My Happy Days in Hollywood (34 page)

I have always taken the critics’ reviews with a grain of salt, often not reading them until a year later. What carried more weight with me were the letters I received from people who enjoyed the movie.
Some of them were from parents who were raising children with disabilities. Many of these letters thanked me for bringing their situations to light and showing their joys and struggles. I also received letters from people who said they showed the film to new employees in group homes and hospitals for clients with disabilities. The letters cheered me up and showed me that people had been inspired by the movie.

Whenever I get down or blue about a project, I remember a conversation I once had with my sister about art and creativity. Penny is one of the brightest and most creative people I know. So whenever I am considering a new project or having trouble with an existing one, I ask her advice. She once told me, “Garry, some people find success at making money out of money. Other people strike it rich by thinking of grand business ideas, or complicated schemes. Our family makes television shows and movies that last. So when trying to decide what to do next, think about whether it will last. That is our family business and our legacy—entertainment that has longevity.” Writer Lowell Ganz once said that charm was our family business. I always think a lot about longevity and charm when considering my next project.

The next movie I would direct would turn out to be
Runaway Bride
. Julia Roberts was ready to go. Richard Gere had signed his deal, and I was ready to pack my bags and move to Baltimore. I needed a boost. I needed a hit. I needed a movie that would renew my status as a Hollywood director. I wasn’t putting pressure on myself so much as I was renewing my focus and commitment to film and what I wanted to say. A love story. Four different weddings. Two of my favorite actors. I was ready to go. Bring on
Runaway Bride
, I thought, and let’s hope it is a film that lasts.

Walking Down the Aisle Again with Roberts and Gere

W
HEN YOU START
to get older in Hollywood, people begin to give you lifetime achievement awards. When this happens you start to feel as if your life is over. The problem was that I was only sixty-four years old when this started, and I didn’t feel like the end of my life was close at all. I felt fine and was doing a lot of acting. I was finishing up my stint as Stan Lansing on
Murphy Brown
. I had a nice size part in the Drew Barrymore movie
Never Been Kissed
, and I was preparing to direct
Runaway Bride
with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Baltimore.

Still, the invitations for lifetime achievement awards continued to roll in. I tried to appreciate the accolades without getting depressed that I would soon be living at the old folks’ home. One of my favorite awards included my name on a street sign along the Bronx Walk of Fame. Although I had been in Hollywood for more than thirty years, I still felt like the stickball-playing kid from the Bronx, so a street named after me in my old neighborhood felt extraspecial.

Runaway Bride
also felt like an extraspecial movie from the beginning, too. However, to shoot a film in Baltimore in the dead of winter was not on my bucket list. I also didn’t want to be so far away from my family, but sometimes you have to sacrifice comfort for a good job. The producers of
Runaway Bride
got a great tax incentive to shoot in Baltimore, so we all packed up and moved there.

Early during the shoot a mugger held up some of our crew in the prop department. Two nights later we heard that some members of
the cast of the
Riverdance
, who were performing nearby, were also mugged. Things got so bad that when my assistant and I would leave the hotel to go out to dinner we would
run
to the restaurant. I heard Barry Levinson, otherwise known as Baltimore’s favorite movie director, was shooting close by. So I called and told him we liked everything about shooting in Baltimore except the crime wave we were experiencing. Immediately Barry made a few phone calls and had more police assigned to our set. We had no trouble after that, and I have always been grateful to Barry.

I had a lot riding on
Runaway Bride
. None of my last three pictures—
Exit to Eden, Dear God
, and
The Other Sister
—had been a hit, and I needed another hit. With a great script and two of my favorite stars, I thought the movie had a lot of potential. At the very least I knew we would have fun reuniting our
Pretty Woman
trio. For years we had been looking for a script but couldn’t find the right one for a sequel. Richard said he was in a cave one day in Tibet and a monk came over to him and said, “When are you going to do
Pretty Woman Two
?” That’s when Richard decided we should find a script, any script and not necessarily a sequel, so we could work together again. Julia agreed, and so did I. And Richard could then walk proudly in caves.

What I didn’t anticipate was how cell phones would intrude on our production. When we filmed
Pretty Woman
, in 1989, nobody had cell phones. On the set of
Runaway Bride
, in 1999, everyone had a cell phone and some people had two. Julia and Richard always seemed to be on their cell phones. Richard was helping the Dalai Lama promote the cause of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, and Julia was saving orphans in Jamaica. I was afraid to shoot a scene because some orphans and the people of Tibet might suffer. I finally had to ask both Richard and Julia to put down their cell phones for a while so we could shoot the movie. I’m only thankful Facebook wasn’t around back then.

As on the sets of my other movies, I liked to plan pranks, contests, and festivities that tied in to different holidays. One day in November the cast and crew decided to pull a prank on me. I was driving to work when a Baltimore policeman came up behind me
with flashing lights on. Nervously I pulled over to the side of the road because I thought I was getting a ticket. I am notorious for being a driver so tentative that I make only right turns and rarely left ones. Suddenly the policeman handed me an envelope that contained a birthday card from the cast and crew. I had to laugh because this was the kind of stunt I usually think of.

We all liked to play pranks on Julia because we enjoyed seeing her laugh. Whereas the younger, inexperienced Julia was easy to make laugh out loud on the set of
Pretty Woman
, I was happy to see Julia the star was still an easy target for a giggle. Big stars like to laugh and experience surprise just like ordinary people. There was a scene in which Julia was going to marry a hippie. She was supposed to climb over a wall and jump onto a waiting motorcycle as her escape from the ceremony. On one of the takes, instead of the motorcycle waiting for her on the other side of the wall, we had a big cake in honor of her birthday. She gave us one of her best smiles.

