My Happy Days in Hollywood (24 page)

We shot a scene in which Jackie’s character visits a house of prostitution, and we hired a number of actresses from Chicago to play the prostitutes. When I interviewed the local actresses, they all read well. But there was something missing. I wanted something, a sound or a look, to set them apart from the prostitutes we have seen time and again in the movies. So I said, “Do any of you ladies play a
musical instrument?” One woman raised her hand and said, “I play the accordion.” She then went to the trunk of her car, brought back her accordion, and played me a song. I put the girl and the accordion right into the movie. Her name was Isabella Hofmann, and she went on to work in television and many stage plays.

Nothing in Common
represented a turning point for me as a director. I learned that I could get the actors to do what I wanted them to do if I could somehow make them think it was their idea. I discovered this method also works well with studio executives, and I have cultivated this skill throughout my life in film. There was a scene in which Jackie’s character was riding on a ferryboat after being fired from his job as a clothing salesman. The scene was flat, and I knew I had to punch it up. Jackie’s character had some pens with his name on them. So in the scene I wanted Jackie to take the pens out of his pocket and throw them into the water. But I thought Jackie would be able to bring more emotion to the scene if he came up with that idea himself. So I cajoled him down the right road.

“So you’re sitting on the boat?” I said.

“Yes,” said Jackie.

“And you have the pens with your name on them in your pocket?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Jackie.

“What are you going to do with those pens? You probably wouldn’t keep them now that you are out of work, right?”

“Maybe I could throw them overboard?” he asked.

“Perfect. Love it. What a great idea. Let’s shoot it,” I said.

“Garry?” said Jackie. “Tell me what great idea am I having tomorrow.”

Jackie saw through my plan. He was just too smart, but he liked my idea and went with it anyway.

As the movie went along we all got happier. Eva Marie Saint, who played Tom’s mother, was lovely and the consummate professional. Jackie was invigorated by life on the movie set. Tom Hanks started dating Rita Wilson. The happier people became, the more I felt my own creativity growing as a director and as a writer. I was
eager to give everyone funny, touching, and interesting bits to do. I gathered material from everywhere, including my own life.

I remembered I had once seen a documentary on Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. The film showed him going around the country, having dinner with different officials at each stop. At one point he was having dinner with a member of the chamber of commerce in a small town. The chamber member turned to Toscanini and said, “Sometimes I eat my whole meal with a salad fork.” Toscanini’s reaction was wonderful. He just stared at the man blankly and didn’t know what to say in return. So I took that moment and put it right into
Nothing in Common
. Tom went a step further and added the response “Including your soup?” It was a great touch, and one of the funniest scenes in the film.

As a director you find success on a movie, and you inevitably make mistakes, too. There was a scene in which Tom needed to see Jackie’s swollen and diseased foot in order to realize just how serious his dad’s health issues were. I wanted to show the audience what an edgy filmmaker I was. So I had the prop department make this terribly ugly foot and then shot it up close. Sadly, Ray Stark later told me the scene with the foot cost us close to $10 million at the box office. The foot was too ugly and big, and it turned people off. I learned from my mistake. The first thing I did when the film was rereleased years later on video was cut out the foot. When I look back on it, I realize I should have let Tom “act” his reaction to the foot and put his face on-screen instead of showing the awful foot.

Nothing in Common
did very well in the critics’ corner. I, however, was not able to bask in the success because something distracted me. I learned that my business advisers had gotten me involved in an over-the-top real estate deal in Pasadena and money was being stolen from me. I have never had a head for numbers. To be told that my finances were a mess was overwhelming for me. I had to do something to calm myself down, so I signed up to direct another movie. I knew that if I lost a lot of money in the real estate deal, I would need to make another movie right away anyway. So I said a quick yes to a script called
Overboard
, and I headed to shoot in
Mendocino, California, a town known for its beautiful coastline, bed-and-breakfast inns, and the occasional smell of marijuana. I left my wife in Los Angeles to face the legal battles while I did the only thing I knew how to do at the moment: direct. Barbara and I were both stressed out at the same time, and we didn’t have the leisure time to help each other through it. We both knew that in order to survive financially she had to face the legal challenges head-on with the help of our lawyer friend Marty Garbus, and I had to hustle up as much work as I could to pay the bills. For the first time in my life I took a movie not because I planned to take it but because I needed the paycheck.

Capturing Love on the Ocean with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell

I
REMEMBER SITTING
beside a small harbor in Mendocino, California, trying to take stock of my life while the crew set up the next shot on
Overboard
. The reality was that
Nothing in Common
opened and even though critically it did well, financially it didn’t do very much. Still, I considered it one of my best works despite the fact it did little for my career at the time. Big box office ruled.

I did know that getting my first chance to direct Goldie Hawn was a director’s dream. Goldie represented that rare quality in an actress I have always found so alluring. She is not only funny but also beautiful. Some women who are great comedians are unfortunately not that attractive, so they can’t play a romantic lead. They can make audiences laugh in nightclubs until tears are rolling down their faces, but we don’t really want to see them kiss Brad Pitt on the big screen. Goldie, however, was and still is gorgeous and funny at the same time. She can get the laughs and win over the male lead. Plus, her training as a ballet dancer helped her have an elegance and grace that are rare for a comedian. I have heard it said before about Goldie that if you put a horizontal line across the center of her face, the top half is a glamorous movie star, while the bottom half is a quirky comedian. It is a winning combination.

Back in the 1960s, when I was producing my TV series
Hey Landlord!
Goldie worked on a series nearby called
Good Morning, World
, about early morning disc jockeys. I once acted in an episode
of that show, so I knew her from that and seeing her around the studio lot. A few years later she won an Academy Award for her performance in the movie
Cactus Flower
and her career really took off. I was a big fan of her performances in
Foul Play
(which my friends Tom Miller and Bob Boyett produced) and
Private Benjamin
, which was written by my friends Nancy Meyers, Chuck Shyer, and Harvey Miller.

