My Mother Was Nuts (33 page)

Then Harvey Weinstein got involved and wanted Ben Affleck for the lead. As much as I liked Ben, I didn’t think he was right. I also had Russell Crowe up at my house wanting the part. But he had done only one U.S. movie at that point, and Harvey wasn’t interested in him. Or in me.

It was one of the few times people were really shitty to me. But I didn’t care. My deal on the movie was in place—it was still in place ten years later when they finally made
Cinderella Man
with Russell, at that time an Academy Award winner, in the lead, and Paul in a role that combined his friend and agent. In fact, when they sent the script to Paul, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance, he said, “I read this script at Penny’s years ago.”

My skin was thicker when Disney came to me with
The Preacher’s Wife
, a script based on
The Bishop’s Wife
, a 1947 Christmastime romantic comedy about a bishop whose prayers for help rebuilding his church are answered in the form of an angel who also seems to have a
thing for his wife. It starred David Niven as the bishop, Loretta Young as his wife, and Cary Grant as the angel. I watched it and didn’t think it made sense.

I met with Loretta Young, the only cast member from the original film still alive. She lived in Beverly Hills and was lovely. She agreed with me that her version of the movie didn’t make any sense because in the end the angel wanted her to go with him. Where were they going to go?

“They never got it quite right,” she said.

I thought the same was true with the script for
The Preacher’s Wife
, which the studio wanted out for Christmas. I sent it back to the studio with notes explaining why and how the script didn’t make sense. They wanted a love story between the angel and the preacher’s wife, who was in the church choir and very religious (and Loretta wasn’t in the choir in the original). It didn’t any sense for the preacher’s wife to get involved with the angel like that. To me, the real story was about the preacher losing his faith, not about his wife complaining that he was too busy.

I turned it down. But they kept sending the script back to me until finally it came together enough to change my mind. Then it kept getting delayed for one reason or another, but mostly because the studio wanted Denzel Washington as the angel, and he went off to make another movie.

In the interim, Kmart came to me and said they wanted Rosie O’Donnell to do a series of commercials for them, but she would only agree if I did them with her. They told her the same thing about me; that my yes was contingent on her being in the ads. They played it well. They signed both of us. We met up on weekends, got paid a lot of money, and became best of friends. We were allowed to take whatever we wanted from the stores. My nieces and nephews loved me.

When I finally met with Denzel, I confirmed my gut instinct: I wanted him as the preacher. I thought the movie was the preacher’s story, and I could envision him filling out that role with depth
and charm. But he wanted the Cary Grant part, and I understood. Courtney Vance, who’d read for me in
Renaissance Man
, came to my house for another reading and nailed the part of the preacher. He was fantastic.

That left the pivotal role of the preacher’s wife.

“Should we use Whitney?” Denzel asked, with a note of hesitation in his voice.

“Who else?” I said.

Whitney Houston had starred in two major hits,
The Bodyguard
and
Waiting to Exhale
, and she had the biggest recording career in the music business. Although she was on the road, I’d heard she was interested in
The Preacher’s Wife
, and of course I was intrigued. I had never met her, but after a meeting in New York, I left a fan. She was sweet and her passion for this world came through loud and clear as she described how she started to sing as a child in Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church.

Her marriage to R&B star Bobby Brown a few years earlier had confused those who thought of her only as a wholesome churchgoing girl. He was a stereotypical bad boy, and no one had more of a good-girl image than she did. Tabloid headlines aside, there were rumors inside the industry. I’m sure Denzel had heard stories. I had heard stories, too. I had said one thing to Whitney: Be honest with me. I just want to know the truth.

She said okay and then let me know that she couldn’t sing every day, just like baseball pitchers couldn’t pitch every day. She needed some time between sessions. She also mentioned that her pitch changed a little when she had her period. I appreciated knowing all the little things she told me.

“Just let me know, and we’ll adapt,” I said.

