My Happy Days in Hollywood (21 page)

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.

Young Doctors in Love
did not, as they say, “do big box office” or “have legs” to become a runaway hit. It made money only in Spain, where there was a big rainstorm opening weekend and people decided to go to the movies in droves. It also did well in Sweden because socialized medicine was very popular there, so any film that made fun of Western medicine struck a chord with the Swedes. But you can’t get a blockbuster from striking it rich only in Spain and Sweden. We had a big cast party, and I remember feeling tired beyond repair. I was doing interviews with the press and I could hardly form a complete intelligent sentence. When my wife finally dragged me home, I slept for three days.

I read some reviews of
Young Doctors in Love
, and they were all pretty bad. Although Janet Maslin, writing for
The New York Times
, didn’t totally dismiss the film when she wrote: “Every imaginable kind of gag has been wedged into
Young Doctors in Love
, in hopes of getting another
Airplane!
off the ground. Not all of them are funny, and plenty of them fall flat. But there are enough bright moments to make this a passable hot-weather entertainment.” So that pretty much summed it up for me—I was a director of “passable hot-weather entertainment.” After reading the reviews I decided to make a deal with myself: If I ever directed another movie I would collect all of the reviews but not read them. I would put them in a file folder and wait a year from the release to allow myself some perspective. I then took some time to think about my future and what I wanted to do next. I remember calling Penny and saying, “I don’t think I want to do another movie. Directing isn’t for me.”

I was, however, already signed up to direct another movie. My contract for
Young Doctors in Love
was a two-picture deal with ABC Motion Pictures. So while I’d passed on Bruckheimer’s offer to direct
Flashdance
, I was faced with another decision: What script would I direct next for ABC? During one of my weekly Saturday morning basketball games, the answer arrived. Producer Michael Phillips showed up with a script called
Sweet Ginger Brown
, which he had won in a card game from the musician Mama Cass Elliot. It was a coming-of-age comedy about a teenager working one hot summer as a cabana boy at a beach club in New York, and it had a stronger and
more believable story line than
Young Doctors in Love
. We rewrote the script, retitled it
The Flamingo Kid
, and started to work on casting.

I knew, however, that I had to do one thing before I directed another movie. I had to quit smoking. I went back to work with Carol Williard, who was now my smoking coach. I smoked my last cigarette before
The Flamingo Kid
started, and almost immediately I began to feel physically and emotionally better. Would my second movie be a hit? Would I find the process easier the second time? Would the pace be less stressful being in New York, away from Hollywood? I didn’t know. I just knew that directing without a cigarette in my hand had to count for something good. Two hands free had to be better than one. And nobody was happier that I stopped smoking than my wife.

Going Back to My New York Roots

I
N 1983 I GOT
a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for my television work. I bought a piece of the Portland Beavers minor league baseball team with Ron Howard. I built a dance studio in memory of my mother at Northwestern University. I started playing more tennis and basketball because I had more energy since I’d stopped smoking. I produced a new spinoff from
Happy Days
called
Joanie Loves Chachi
, and Cindy Williams named me in a $20 million lawsuit because she said I made her work too hard on
Laverne & Shirley
while she was pregnant. A pretty busy year for a forty-nine-year-old married father of three. I liked getting my star. I owned the baseball team for three years.
Joanie Loves Chachi
was a big hit in Korea because the name Chachi sounds like their word for
penis
. And Cindy Williams eventually settled her lawsuit with me and we became friends forever. So I then had the time to focus on my next directing project:
The Flamingo Kid
.

I relocated to New York City for the summer to cast the movie and then stayed on throughout the shoot. I lived in midtown Manhattan at the Parker Meridien hotel, and most days we drove out to Far Rockaway, where the movie was shot at a beach club. I liked being in New York again. A few times since I left the Bronx I have gone back to visit my old apartment building, and taken my wife and children. I have always been nostalgic for the Grand Concourse. The time I spent shooting
The Flamingo Kid
was no different. How I went from a sick kid in bed to a movie director sometimes
confounds even me. But as I started to direct my second feature film, a story about a gin rummy game at a beach club and a teenage boy on the cusp of becoming a man, I felt more grateful for my own career than I had ever been. I was still, of course, scared, in a new way, that if this movie wasn’t a hit they would tell me to go back to television. But I would give it a shot. As Penny said, we are people who learn from our experiences. Samuel Beckett once wrote, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” That’s me.