My Happy Days in Hollywood (32 page)

A few weeks later the producers called and asked if I would come back and do another episode.

“Is Louis coming back, too?” I asked.

“Louis is not. Just you,” they said.

Louis was returning to his day job as a French film director.

I was still trying to decide on my next movie, so I said sure as long as I could still make movies. For the next four years I appeared on and off as Stan Lansing and loved my work on the series. I think acting in a television series taught me how to be a better director and be more sensitive to the needs of actors. I came away from
Murphy Brown
with a greater appreciation of what it is like to be the person
standing underneath the bright lights and in front of the camera vulnerable for all America to see. I admired actors more for the hard work they do, whereas in the past I think I gave more credit to the writers and directors.

Another thing I loved was seeing the writing staff of
Murphy Brown
. When I started writing for sitcoms, in the 1960s on
The Joey Bishop Show
, the writers were heavy drinkers, misfits, college dropouts, and people who wrote for nightclub comics who came up through the ranks like me. By the late 1980s and ‘90s, the staff writers on sitcoms were top-ranked students from Ivy League colleges. The 4.0 superstars had figured out for themselves how much money there was to be made as a staff writer on a weekly sitcom. Suddenly graduates from Yale, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, and Northwestern weren’t going directly to medical or law school but instead were heading to Hollywood to start as entry-level sitcom writers at ABC, CBS, and NBC. I thought it was sad to have so many bright young people on staff as sitcom writers.

During
Murphy Brown
I had time to reflect on my television career. I’ve been on the comedy side of show business since the late 1950s and have tried to adjust to the changes. There were soft family comedies in the 1950s—and hipper and more sophisticated comedies in the 1960s. The 1970s took its cue from the rebellious 1960s and did social issue comedy, and then discovered the big-kid audience with
Happy Days, Three’s Company
, and
The Partridge Family
. And the 1970s were the end of variety shows, to be replaced by late-night talk shows and
Saturday Night Live
. The 1980s became high-concept comedy and a stronger female comedy presence, such as
Murphy Brown
. Also, new outlets on cable started to take foothold—allowing comedy with less censorship.

The late 1990s made comedy and money bedfellows. It featured more costly special effects to make comedy moments. At the end of the 1990s, the Internet and cable came on strong, allowing many new outlets for entertainment. The 2000s saw so much new technology we now had to make people laugh in new ways. I dreamed of doing jokes on the big screen, only to realize that humor had to be scaled down to laughing at things on your computer or your tiny
iPhone. With cable channels and Internet, there are many new outlets; comedy is more in demand than ever.

Some comedy devices, however, have suffered. Story is becoming more irrelevant. Simple stories, ensemble casts, fast-paced jokes, and the reality shows are in demand. Reality shows create comedy from laughing at your neighbors. They can be funny but often “mockery” has replaced “wit” and embarrassment or winning big has replaced “charming” and “delightful” humor. Who knows what the future will bring, but I hope to be a part of it.

Playing Stan Lansing on
Murphy Brown
gave a boost to my ego while I was still licking my wounds from the failure of
Exit to Eden
. It’s hard to be too depressed when you are appearing on a national television series that is at the top of the ratings. The funny thing was that people would recognize me from
Murphy Brown
but they wouldn’t immediately put two and two together. I would be in a restaurant and a guy would lean over to me and say, “Were you once my dentist?” Or “Did we go to college together?” And I would say, “I play Stan Lansing on
Murphy Brown
.” And he would say, “Aha! That’s where I know you from!” Over time people began to stop me in the street and say, “Hey! Stan! How ya doin’?” For my wife and family this new notoriety was strange. After all of my work in television, people knew my name from my credits but very few people, except for those who had seen me in
Lost in America
, knew my face.

The experience on
Murphy Brown
also gave me the confidence to seek out other acting work, including the cable television film
The Twilight of the Golds
, starring Brendan Fraser and Faye Dunaway, in which I played the father. One entertainment magazine wrote, “Marshall continues to prove himself even more talented in front of the camera.” I wasn’t quite sure if I should feel flattered by that comment or take it as a slam against my directing skills. The film was rather controversial because it involved a family struggling with the ethical question, “What if you knew your fetus was going to be gay?” The story of love, acceptance, and struggle was topical at the time and I think broke some new ground. I was excited to be part of such a dramatic film, which was a departure from my own acting.
In one scene I had to cry, and I tried my best. It was not the greatest crying ever done on film, but I gave it a shot.

While I was carrying on with my acting, I got the phone call from Paramount’s Sherry Lansing who said she was ready to make a movie called
Dear God
. She wanted me to direct, with Steve Tisch producing and Greg Kinnear set to star. The film was low budget, but now shooting a movie for me was about how much I liked the project, plus is the script ready to go and is the financing in place. In this case I was ready and the studio felt Greg was ripe to pop out as a star. He had appeared opposite Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond in Sydney Pollack’s admirable remake of
Sabrina
and done a good job. After screening
Sabrina
, I had to agree that he could act. Besides, I met him, and I liked him.

