My Happy Days in Hollywood (33 page)

C
OMEDIAN JOE E. LEWIS
once said, “You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.” I have found that as you get older you naturally begin to question the choices you make. Why am I here? What do I want to be remembered for? What is my legacy to my children and my grandchildren? They are not lofty or egotistical questions but rather practical ones that go through most people’s heads at some point. I never wanted to change the world. I wanted to entertain the world. I knew I would be remembered most for my television shows, but I wondered about my movies. Were
Exit to Eden
and
Dear God
the films I wanted people to base their impressions of my entire directing career on? My answer was no. I had talked to Julia Roberts and Richard Gere on the phone about doing
Runaway Bride
but the film was not ready to go into production. I could shoot another film before starting
Runaway Bride
. That’s what I decided to do.

I knew that
Runaway Bride
had a good shot at becoming a hit, so I decided that for my other script I would look for something with depth on a subject that interested me: raising kids. In 1995 my daughter Lori gave birth in San Francisco to fraternal twin girls who arrived at twenty-seven weeks, or three months early. Lily and Charlotte lived in the newborn intensive care unit for eight weeks, and both were diagnosed with cerebral palsy at ages one and two respectively. I remember the first feelings I had upon hearing the news were fear and anger. I wanted to punch something. But the
anger turned to love when I met these little beans, who came into the world weighing hardly more than two pounds apiece. I couldn’t wait to kiss their faces and put them into my next movie. The subject of a family facing the challenges of raising disabled kids was on my mind in the mid-1990s as I watched my daughter begin to raise her daughters.

Stories about parents raising children had always fascinated me. Odd families. Quirky families. Not-your-average-run-of-the-mill families. Growing up in the Bronx, I always knew the family I came from wasn’t perfect, and I saw how my parents struggled to keep us happy and healthy. I knew other families didn’t drink Pepsi and milk to make the milk last longer. I knew most families didn’t put ketchup on their noodles and call it spaghetti sauce. Many of the families I knew growing up and know today are dysfunctional in one way or another. I hoped I could find a script that addressed the struggles of parenthood rather than only the romantic and happy moments of being a mom and dad.

While I was looking for a good script about a family something else happened: I became a big hit on Nick at Nite. The cable channel bought many of my old television shows in a deal with Paramount. My wife and I would sit in bed at night, turn on the television, and literally watch my TV career pass before our eyes. I was happy to see my shows on television again. I wasn’t proud of every single episode, and some even made me cringe. However, this was not the case with
The Odd Couple
. There is not one episode of
The Odd Couple
that makes me cringe. In my book Jack and Tony made each episode of that series special and above and beyond what we had set out to do.

To be able to laugh in the 1990s at jokes that were written in the 1970s made me feel good. I had created shows that lasted. Even if I had a shaky movie-directing career, on Nick at Nite I still had a very successful television career. It also made me happy that generations of kids, including my own grandchildren, who were not born when my shows were in prime time, could now get to know Fonzie, Richie, Laverne, and Shirley. The first time my granddaughter
Charlotte saw Lenny and Squiggy burst through a door in an episode of
Laverne & Shirley
she said, “Pop, those guys are
really
funny!”

When I wasn’t watching Nick at Nite, I read scripts. Alex Rose, who had produced my movies
Nothing in Common
and
Overboard
, brought me a story that was loosely based on her own family. Growing up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Alex had a sister who was mentally challenged. Her sister had moved out of the family house at a young age and into a home for children with disabilities. She was living in a group home in Chicago and was doing well when Alex pitched me the story idea. Alex and I decided to go to Chicago and meet her sister. I found her sister, and the way in which her family dealt with her disability, very compelling.

I decided to take Alex’s sister’s story and make it a screenplay with my friend Bob Brunner, who had started with me on the New York
Daily News
back in the late 1950s. We had come a long way together since our stint as copyboys. Bob had done some rewrite work on
Frankie and Johnny, Exit to Eden
, and
Dear God. The Other Sister
offered us the chance to write something from scratch. Nobody paid us to do this. We simply wrote it and hoped we could sell it. When we finished the script I took it to Disney. They had been so supportive during
Pretty Woman
, and I’d heard some of the executives in the land of Mickey Mouse had seen
Frankie and Johnny
and liked what I did on that film, too.

