The first time Richard and Julia spent an evening out together was at my daughter’s wedding that August at my house. They danced together and got the opportunity to know each other away from the set and the cameras. What made their chemistry eventually so powerful on the big screen mirrored some of their chemistry off-screen. Shortly after we started Julia broke up with Liam, and neither she nor Richard was dating anyone else. So they could hang out—unencumbered by outside relationships or paparazzi. We had a very quiet set. He taught her to play the guitar, for example. She bought a new dog. We played pranks on each other. Julia came to work tired one day, and Richard and I decided to keep her awake by having him snap a velvet jewelry box jokingly on her hand. It remains one of the hallmark moments in the film because Julia registers such true surprise with her smile and her laughter.
What people don’t know about the movie is that some of it never made it to the big screen. We felt we would get such mileage out of showing Julia in Richard’s fancy arena that we might get the same mileage from showing Richard in her dark and seedy world. So we shot a number of scenes in a club called the Blue Banana. I made up the name of the club because I love bananas and eat them often on a set. In our movie the Blue Banana was a place where Julia’s character, Vivian, and her friend Kit, played by Laura San Giacomo, hung out. In one scene Edward almost gets beaten up in a back alley by a gang. My son, Scott, plays a knife-wielding, skateboard-riding drug dealer (which to be honest caused a slight rift between my wife and me, because she was against our son playing a drug dealer. But I needed a boy who could ride a good skateboard). Showing the characters in each other’s worlds made sense mathematically but ultimately not emotionally. So most of that footage from Vivian’s world got left on the cutting room floor.
One of the funny behind-the-scenes aspects of Pretty Woman was the merchandising that appeared in the movie. One of the ways a director gets extra money for his budget is by placing various products in the film. For example, I got a five-figure deal to mention a condom company. The fact that Julia was able to integrate the gold condom into the scene was funny and also talked about. In another sequence, involving a polo match, a car company gave me a big truck to use with money to match. I thought, rich people at polo matches don’t drive this kind of truck. So instead of driving it I just had some attractive wealthy people lean against it, and I was still able to get the merchandising money.
Julia came to the set every day knowing her lines, but sometimes the tedious pace of the production would bore her. I think she started to do needlework on the set of Pretty Woman, a pastime she would continue on other movies. She had visitors to the set. Her mother came one day to watch when we were filming on Wilshire Boulevard. I always feel a certain responsibility when I am shooting other people’s children, especially someone as young as Julia. I remember telling her mother that she was doing a wonderful job, and that I would do my best to watch over her. I think my experience as a camp counselor when I was in high school came in handy when I started directing young actresses. Often I got the best tips because I told the parents in detail how well their kids were doing at camp.
So you can imagine how worried I felt when Julia fainted in the middle of a night scene. On a movie shoot days are long, and nights can feel even longer. Emotions run high all the time, and people occasionally get sick and even faint. While the on-set nurse was tending to Julia, I went over to try to figure out what was wrong.
“What did you eat today?” I said.
“Half an avocado,” she said.
“Maybe you should have gone for the whole avocado and then you wouldn’t have fainted,” I said. She said she would try to remember that. Then I shared my can of tuna fish with her. I always carry tuna fish with me on the sets of my movies in case I need a shot of protein. So Julia and I shared a little protein and conversation and then got back to work.
Working with an actress trying to stay thin is nothing new to me, but it’s still worrisome. I made a point of seeing that Julia ate healthy food every day. Eating for me is one of the joys of filming a movie. At what other time in your life do you have complete access to a private chef and whatever food you want twenty-four hours a day? But for young actresses trying to stay thin, a movie set can present too much temptation and trouble.
While Julia was new to life on a movie set, Richard was a veteran by the time we shot Pretty Woman. I spent a lot of time with him talking about life and his career. He is a complicated person. He enjoys getting to know people, but at the same time he works hard to preserve his time alone. Comedy for him, as for Matt Dillon, does not come naturally. Matt and Richard love to play brooding, sexy characters, but sometimes they lack the confidence to reach for the big jokes. So as with Matt on The Flamingo Kid, I gave Richard comedy roads to venture down. He bravely took them, and did a wonderful job.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie takes place in an opera house. We were originally supposed to film inside the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, but the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit in October and the location was damaged. Instead, our brilliant production designer Albert Brenner built an opera set for us in Los Angeles. In this particular scene Richard delivers a beautiful speech about his love of opera. As a counterweight to his passionate words, I gave Julia some opera glasses to play around with. Richard knew that Julia was going to get the big laughs from flipping and flopping about with the opera glasses, and he wanted to exit the scene early. It was not always easy for him to be her straight man. To put a twist on the scene and make him happy, I gave him a new ending to the scene. When Julia turned to another patron and said she liked the evening so much she almost peed in her pants, I had Richard jump in to cover for her and say, “She said she liked it more than The Pirates of Penzance.” When Richard saw the final cut of the movie, he beamed with pleasure at his delivery of the joke because he got such a big laugh.
