My Happy Days in Hollywood (22 page)

Originally we cast Matthew Broderick in the lead, but then the deal fell apart and he took another movie. A nineteen-year-old Matt Dillon was hired by the studio and announced the first day we met that “I don’t do comedy.” I had seen his two recent movies
The Outsiders
and
Rumble Fish
, and he was right, they were not brimming with comedy. In fact, Matt spent a lot of time in those movies looking down and mumbling into his shoes. So I told him in this movie we would help him look up more. On the outside he was a tough and brooding movie star on the rise, but on the inside he was still a kid from New Rochelle. I knew that from a humor perspective, I had to find something that would work for the movie and for him. I took Matt to lunch at Wolf’s, my favorite deli in Manhattan that is sadly now closed. I noticed that he made an unconscious little humming sound with his mouth as he ate the sandwich. I said, “Matt, that is funny! We’ll put that right in the movie.” I think I startled him by recognizing the comedy that was hiding inside of him. He didn’t even seem to know it existed.

For the part of Matt’s gin-rummy-playing mentor, our casting director, Margery Simkin, suggested Richard Crenna. I knew him casually and from seeing him from time to time at the girls’ school where both our daughters went. But I didn’t realize until we got on the set what a true godsend Richard would turn out to be. Steady and precise, his performance in
The Flamingo Kid
, in my opinion, is just brilliant. Richard, Jessica Walter, and Hector Elizondo, whom I cast as Matt’s hardworking plumber father, were all pivotal to have on a movie set where most of the other actors were inexperienced and under twenty-five years old. I always find it helpful to surround young performers with adults like I did on
Happy Days
with Marion
Ross and Tom Bosley, and Phil Foster and Betty Garrett on
Laverne & Shirley
. Without the adults the kids don’t have any role models to look up to.

I’m always casting people, even when I’m outside my office or on vacation. So it’s no surprise that I found Matt’s female romantic costar at a celebrity sports weekend in Southern California. I was down in La Costa with my wife at a tennis tournament hosted by Carl Reiner. I saw a young woman with long legs and strawberry blonde hair hitting the ball on a nearby court. I turned to Barbara and said, “If that girl can talk, I need her for
The Flamingo Kid
.” I didn’t need an experienced actress but I did need one who could deliver the dialogue in a convincing and charming way. Her name was Janet Jones, and she had played semiprofessional softball and was very athletic. She had exactly the peaches-and-cream look I needed to play opposite Matt. (Real-life hockey player Wayne Gretzky was also attracted to her athletic looks; he married her a few years after the movie came out.)

The Flamingo Kid
was the first movie where I introduced pranks. I found you need something to think about other than the movie because the pace can drive you crazy. To lighten the atmosphere I introduced the concept of the last-day pie in the face. Whenever an actor was shooting his last scene of the movie, he would get hit in the face with a whipped cream pie when he least expected it. On his last day Hector thought he was safe because he was shooting a scene in a car alone. But I snuck someone with a pie into the backseat of the car and we got him anyway. The big stars didn’t want a pie in the face, but they got hit anyway. There is no “star protection” from my list of pranks.

One of the things I learned early on to enjoy about directing is the unexpected. Studios make big deals, agents package famous movie stars together, and lots of money is made every day, but none of that excites me as much as when I get to discover a special person who has not been on the big screen before. That is what happened when I first saw little Peter Costa. His mother brought his sister in to audition, and she sang, danced, and did the hula hoop. When she was done they walked back out to the waiting room, and that is
when I saw Peter, the little girl’s brother, lying on the carpeting. He had a chubby face with freckles, white skin, and wise eyes that made him look older than he was.

“Who is that?” I asked the mother.

“My six-year-old, Peter,” she said.

“What does he do?” I asked.

“Nothing. He doesn’t do much of anything,” she said. “He hardly talks.”

“Are you sure?” I said excitedly.

She nodded.