I met with Disney’s Joe Roth, who said he liked the script. What clinched the deal, though, was that his wife read the script and liked it so much she said he had to produce it. He agreed to green-light the picture, but he said he had to be honest with me about it. This would not be a big hit picture, nor would it be a big-budget picture. But if we did it right, we could make a small picture about a special subject that might interest audiences, families, and also me. It was the right time in the history of their company for Disney to make a smaller picture. Roth suggested Diane Keaton to play the mother because Disney was looking for a suitable project for her. I had never worked with Diane, but my wife and I were big fans of her work in Woody Allen’s movies.

I didn’t even bother interviewing other actresses for the role of the mother. I always look for something quirky about an actress, and I remembered a story I had heard years ago about Diane. She was in the original Broadway production of
Hair
, and she was the only actress who would not take off her clothing for the big naked number “Where Do I Go?” She had a quirky side and a modest side that I thought was admirable. Also as we began production on
The Other Sister
, she had just adopted a daughter to raise as a single parent. Diane was developing a maternal side as well.

The thing I liked most about our script was that the mentally challenged daughter not only was from a wealthy family but also was beautiful. Too often this type of story would have depicted her character as an unattractive girl from a poor family. I thought our story was honest because not every family with a disabled child is living at the poverty level. In
The Other Sister
, Carla Tate is from a family that has money to fix most problems, but her disability is an issue that money can’t fix. The other angle I liked was that when I went to meet Alex’s sister, she had a boyfriend. So my script was going to have a love story angle, a portrait of what it is like for two mentally challenged people to date, fall in love, and try to build a relationship.

Many young actresses wanted the part of Carla. After holding auditions I decided the best actress for the part was someone I could not get easily. Her name was Juliette Lewis, and she had just gotten out of rehab. Disney doesn’t love making pictures with actresses straight out of rehab, but I asked them to make an exception in this case. However, the executives at Disney knew they would have trouble getting insurance for her and they flatly turned her down.

Sometimes you have to think with your gut instead of your head. I was so convinced that Juliette would be perfect for the movie that I decided to put up the extra insurance money myself. Some friends and industry people tried to talk me out of it. We all knew one of the commonsense edicts of Hollywood is “never invest in your own movie.” But I did it anyway. So if Juliette started using drugs again, or had to drop out of the movie for any reason, I would have been out of a lot of money. I didn’t worry about that. I wanted the actress
who was best for the movie. Casting is a little like magic, and when you find it, you don’t want to see it walk out the door. I always joked that if you are having trouble casting a role, go and stand in the parking lot of a rehab center and grab some of the people coming out.

The most difficult decision of the entire picture was deciding not to hire my daughter Kathleen for the part of Carla’s lesbian sister. Kathleen is an excellent actress and she would have done a great job. There were two other actresses, however, whom I thought made a better threesome with Juliette. So while I love the art of nepotism and I hated having to disappoint my daughter, sometimes you have to make a decision not to hire a family member. We hired Poppy Montgomery as Caroline and Sarah Paulson as Heather. For the father we needed a calm person who would play well opposite the more volatile and high-strung mother. I chose Tom Skerritt, who had been starring in television shows and movies for years. All I had left to cast was the part of Carla’s love interest, a boy who also had mental challenges.

We found an up-and-coming actor named Giovanni Ribisi, who coincidentally belonged to the Church of Scientology, as Juliette did. I thought he might provide some added support for her if she needed some help with her drug addictions, or at least be a friend closer to her own age to talk to. Giovanni brought his young wife, Mariah, and baby, Lucia, to the set, which I thought offered some nice stability. From the moment I met him I could tell he had a talent well beyond his years. He was someone who would have a career as an actor for the rest of his life.

