Marshall Law
By Craig Modderno
Click photo to enlarge.
When you walk into actor-director-writer-producer Garry Marshall’s office in Burbank, the history of 1970s television comes alive. There’s a board game featuring Henry Winkler as the legendary Fonz on Happy Days, a miniature Mork doll in an alien suit from Mork & Mindy, the show that introduced Robin Williams and enough toys from all of Marshall’s shows (which also include The Odd Couple and Laverne & Shirley) to entertain his grandchildren and any visitor with a Willy Wonka sweet tooth for TV nostalgia. Marshall’s 1995 book, Wake Me When It’s Funny, written with his daughter Lori and introduced by his sister Penny Marshall, offers a more complete overview of the life and times of a showman who both knows funny and is funny. Marshall was already in his forties when he reigned as king of TV comedy in the ’70s, and he could easily have made that his career high. Instead he made the difficult transition to the big screen, where his impact has been highly entertaining and on several occasions genuinely memorable. He followed his outrageously funny film debut, 1982’s Young Doctors in Love, with two comedy-dramas that have held up with critics and audiences, The Flamingo Kid and Nothing in Common, then directed two rental chestnuts: Overboard, a pure Goldie Hawn product, and Beaches, the perennial tearjerker. That was all a warm-up for the blockbuster Pretty Woman in 1990. With highs (Runaway Bride and the two Princess Diaries flicks) and lows (the inexplicable Exit to Eden, which featured Rosie O’Donnell in S&M gear) in the intervening years, Marshall has remained vital and successful into his seventies, a phenomenon as unusual in Hollywood as the transition of a child star into successful adult stardom. His latest film marks an act of courage many a young director would flinch from–directing Lindsay Lohan in the
comedy-drama Georgia Rule.
CRAIG MODDERNO: In a few sentences, tell the public why they should go see Georgia Rule.
GARRY MARSHALL: It’s about a young, free-spirited girl played by Lindsay Lohan who lives in San Francisco and becomes too much for her parents to deal with so they ship her out to Idaho to live one summer with her grandmother, a tough cookie played by Jane Fonda. They learn from each other, and a few dark secrets about their family come to light. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s one of hope.
Q: Why this movie?
A: At some point, every veteran director must ask himself how many films he has left. I didn’t want to make Princess Diaries 3.
I had actually read Georgia Rule over 10 years ago but couldn’t get it made. I’m always looking for a comedy that’s about something serious, and I’m happy to make Georgia Rule so I have closure on a project I believed in for over a decade.
Q: Your producer and financier, James G. Robinson, sent Ms. Lohan a well-publicized letter during the making of Georgia Rule stating that she was being unprofessional and that she should get her act together. Was he justified in doing so?
A: Jim and I have a lot in common, and he was delighted to work with me, since I was the first director he’d worked with who was older than he was. I told him, the first thing you do when you hire Lindsay Lohan is to hire four doubles and a sound-alike, because God knows where you’re going to go. You want to be ready. I know how to work with actors with reputations for being difficult. I told him that if she showed up on the set, he wouldn’t hear from me–it’s my problem to take it from there. I’d heard she didn’t come on time. For this film, she was a little late here and there, but we worked fine together. Then it got hot and messy when we were shooting in the mountains. Finally, one day she didn’t show up. To make a long story short, she wasn’t sick, we lost a day’s shooting, Jim wrote the memo and the next day she showed up. We then did a gag reel where she said, “Well I’m here. Apparently I wasn’t as sick as I thought!” Lindsay’s hardest day was when she locked her keys in her new car and couldn’t convince the high-tech security system guy that she was who she was. I had to convince him to come fix her security system so we could get back to work. The only time I ever yelled at Lindsay was the day she turned 20. I told her to say her lines a different way and to stand in a different place. Then I called “Action!” and they brought in a cake. She started crying as we sang “Happy Birthday” to her. It was a big moment for her, because her father was in jail and her mother…who knows?
Q: If you were Lohan’s manager, what advice would you give her?
A: I’d tell her, “If you keep carrying on and don’t show up, people are gonna stop working with you.” Of all the young actors who are running around, Lindsay is the best actress by far. But she shouldn’t be in the media more often than the Lakers. She and I had a way of working together when things got rough. She’d say, “Leave me alone, I’m just a kid.” I’d reply, “Leave me alone, I’m old.” Lindsay is at that age where she needs to be told, “You can’t throw everyone’s world totally out of whack.”
Q: At 72, you seem to relate pretty well to young actresses–not just Lindsay Lohan but Anne Hathaway on the two Princess Diaries films.
A: I’ve been working with young talent since the early days of Happy Days. And I lived with two sisters and raised two daughters. So I know growing up is a tough period. The key thing that I do in working with young actors on the set is to never embarrass them. If you work with young actors who don’t have talent, you keep them far away from their peers that do, and then you tell your agent that you’re not working with young actors again until your career goes south!
Q: Did any of the young talent you worked with in the ’70s have drug problems they overcame?
A: All the young actors I knew back then eventually got their act together. Robin Williams was going through a divorce and the immense pressure of handling his huge overnight success, but he got over his drug problems. I always loved his line, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you’re making too much money.” When it came to drug use back then, the answer was not to preach to them but to distract them. [Laughs] I had softball games that everyone on my TV shows played in. I had a secretary, which I talk about in my book, who was really a counselor available to talk to anyone on my shows about their problems. I was determined to help anyone associated with my shows not to become a drug statistic. A baseball statistic, yes, for their achievements in celebrity softball!
Q: Could you produce a TV sitcom today?
A: Not necessarily. I think I was in the right place in the right era of television for my skills. I don’t think today’s TV executives know who Lucille Ball is. Our culture moves so quick today that our cultural references, which have always been the basis of much sitcom humor, almost make the classic sitcom format obsolete. I don’t have an interest in most reality shows because they often prey on a certain type of people who are too easy a target for humor. Those people on American Idol are looking to be big stars rather than entertainers, so they deserve any abuse they get, but some of the others don’t.
Q: Why hasn’t any actress been able to equal the impact that Julia Roberts had on the public with Pretty Woman?
A: I think that because there’s so much media out there today, the public instantly knows them so well. There are a lot of good actresses out there. Lindsay has the best chance of any American actress to be that all-encompassing female lead who gets the big bucks.
Q: You worked with Richard Gere both times you worked with Julia Roberts. What’s one of your favorite Richard Gere stories?
A: He called me once from India, I think, and asked for my advice. He said, “What do I tell the spiritual leaders I’m meeting in the caves here? They all want to know when we’re making Pretty Woman 2.”
Q: Not long after getting an Oscar nomination for Almost Famous, Kate Hudson faltered badly in your film Raising Helen. What went wrong?
A: I’ve made 16 movies, and Raising Helen is the only one where I don’t know what the hell happened. It might have been Kate or the subject matter, but I still don’t know why it failed!
Q: What advice would you give a young actor today who’s had sudden success in films?
A: Be a supporting actor in as many films as you can, because you’re not good enough to star in a movie right away. Or be born in England and learn how to act in plays. So few people can carry a film and studios are so eager to find them that they’ll promote someone who’s not qualified. You don’t win Academy Awards for the number of magazine covers you’re on. Don’t think you can trot to first base just because you hit the ball well. Run out the hit. [Laughs] I love it when I can use a sports metaphor to get my point across!
