My Happy Days in Hollywood (36 page)

“How about Julie Andrews?” I said in a script meeting with some Disney executives.

“Julie Andrews? Isn’t she dead?” said one very young Disney executive.

“No,” I said, amazed by the ignorance in the room. “I just saw her in the newspaper. She’s still around. Still lovely as ever.”

“But I read someplace she can’t speak anymore,” said another young executive.

“No, she can speak fine. She just can’t sing the way she used to,” I said.

From my director’s standpoint, the best queen for the job in my movie was Julie Andrews and I didn’t need her to sing. Other names, such as Helen Mirren and Glenn Close, were pitched that day. But Julie Andrews was the perfect casting for me. Also, timing was on my side. I knew that Julie had recently settled a lawsuit over a tragic throat surgery that had left her barely able to sing. And I’d heard she was eager to get back to acting.

While we were waiting for Julie Andrews to read the script, I started to work on casting the part of Princess Mia. I talked to the extremely tall movie star Liv Tyler and the very funny television actress Amanda Bynes. While I found them both incredibly talented, their scheduling conflicts were too complicated and I had to rule them out. I decided to find my princess another way—discover her. The casting department interviewed more than nine hundred actresses, because any Disney project with the word
princess
in the title attracts the masses. Then they put close to sixty girls on tape, and they screen-tested about half of those for me to see. I then brought the best eight screen tests back to my secret producers, my four-and-a-half-year-old granddaughters.

“Pop, why do we have to cast today? Why can’t we just eat ice cream?” begged Charlotte.

“We need to find a princess for Pop’s movie,” I said. “This is very important work. I’ll pay you a dollar.”

“I’ll do it,” said Lily, always one to want to make a dollar.

“Okay. Me, too,” agreed Charlotte.

Out of the eight tapes I showed them, they liked Anne Hathaway’s best. When I asked why, Charlotte said, without hesitation, “Because she has princess hair.” Anne had dark black hair, dark
makeup, and looked almost gothic. I had only one other piece of film on Anne, from a television show called
Get Real
in which she cried the whole time. I certainly didn’t need crying in my movie. But when we did the screen test, she showed two sides to her character. First, when she came in to read for us, she dropped her purse, tripped on her chair, and showed a clumsy side of herself. Then, during the screen test, she was the only actress who picked up a scepter and crown we’d provided. With those props she recited Mia’s pivotal speech with outstanding dignity. She had beautiful skin, and I could see in her eyes that somebody was home.

We were still waiting for Julie to decide about the queen role, so I called her manager, Steve Sauer, and asked him if Julie could come to my house for a visit. When he asked why I was so insistent that the meeting take place at my house, I explained the reason was karma. Julie had once lived in my house. It seemed like we were predestined to do a movie together. When Julie starred in
Mary Poppins
, Disney had rented her a house in Toluca Lake, the small suburb near the studio that was put on the map by its local residents Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. My wife and I bought that house in 1975 and have lived in it ever since. We raised three children in that house, sent them all off to college in the Midwest, and hoped to live there forever. Steve said Julie would love to meet with me and see her old house.

I very casually mentioned the visit to my wife one night at dinner.

“Julie Andrews is gonna swing by next week for some tea,” I said.

“
The
Julie Andrews?” said Barbara. “She’s going to swing by for some tea at our house? Here? With us? When? What will I
serve
?”

“Tea would be good,” I mumbled.

My wife is usually cool as a cucumber, but she is also one of the world’s biggest Anglophiles and biggest Julie Andrews fans. The thought of having Julie under our roof put fear into her heart. She searched the house for our finest china and chose some tea she had just brought back from Fortnum & Mason in London. I worried my wife was making too big a deal. I didn’t want to make a big fuss and scare Julie away.

“A fuss?!” Barbara said. “You can’t just serve Julie Andrews Lipton tea!”

The day Julie arrived there was no entourage or pomp and circumstance. She drove herself in her own car through our gate and was wearing a simple T-shirt and baseball cap. We were a little surprised by the baseball cap because you don’t think of Julie as sporty, but she is. We half expected trumpets to announce her entrance, but she simply stepped through our front door like a regular person. There was no fanfare, just a warm and elegant new friend who happened to have starred in everybody’s favorite movie,
The Sound of Music
. Meeting Julie Andrews instantly improves one’s posture because her own is so exemplary. To hunch in front of her would seem rude.

