My Happy Days in Hollywood (20 page)

I had a dilemma: I wanted to go to Broadway, but I didn’t have great faith in the play. Despite that fact, Jerry and I hadn’t come this far and worked this hard just to see our play fall short of Broadway. I told Eisner to forget his money and I would find another way. Despite the headaches the cast of
Laverne & Shirley
gave me, Penny and I have always been very close. Whenever I have an ethical dilemma I ask for her advice. “Should I give up?” I asked. She said, “No. You’ve never been to Broadway. Go for it. We are people who learn from our experiences whether they turn out good or bad. So I would shoot for Broadway if I were you.”

“But how am I going to raise the money?” I asked. “Paramount pulled out.”

“I’ll give you some, and then I’ll raise the rest from friends. Give me a day or two,” she said.

Penny wrote a check, and she got Cindy Williams and Jim Brooks to write checks, too. Cindy wrote me a note with the check that read something like, “I don’t know what you are doing in Boston but without you I wouldn’t have a career. So here is some money.”

Jerry and I knew it was a long shot, but we went ahead and opened
The Roast
at the Winter Garden. Our friends, family, wives, and children flew in from Los Angeles to see us make our Broadway debut. Unfortunately, we lasted through only eleven previews and three nights; then we had to close the show. As we were leaving the theater we saw two men putting up a sign for a new show.

“
Cats
?” said Jerry as he read the sign.

“A show about pussycats?” I asked, mockingly.

“It will never last,” said Jerry.

My friend Joel Sterns, always a great lawyer and adviser, said to me, “You helped
Cats
.”

“How?” I asked.

“You lowered the bar,” said Joel.

Cats
went on to run for eighteen years on Broadway, making it one of the longest running shows ever.
The Roast
ran three nights. That’s show business. But I don’t regret it. I got to live my dream of seeing something I had written on Broadway, if only for eleven previews and three nights. And the three nights was even a stretch. We had to stay open those nights in order to collect the insurance money. However, Rob Reiner was able to come back and resumed his starring part for the last two nights, and he was terrific.

When we realized
The Roast
was a failure, we had to close it. Jerry took the first flight home to Los Angeles. I wanted to stay and throw a goodbye party, and his wife Joanne decided to stay with me and host it. I always feel you have to stay as a leader for better or worse. You can’t leave the ship. We had a nice party, but the closing of the play still came as quite a blow to all of us. My eleven-year-old son, Scott, couldn’t understand the injustice. “But they laughed, Dad. I heard the audience laugh.” I learned that in theater, and later in movies, you need more than just “funny.” You have to have a story with depth and emotion that people can follow. Unfortunately, while I was working on
The Roast
, ABC canceled
Mork & Mindy
. The show had a lot of problems, but one of them was that I was not there to produce, supervise, and spearhead as I had done during the first two seasons. I was too busy working on
The Roast
to give
Mork & Mindy
the time and attention it deserved.

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.

Directing an Outrageous Hospital Comedy as My First Movie

A
T 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.