My Happy Days in Hollywood (28 page)

Janet Maslin of
The New York Times
was a big fan of the movie. She found Julia Roberts “so enchantingly beautiful, so funny, so natural and such an absolute delight.” Maslin went on to call Richard Gere “dapper, amusing and the perfect foil.”

The film turned out to be better than expected by me and everyone who worked on it.
Pretty Woman
made Julia Roberts a star. It put Richard Gere back on the top of everyone’s casting lists. It introduced the fresh new face of Laura San Giacomo. It boosted room sales at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, where we shot some of the hotel scenes. It made me more in demand as a director than I had ever dreamed of. And finally, from a personal standpoint, it earned me enough money to get myself out of debt.
For a little picture, it had the greatest impact of any movie on my career and on the careers of many people associated with it. We made it for $14 million, and it grossed more than $178 million in the United States alone. Worldwide it has grossed more than $463 million, which is amazing any way you say it. The movie still makes money today. And it gave me the label of romantic comedy director.

People think Hollywood is about money, but to tell the truth, I have found again and again that it is about the friendships and lasting partnerships you form while working together. Julia, Richard, and I were an unlikely trio in terms of experience, personalities, and interests. There was just something about that time in history and about the movie itself that made the three of us friends forever. We made a pact: If two of us ever got a script they wanted to make, they would have to offer it to the third person first as a nod to the power of our friendship. It would be ten years before we would all come together again, on the set of
Runaway Bride
, but in the meantime we stayed in touch and always offered each other scripts when they arrived on our desks. That’s just what friends do for each other, even in Hollywood.

One final funny memory about
Pretty Woman
concerns the hotel we shot it in. When we were scouting for the location, we went to a number of venues, and many of them said we could not shoot in their lobbies because “we do not allow prostitutes in our hotel.” Big mistake for them. Only the Regent Beverly Wilshire (now the Beverly Wilshire) said yes. A few years after the movie was released, my wife and I went to stay at the hotel and bought the “Pretty Woman Package.” It cost several thousand dollars and included a very large suite, champagne, and strawberries. Also available was a version of the red dress that Julia wore in the movie. My wife brought her own purple dress, so we didn’t need a red one.

The night we stayed in the hotel Barbara and I laughed about the fact that
Pretty Woman
is the only one of my movies in which she was cut out. She appeared as a shopper in a scene we filmed in Gucci, but ultimately her dialogue had to be cut because of length
and pacing. But if you look closely in the scene with Elinor Donahue, from
Father Knows Best
, you can see my wife leaving the store wearing a red blazer and carrying a shopping bag. Barbara understood that sometimes a director has to leave his family, even on occasion his wife, on the cutting room floor.

Pfeiffer, Pacino, the Clair de Lune, and Me

A
FTER THE SUCCESS
of
Pretty Woman
, I could basically pick my next picture. I had to sit for a moment and think: What do I want to direct? I was, of course, getting a lot of offers for mainstream glitzy romantic comedies, but doing the same thing right away didn’t interest me. The truth was I wanted to challenge myself and try directing a more serious movie. That’s why I jumped at the phone call from Paramount executive producer Scott Rudin, who said he wanted me to consider directing the screen version of Terrence McNally’s hit play
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
. I had never seen the play, so Scott had me fly out to see a New York City production. He promised the night after I saw the play that I would have breakfast with Terrence.

So I flew to New York, went to the show, and phoned Scott later that night.

“I love the play. I want to do it. I can’t wait to meet Terrence tomorrow for breakfast to talk about it,” I said.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Scott? Are you there? What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Mike Nichols wants to direct the movie. He is in and you are out,” said Scott.

“So no breakfast with Terrence?” I asked.

“Mike Nichols is having breakfast with Terrence. Sorry,” he said.

I hung up and then flew back to Los Angeles the next day.

I didn’t direct another movie right away. Instead, I developed a
stage play that I had written a few years earlier with Lowell Ganz called
Wrong Turn at Lungfish
, the story of a dying blind professor who bonds with a young woman who comes to read aloud to him in the hospital. It took a full year for Scott Rudin to call me again.

“Mike Nichols dropped out of
Frankie and Johnny
. Do you want to direct it?” he said.

“Yes, I do, but only if I get breakfast with Terrence McNally,” I replied.

I flew to New York again and finally had my meal alone with the playwright. I had long admired his work, and meeting the man in person made me like him even more. Terrence is a bright, soft-spoken, frail-looking, sensitive gentleman and a true man of the theater. As a young writer he worked as a tutor for John Steinbeck’s children. His life was dedicated to words and characters and creating and celebrating them. After our first breakfast we realized we would be not only friends but also partners and teachers. I wanted to learn to write and direct plays, and he wanted to learn to write screenplays. As Terrence began working on the screenplay for
Frankie and Johnny
, I started to direct a production of my play
Wrong Turn at Lungfish
at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. I helped Terrence write during the day, and he helped me direct at night. We continued to send notes to each other throughout the process.

One day Terrence sent me a note that said, “I’m including a speech about love for Johnny that I think is good for the quality of the character. I threw in a blow job for good measure.” Later he wrote to me, “I’m very proud and happy you are directing this movie.” For Terrence,
Frankie and Johnny
was not just a play or a movie but rather a labor of love. He was more of an intellectual than a show business writer, but he wanted to see what it felt like to work in the Hollywood mainstream. Together we knew we had to protect the characters he had written so well. We couldn’t let Hollywood make them over to such an extent that they were unrecognizable.

