My Happy Days in Hollywood (42 page)

However, the parade of A-list stars on the film made every day exciting. In addition to Oscar winners De Niro and Berry, we were able to cast Hilary Swank. I had never met her, and I have to say she was a delight to work with. She told me when she first moved to California she lived out of her car. She is a real person, who has worked hard to make her career what it is. Hilary was ready with some pranks of her own. One day I yelled, “Action!” and she led the cast in the theme song to
Laverne & Shirley
. I cracked up. She is a great actress, but on my movie she was ready not only to act but also to have a good time. She was hands down the star of our gag reel. She did gags to others and allowed them to be played on her. One of the funniest is when she was doing a serious scene and the crew threw confetti on her head.

An odd thing about Hilary is that she is one of the few movie stars who owns a pet bird and she can’t talk highly enough about birds as pets. She told us she recently took her bird to Paris and he learned to speak French. In addition to pets we talked a lot about her character and her hair. She wanted her hair to move, so we agreed on hair extensions. When we weren’t talking about her hair, we of course focused on how best to portray her character. As an actress
she can switch from comedy to drama in a second. She has not only incredible magnetism but also concentration. We laughed over the fact that she is often mistaken for Jennifer Garner, a star of
Valentine’s Day
. Hilary said it is because they have similar lips.

Sometimes as a director you have to recognize when to step back and let an actress do her own thing. Hilary and I worked well together mapping out the comedy scenes. But when it came to the serious speeches, I took a different approach. As she prepared to give her big speech, I said to her, “This serious stuff is what you do for a living. So I’m going to get out of your way and just let you do it.” I gave her no direction because she didn’t need it. You have to know your actors and then use different tactics with them to adjust to the tone and intent of each scene.

Hilary’s character is the head of the Times Square Alliance, which oversees the dropping of the ball on New Year’s Eve. Her character was afraid of heights, so we had a policeman, played by the wonderful Rob Nagle, carry her up and down the steps to the ball. When we were setting up the scene, I worried it would be difficult to see her face. Hilary said, “No matter how he carries me, I’ll find the lens.” She always knew where the camera was. New actors often don’t know how to find the lens or the light, but Hilary is a veteran, and it was exciting to watch her work. She can even do improvisational comedy well. She was especially good in a scene that used improvisation with Matthew Broderick.

Saying goodbye on a movie set, however, is not easy. I found it touching that both Hilary and Halle didn’t want to go home. Although the long hours and the work on a set can be hard, sometimes making a movie can be more fun than real living.

The forty-eight-day shoot on
New Year’s Eve
felt too long. It was not the longest shoot I ever faced in my career, but the bad weather made it a true struggle for everybody. My wife and children visited often to help keep my spirits up. When I didn’t have family in town, I used other methods to stay cheery. Years earlier Barbara and I had given money for a Central Park bench that now bears our names. When I had a day off, I would walk out of the hotel, cross the street, and sit on my park bench. It gave me some time to reflect on the
movie and on my life, and how I was looking forward to wrapping and going back home, where it was warmer.

Sometimes I would sit on my bench and dream about returning to Los Angeles to be greeted by a heat wave, or going to Hawaii for a Christmas vacation, or playing softball in the broiling heat. My staff also did their best to keep me peppy. Heather would bring me good news from the outside world, especially about my grandchildren: Sam had won a baseball game, Siena had started preschool, Ethan was learning piano, and Emma had done great in her ballet recital. News of my family would lift my spirits as I stood in Times Square in the freezing cold. I vowed once and for all to become a warm-weather director. If Katherine Fugate wrote another ensemble script, I decided it would have to be about the Fourth of July or something I could shoot in Hawaii.

During a movie I don’t have time to read books for pleasure, but I could reflect on books that had influenced my career. I did this sometimes while I was sitting on my park bench preparing my shot list, which is the outline I give to the crew each day to tell them what angles I want to shoot. I remembered J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
and Thomas Mann’s
Magic Mountain
always resonated with me:
Catcher in the Rye
because it reminded me of my own coming of age, and
The Magic Mountain
because it gave me hope that even a very sick kid, like I had been, could find love. Both inspired me to create my own stories and weave my own coming of age and love stories into the movies I directed.