I looked down at Peter and saw that he had perhaps the world’s greatest deadpan expression. I hired him on the spot, confusing the mother to no end because she had brought her daughter in to audition. But sometimes you find your cast where you least expect them. I had to hire his sister, too, because I didn’t want to cause any trouble at home for them. I used Peter throughout the movie at the cabana club as well as in our beach scenes. I wasn’t the only one who recognized his talent. Later Peter became a regular on
The Cosby Show
.

The casting was more intense than usual on
The Flamingo Kid
because we had a lot of beach scenes and at one time more than five hundred extras. I tried to fill the crowd with interesting looking people I liked such as Jack Klugman’s son Adam and a talented actor I knew would become big one day named John Turturro. I also remember sitting on the beach listening to two girls who were talking with the worst accents. One of them was named Marisa Tomei. I thought they were interesting girls—and not your usual actresses—so I put them right in the movie and gave them speaking roles. With the casting under control, I also was a happier director on
The Flamingo Kid
because it was a story I could relate to growing up with my own dad.

The original writer, Neal Marshall, no relationship to me, had written a solid script based on his youth spent in the Catskills. Neal and I rewrote the script with notes from the producers, then the screenwriter Bo Goldman took a pass at a rewrite but would not ask for screenwriting credit for it. Bo let Neal and me share credit because he said he didn’t change enough to warrant credit. He did,
however, tell me that while the dialogue was essential, the actors’ reactions to things were even more important. So I never forgot that while directing the movie. Later, when I met director Blake Edwards, he said the same thing. “The reaction to the action is critical.” To have a great line is nice, but to have a strong and memorable reaction is even better.

Directing a film
after
I quit smoking was a life-changing event for me. I had so much more energy and could come up with more material for the actors. In one of my favorite scenes, Matt Dillon visits the fancy home of Richard Crenna. Since moving to California in the 1960s, I have been to many people’s fancy homes and have felt like a foreigner in a strange land myself. Just entering a home in Bel Air makes me feel like I’m going to knock something big and pricey over and break it. Once I went to the house of Doug Cramer, who was the head of Paramount at the time. I had to go to the bathroom, so I tried to pee in the fancy bathroom without making any noise so the people in the living room wouldn’t hear me. I was able to remember my own nervous anxiety and put it into
The Flamingo Kid
. I also had Matt take some guest soap and put it in his pocket, and then had Richard voice-over the line, “What are you doing in there? Stealing the soap?” Matt might have been new to comedy, but he took what I gave him and made people laugh out loud.

As harrowing as the shoot on
Young Doctors
was,
The Flamingo Kid
was a delight. The cast and crew seemed to enjoy coming to work each day. I know I certainly did, especially working alongside cinematographer Jimmy Contner, who would go on to shoot the television series
Miami Vice
. Contner was an intense man with a great cinematic style. After I introduced pranks, the cast started making up some of their own. One day Richard and Matt were in a car set so long they made a cardboard sign that read,
FREE THE CAR PEOPLE
. Another day, after controlling five hundred extras all day long in a swimming pool scene with a giant bullhorn, the first assistant director, Stephen Lim, called it a wrap, then jumped into the pool fully clothed. These were not depressing movie days. They were truly happy ones. The hardest part of the movie was being away from my wife and kids, but they made several trips to New York to see me,
which made me happy. With two kids still in high school and one in college, it was a tough time to be out of town. My wife had started to work again, too, as a nurse at the Los Angeles Free Clinic.

I shot the ending of the movie and headed back to Los Angeles. When I got home I realized I had shot the ending wrong. But I didn’t have enough experience as a director to know how to fix my problem. Who should I talk to? How should I proceed? Was I overreacting? So I went to consult my producer Michael Phillips, who by then had produced three big films:
The Sting, Taxi Driver
, and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. He was a kind man who offered me nothing but patience and wisdom. If I didn’t have the experience to know what to do about the ending, Michael certainly did. He told me if I thought that I really had the wrong ending, then I had to ask the studio for more money to reshoot it. So I did just that. But it was too expensive to fly the cast and crew back to New York, so we had to reshoot the ending in Los Angeles. Instead of building a set we decided to shoot at Alice’s Restaurant in Malibu, because there we could have an inside-outside beach set to closely match the one we had shot in New York.