The Other Sister
was not an easy film to shoot because it blended drama and emotion with lighter comedy and personality insights. Dante Spinotti, who had done
Beaches
and
Frankie and Johnny
with me, came onboard as my cinematographer, and that made me very happy. We shot part of the movie in Los Angeles, and I always like to work near my house. Some of the time, my wife makes me move into a hotel when I work in Los Angeles so I can order room service whenever I want and not subject her to our crazy work schedule. But I could still go home on the weekends and some early nights, sleep in my own bed, and play tennis or softball with my old friends. We
shot the other half of the movie in San Francisco, where my daughter Lori lived, so I was able to get a home-cooked meal and visit my twin granddaughters while on location.

Directing
Frankie and Johnny
had taught me a lot about actors. Whereas Michelle Pfeiffer would do a scene in several takes, Al Pacino could take eighteen or nineteen. I knew that most everyone else would be in the range. Juliette fell into the quick category. She didn’t need a lot of time to prepare and never stayed in her character. Giovanni, on the other hand, stayed in his character, with the same mannerisms and voice, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. I learned to respect and admire the different ways they approached a scene.

As the movie veteran in the group, the eternally youthful-looking Diane had an opinion about everything, and I grew to depend on her experience and knowledge. She is one of the few people in the world who can say “Coppola did this” and “Woody would do that” and be telling the truth. The trick for her was finding a way to make Elizabeth Tate human. The mother was not written as a likable character. Many of the scenes showed her struggling to raise her disabled daughter, and being cold and even mean when others might have been warmer. Portraying an unlikable character, however, didn’t scare Diane. She was excited to do something new and tried to infuse the mother with a level of humanity.

One of the things I liked most about working with Diane was watching her with the younger actors. She didn’t have a big ego around them. In fact, it was the complete opposite. Diane believed that you stayed on the set to help other actors with their scenes no matter how big a star you were. (Two years later on
The Princess Diaries
, I noticed that Julie Andrews subscribed to this same philosophy.) If Diane had finished her scenes and Juliet still had closeups to do, Diane would stay to help. She never stayed in her trailer. She would change into her regular clothes and then recite lines to Juliette off-camera. This was incredibly helpful for me as a director and for the young actors, too.

There are some scenes in
The Other Sister
that I’m very proud of. There is a scene when Diane and Juliette fight on a golf course
and in the middle of their fight, sprinklers go off. I thought it was an exciting and dynamic scene that they both did well soaking wet. There is a scene of my sister Ronny and me dancing at a wedding that always makes me smile. There are, of course, always things that make you squirm a little. When Juliette and Giovanni are talking one of them says, “Who invented sex anyway?” And the other says, “Madonna.” I wish I had taken that line out of the movie. It was too big a joke for a quiet moment between a girl and a boy. But that is minor. I like what we were able to do with the movie.

On
The Other Sister
I started to learn some of the finer points of film, especially from cinematographer Dante Spinotti. In one scene with Diane we didn’t have the right light. We also didn’t have time to change the lights. So Dante came up with a trick. He told me to get the costume designer to dress three extras in white saris and have them stand near Diane. The wardrobe department just happened to have white sari-like shawls in the truck. We did that and presto! The white saris brightened the scene. It was not a surprise that Dante had been nominated for an Academy Award for
L.A. Confidential
. He has always been a brilliant cinematographer in my book.

The Other Sister
received some very thoughtful and positive reviews. Stephen Holden wrote in
The New York Times
that the film was “a beautifully acted love story about two mentally challenged young people struggling for independence and self-respect.” He attacked me a little for candy-coating some of the story line but ultimately praised the film for its “outstanding performances” by Juliette Lewis, Diane Keaton, and Giovanni Ribisi. At two hours and nine minutes, it was definitely one of my longer movies, but I felt I needed the length to tell my story. Some critics took me to task for the length, while others found the movie trite. Desson Thomson wrote in
The Washington Post
that “everything is reduced to a transparent formula. And everyone plays their schematic part.” Everyone is entitled to his opinion. I didn’t think the film was formulaic. I thought it was innovative.