My Happy Days in Hollywood (25 page)

When you work with kids there is always the risk that one of them will get hurt, and that happened on
Overboard
. Jared twisted his ankle while he was riding on his skateboard between scenes one day. He couldn’t walk, and we were about to shoot a big chase scene in which Goldie runs through the woods after the boys. The doctor who looked at his ankle said he could run in a day or two, but I didn’t want to get behind schedule. It would have cost thousands of dollars to shut down for two days. So instead I improvised. I had the boys all put on Halloween masks. Then I could replace Jared just for that one scene with another young actor. Nobody knew the difference, and we were able to film the scene as written by purchasing some cheap Halloween masks. We didn’t lose even a half day.

The best part of
Overboard
for me was watching Goldie in the scenes when Kurt tries to convince her that she is his wife. In one scene he tells her that she used to be chubby and quite promiscuous. Goldie, wearing a frumpy hand-me-down dress, turns to Kurt and deadpans, “I was a short, fat slut?” It is one of the funniest moments in the entire movie, and I still laugh when I see it. There was also a scene in which she cooks a chicken, and the physical comedy is quintessential Goldie. I gave her the idea of cooking a chicken in a small pot and she ran with it.

I loved working with Goldie and seeing her be sophisticated in the fancy scenes and do slapstick comedy in the others. On some days when Goldie was filming, her daughter, Kate, who was then nine years old, would come and sit in the director’s chair with me. I would say, “Let’s say ‘Action, Mommy,’ ” and Kate would do the slate with me. Years later I would direct Kate in a movie of her own called
Raising Helen
, and we talked about our memories of filming
Overboard
, in Mendocino.

I cast a couple of friends in
Overboard
, too. My smoking coach
Carol Williard had a small part, as did Hector Elizondo. Hector couldn’t have a big part in this picture because he was busy doing another project. But we did manage to squeeze him in as a Portuguese captain of a boat that finds Goldie after she has fallen overboard. Although I had a tough time working with him on
Nothing in Common
, I used cinematographer John Alonzo again because he does a fine job of shooting women. I needed him to capture Goldie. John and I were able to get along better on this picture. Sometimes knowing a person’s baggage helps you both sort it out. He still didn’t like my less than authoritative style, but we could work together to shoot a great scene with Goldie. One of the most memorable scenes with audiences is when Kurt reveals to Goldie her new walk-in closet that he has built especially for her. John shot a great sequence to reveal every girl’s dream closet set to the beautiful musical score of Alan Silvestri.

I always try to put something in the actors’ hands to make them appear more real. This worked well for Kurt because he likes to gesture and have something in his hands when he talks. I told him in one scene, “Your character likes walnuts. So sometimes we will have him cracking walnuts and eating them out of the shell.” Kurt latched on to this immediately and sometimes would use it as a metaphor for needing something, anything, in his hands. He would look across the set to me and say, “Garry! I need walnuts.” I knew that meant he wanted to have something in his hand or something physical to do while he was talking. At the end of the movie he sent me a silver walnut from Tiffany as a gift.

I have now watched
Overboard
dozens of times, often with my children and my grandchildren. One of my favorite scenes is the end of the picture—when Goldie, wearing a beautiful gold lamé dress, leaps off a fancy yacht and swims toward Kurt’s waiting arms. The reason I like the scene so much is that we almost didn’t get to put it in the picture.

In our story the Coast Guard gets an emergency call and has to rush away from Goldie’s boat. This precipitates Goldie jumping off the boat and making a beeline for Kurt. Goldie’s first jump was hard. We were shooting in the Long Beach harbor, and the water
was freezing. After a few practice runs Goldie looked at me and said, “It’s too cold. I don’t want to jump in the water anymore.” Kurt overheard this and walked over to talk to Goldie while the crew was drying her off. He said, “Honey, for the money they are paying you, you have to jump again.” She looked back at her partner, knowingly, and prepared to shoot the scene again and again. She did a great job, and so did Kurt.

Over the several months of shooting
Overboard
, I was able to concentrate and even find my way out of my sadness, depression, and worry about going bankrupt. Working with Goldie was the perfect antidote for my mood. The picture, unfortunately, was not a big hit, but the problem was that the studio executives marketed it wrong. They thought it was an upscale comedy and they should target all of their marketing to rich people. They were wrong. It was a comedy that would appeal to families and children, even small children.
Overboard
didn’t find that audience until it hit the video market, where it turned out to be a big hit. Sometimes you create a film you like yet the studio executives miss the whole point.
Overboard
is the perfect example of this. People with beluga caviar on their crackers didn’t want to see it, while people with peanut butter and jelly on their crackers did.

So while I had fun making the movie,
Overboard
was a critical and box office disappointment. My finances were still up in the air, and again I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I do a comedy? Should I do a drama? Should I take a break and refocus my career? Some people even thought I should do a television show in order to make some fast money. Then I got the phone call that I had been waiting for. “The script for
Beaches
is done. Bette Midler is happy with it and ready to go,” said my agent. So my decision was made: My next picture would be
Beaches
, starring Bette Midler. I packed my bags and headed back to the city of my own roots, New York.

Exploring Female Friendship with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey

W
HEN THE SCRIPT
for
Beaches
was ready, my agent, Joel Cohen, went to the powers that be at Disney and told them about my ongoing financial struggles in Pasadena. He was honest with them and told them I was deeply in debt. Executive Jeffrey Katzenberg made the decision to pay $500,000 of my salary up front, before even one scene of the movie was shot. I remember thinking the advance on my salary was unprecedented, and it still is. I asked Joel why they were being so kind to me. He said they knew my work and could count on me to turn in a movie on budget and on schedule. So as I began to direct
Beaches
, my fifth feature film, I felt grateful for the support from Katzenberg and Disney’s head, Michael Eisner.