Some stars introduce you to their agents, but Richard introduced me to the Dalai Lama. I went to an event where His Holiness was speaking, and Richard and I stood in a receiving line to meet him. When we finally got to where the Dalai Lama was standing, Richard introduced me by saying, “Your Holiness, this is one of the funniest men you will ever meet.” I was embarrassed, because that is an uncomfortable way to be introduced to the most famous living Buddhist. However, I quickly covered and said, “Your Holiness, I read that we are the same age.” Showing his sense of humor, the Dalai Lama said, “And we both have done well.” It was not like the Dalai Lama had met so many funny people in his life either. I couldn’t imagine he had spent much time at the Improv in Mumbai or the Comedy Club in Delhi.
My love of playing pranks continued on Pretty Woman, and most of them involved trying to get Julia to laugh, because nobody laughs better than Julia. There is a scene when she takes a bubble bath in Richard’s hotel room. She is listening to music on headphones, but at one point she takes off the headphones and goes under the water. During one take the minute she went under the bubbles, I had the whole cast and crew run off the set. When she came out of the bubbles, she was surprised to see that she was sitting on an empty set and broke into a full round of giggles and a couple of choice swearwords, too.
The reality is that young people get bored easily, even young people who are movie stars. So I like to keep my actors entertained and on their toes. When actors least expect it, I will pull a prank. I knew if I could keep Julia laughing, I could keep her interested in her job. That is important to me. I don’t just want to make movies. I want to make actors enjoy the process. I don’t want people to go away saying, “I just finished a Garry Marshall picture and it was hell.” I want them to leave saying, “I had a lot of laughs with Garry on the set.”
I always knew that a prostitute with a heart of gold falling in love with a wealthy businessman was a predictable story line; it was magical because of these two actors. But there was a glitch: Some of the other executives thought the manipulative business side of the movie was a stronger angle. So there
is a scene in the Rex restaurant in which Richard discusses a big takeover deal with several other businessmen. I filled the scene with humor. Julia flips an escargot into the air and a waiter catches it. The line “slippery little suckers” was her own ad-lib. However, despite the fact that I thought the scene was working, I received some notes from the studio that the business deal was unclear and I should reshoot the scene. I knew that to rent the fancy Rex restaurant for another day would be ten thousand dollars, which would put my picture way over budget. I was not willing to do that.
My saving grace on nearly every movie I have directed is that I can pick up the phone and call the person in charge of it. I called Jeffrey Katzenberg to discuss the restaurant scene and we watched the footage together. I told him that in my opinion the scene was not about the hostile business takeover but instead about a young girl being in a fancy restaurant for the first time in her life. The business deal was merely background buzz for her humor. In fact, life was imitating the film, because Julia admitted that she had never been inside a restaurant as fancy as the Rex. Her honest and wide-eyed looks brought even more charm to the scene. Katzenberg agreed with me, and we left the scene alone and let Julia shine. When Julia saw the film for the first time, she laughed because she had no idea the waiter was going to catch her snail. She thought it just flew into the air off-camera.
Some directors have their entire plots mapped out, but on Pretty Woman I shot nearly the whole picture without knowing my real ending. My obligation was to have the lovers get back together somehow, but I wasn’t sure how. I came up with a possible solution during an earlier scene in which Julia is eating a croissant in Richard’s hotel room. She finally stands up and says to Richard’s character in essence, “I want to be your girl, not just your beck and call girl.” That’s when it dawned on me that I was directing a fairy tale and I needed a fairy-tale ending. I had to find some kind of metaphorical way for Richard to ride up on a white horse and rescue her—in the most modern and feminist sense of the word.
In the film Edward is afraid of heights. This was in my opinion a brilliant character trait, and the credit for it goes to Barbara Benedict, the sole female writer on our rewrite team. How perfect to have a big corporate guy who does hostile takeovers without fear be afraid of tall buildings. To add to the character we had him book the penthouse in every hotel because that is usually the most expensive room. He pays for the high things in life but never allows himself to enjoy them. Despite the fact that he is in the penthouse, he never steps outside on the balcony because of his phobia.
So when I was thinking about the ending, I got the idea that it should somehow involve Edward overcoming his fear of heights in order to get the girl. We came up with the concept of his climbing up the fire escape of her building. A writer or director can spend all day trying to craft the perfect ending, but sometimes you show up at a location and things are not perfect. When we went to shoot the scene, we discovered, of course, you have to pull down the lowest set of stairs on a fire escape to make it work. At first glance it didn’t seem like the most romantic ending to a movie ever shot. But then it struck me that one variable you can always change is weather. So I decided to make it rain, and then have Richard elegantly pull down the fire escape using the handle on his umbrella. Finally, the ending to Pretty Woman came together. Richard drove up not on a white horse but in a white limousine. He pulled down the fire escape with his umbrella handle, then climbed up with his umbrella in hand to rescue the girl. To make the story modern, our producer Laura Ziskin came up with the memorable line “She rescued him right back.” Romantics rejoiced, and feminists weren’t too pissed off either.
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.
16. FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
Pfeiffer, Pacino, the Clair de Lune, and Me
AFTER 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.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 19