Another time we were filming right before Christmas and I hosted a Christmas tree decorating contest. Richard won with a tree he decorated with different photos from his life and acting career. One of his favorite hobbies is photography, and each year he sends Christmas cards to his family and friends containing a picture he has taken during that year. My wife frames his Christmas photos and puts them in the now quiet, expensive guest bathroom where my daughter used to put up fan pictures of Richard back in the 1970s. So our tradition of having a Richard Gere–themed bathroom carries on.

It was reported that Julia and Richard got $20 million apiece to star in
Runaway Bride
. To say they were big stars was to make an understatement. Julia, in particular, was a powerhouse and being closely watched along with Benjamin Bratt, her boyfriend at the time. However, even on a major motion picture someone can pull the focus from the stars when bad behavior is involved. Our cinematographer got arrested for getting into a fight in a Baltimore bar. It was embarrassing, and we discussed what he should do to redeem himself at work. He decided to gather the cast and crew and apologize for bringing negative publicity to the production. While he was
giving his speech, Julia was so excited that someone
else
was the center of attention that she could hardly stand still. For her, to be just a bystander felt like a day at the spa. She listened carefully to the apologetic cinematographer and looked just like a normal, everyday girl instead of an A-list movie star.

Even superstars being paid $20 million, however, have off days, and Richard and Julia certainly had one on
Runaway Bride
. The disagreement started over scheduling; to be honest, I’m not sure what the details were. I think one of them needed to go to a meeting in New York but the other one didn’t want to change the shooting schedule. To me it didn’t matter what they were fighting about. Directing a love story when the two stars are quarreling isn’t easy. One day, they weren’t speaking to each other. I knew them both well enough to talk to them individually, but I was unable to melt the frost between them. I couldn’t rearrange the production schedule to make them both happy at once, so I had to come up with another plan. That night I was in bed pitching ideas with my wife who was in town visiting me.

“It has to be a love montage. Maybe they should eat something. Ice cream?”

“I think you can do better,” said Barbara.

“They already ride horses at the end. What’s better?”

“I’ve got it. They can fly kites. They can run and look romantic, but they both will have to look up. So they won’t have to look at each other,” said my wife.

The idea was perfect. And if you watch
Runaway Bride
today you can see the kite-flying scene and know that behind the scenes the two stars were not speaking to each other off-camera. Flying a kite side by side, they look like any other happy couple falling in love. Despite the fact that my wife is a great nurse, I know in my heart she could have been one hell of a movie producer as well.

After that day things got better between Julia and Richard. When we moved on to the horse-riding scenes, they perked up because they are both excellent riders. However, when you work with animals something always goes wrong. We had a scene in which Richard is on a horse and Julia is seated behind him nuzzling his
neck. Unfortunately, at that exact moment the horse bucked, and Richard raised his shoulders to control the horse, knocking Julia in the chin and jamming her teeth. So when I yelled, “Action!” all you could hear was Julia screaming “Ouch!” We had to shoot this beautiful and romantic shot many times to get it right without anyone getting hurt.

It rained a lot on our shoot, and we spent a lot of time discussing how cold we were. Yet on a positive note, I remember thinking more than anything else how strong we were as a team. I had Hector Elizondo, my lucky charm, playing the husband of Rita Wilson (Tom Hank’s wife), who was Richard’s boss. I had Paul Dooley playing Julia’s dad, as well as the always dependable and brilliant Joan Cusack as Julia’s best friend. I cast my daughter Kathleen as one of Julia’s bridesmaids. At the same time Kathleen was appearing in an off Broadway play, so she flew back and forth between Baltimore and New York. Her play was so far off Broadway that it was in the basement of a supermarket. During scene changes you could hear shopping carts rolling overhead. But it was great experience for Kathleen to be in a $72 million movie at the same time she was in a minimum-budget subterranean play.

Among our
Runaway Bride
cast we didn’t have a single weak link. Julia herself seemed physically and mentally strong. In one scene she even pulled an eight-year-old boy on the train of her wedding dress as she bolted out of a church. Some of the producers wanted to hire a little person, but I knew we would be fine with a little boy. I brought a group of boys out to a field to audition. I put my jacket on the ground and asked them to lay on their stomachs and let me pull them around. Some of them didn’t hang on right, but I finally found a great little boy. I put him in a tuxedo and popped him right into the scene.

Richard was in a happy place in his life while we were filming. He was dating Carey Lowell, an actress who had appeared in my sister’s television series spinoff of
A League of Their Own
. Richard’s relationship with Carey, and the fact that she had a daughter, made him seem more settled than I had ever seen him before. I noticed he would fly back to New York on the weekends to be with Carey and
her daughter. One day Richard was about to fly back and I asked him to stay to help me shoot some additional footage.

“Okay,” he said. “Of course if you need me I will stay.” I could tell he was disappointed, though, more than I’d thought he would be.

“Just for my own knowledge, were you flying back for something special this weekend?” I asked.

“Hannah, Carey’s daughter, is in a horse show,” he said.

“If that’s the reason, then you can go. I’ll shoot around you,” I told him.

“You mean if there was another reason you would ask me to stay?” he said.

“Yes. To see a twelve-year-old who is expecting you to come to a horse show and watch her get a ribbon? This is a good reason. Always remember, life is more important than show business.”