Her visit went off without a hitch. She loved seeing the house again and told us stories about when she lived there.

“The pool was over there,” she said, pointing to the backyard. “And we had that Jacuzzi back then, too. Plus an organic garden back there.”

“There was also a bad half-basketball court. But we put in a new one, and Garry and his friends play every Saturday,” added my wife.

Julie had brought with her a picture of her two-year-old daughter, Emma, taken years earlier in front of our fireplace. Barbara showed Julie her “Queen’s Collection,” two large glass armoires filled with plates, teacups, and other memorabilia from the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. The two women admired several items in the cases, including a dried flower bouquet that had been given to my wife by Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York. The resemblance between my wife and Julie Andrews is startling when you see them side by side. Although one grew up in England and the other in a poor suburb of Cincinnati, there is something about both of them that is refined, almost as if they are distant cousins.

That day we talked about our families and children, and another good sign emerged: Julie’s mother’s name was Barbara Wells, which was my wife’s maiden name. When it came time for the fancy tea, however, it was too hot outside, so Julie opted for a bottle of Perrier. But otherwise it was a perfect afternoon and a perfect way to
kick off our time together on
The Princess Diaries
. Shortly after our visit Julie sent word through Steve that she had finished the script and would love to star in the movie. I told my wife the good news and said we could buy more Fortnum & Mason tea.

What I loved about Anne Hathaway was what I loved about Julia Roberts: Each has the ability to be clumsy and beautiful in the same movie. Anne made us laugh in her screen test and moved us with her words as well. I was confident that I could capture that on-screen and make a great film. I also liked her youth and enthusiasm. Her mother had been a stage actress and toured with
Les Misérables
and Anne had worked at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. If anything, Anne had more experience in the theater than movies. The first time I took her out to lunch, we went to my father’s country club, the Lakeside Golf Club in Toluca Lake. The club has a beautiful dining room that is rarely crowded. But I think the silence, and probably me, scared her. Anne would later refer to our lunch at “that scary place” and ask never to go back there. However, a year later we went back to the club and she loved it and confessed that she was, at first, a little intimidated by me.

Once I chose Anne as my princess, I had another odd problem: I had to win over her parents, who weren’t sure they wanted her to do the film. They were both concerned about the idea of their daughter becoming an overnight movie star. They worried, as most parents would, that she would become a drug addict or a crazy show business girl. I did some research and discovered her dad was a big lawyer in New York. So I called up my big lawyer friend Joel Sterns, who’d been one of my best friends at Northwestern, and asked him for a favor. “Joel, will you call up this girl’s father, lawyer to lawyer, and tell her that I’m not going to give her cocaine? Fig Newtons maybe. But no drugs.”

Joel made the phone call, and then I met with Anne’s parents. I introduced myself as the man who created
Happy Days
to demonstrate my proclivity for family entertainment. I told them we weren’t a crazy group in general; after all, we were from the studio of Mickey Mouse, not Mickey Rourke. Winning Anne’s parents’ support was important to me, and to the success of our movie. Two of the best
parents I have ever seen were those of Ron Howard, and look what a sane and successful person he turned out to be. So once Anne’s parents signed on, I had my princess and my queen of Genovia.

I expected Julie to be quite formal on the set, but she was not at all. She was professional yet warm and friendly to the cast and crew and got along well with Anne and with Hector Elizondo. Hector has appeared in each one of my seventeen films because I enjoy him so much personally and professionally. The first time I worked with him he starred in
Young Doctors in Love
as a gangster wearing a dress. It was not a role about which you say, “Let’s do that every time.” But I enjoyed working with Hector so much that I found a part for him to play every time I signed a new deal. He was the father in
The Flamingo Kid
and, of course, the wise hotel manager in
Pretty Woman
. In
The Princess Diaries
he played Joe, the chauffeur and queen’s head of security.