One of the biggest hurdles we had to overcome at the beginning was casting. Kathy Bates had starred as Frankie in the stage version of the play in New York, and she was brilliant. But, obviously, the executives at Paramount wanted a bigger box office name for the
movie. I couldn’t argue with that logic. Kathy is a name today, but she was not back then. Luckily I later got to work with her when I cast her in my movie
Valentine’s Day
. She is still brilliant.

They first sent the script to Al Pacino to see if he was interested in playing Johnny. He had not done many love stories because he was usually carrying a gun and yelling things like “Attica!” Al, however, was in the mood to do something new, too, so he agreed.

Once the studio signed Al they started interviewing actresses. Michelle Pfeiffer wanted the role badly. She drove to my office in Toluca Lake to try to convince me. She didn’t come with an agent, manager, or entourage. She walked into my office alone. She knew that the problem was many people in Hollywood thought she was
too
beautiful to play Frankie. Who would believe that Michelle could play a lonely, regular girl who had given up on men? After talking with me for an hour, Michelle convinced me that she could play the part. She said the fact that she was pretty didn’t mean she was a stranger to loneliness and heartache over men. I believed her. I read after the casting was announced that Kathy Bates laughed when she found out Michelle was taking over her role for the movie version and rightfully so. But the truth is that the studios think some actresses are better suited for the theater and others for film. In this case I agreed. I thought Michelle and Al were a great casting choice.

Terrence and I continued to work well together once the casting was done. He is a great storyteller and someone you always want to sit next to at a dinner party. He told me he once went to a production of
Frankie and Johnny
at a theater in New Orleans. He was shocked to see that the actors performed most of the play totally in the nude. When Terrence went backstage to talk to the director afterward he said, “Well, that was quite a version!” The director didn’t understand. He thought he had directed the play exactly as it had been written in the Samuel French publication. Sure enough, the director was right. Terrence reviewed the stage directions, and after
Frankie and Johnny
took their robes off, there was no
written
direction for them to put them back on. In future publications of the play, Terrence corrected this to avoid any more unintentional all-nude productions.

I was finally ready to start filming
Frankie and Johnny
. As a director I had worked with so many up-and-coming actors, but these two were superstars. I couldn’t deny that I was a little nervous, but most of all I was tickled and excited to be part of the project. Sometimes my wife and I would sit in bed and I would say, “Honey, I’m directing Al Pacino tomorrow. Can you believe it?” I also was thrilled because I was under the impression that Michelle and Al would come to the set with an acting shorthand in place because they had worked together on
Scarface
. I had seen
Scarface
and thought they had a nice chemistry together. You can imagine my surprise when I brought in Michelle and asked her about Al.

“I’ve never met him,” she said.

“What are you talking about? I saw
Scarface
. You played the girl?”

“Yes, but he never talked to me off the set or out of character. Nobody ever introduced him to me,” she said. In her defense she was only in her early twenties and didn’t know very much about the movie business.

These are the kinds of stories that make you just shake your head and wonder.

“You did a whole movie with a man and never
met
him?”

“Yes,” she said.

I had to fix this right away. So Michelle and Al officially met on
Frankie and Johnny
. They became very supportive of each other during the shoot. One day I remember her brother was in a car accident and she was upset about it. Al was particularly sensitive to her that day. Another day Al was on edge because he was going to the Academy Awards. (He wouldn’t claim an Oscar until a year later, 1992, when he won for
Scent of a Woman
.) Michelle was very nice to him and kept him calm nearly all day long. They respected each other and protected each other as good stars should do.

Kissing was another matter. Michelle is gorgeous, but her skin is quite fragile and fair. Al, even after a shave, usually sports a five o’clock shadow because he is comfortable that way. So their kissing scenes were tricky to navigate. After three or four takes, Michelle would break out in a rash from his rough stubble. The makeup
department would have to come in and put lotion on her to protect her face. So sometimes the kissing scenes took longer than others. However, I think one of the best kisses I ever shot was when we were on location at the New York flower mart. Associate producer Nick Abdo and I were pitching ideas about how to show their big on-screen kiss. I wanted flowers in the background, but I was having trouble getting the right angle. Nick suggested having a truck pull up behind them so a worker could open the door to the truck to reveal dozens of beautiful floral arrangements just as Frankie and Johnny came together to kiss. So that’s what we shot. I think that is one of my talents as a director: When I hear a good idea I can recognize and appreciate it without getting my ego hurt that it wasn’t my idea. When I see that scene now on television, it gives me goose bumps. As a director you are always looking for a new way to reveal a kiss, and this worked very well for me thanks to Nick’s suggestion.

The play was intimate, and I wanted to maintain that feeling between Frankie and Johnny on the big screen. However, that was a lot to ask of Al and Michelle as actors. Many of the scenes had just the two of them and required multiple takes. One of the last scenes we shot was scene 105, in which Johnny calls up a classical radio station and asks them to repeat the song “Clair de lune.” The scene ran about five minutes, and featured only Michelle and Al, so it was unusually intense to direct. It took five long days to shoot, so I made T-shirts for the crew that said “I survived scene 105.” But Al and Michelle were professionals and never complained. They would stay as long as I needed them on the set.