Not only was I lucky enough to work with Steven Spielberg, but also with his executives, especially Deb Newmyer. Deb and I became close friends. She could always make me laugh. Suzanne Tenner, a stills photographer, also became a good friend. I felt as if I was being welcomed into the arms of the sisters, mothers and grandmothers of American cinema. The actresses were so happy to be working with each other, and with a woman director. One day, Jean Simmons and I were walking around the sound stage where our house set was built. Jean told me how she had shot Spartacus on this very stage. My heart skipped a beat. Stanley Kubrick had stood where we were standing now.
I talked to Anne Bancroft about The Miracle Worker. She won an Academy Award for her heartbreaking performance as Helen Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan. She told me she had never seen it.
‘Anne, watch the movie,’ I said. ‘You are breathtakingly good in it.’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t ever watch myself.’
Years later, when I was mothering my own version of Helen Keller, Anne’s performance would have an extra meaning for me.
One day, when we were close to finishing a scene, I got a message that there was an urgent call from Manda.
‘Everything okay?’ I asked.
‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Dowie and I are under a table. Didn’t you feel the earthquake?’
‘No, I didn’t, but—’ Just then I heard a wave of noise that started off as a low rumble but soon climaxed into a terrifying roar of shaking metal. The ground began to shake and roll. There was screaming all around me.
‘I gotta go, stay under the table!’ I shouted, and hung up. I ran outside with the cast and crew.
‘Are we in danger?’ I asked Sergio, my first AD. Sergio was a big, handsome Yugoslavian bear.
‘Probably not.’ He smiled. ‘But no one takes any chances after the Northridge quake.’
A few minutes later we went back and finished the scene. When I called home, Dowie had fallen asleep. Manda said he had enjoyed the drama.
I didn’t know anything about quilts or quilting when I began making the film. Whitney Otto told me that for her quilting was a metaphor for storytelling and life experiences. At the end of the film, I used this passage from the novel, about choosing a lover: ‘You have to choose your combinations carefully. The right choices will enhance your quilt. The wrong choices will dull the colours and hide their original beauty. There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.’
Quilting is a traditionally female craft and culture. It has a long history. In pioneering days, women were often too busy with household and child rearing and other duties to make quilts as well. Many of the quilts we see in museums now were made by wealthy women. There are exceptions, of course. Slave quilts were made as story quilts, inspired by Biblical tales or as family history, to pass down from mother to daughter.
Les Dilley, the production designer, asked some Californian quilters to make the five quilts featured in the film: the wedding quilt, the landscape quilt, the African animal-themed baby quilt, the story quilt, made by slaves, and the crazy quilt that Marianna made to remember her many romances. We needed three copies of each quilt, in various stages of completion, so that we could pretend our actress quilters were creating them. Armies of quilters were required. Patty Witcher, my line producer, asked an African-American textile artist to create the designs for the story quilt. When the quilt arrived, Doug Fox, the art director, immediately threw coffee on it to make it look old and stained. At the wrap party I was given a quilt with the signatures of everybody (even Steven S) sewn into it. There was even a tiny bit of dinosaur fabric on the back of the quilt for Dowie.
One of the best parts of directing How to Make an American Quilt was working on the score with composer Thomas Newman. While Jill Bilcock and I were editing the film, I went to Tom’s studio at least twice a week. He played me sections of music on computerised versions of instruments. Sometimes he would sit at his upright piano to try out melodies. Back in the editing room, Jill would cut in the temporary music. The final score was recorded with real instruments in a large recording studio on the Universal lot, filled with microphones and music stands and chairs and a big screen so the musicians could watch the movie as they played. I sat on the other side of a glass wall with the producers and sound engineers. I searched out the cellos first, then the rest of the players. I loved Tom’s music and I revelled in the fact that here was a big Hollywood orchestra scoring my film.
Sometimes Dowie would come and listen too. One day he asked Tom if he could lie down among the instruments. Tom said fine, so Dowie went and lay on the ground in the string section so he could feel the vibrations of the instruments through his body. Now, when I listen to the soundtrack of Quilt, I know that somewhere, in among the musicians, a little, dinosaur-obsessed boy is lying on the floor, communing with Tom’s music.