On each film we do together Hector not only turns in a solid performance himself but makes the other actors’ performances better, too. He commands the big screen and inspires the cast to rise to the occasion. Hector Elizondo and Julie Andrews are exemplary to work with in terms of timing, acting, temperament, and everything in between. They build their characters based on behavior. To watch them is to watch two perfectionists in action. And they both learned that the youthful Anne Hathaway was talented and certainly not a brat.

Hector even threw in several ad-libs to Julie, and she easily kept up with him. A little known fact about Julie is that when she lets down her guard she can swear with the best of them. What is odd is that she swears with impeccable diction. I have never heard someone curse so distinctly. She enunciated every syllable of every curse word. She is also a romantic and requested a relationship for her character in the movie. So we layered in a subtle friendship-with-potential between Queen Clarisse and Joe.

You might think that an actress of her caliber would be quite needy, but Julie was the complete opposite. Once she was wrapped for the day but I saw she was still on the set at two in the morning,
and I wondered why. Anne was still shooting, trying to tackle a tough scene, and we were using a day player to stand in for Julie’s character off-camera. Suddenly Julie said she wanted to read the scene off-camera with Anne. Like I told Diane Keaton, I told Julie she didn’t need to do that. Her day had been long and it wasn’t essential.

“I want to stay,” said Julie in her proper, no-nonsense voice. “The young people must learn the proper way to be an actress. You must read off-camera for the other person’s close-up.”

Julie wanted to protect Anne, a trait I have seen in her many times since. I think as a director you have to know when to step back. If actors say something negative to each other or begin to fight or in rare cases hit each other, you jump in. I have never had hitting on any of my movies. But otherwise you allow them to build a relationship on their own. These two women bonded well. Anne had two minutes of experience, and Julie had decades of experience. Together, they made a lovely duo. Chuck Minsky, a wiry, youthful man, was my cinematographer on the movie. I have worked with Chuck many times before and chose him for this film because he has a gift for making women look beautiful on film.

Julie had played royalty in other movies, and her pet peeve was the obligatory queen crown. Crowns are tricky to get on and off without messing up your hair. In movies it often comes down to what will make the hair look best. So Julie never wanted to be seen putting the crown on or taking it off on-camera. The hair and makeup department built an ingenious little device that would help the crown sit more smoothly on her head. Other than the crown, she hardly fussed about anything. She always came to the set ready, willing, and prepared to assume the role of our queen and said, “Let’s deal with that damn crown!”

After months of editing with Bruce Green, the movie’s promotion went into high gear. The press junket for
The Princess Diaries
was exciting because our little film became the sleeper hit of the summer of 2001. We thought we were making a kids’ movie, but it turned out mothers and daughters wanted to share the joy of watching
Anne and Julie. So our popularity spanned two age groups. When it came to handling the press, however, Julie knew the ropes, but the younger girls needed some guidance.

By the time the movie was released, Anne had been accepted at Vassar and was reading more intellectual works. And so, she took her first press junket a little too seriously. When the press asked her questions, she started quoting Nietzsche, Kafka, and Schopenhauer. Heather Matarazzo, whom I’d cast as Anne’s best friend, Lilly, after she impressed me in the independent film
Welcome to the Dollhouse
, also did not want to talk about being the friend of a princess. She wanted to talk about gay rights and being a smart lesbian in Hollywood. This combo gave the Disney publicity people heart attacks. “Garry, do something,” they begged me. To round out our press tour we had Mandy Moore, the singer, a pretty, blonde newcomer, who played a popular yet mean girl to Anne’s nerdy girl. After watching Anne and Heather on the first round of interviews, I decided to jump in with a little avuncular advice.

“Ladies! Ladies! You are talking about existentialists and homosexuality. Schopenhauer and sex are not going to get you a feature story in
Teen Vogue
. Look at Mandy Moore. She’s talking to the reporters about her hair and makeup. The reporters are eating it up, and she’ll get good press in all the teen magazines. So please, do me a favor and perform breezy chitchat about what kind of shampoo and conditioner you use. Just talk about it today. Tomorrow you can talk about whatever you want.” They both immediately lightened up and dazzled the reporters.