I also reflected on jokes and comedians who changed my career. I mentioned it earlier, but it deserves repeating that I will never forget the Jack Benny episode in which someone tried to rob him. The thief said “Your money or your life?” Jack’s character was set up as a notorious cheapskate, so he had to pause before answering. The question brought sheer silence from Benny and a roar of laughter from the audience. That joke made me want to write a character who was equally clever. Another line I liked was the opening of Albert Camus’s
The Stranger:
“My mother died today, or was it yesterday?” I loved it because it established the narrator’s character so well. My inspiration ranged from Jack Benny to Camus.

Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and Arthur Miller all went to my high school, DeWitt Clinton. All three men influenced my career, especially because I knew they walked through the same hallways that I had. When I first saw Chayefsky’s movie
Marty
, I felt as if doors were opening before my eyes. I realized that if Chayefsky could write stories from his neighborhood, then so could I. I think
Marty
was one of the reasons I was able to create a series like
Happy Days
. Chayefsky’s movie gave me the confidence to believe that my friends and my stories about them mattered.

From that point on I also never forgot a character with a quirk or flaw because I knew I could use it in my work. Many years earlier I’d worked for a team who were writing jokes for a trip by President Kennedy to Texas, well before his assassination in the same state. We wrote lots of jokes for him about putting on a big Stetson hat. But when he arrived in Texas he refused to put on any hats. He thought they made him look less dignified. So I wrote Kennedy’s aversion to hats into Ashton Kutcher’s character in
New Year’s Eve
. When everyone in Times Square is putting on goofy hats, Ashton says, “I don’t do hats.”

Ashton is not only very talented but very practical. When I gave him the script there was more than one character I could see him playing, so I told him to choose. He decided that he wanted to be the cartoonist stuck in an elevator because it was a character who, unlike the rest of the cast, didn’t like New Year’s Eve. Ashton also knew that by choosing that character he would rarely shoot a scene outside and could thus avoid winter in New York. A good actor, and a wise man.

I thought a lot about being a sick kid while I was directing
New Year’s Eve
because although I was now cancer-free, I didn’t know how long I would be. The problem was that the radiation had burned the inside of my mouth, so it was still sore when I ate. I had directed so many movies in a healthy state that I found it difficult to direct with a sore mouth. But I learned that if I ate a big breakfast in the morning and then a big dinner at the end of the day, I could tread lightly at lunch and avoid hurting my mouth. No matter how I tried,
however, I started to lose weight on the set. Barbara and my assistant Heather would give me soft food to ease the pain. Usually this kind of cancer requires a feeding tube, but my wife was determined to help me avoid one. She would puree Progresso soups and kept me alive on chicken noodle and corn chowder.

Despite my problems with eating, mentally I was sharp as a tack. Every morning I would wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 and go to the set. I would be greeted by a sea of hugs from my crew members. It sounds corny, but a hug is a great thing to get in the morning, especially at 5:00
A.M
. when you aren’t feeling well. The first assistant director Dave Venghaus would hug me. The script supervisor Carol DePasquale would hug me. The cinematographer Chuck Minsky would hug me. The costume designer Gary Jones would hug me. It was a hug fest. On days when I had to go to a cold sidewalk and direct and when I couldn’t eat because of my sore mouth, a hug was a simple but great gift. The actors also inspired me. You’re not going to complain about pain in front of Halle Berry and Robert De Niro.

