Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall is a mix of Tinseltown and the Bronx, with quite a few laughs thrown in. Which is why Julia Roberts and Richard Gere were happy to reteam with him for Runaway Bride.
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You can say what you want about director/actor/writer/producer Garry Marshall, and Lord knows the critics, over the years, have lambasted him for his unrepentant sentimentality, but one thing is undeniable: Marshall knows funny. This is a guy who made his bones writing gags during TV's Paley-olithic era, who knew Lenny Bruce, wrote for Lucille Ball and gave Robin Williams his first job on television. So when Marshall says an actor isn't funny, that actor isn't funny. And that's what Marshall was saying during a now-legendary casting session 10 years ago. He was auditioning a gorgeous, leggy, hardly known 21-year-old named Julia Roberts for a film called Pretty Woman. Six actresses were up for the part, and since Richard Gere had not yet been hired, they were screen-testing with Sam Neill.
As Marshall recalls, "Julia was quirky, but I couldn't find where she was funny." But he sensed there was some potential there so he got the notion to challenge her. "That's what you do with people who you suspect may be champions. You push them and find out what they're capable of. So I said to Julia, "We're going to do another test, only this time you'll read with Charles Grodin.' Now, Charles is one of the funniest men I ever saw. He didn't quite fit the part, but he was in the game. I told him, 'Who knows? We might go that way.' And he was thrilled to be brought in as a leading man. So then I said to Julia, 'Grodin is going to blow you right out of the scene because he's much funnier than you. He's gonna kill you. So all I want you to do is find a way to stay with him.' She'd already done the scene 12 times, but with Grodin, all of a sudden, she was marvelous. She stood there and would not be pushed out. And she was funny. So I called Jeffrey Katzenberg and said, 'We got the right actress.'" The movie went on to gross hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide and make Roberts a star and Garry Marshall an A-list director.
Ten years later, Roberts, Gere and Marshall have reunited to make another romantic romp, this one about a woman who has trouble saying, "I do." To get Marshall's take on the film, I've trekked out to his office in Burbank. Actually it's more than an office. It's a dukedom befitting Hollywood royalty. It includes Marshall's two-story, pseudo-ski-chalet of a production manse and the Falcon Theatre next door where Kathleen Marshall (one of his three children) appeared recently in Arsenic and Old Lace. "If one of my kids had become a doctor that theater would be a medical building," he says.
In the wood-beamed inner sanctum, Marshall is elevating and icing his right knee which is swollen from his morning tennis match. At 64, he's still an avid, albeit mediocre, athlete, which he's been since his boyhood days in the Bronx. With an accent still redolent of the mean streets ("faawny"="funny"), Marshall says, "I was never the best player, so they made me captain because I knew how to handle people. And I'm sure Paramount was thinking, 'Garry can handle Richard and Julia' when they hired me for Runaway Bride."
How exactly does he handle them?
"I feel if someone is behaving badly, I can take them aside and convince them that they're an idiot without screaming in their face, and I've done that time after time. Al Pacino said to me, 'We [actors] get temperamental once in awhile.' I said, 'If there's a problem, signal me.' I always have signals for the actors. If there's fighting in front of a crew or civilians I get crazy. 'NO! WE DON'T DO THAT HERE! WE GO OFF!' Look, I know that acting is hard to do well. And being a good actor doesn't mean anything. Like ballplayers, it could be gone in a second. I have admiration for them, but I also tell them there will be days when I will call on them to be an adult."
As it turned out, Marshall's handling skills were badly needed when Runaway Bride turned out to be five weddings and a real-life funeral. Halfway through the shoot Julia Roberts got a call and learned that one of her favorite people, director Alan J. Pakula, had been killed in a freak accident on a highway outside New York City. "What a useless death," says Marshall. "A pipe flew off the road... give me a break, God. Bad writing!" Roberts was devastated, and Marshall had to figure out a way to get her through it. "We cried and hugged, and then I told her stories about my terrible childhood."
"Did you have a terrible childhood?"
"No, I had a lovely childhood. Then I told her jokes from my stand-up routine which I did in New York 35 years ago."
"Let's hear a few."
"They're terrible."