By the time
Overboard
was being discussed, Goldie was not just an actress but a powerful producer as well. The thought of working with her might intimidate some directors, but I was
Laverne & Shirley
strong. Working with strong, independent women has always appealed to me. The best news of all about the project was that she was in love with her costar, Kurt Russell. They had met on the film
Swing Shift
and had been together ever since. Unlike
Nothing in Common
, in which Tom Hanks was getting divorced, Goldie and Kurt were in the glow of falling in love.

When Goldie and I first met we talked about the things we valued most in life: our kids. Goldie had two little children at the time—Kate and Oliver. She had survived a bad divorce, and ironically her ex-husband eventually married my old friend Cindy Williams, who had starred in
Laverne & Shirley
. Goldie and I had a lot in common. I think I knew right from the start I was working with a woman who was not only talented and funny but a smart boss. There was no doubt she was a major motion picture star, but inside she was a decent human being.

Goldie was producing the movie with her business partner Anthea Sylbert and actor Roddy McDowall, who would play a small part as a butler. The only person in the equation who was totally new to me was Kurt. I knew that he had been working steadily since he was a child for Disney and other studios, but what I didn’t know was what a professional he was. (I also heard he had once played baseball for the Portland Beavers, a minor league team I had once owned. So I almost owned Kurt.) I didn’t know that Kurt would be one of the nicest actors I would ever work with because he was such a team player. He would turn in a beautiful performance in a scene. Yet a minute later if we started losing the light or the weather would
turn on us, he would be the first one to pick up a light and help us move the entire set.

Kurt was always in a good mood and was great with the children. And it was fascinating to see him work so well side by side with Goldie. They have an amazing loving relationship despite the fact that she is a devout Democrat and he is a card-carrying Republican. I remember they would often fight openly on the set about their different political views. Kurt is, in every sense of the word, a regular guy, who told me he likes to go wild boar hunting without a gun. So basically he’s running after crazy boar with just a knife in his hand. He is so rare in Hollywood because he doesn’t have a neurotic bone in his body. He just exudes balance.

Before we began shooting
Overboard
, I had been waiting on another script called
Beaches
, which was the adaptation of a popular Iris Rainer Dart book with Bette Midler attached. As much as I wanted to direct
Beaches
and work with Bette Midler, I felt financially that I couldn’t wait. I talked to my agent, Joel Cohen, and he said I could direct
Overboard
first, and by the time I was done the script for
Beaches
would be ready. Joel was always right.

I talked to Francis Coppola about my financial troubles because he had been in debt as well. I remember he said to me, “Garry, don’t worry. You will make money again. Just get
even
.” He basically was saying do whatever you can to get out of debt and worry about making back your money later. He said a lot of people would be worried about starting from the ground up again, but he told me not to worry about that. “I have seen your work,” he said. “You will make the money back.” He seemed to have confidence that it would work out, and it did.

Overboard
was a lonely picture for me because I felt so far away from my friends and family. My other movies had been shot in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, which are cities where I have many friends. But Mendocino, which is three hours north of San Francisco, seemed remote and isolated. My wife was able to visit the set, but her priority was getting us out of this real estate mess and making sure we had the financial security to survive and keep the kids in college.

With the exception of my family, we had hardly any visitors to the set. Our cast and crew, of course, fascinated the town’s people, but we were basically a small band of film people on our own. Aside from wineries and plenty of marijuana farmers, there are few activities or businesses in Mendocino. On the flip side, there were no paparazzi around. So even Goldie and Kurt were able to move about without being bothered by the press or autograph seekers. Alexandra Rose, my producer from
Nothing in Common
, was on this film, too, and she met her future husband, Rob Meadows, while we were on location. So being at a remote location has its pros as well as its cons.

At the time Mendocino had one nightclub with a band. On every movie I have to get a physical for insurance reasons. Before the
Overboard
shoot my doctor worried that I might get too exhausted by directing another movie so soon. He told me one thing that might help was dancing. So I made a nightly pilgrimage to the only nightclub in Mendocino to dance away my stress.

Overboard
was the story of a wealthy woman who falls overboard on her own yacht, gets amnesia, and is adopted by a local carpenter (played by Kurt Russell) and his family. Kurt tries to convince her that she is poor, married, and the mother of four children. I thought the script, written by Leslie Dixon, was funny, and I was able to put together a great supporting cast. Edward Herrmann played Goldie’s husband and Katherine Helmond her mother. To play Kurt’s four sons we cast Jeffrey Wiseman, Jamie Wild, Brian Price, and Jared Rushton, who would go on to star the following year in my sister Penny’s movie
Big
.

I did not have a lot of experience working with young children. I had raised three children of my own and worked with the young cast on
Happy Days
, but directing four boys with relatively no experience was challenging. On purpose I cast the four kids out of Chicago because I didn’t want them to look like Hollywood kids with blow-dried hair and dyed eyelashes. In one scene the youngest son, Jeffrey, had to cry, and we talked about the scene and how we would approach it together. He said he never got sad, but then I asked him if he had ever had a pet that died. He said, “A dog named Fluffy.” So I said when we get ready to do the scene we will talk
about Fluffy, and he agreed. Crying on-camera is not an easy thing, but six-year-old Jeffrey did a fine job, especially when we conjured up memories of Fluffy. But after we wrapped that scene, every once in a while he got a little paranoid and would say, “Are we going to talk about
Fluffy
again?” And I assured him no, we were done with Fluffy and the tears.