On the weekends sometimes I wouldn’t even get dressed. I would just hang out in my hotel room with my wife or kids and grandkids until it was time to go back to the set. My spirits were high until an odd thing happened: My friends started to die. I had five friends die during the filming of
New Year’s Eve
. These were not just acquaintances but very close friends. My friend Mark Harris used to say that when the friends in your age group start to die it is like they are calling up your class. First was Joel Sterns from college; then Mark Smith and John Grahams from the army; my friend Bill Lowenberg, with whom we had spent countless Christmas holidays in Hawaii; and director Blake Edwards, who was married to my friend Julie Andrews. One of the things I admire most about Julie is that she always speaks so highly of her late husband. A negative word about Blake has never slipped from her lips in my presence. I try to behave the same way toward my wife.

My wife, the consummate intensive care nurse, accepts death as part of the universe. But I take it harder. In order to keep my spirits up during all the funerals, Barbara came to New York more than
she would have on a movie location that was not in Los Angeles. One night we went out to dinner quite late at a favorite restaurant in midtown to celebrate our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. I was feeling tired but overall pretty well. I had a cream soup followed by some capellini, and then I didn’t stop. I went for the osso buco. I had lost so much weight that I thought it might be a good night to have some excellent food that wouldn’t hurt my mouth. This is where the night began to go very wrong. I started to feel clammy and anxious. I had had two Bailey’s Irish Cream during the meal as well. By the end of the osso buco, I thought I was going to throw up. I put my head on the table. If you do this in other states it might go unnoticed, but in New York City if you put your head down on a restaurant table, people will call an ambulance because they think you might sue the restaurant. Before I knew it the restaurant manager had called the obligatory ambulance.

I think all along my wife knew that the dizziness and anxiety were just from my stress level and bad stomach. If I had been in Los Angeles we probably would have gone home and gone to bed. But when you’re away you tend to err on the side of caution. The paramedics and policemen came and put me in an ambulance bound for New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Knowing that five of my close friends had recently died, I must admit there was a nagging little voice inside me saying “Maybe it’s your time, too.” But I told that little voice to be quiet because I was in the middle of directing a movie and I wasn’t ready to go yet. After I arrived at the hospital the doctor worried there might be something wrong with my heart. Barbara and my assistant Heather, who had made a beeline to the hospital to meet us, both said to the doctor, “He can’t stay overnight, he has to go to work tomorrow.” Eventually things calmed down and I was fine. The doctors said it was just stress, exhaustion, and an upset stomach.

My trip to the hospital was the low point of the movie. But what kept me going on the set was seeing fresh faces each day. One of the peppiest was that of Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Abigail Breslin’s mother. I had worked with her many years earlier in
Hocus Pocus
with Bette Midler and my sister Penny. It was great to see her, and
after directing her for a few days I was struck by the fact that Sarah Jessica is truly one of the happier actresses working in Hollywood today. As the mother of a little boy and twins, she has a lot on her plate, but she seems genuinely at peace. I asked her what her secret was when so many actresses in Hollywood often seem unhappy. Her answer: “I’ve just been doing it so long.” Harold Pinter directed her in a play when she was five years old, she starred on Broadway in
Annie
, and then she went on to a stunning run in
Sex and the City
. No matter how tricky a scene I set her up in, much like Hilary Swank, Sarah Jessica would look at me with pure confidence and say, “I’ll get there.” I like working with capable people, and two of the best were Tom Hines and Matt Walker, my on-set rewrite team. They are a major reason why
Valentine’s Day
was a hit, and why the
New Year’s Eve
script got completed.

Another familiar face I was happy to see again was Michelle Pfeiffer, with whom I hadn’t worked since we made
Frankie and Johnny
. In
New Year’s Eve
she plays a shy and unhappy Manhattan secretary until she meets up with a bike messenger who changes her life forever. Zac Efron and Michelle had worked together on
Hairspray
. She wanted to infuse her character with a touch of Asperger’s syndrome, and Zac was brave in his comedy choices. Michelle is not an improviser. She likes to have every movement and line scripted. Zac also likes to make choices and plan out his character. Together we created an ultrahip bike messenger who was a wonderful foil for Michelle’s secretary. One of the highlights of the film is at the end, when Michelle and Zac do a terrific dance together and we see her come out of her shell.