The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(113)

In the early 1980s, I met a bright, hustling young TV-movie producer on the Paramount lot named Brian Grazer. We hit it off both personally and creatively. Brian was bursting with ideas, and he conceived the stories for what became my second and third feature films, Night Shift and Splash. I watched in awe and gratitude as Brian fearlessly navigated the Hollywood studio system to get these movies produced and distributed by major studios. Night Shift was a sleeper success for Warner Bros. Splash, a Disney production, was my first bona fide hit, landing in that year’s box-office top ten and receiving Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. My working relationship with Brian was clearly working. He and I decided to stick together and create our own independent production shop, which we named Imagine Entertainment.

This marked the end of Major H Productions, a changing of the guard. Dad had no stake in this new company. Yet he never guilt-tripped me for seeking out other collaborators and business partners, nor did Mom pressure me to continue working with Dad. They let me follow my instincts—instincts that they themselves helped hone—while maintaining our familial closeness.

What a gift that was: to let me fly away, the way Opie let his baby birds fly free at the end of “Opie the Birdman.” It was their final act in raising me and positioning me for success in our shared field of work—a tremendous act of love and grace.


I WASN’T THE only Howard to take flight. In the 1980s, Mom returned to acting for the first time since Dad pressed her into service for the shows that he directed on the air force base. It started with me putting her in Cocoon as a featured extra who worked on the film for several weeks. Then Henry Winkler cast her and Dad in small parts in a Dolly Parton holiday movie he was directing, A Smoky Mountain Christmas. (Henry had already done me a major solid by agreeing to star alongside Michael Keaton in Night Shift; I wouldn’t have received the necessary financing for the film without someone of his status attached.)

Newly alive to performing, Mom started going out on auditions. Before long, she had effectively cornered the market on little-old-lady roles in sitcoms, appearing in Roseanne, The Wonder Years, Married . . . With Children, and Grace Under Fire. One day in 1994, when I was preparing Apollo 13, Dad called me.

“Ron, I want to ask you something about your casting,” he said. I immediately began to wonder if he had a role for himself in mind, which would have been unlike him; he had never, ever promoted himself to me.

“I see that in the latest Apollo 13 rewrite, there is a terrific little role for Jim Lovell’s mother, Blanche,” he said. “I think Jean would knock that out of the park.”

Okay, now I was in a bit of a dilemma. Dad was leaning on me to cast Mom, but this part wasn’t a casual walk-on. Blanche has a major scene in which her daughter-in-law breaks the news to her that there has been an explosion in the command module, putting her son in danger. Blanche, far from breaking down in tears, displays a steely resolve. She reassures her crying granddaughter by saying, “If they could get a washing machine to fly, my Jimmy could land it.”

I acceded to Dad’s request to give his thought some serious consideration. But I couldn’t play favorites or assume Mom was a natural for the part. I made her audition. I drove to their house nervous as a cat and fully prepared to have an awkward, let-them-down gently conversation. I had been through a version of this before, with Dad. In a couple of my films, his best scenes had hit the cutting-room floor during the final editing, and I had to break the news.

But Mom came prepared. She was immediately and undeniably excellent from a performance standpoint. There was just one problem. For the first time in her adult life, Mom looked too young to be believable. When I expressed this concern, Dad pointed out that makeup could enhance the lines in her face. Then Mom went in for the close. She popped out her false teeth, smiled wide, and said, “Don’t you think this would do the trick?”

“Okay, Mom, okay!” I said. “Put your teeth back in. You got the part.”

We put her in a wheelchair, and the hair and makeup people did fantastic work to make Mom appear convincingly frail and elderly. She nailed the scene in just a couple of takes—it’s a favorite of many Apollo 13 fans.





CLINT


Being the boy who stayed local created a different dynamic for Dad and me than it did for him and Ron. In Dad’s later years, he and I were best friends as much as we were father and son. We went to ball games together, hung out together, engaged in shoptalk. When I was cast in something, I ran the material by him and sought out his thoughts. Not his guidance, which is what he gave me when I was a kid, but any useful ideas he might have.

I didn’t always take his suggestions on board, but I treasured our ritual of discussing the work and Dad clearly appreciated that I solicited his input. And one day in 1998, he came through with a truly great piece of advice.

Just a few weeks before I turned thirty-nine, my agent called me with a strange piece of news. He told me that MTV wanted to honor me for lifetime achievement at that year’s MTV Movie Awards—the raucous, looser, sillier cousin of the network’s higher-profile MTV Video Music Awards. The statuette that they gave out to the winners was a gold-plated bucket of popcorn.

This phone call happened to come on April 1, a fact that was not lost on me. A lifetime achievement award? Me? Ha! But even after my agent persuaded me that MTV’s offer wasn’t an April Fools’ joke, I wasn’t a total idiot about their intentions. The previous two years’ winners had been Godzilla and Chewbacca, and the whole thing was tongue in cheek. I got it completely that they had picked me because I am a so-called cult actor with a funny look and a résumé of weird parts, from Balok and Eaglebauer to the psychos I played in Evilspeak and The Ice Cream Man.