13
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
In 1995, I suspected I was pregnant again. Along with the normal symptoms, my sense of smell had become acute: smells that normally didn’t bother me—garlic, cooking oil, roast chicken—now made me nauseous. I was in the editing building at Amblin and asked my assistant, a fabulously glamorous English girl named Michelle, to pick me up a pregnancy test at the pharmacy. She stared at me in surprise, then raised an eyebrow and smiled.
That afternoon I found out that yes, I was pregnant, at least according to the stick I had just peed on. I called PJ at home. He was thrilled.
It was Anne Bancroft who inspired me to have a second child, or at least to stop using birth control. One day, during rehearsal, she turned to me, took my hand and smiled. ‘Jocelyn,’ she said, ‘I hear you have just one child?’
‘Yes, a little boy. He’s four.’
‘Let me give you some advice. Have another kid.’
I laughed. ‘Why?’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I have the most beautiful boy too, but I only ever had one kid, and I think, growing up, he was lonely. So do yourself a favour, and do your son a favour. Have another child.’ I idolised Anne. She was charming and motherly, a fairy godmother. Deep inside, I heard a voice saying, Yes, Ann. I’ll do as you say.
When I told Deb Newmyer, she immediately got me an appointment with a Beverly Hills obstetrician. I did not know then that Paul Crane was the OB/GYN to the stars, and something of a television star in his own right. In any case, he was a caring and thorough doctor.
In September that year, PJ and I enrolled Dowie at a preschool in Santa Monica. One day, a couple of weeks after he’d started, Susan, the teacher, raced after Dowie and me at pick-up time.
‘He forgot his lunch box! They decorated them today.’ Susan handed me a lunch box with the word ‘Spike’ painted on the side in fluorescent glue.
‘Oh, that’s someone else’s lunch box,’ I said.
‘No, it’s mine,’ said Dowie.
‘Yes, it’s his,’ said Susan. ‘Isn’t it, Spike?’
‘Spike?’ I asked.
‘Yes?’ said Dowie. ‘That’s my name now.’
‘He asked us to call him Spike,’ said Susan, nodding at me with great meaning.
‘Bye, Spike!’ called a tousled-haired urchin.
‘Bye, Max!’ called Spike.
At home, I asked him why he had changed his name, hoping it was temporary. He said, ‘Dow rhymes with cow, and that’s dumb. And Dowie has “wee” at the end, which is like pee, and everyone was teasing me!’
‘Okay, that’s mean of them, but you don’t have to change your name just because other people tease you.’
‘I already have. I’m Spike now.’
‘Why don’t you use your middle name, Luke? It’s like the kid in Star Wars.’
‘No. I like Spike. I want to have a name that won’t attract attention.’
‘I think Spike might attract attention,’ I said gently.
Spike looked at me with
his serious blue eyes. He leaned closer. ‘I have taken Dowie and I have torn it into a million pieces and you will not put it back together again, Mummy,’ he declared, like a small king issuing a decree.
And that was that. At the age of four, Dowie became Spike. When I asked him how he chose the name, he was mysterious. It was only months later, when I was visiting Steven Spielberg and Deb Newmyer at Amblin one day, that I solved the mystery. I was in Steven’s office, where there were some framed animation cells on the wall. I looked closer and saw the dinosaurs from one of Spike’s favourite videos, The Land Before Time, which Amblin had produced. As I gazed up at the pictures, I remembered the names of the dinosaurs. Little Foot, the apatosaurus, Cera, the triceratops, Duckie, the swimming dinosaur, Petrie, the little pterodactyl, and the chubby stegosaurus was called… Spike. Spike! I was so happy to have figured it out, I blurted my discovery to Steven and Deb. About a week later, Deb gave me a handpainted animation cell from The Land Before Time, showing Spike the stegosaurus, and signed by Steven, who had written, ‘Hey Spike, Go easy on your mum.’
Because I was thirty-five, I had to have all manner of pregnancy medical tests. I was in the editing room at Amblin when the doctor called to tell me all my tests had come back normal.