I brought in Jennifer Lewis as Whitney’s mother and Gregory Hines, both of whom had been in
Renaissance Man
. I was a fan of Loretta Devine, who played Courtney’s secretary, and I still remember casting young Justin Pierre Edmund as Whitney and Courtney’s
son, Jeremiah Biggs. During the test, he sounded like his nose was stuffed. His mother said he had a cold. Well, it turned out he talked that way. So we wrote in a couple lines where Jennifer referred to his cold. Problem solved.

By this point, I knew making movies was an exercise in flexibility. Denzel missed a few days of rehearsal in New York because he got hung up on a movie. When he did show up, he was frustrated by the lack of reaction to his read. Even Whitney was getting laughs. Well, he pushed, and that’s the worst thing you do in comedy. Then we couldn’t find him the next day. I called and got nothing. Later, he gave me a story about having just come off another movie.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Apologize to your fellow actors. Every one of them is looking up to you because of who you are. It’s not nice to skip out. Just tell me. Say ‘Hey, I’m going to a party,’ or ‘I have to do something to switch gears.’ I don’t like it. It’s on my time. But I understand.”

Denzel understood, too. When we arrived on the set the next day he was the definition of a leading man in every way. Our first day of shooting was in a courthouse in Yonkers. Courtney, as Reverend Henry Biggs, gave a speech at the hearing for Billy Eldridge, a teen who’d been wrongly arrested for robbing a local mom-and-pop grocery store. It was freezing out. A heavy snowstorm had left six feet of snow on the ground, causing a daylong delay. We couldn’t get the trucks in. Since we had the courtroom for only two days, we shot for twenty-four hours straight. The crew, who’d worked with me on
League
, started singing, “We are the members of the All-American League …”

Weather and logistics pose unexpected challenges on every shoot, but
The Preacher’s Wife
tossed a few new ones at me. For instance, the Pope visited New York City and the Popemobile tied up traffic on a day when we were shooting the interiors of the reverend’s house on a soundstage at the Chelsea Piers. The exteriors of the homes and the church were in Yonkers. And the interior of the church was in Newark. In other words, nothing was in one place.

So when people in the church are getting up to leave, they are in Newark, and when they exit they are in Yonkers. Makes sense, right? No. But that’s how movies are made.

There was a man who lived in the apartment building across the street from the house we were using for exteriors in Yonkers, and he did not like our trucks clogging the streets and taking up all the parking spaces. He let us know his displeasure, too. Every time I yelled action, he cranked up his music. After a few frustrating times, I figured out that I could fool him by yelling the opposite: cut when we started a scene and action when we finished.

That was a small annoyance compared to the disaster that occurred a short time later. We were shooting the scene where Jennifer Lewis as Margueritte was taking food to Hakim’s (Darvel Davis Jr.) grandmother, who lived across the street. Jennifer and Denzel had to walk and talk as they went to the building.

In the middle of the third or fourth take, Jennifer was about to reach the top step of the building, and I was about to ask for the cameras to go in close for coverage. Then I heard a loud explosion, a thundering boom. Everything stopped. Producer Tim Bourne was next to me, and I turned to him and said, “What happened?” Moments later, we found out. A home around the corner and two houses down had burst into flames. We could see the fire shooting through the roof and out the windows.

Our grips and crew dropped everything, grabbed some ladders and hoses from neighboring yards, and pulled a six-year-old child from the house. Later, we learned that two children had died inside. Two teenagers were later charged with second-degree murder and second-degree arson. All of us heard the whole thing as it unfolded, from the explosion to the roar of the teens speeding away in a car. Then the fire trucks arrived, as well as the cops, and they boxed us in all night.

Another time Whitney looked around one Newark neighborhood where we were shooting and said, “This is a crack neighborhood.” I
replied, “Do you think they’re going to get high and come out and shoot the actors? I don’t think that’s what happens on crack.” Of course, I had never done crack. At least I didn’t think I had. I had to call Lorne and ask if we had ever done crack.

“No, it was after our time,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Just checking.”

But for all that, there were days on
Preacher’s Wife
when I felt like the spirit was shining on us. Before production, I had searched for the right choir for the scenes inside the church when Whitney would be singing with the choir. I had gone to Whitney’s church, The New Hope Baptist, where she had learned to sing. I could see it was a special environment. Her mother, Cissy, still worked there. I put her in the movie, too. I had also gone to Denzel’s church in L.A., the First AME. Finally, I scouted the Georgia Mass Choir in Atlanta. They were perfect for the movie.