"Oh, c'mon."
"Guy walks into a doctor's office with a pelican on his head. The pelican says, 'Doc, help me, I got a guy stuck to my feet.'"
I have to admit, I laughed.
"Guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, 'Doc, nobody pays attention to me.' The doctor says, 'Next.' I told her 20 of those. That kind of silliness got us through."
Runaway Bride was shot in small towns and cornfields outside Baltimore. Marshall says, "It was December, and there'd be locals standing out there in the bitter cold hoping to get glimpses of the actors. So I asked Julia and Richard to come out of their trailers and say hello to the people. Well, with Richard they yelled, but when Julia got close to them they would pant and scream and some would start to cry. I'm talking adults. I've only seen that kind of reaction with Princess Di and the Pope. So she stands there and greets the people and signs autographs and after that she doesn't know what to say. One day we said, 'Julia will only sign autographs for people under five feet tall.' And adults were getting down on their knees. Occasionally I would have to intercede and hustle her off."
The Julia madness was not limited to land. "She had a birthday party on a boat off Annapolis. And two other boats followed her and the people on those boats actually had counterfeit party invitations. It's very hard to be her right now. Guys from the newspapers were offering crew members $ 1,000 for any kind of gossip about her, and she gets hurt by the stuff that's written. Richard tried to get her mind off it. He said, 'I'm heading toward 50 and Garry's heading toward 70, so who gives a shit what they say?' But Julia's 31 and does care."
"How have the two of them grown as actors?"
"Well, Richard was not known as Milton Berle when we did Pretty Woman. He's come a long way. He's much more relaxed doing comedy. Julia's improved dramatically. Her craft is superb. She knows her lines, she knows everyone's lines, she knows where the camera is and she's even aware when the camera is too close for comedy. She always liked Lucille Ball, but in Pretty Woman she was afraid to go out there too far. Like all the young people now, she wanted to be clever. They all want to be clever. No one wants to be funny. She'd tell the prop man, 'Don't give Garry any more props because he'll make me do something crazy with them.'
"In the scene at the opera, for instance, I gave her the opera glasses. She said, 'I don't know how to use these,' and I said, 'That's what were going to play. How do we use it?' Now she looks for new things. She'll give you three or four ways to go with a moment. And Richard and Julia have become two of the best in playing that moment of connection that neither wants to acknowledge. They'll do it with a look or he'll hold her hand a second too long or she'll improvise a perfect line like 'Suddenly I can't climb a fence,' after she gets halfway up and then falls back into his arms.
"Of course, the other big difference is Julia's such a shtarker [in good shape]. When you work with the 19-to-22-year-old actors, they're always so exhausted, because they're up all night dancing. Naps they take all day. But Julia was out running, jumping rope, kickboxing and she did her own horse-riding stunts."
During the shoot, a magazine article came out listing the world's most popular actresses and both Julia and Joan Cusack, who's also in Runaway Bride, were on the list. Marshall says, "The bigger you get, the more I make fun of you. I'd wave the article and say, 'I'm stuck with two of the top 25. Could we see if two of the world's most popular actresses can speak a little louder?'" And Gere was not spared. "Richard looks great, but his hair is now so white that I told Julia that if she stood close enough to him, I wouldn't have to light her. I never mention how much Richard and Julia are getting paid, but when I need another take, I always say, 'For what I'm getting paid, that was not good enough. We have to do a little better for my sake. I feel guilty taking the money."'
"What do you see Julia doing with her money and her fame?"
"I think she's still trying to figure out what to do. She needs something else in her life that's rewarding, and she can't be Susan Sarandon. Susan can discuss world hunger and amnesty and artists' rights and still wear a hot little outfit. I talked to Julia about how to give back, and I see her going the Audrey Hepburn route. That is, helping with children who are hungry and dying all over the world. She's most comfortable with children. She was hugging my grandkids all the time."