‘Do you still want to know the baby’s sex?’ he asked.
‘Yes!’ I said.
‘It’s a girl.’
I couldn’t have been happier. She’s here, I thought. The daughter I have been waiting for all my life. And I imagined her, my future daughter: she would have dark hair, like all the girls in my family, and she would be brave and strong. She would be funny and creative. I would raise her to stand up for herself, to be a feminist, to dream big, and to always believe she was capable of anything.
PJ and I decided we would give her a flower name, Lily, a little tribute to Anne, because her character in Quilt was Glady, after a gladiolus. For Lily’s second given name we chose Katherine, after my sister. Then we added Moorhouse, so my surname could be one of her given names. Lily Katherine Moorhouse Hogan.
Mum and Dad flew over to Los Angeles to stay with us. There was an unspoken understanding between Mum and me that this birth would go smoothly. She would be fully supportive; PJ would not have a panic attack and cause a family fracture; if I became depressed after the birth, Mum and Dad and PJ were all going to be there for me.
By late November, Lily was ten days overdue, and I was as big as a whale again. My belly stuck out straight in front of me. PJ used to call it my torpedo belly. On 28 November, my waters broke around ten in the morning. The contractions started immediately. Dr Crane had told me I had a good chance of having a vaginal birth this time. That was my hope. The midwife told me to keep upright for as long as possible, so PJ and I walked around the neighbourhood in the hope that gravity would help things along. We tried to take in a screening of the Scorsese movie Casino, which had only just been released, but the pain was too distracting. As we headed for the car at 3 p.m. Mum burst into tears at the edge of the carport. I walked back to her. Dad was hugging her.
‘Mum, don’t cry,’ I said, smiling. ‘I want this pain. I’ve been waiting for it. It means Lily is coming soon.’
We headed down Sunset Boulevard towards Cedars Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills. PJ apologised for every curve in the road, as I held onto my belly. Okay, so now I no longer wanted this pain. It was getting way too intense.
In the elevator at the hospital, I leaned on PJ and groaned.
‘This is her first labour, I guess?’ a nurse asked PJ.
‘Uh, no,’ he said.
‘No, it’s not my first!’ I squawked like an enraged cockatoo. ‘It just bloody hurts!’
As soon as PJ, my midwife and I entered the birthing suite, I declared, ‘I want an epidural now!’ The midwife was beaming. She examined me and said all was going well.
At last I was given an epidural and the pain disappeared. Deb Newmyer rushed over from her Amblin office to be with me. I managed to sail through the biggest contractions while Deb rubbed my pins-and-needly feet and PJ kept me laughing. From my birthing bed, through my large picture window, I had a perfect view of the famous Hollywood sign. Dr Crane walked into the room around 10 p.m. and told me he was going to let the epidural wear off, so I would start feeling the contractions again. ‘I don’t want that,’ I said, alarmed.
‘You have to feel the contractions so you can push,’ he said with a smile.
So I was really going to do this. I was going to push my baby out. It was not going to be a caesarean. A few minutes later I began to feel killer contractions.
‘Okay,’ said Dr Crane. ‘Are you ready to push?’
‘No,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Well, you have to, Joss. No choice. Every time you feel a contraction, start pushing. When the contraction stops, you rest.’
After forty minutes of pushing I thought I was going to die from exhaustion. Lily’s head was big so Dr Crane performed an episiotomy. I was so stretched down there, I didn’t feel thing, just saw a flash of the shiny scissors. Snip!
‘Oops!’ said Dr Crane. Deb and the midwife laughed.
‘What do you mean, oops?’ asked PJ.
Dr Crane handed him a lock of Lily’s hair.
‘She’s a brunette.’ He smiled. ‘Your daughter’s first haircut. Sorry about that.’
Dr Crane then asked if I wanted to pull Lily out the last bit of the way. I was surprised, but leaned down and felt the top half of my warm, wet baby. I lifted her under her arms while Dr Crane supported her head. I felt my daughter slip out of me and pulled her onto my chest for her first cuddle.
