner quite late at a favorite restaurant in midtown to celebrate our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. I was feeling tired but overall pretty well. I had a cream soup followed by some capellini, and then I didn’t stop. I went for the osso buco. I had lost so much weight that I thought it might be a good night to have some excellent food that wouldn’t hurt my mouth. This is where the night began to go very wrong. I started to feel clammy and anxious. I had had two Bailey’s Irish Cream during the mea
l as well. By the end of the osso buco, I thought I was going to throw up. I put my head on the table. If you do this in other states it might go unnoticed, but in New York City if you put your head down on a restaurant table, people will call an ambulance because they think you might sue the restaurant. Before I knew it the restaurant manager had called the obligatory ambulance.
I think all along my wife knew that the dizziness and anxiety were just from my stress level and bad stomach. If I had been in Los Angeles we probably would have gone home and gone to bed. But when you’re away you tend to err on the side of caution. The paramedics and policemen came and put me in an ambulance bound for New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Knowing that five of my close friends had recently died, I must admit there was a nagging little voice inside me saying “Maybe it’s your time, too.” But I told that little voice to be quiet because I was in the middle of directing a movie and I wasn’t ready to go yet. After I arrived at the hospital the doctor worried there might be something wrong with my heart. Barbara and my assistant Heather, who had made a beeline to the hospital to meet us, both said to the doctor, “He can’t stay overnight, he has to go to work tomorrow.” Eventually things calmed down and I was fine. The doctors said it was just stress, exhaustion, and an upset stomach.
My trip to the hospital was the low point of the movie. But what kept me going on the set was seeing fresh faces each day. One of the peppiest was that of Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Abigail Breslin’s mother. I had worked with her many years earlier in Hocus Pocus with Bette Midler and my sister Penny. It was great to see her, and after directing her for a few days I was struck by the fact that Sarah Jessica is truly one of the happier actresses working in Hollywood today. As the mother of a little boy and twins, she has a lot on her plate, but she seems genuinely at peace. I asked her what her secret was when so many actresses in Hollywood often seem unhappy. Her answer: “I’ve just been doing it so long.” Harold Pinter directed her in a play when she was five years old, she starred on Broadway in Annie, and then she went on to a stunning run in Sex and the City. No matter how tricky a scene I set her up in, much like Hilary Swank, Sarah Jessica would look at me with pure confidence and say, “I’ll get there.” I like working with capable people, and two of the best were Tom Hines and Matt Walker, my on-set rewrite team. They are a major reason why Valentine’s Day was a hit, and why the New Year’s Eve script got completed.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 29