The advantage of
Dear God
not being a big-budget picture was that I could hire some of my talented friends and give them a break. I hired the funny and intense Laurie Metcalf from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and more recently the sitcom
Roseanne
. Laurie has always been one of my favorite actresses because she is like a chameleon, able to completely transform her body and look to adapt to a fictional character. She can bring an entire scene alive without saying a word because she uses her body to express emotions and is a master of guttural sounds. She has the best concentration while doing expressive acting that I have ever seen. (Years later I saw a play that starred a girl who demonstrated the exact same concentration, and it turned out she was Laurie’s daughter Zoe Perry.) In other supporting roles for
Dear God
, we were able to get my friend Jack Klugman and comedian Tim Conway, whom I had admired since his days on
The Carol Burnett Show
.

Dear God
was about a handsome and smart young man who also happens to be a con man. One day he begins answering people’s letters to God and making their dreams come true with the help of a ragtag group of postal employees. Greg was well-suited for the role, but the problem from the beginning was that we didn’t have any big-name stars. I guess our hope was that we would find an audience and turn our cast into big stars, but it didn’t happen that way. Greg
was up-and-coming, and very charming on-screen, but this was not destined to be his breakout movie. A year later, he was featured in
As Good as It Gets
and he was on his way. The rest of the
Dear God
supporting cast, while extremely talented, were not the kinds of actors who drove audiences into movie theaters.

Recently I had the opportunity to see
Dear God
again, and I recognized another problem with the movie—the music. When the studio saw our dailies, they decided that we lacked the story quality and star power to become successful. Based on that opinion, they held back on music financing. If we had had bigger stars and a more exciting story, Paramount probably would have spent more money buying songs and hiring a big orchestra. For a director it’s frustrating not to get the proper studio support in any area.

Things also fell apart when we showed the picture to test audiences. When you have a movie that relies on the audience either believing or not believing in God, it is tricky. The religious people laughed at some jokes and not at others, and the atheists were a bit suspicious about the entire picture. So it was a tough audience to please. After Paramount saw our numerical results, they also cut our editing budget. Often I didn’t have the budget to cut a joke out of the movie even when I had numbers that showed it wasn’t working. Further, our title confused people. Audiences who had loved the movie
“Oh, God!”
wondered why George Burns, dead since 1996, was not in my picture, too.

A movie for me is never pure joy or pure hell. There are always highs and lows and many days in between. So when I look back on
Dear God
, I look at the positive aspects: The process had been fun and rewarding. Greg Kinnear was a delight and I had gotten to see my actress-daughter Kathleen almost every day. I’d been able to live in my house with my wife and work close to home part of the time when I wasn’t staying in a nearby hotel. I’d enjoyed once again working with Hector Elizondo, who played one of the post office workers. And for the first time ever I’d put my twin granddaughters, Lily and Charlotte, into a movie. They played babies who were stressing their mother out so much that the postal workers granted the mother’s wish to get a break from her kids. My granddaughters
demonstrated excellent crying on command with chocolate pudding on their faces when I yelled “Action!” However, I didn’t think they had a future in acting.

Finally, I stopped pondering the question, “Should I still be a film director?” I knew in my heart and at my age that film directing was the perfect job for me. But the fact that the profession was a good fit didn’t mean that the projects I chose were always spot-on. After
Dear God
was released I continued to worry even though I had enough money to survive. I think my worry stemmed from some of the men I’d met at the beginning of my career. There was a chubby curmudgeon named Marvin Marx who wrote for
The Joey Bishop Show
. He was always worried about money. We would all go out to dinner and he would put the bill on his credit card and make us give him cash so he would have spending money. He also used to go to the Nabisco factory and wait at the side door, where they would hand out boxes of broken cookies for free. I didn’t want to worry the rest of my life about money, and I didn’t want to wait in line for broken cookie crumbs either.

Movie directing had not always been my only dream. I had another long-standing goal: to build a theater. On November 9, 1996, I signed the paperwork to build my Falcon Theatre on Riverside Drive in Burbank, California. Since moving to Hollywood I had wanted to build a space in my hometown of Toluca Lake to produce plays and musicals, partially in memory of my mother, who thought creating live theater was the most noble of all professions. My financial trouble in Pasadena had sidelined my dream for so long that I thought it might never happen. But now I finally had enough money to start construction. However, once we broke ground I began to worry about money again. You can’t construct a building and not be constantly worried about how you are going to pay for it, especially if it is a 130-seat theater that’s already $1 million over budget. I know how to bring a movie in under budget but not a building.

Building the theater was a highlight for me personally, but it did nothing for my movie career. I have often said that Hector Elizondo is my lucky charm, but if I had to name a female lucky charm for me, it would be Julia Roberts. She brought me creative and financial
success on
Pretty Woman
, and I will always be grateful for her. What is lovely and amazing is that she brought me luck a second time when I needed it most. At home one night I was reading a play that we were considering producing at the Falcon when my wife came into the room. But I didn’t want to be interrupted.

“Garry, you have a phone call,” said Barbara.

“I’ll call them back,” I said.

“I think you will want to take it,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s Julia Roberts,” she said.

“Okay. Hand me the phone,” I said.

“That’s not all,” she said.

“What else?” I asked.

“Richard Gere is on the line, too,” she said.

“Richard and Julia are calling me together?” I asked.

“I know. The
National Enquirer
would have a field day. I’ll go and get you a Fudgsicle while you start the call,” she said.

The phone call was a big deal. It was about a script called
Runaway Bride
.

My life was about to change for the better again because of a lion-haired actress named Julia Roberts.

Striving for a Different Kind of Love Story