Although we only used part of the 150-member group, they sounded at full strength when we shot Whitney and the whole choir singing “I Love the Lord” and “Joy to the World” inside the Newark church. I’m a gospel music fan, but it wasn’t necessary to be a fan to know these takes were extraordinary. Nor did you have to be religious to sense a special, powerful spirit fill the church. During “Joy,” they sped up, the floor shook, and everyone from the crew to the choir members jumped, stomped, and swayed. Jesus was in the house. I could feel it. Miroslav could, too. He pushed the camera in closer.

Despite reports, I didn’t have any problems with Whitney. Yes, she did have an entourage, and yes, there were a few times when she fought with her husband, Bobby Brown, on the phone, and yes, she did on occasion miss her call times. But her people always sent word that she was going to be late or unable to work and we altered the schedule. That’s all I asked. Let me know what was going on.

I know years later she told Oprah Winfrey that her drug use was already such a problem that she was getting high every day. She qualified
that by explaining that she only did them at night, after work, so that could explain why I didn’t see her misbehaving or high. If she had been high, I would have noticed. We talked before, during, and after scenes. We pushed in close often enough that I would have seen a change in her eyes. Bobby only came to the set a couple times, but he stayed in her camper. He was never a problem. If she “wasn’t happy,” as she told Oprah, I didn’t see it on the set.

I’ll tell you what I did see: greatness. On the night we shot her singing in Jazzy’s, the club where Whitney’s character, Julia, had sung as a younger woman, she brought all the talent, charisma, and magic that made her a superstar. In the scene, she let her old pianist, Bristloe, played superbly by Lionel Richie, coax her back onstage. We were at the end of the shooting schedule. This was her solo, her big song, and we’d worked hard behind the scenes to simply pick a goddamn song for her to sing.

Given the massive successes of the soundtracks of her previous two movies, as well as her own recording career, she was being pressured from all sides on which song to choose. Everyone around her seemed to have an opinion. She was overwhelmed by submissions. She couldn’t make a decision and went into shutdown mode.

About a month earlier I had asked what she wanted to sing at Jazzy’s. I wanted to nail down a song. I went into her Winnebago which she kept at 120 fucking degrees. I was layered in winter clothes and dying. I had to talk real fast. She explained if she picked so-and-so’s song they would get royalties. If she did a cover, like she did with Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” on
The Bodyguard
, that person or group would get royalties. It was about money. Everyone wanted a cut.

I cut to the chase.

“Look, I don’t get a cent either way,” I said. “So let me ask you this: What do you
want
to sing?”

“There’s a Four Tops song,” she said. “It’s called ‘I Believe in You and Me.’ That’s what I want to sing.”

She played it for me. I saw how it fit into the movie. I said fine, let’s do that. I was dying from the heat.

We shot the scene in a club on 14th Street in Manhattan. Whitney and Denzel were seated at a table. Then Lionel came in and said a few lines that set Whitney up to get on the stage. Denzel clapped at the table as she stepped up to the microphone. It sounds simple, but these things take forever. As the scene wore on, I saw Denzel get a little cranky. Whitney said he had a case of suit fever, which was like cabin fever, except she was referring to the gray suit he wore throughout the movie. He had eighteen of them; they were exactly the same.

I let him go home, took his place at the table, and had Whitney sing to me. We did a number of takes and each time I got chills. Like everyone there that night, I knew these performances were special.

Then it got better. BeBe Winans, the award-winning gospel singer, had come to visit and even though I had what I needed for the movie, I also had Whitney onstage, Lionel Richie on piano, and the Grammy-winning producer-musician-arranger Mervyn Warren leading the band. So I said, “Why don’t you go up and sing with her?”

It was 4 a.m., but after huddling with Mervyn for a few moments, BeBe and Whitney sang together, and it was unbelievable, one of those genuine you-had-to-be-there experiences where talent was on full display alongside the sheer joy of singing. I’ll never forget it.