‘Woah!’ shouted the midwife.
I had forgotten about the umbilical cord. Dr Crane handed PJ the scissors to cut Lily’s cord. Minutes later she was wrapped up snug in my arms. She had a lot of hair for a newborn. She even had hair on her ears and some on her back. My little hairy bear cub. After her first squawk of surprise at being born, Lily didn’t cry at all. As we took turns cuddling her, she seemed to be scrutinising us, like a small, unblinking owl. I kissed her cheeks and breastfed her right away. Wow, I thought. My sub-par body actually succeeded at this birthing stuff. It felt like a miracle. It was a healing experience.
14
A movie is a war. And if you don’t know it’s a war you’re missing something. The war is between the problems, the people with the ideas, and the people with the money. The crazies versus the bean counters.
DICK SYLBERT
In September 1995, I had been sent the script for A Thousand Acres, by Australian writer Laura Jones. I thought it was brilliant. Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer were attached to star, and they were also producers on the movie.
I had adored Jessica since first seeing her play the angel of death in Bob Fosse’s movie All That Jazz. We met in a restaurant in Beverly Hills when I was still pregnant and close to completing the final cut on Quilt. She was gorgeous and gracious. We got along well and talked about what an extraordinary story unfolded in A Thousand Acres. Based on King Lear, Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel turns everything inside out and tells the story from the daughters’ point of view. The two oldest daughters in the Cook family are traumatised victims of their father’s incestuous abuse. The youngest daughter, who was never abused, sees her father as a loving man. It is a powerful and disturbing novel. I could easily imagine Jessica playing the role of the brave, long-suffering eldest sister, Ginny. Michelle Pfeiffer was perfect for the role of the middle, more dangerous sister, Rose.
When I officially got the job of directing A Thousand Acres, I was ecstatic, but Deb Newmyer asked why I wanted to do a film about incest, murder, cancer, suicide and dementia. ‘It’s just so depressing, Joss!’ she warned me. ‘Are you sure this is a good follow-up to Quilt?’
Around the same time, PJ was offered an amazing opportunity. Jerry Zucker, director of Ghost, Airplane and Rat Race, was producing a movie called My Best Friend’s Wedding, starring Julia Roberts. Both Ju
lia and Jerry had seen Muriel’s Wedding and wanted PJ to direct their movie. He read an early draft, felt some of it wasn’t working yet, and was going to say no. I remember we were sitting in our local Starbucks, Lily in her stroller, transfixed by the whirring ceiling fan above.
‘I don’t want to do another movie with wedding in the title,’ said PJ. ‘People will think that’s all I ever want to do. Wedding movies!’
I told him he would be crazy to turn it down. Firstly, Julia was one of the biggest stars in the world. Secondly, Jerry Zucker knew comedy, and would be an amazing person to work with. Thirdly, the script was very, very funny.
Our friends Heather Mitchell and Martin McGrath were visiting Los Angeles. PJ asked Heather to read the script and advise him. She agreed he should do the movie, but she said the key to making the script even funnier would be to develop the character of George. PJ finally agreed to work with the writer, Ron Bass, on a new draft that gave a lot more scenes to George. The studio gave it the green light.
This meant PJ and I were now going to make our movies at exactly the same time. Neither of us had ever made a movie without the other person being there on set for moral and creative support. We also had two small children. But we both wanted to make another film, and both movies seemed like sure winners. ‘Can we do it without the on-set support of the other?’ we asked ourselves.
‘Yes!’ I declared. ‘Of course. I can do anything.’
In April 1996, the Hogan-Moorhouse clan made the move to Chicago, where My Best Friend’s Wedding was set. We had a lakeside apartment on the forty-fourth floor of a building so tall that it swayed slightly. We were so high up that sometimes the clouds were floating below us. There was a constant whistling wind outside the windows. I really missed bird calls, so I bought a machine with nature sounds, to make our life seem less artificial. We brought our ‘manny’ from Los Angeles, Anthony, a sweet young man whom Spike adored. He became part of our family, living in an apartment on the floor below us.
Unconditional Love Page 13