Marshall's sets are usually family affairs. On Runaway Bride, his son Scott shot second-unit scenes, and daughter Kathleen, wife Barbara and the two grandkids all played bit parts. In addition, his sister Penny helps him with his casting. The family name was Mascirelli. His father was an advertising executive, his mother was a dance teacher, and after she died Garry underwrote a dance center named in her honor at his alma mater, Northwestern. He majored in journalism, and after a stint in the army, in postwar Korea, he got a job as a copyboy at the New York Daily News. "I was never very good at it," he says. In his spare time he was writing jokes for his nightclub act. Comedian Phil Foster taught him an important lesson. "He said, 'If I wanted to write humor out of my imagination, I'd be out of the business in two weeks. You must look at the world through a comedy eye. Look every day at people, their behavior, what they say, because actual people will say things you could never think to write.'"
With Foster's help, Marshall, at age 24, got a job writing jokes for Jack Paar. "My father used to say, 'Get a job you can do if you have a toothache.'" No matter what else was going on in Marshall's life, he could always write his five pages of jokes. In 1961 he moved to Hollywood to write for Joey Bishop. He soon hooked up with Jerry Belson and together they wrote more than 100 sitcom scripts for such series as The Danny Thomas Show, The Lucy Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Producing stints followed. In 1974 came Happy Days (which ran for over 10 years; Henry Winkler's leather jacket is in the Smithsonian), and in 1976 he launched Laverne & Shirley, which his sister Penny starred in with Cindy Williams.
From the first episode it was number one in the ratings. "He single-handedly put the Paramount television department on the map," says Carl Reiner. Mork and Mindy followed and for a period of about five years, Garry Marshall was king of network television. His queen, Barbara, he met because she lived next door to him. "I'm a terrible driver, and I dated whoever was in the next building." They've now been married 36 years. This in a business in which it's not unusual for married directors to take their leading ladies to bed.
"My wife says, 'If you run off with some 19-year-old, she'll send you back in a week. Especially after she sees you eat.' I have my own problems. Hard to live with. So she's pretty secure. Also, she's a nurse, so she's not fascinated by show business. Once I came home all upset because Danny Thomas didn't like a couple of my jokes. And she said that, earlier that day, two patients had died in her arms."
Barbara was the one who got the call when Garry had an anxiety attack while shooting his first feature, Young Doctors in Love. "I was nervous, I didn't know quite what I was doing, and I got crazy, and when I get crazy I get sick. And Barbara had to leave the hospital and come on the set to get me. And she said, 'What is this? This is supposed to be fun.' It's never happened again." Now, if things spiral out of control, Marshall and his cinematographer have worked out an act. "We walk off the set. We go about 100 yards away, and then we get very animated and scream at each other. Nobody can hear what we're saying, but it looks bad. In fact what we're yelling are numbers. 'FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT!' Then we come back." By then things usually have settled. "Nothing is that important that you should get crazy. I made that peace years ago. If it's too messy, I'll go home before you fire me."
You've got to figure that, with Marshall's background, his perspective on the current state of screen comedy is going to be interesting, so I ask, "What did you think of There's Something About Mary?"
"It's the next generation of comedy. It has to be gross, because comedy has no other place to go. With violence, you can go further out. Tarantino can give you more blood and more shooting, but with comedy where else can you go? You can't go ethnic, because the politically correct people have pulled the rug out from us on that. And all the best, light, white humor is on TV. You're not going to make a movie that can top some of Seinfeld's stuff. They got 10 writers, and they're all in the same room. They're topping the movies. But Mary wouldn't have worked with another girl. Her beauty had to be above all the grossness. And Cameron Diaz has the same qualities as Julia and Gwyneth Paltrow and Claire Danes and Natalie Portman. Their beauty on the big screen will not let them get into the muck and mire."
The muck and mire, I suspect, will not claim Marshall either. Don't expect to see him following the trend and going the gross-out route. His has always been a gentle, observational, above-the-waist comedy. Rather than getting their dicks stuck in zippers, Marshall's characters get their thumbs stuck in bowling balls. While his better-known comedic contemporaries (Woody and Mel) get increasingly bitter or marginalized, Marshall continues to give us mainstream, romantic comedies with great setups, great punch lines and happy endings. "It's still a magical business," he says, "and my job is to try to keep it magical."
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Jeffrey Lantos interviewed Juliette Lewis for the March 99 issue of Movieline.