I thought a beach was a beach, but I turned out to be wrong. The sun on the West Coast sets on a different side than the sun on the East Coast. So we decided to shoot in Malibu at night. With the sunset problem addressed I had to deal with the thematic problem. In the original ending, the dad (Hector) and the son (Matt) never really made up. Their reconciliation was too casual and unsatisfying. So with the reshoot I had to bring the father and son back together with a more triumphant reunion. I did what I wished my own father had done more with me—I had them hug. I knew that the audience needed to see them hug. Even after a son “comes of age,” he still can always use a hug from his dad to let him know he is on the right track.

When I was working in television I developed a crew who went with me from series to series, but in film I didn’t have that yet. So I decided near the end of
The Flamingo Kid
that I had to start jotting down names of the people I might want to work with again. One day I was listening to the walkie-talkies, which the production assistants
used to communicate with one another. Suddenly I overheard a thick, authoritative New York accent bellowing very intelligent commands from an outer parking lot. I went up to the first assistant director and said, “Who is that voice?” He said “Ellen Schwartz. She’s great.” So I made a note to hire her for my next picture and possibly promote her. When you see good people who do their jobs well and can make your life easier, you want to bring them onto your next picture, too. (Ellen later became a terrific producer and worked on several of my later movies.) The key for me is to make a cohesive team on my movies like I had done growing up with my Falcons sports teams.

The first editor who cut our dailies had to leave to do another movie, so for the major editing I hired Priscilla Nedd. She was a self-professed workaholic, and I liked her the moment I met her. She was unmarried, without kids, and could work as long as I needed her. (She would often say during our editing sessions that she worried she would never get married. But she was wrong: I later walked her down the aisle when she married producer David Friendly.) We edited the film at Raleigh Studios near Paramount, where I had done my television shows for so many years. I’m always one to appreciate good karma, and I liked being so close to Paramount and my old working neighborhood. Not only was Priscilla willing to work hard like me but she showed passion when necessary. Sometimes when we were arguing she would climb up on top of the editing machine and lay down and say things like “I can’t do that edit. I won’t do it. Please don’t make me.” She made me laugh, but I respected her, too. She had just worked as one of the editors on
An Officer and a Gentleman
, which I admired, so I trusted her taste. We literally had to work around the clock sometimes to get the job done on
The Flamingo Kid
because we always felt behind.

One day I went to the office to get something. I noticed a man in the office, wearing a wig, fixing our window shades. Suddenly the man turned around, and I saw it was Ron Howard and he said, “Garry, this is your life!” He quickly ushered me out of the building to a waiting limousine. Priscilla looked out the window from upstairs to see me leaving in the limousine with Ron Howard and
she yelled down, “Garry, where the
fuck
are you going?” She was panicked because we were behind schedule again and had to screen a preview soon for test audiences. But I had no choice. Ron took me to a nearby soundstage, where they filmed my episode of
This Is Your Life
as a television special. My teacher Raphael Philipson from DeWitt Clinton High School was there, along with Pete Wagner, on whom I had based Fonzie. My family and other friends celebrated memories with me, too. Glory, however, passed quickly and later that night I went back to editing with Priscilla.

When I finished
The Flamingo Kid
, I hoped for bigger box office receipts than
Young Doctors
just so I could say that I had improved from my first picture to my second. I don’t need a lot of praise, but I do always like to do better. But what I didn’t expect was that there would actually be good reviews. They would prove to be some of the best reviews of my career. Critics were putting my picture in the same category as
Diner
and
Risky Business
. Audiences and critics were suddenly taking me seriously as a director and not telling me to go right back to television. Overall, reviewers thought Matt Dillon was great, Richard Crenna brilliant, and the story a strong, solid comedy.