Both Katzenberg and Eisner are infamous in Hollywood for many things, but I will remember them most for what they taught me: Eisner taught me how to make the difficult phone call. He said every day when you are an executive or boss you will have to make at least one difficult phone call, whether it be to fire someone or to get mad at them for a job not well done. He told me to pick a time of day when you are most comfortable and confident to make that call. Katzenberg taught me that no phone call, no matter how important, should last more than
two
minutes. Both men taught me about the importance of an efficient telephone call.

Following a movie staring Goldie Hawn with a movie staring Bette Midler made me feel as if suddenly I was a hot movie director.
Back when I started directing I’d never dreamed that I would get to direct these famous women, or that I would find my calling as a director with a talent for directing women. I was raised in a house full of women, including my grandmother, mother, and two sisters. Then I became the father of two daughters and would eventually have four granddaughters. I felt by the time I did
Beaches
I had developed a sensitivity for figuring out how to make women happy. And perhaps most important, I understood that if they were upset, there were a number of avenues I could travel down to bring them back to happy. It goes without saying that when female stars are happy, they act better, too.

The script for
Beaches
was based on the wildly popular Iris Rainer Dart book of the same name. It was the story of two childhood girlfriends, CC Bloom and Hillary Whitney, who have a falling-out and lose touch, only to reunite after one is diagnosed with terminal cancer. So the premise was a heavy one: How do you help your best friend die with grace and dignity? Initially Disney didn’t want to make the movie because they thought it was too dark. That’s where I came in. I was often brought in to lighten up a script. I can just imagine the executives pitching the idea. “We’ll get Garry Marshall to direct, and then we’ll save money on the rewrite. Mr.
Happy Days
can lighten our dark script for less money than hiring another writer.” So that was my assignment with
Beaches
. I was not to dwell on the death but instead to up the stakes on the comedy and the friendship between the two women from opposite sides of the track.

Beaches
needed star power to work. It was not a small independent movie but a mainstream movie-star vehicle. The script came with Bette attached, so we had to find someone who not only could play the other part but also looked right side by side with Bette. We decided to screen-test five actresses. I watched each screen test on tape but still couldn’t decide. So I watched them all again, only this time I turned off the sound. My decision became clear in an aha moment. It was Barbara Hershey who looked right with Bette. The two of them had the best chemistry. One of the other actresses was Sissy Spacek, whom I love, respect, and admire very much. But
alongside Bette, Sissy looked like just another pretty, pale redhead. In a two-shot Bette and Barbara had a certain amount of class and elegance to them.

Barbara brought to the set her own experience as an actress and a bit of quirkiness as a person, too. You can ask around town and find out things about actresses, but you don’t really know what they are like until you work with them for a year. Barbara, I knew, not only named her son Free but also once changed her own name to Barbara Seagull. When Barbara arrived on my set, she clearly was transitioning to more of an establishment person because she introduced her son to me and called him Tom. Nonetheless, she ran in a more spiritual crowd than either Bette or I did.

The two actresses’ processes were completely opposite. Barbara was very sensitive and needed a lot of hugs. Bette, however, seemed to thrive on confrontation and resolution. Barbara would come onto the set a half hour before her call time, completely in character, and need to touch every piece of furniture to let it resonate with her. She would ask questions about the props and where they came from. Bette, on the other hand, would run in right before the cameras rolled and yell, “Let’s go. I’m here. Where do I stand?”

The biggest problem we had was the day Barbara appeared with gigantic lips. Without giving us any warning, she had gotten a doctor to inject her lips with something to make them temporarily more plump and seductive. When we saw her arrive a cameraman turned to me with alarm in his eyes.

“What are you going to do with those
lips
?” he said.

I stared quizzically at her lips, too. I had never seen lips so large on such a petite face.

“We have to shoot them,” I said. “We can’t push them down.”

I knew we couldn’t stop production. The lips might take weeks to go down. So you will notice if you watch
Beaches
that Barbara’s lips are larger in some scenes than in others.

Before we shot the lips, however, I had a private discussion with Barbara about her motivation for the cosmetic alteration in the middle of my movie. What was she thinking? She said she did it because she felt Bette was going to overpower her on-screen. She
thought she needed an extra
something
to make her appear special in the role. I understood what she was saying. This is the reason many actresses and even ordinary people have cosmetic surgery. However, I was not beyond mocking the lips. Sometimes I would give Barbara a kiss and pretend to bounce off her lips. She and the crew always got a good laugh from that. Even with an actress as dedicated and serious as Barbara, humor was a good way to become good friends, which we remain to this day.

I worked well with Bette because she is a lot like my sister Penny. They are both creative, extremely opinionated, sometimes loud and sometimes bossy, but usually very smart and on the money. When I worked with Penny on
Laverne & Shirley
, I assigned her the extra job of policing the wardrobe. This gave her something to distract her. I knew Bette liked power and she liked flowers. So from the first day on
Beaches
, I told Bette she was in charge of all the floral arrangements. She could assign them, select them, and approve them. An outsider might think this was a strange task for an Academy Award nominee, but I knew that Bette had the energy not only to act and produce but to work with flowers as well. The flower assignment gave her something to think about in addition to the script, the movie, and her hair. So whenever I saw her getting anxious about some aspect of the movie, I would say, “Bette, could you go and check on the flowers?” This task helped her relax and regain her focus.