The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(97)

Dad and I had written a screenplay together called ’Tis the Season. I really wanted it to be my first feature as a director. The script was based on the experiences of a USC friend of mine. He was a troubled guy from Columbus, Ohio, who had a difficult family life back home and wanted to stay in L.A. for Christmas break. He somehow scratched together a few bucks and rented a fleapit apartment in the seediest, druggiest part of Hollywood, the same Western Avenue–area stretch where my friend Doug and I had edited The Initiation.

This inspired me to write a coming-of-age story about a young man who, while living amid Hollywood’s dens of iniquity, falls for a prostitute. It was a very slice-of-life, Tom Waits–like exploration of that Skid Row milieu, with the characters humanized rather than flattened into two dimensions. Dad had the idea to give the prostitute a protective older brother who happened to be gay, which made the script both more nuanced and more provocative—you rarely saw gay characters in mainstream films in the mid-1970s.

I was convinced that ’Tis the Season would be a great movie, if only I could make it. So I tapped my inner entrepreneur. A short time after our wedding, Cheryl and I flew down to Sydney for a Happy Days promotional trip. Strangely enough, Australia was the first country where the show took off in dominant fashion. In the U.S., we attracted the teen audience early on, but it really wasn’t until the third and fourth seasons that Happy Days became the ratings juggernaut and cultural phenomenon that people remember it as. In Australia, we were an instant smash. Our benefactor in that country was Reg Grundy, a media baron who had made his fortune inventing and producing TV programs.

Grundy was a hardy and gregarious man with a white grandpa mustache: a shorter, Australian version of Ted Turner. He hosted Cheryl and me on his speedboat and seemed to take authentic interest when I spoke of my directing ambitions. He loved Happy Days for the record-breaking ratings it received down under, but he was even more effusive in describing Australia’s burgeoning homegrown film and television industry. I thought that perhaps I stood a chance of becoming a part of it.

So I pitched ’Tis the Season to Grundy, with the idea that I would direct it. I planned to cast Charlie Martin Smith in the lead and hoped to cast Candy Clark or Teri Garr opposite him. Grundy liked what he heard. We reached a verbal agreement that if I could secure distribution for my film in the United States, he would kick in $150,000 for the world rights outside of the United States. Finding a U.S. backer-distributor would be a tall order, especially for a twenty-one-year-old novice director still best known for being Opie. But my talk with Reg was a promising start.


THE THIRD SEASON of Happy Days proved Fred Silverman right. The three-camera format, the studio audience, and the more pronounced emphasis on Fonzie made the show bigger than ever. Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman wrote a sharp script for the season opener, “Fonzie Moves In,” which set up the circumstances for the Fonz to become the Cunninghams’ tenant, living in a little apartment above their garage. Now it was plausible for him to be in our house all the time, not just at Arnold’s, our local hangout.

Happy Days did indeed knock out J.J. and Good Times. We beat them in our shared time slot that season, finishing eleventh in the ratings. They slid to number twenty-four. The following season, CBS moved Good Times to Wednesdays and Happy Days became the top-rated show on television. We entered our imperial phase, ranking in the top five for three seasons in a row.

In the mid-1970s, Henry was not merely a TV star but one of the biggest stars in the world, period. In 1976, his annus mirabilis, he, his ducktail hairstyle, and his iconic black leather jacket were all over the newsstand. Henry’s face was on the cover of People, the music magazine Crawdaddy, the kids’ magazines Dynamite and Bananas, the teen magazine Young Miss, and even Mad, where the famous illustrator Jack Rickard drew him wearing a false nose, mustache, and glasses.

TV Guide paired Henry with me for one of its covers that year, both of us dressed in character as we flanked a hot rod. There was no doubt that the Fonz was good for all of us on Happy Days. It was like being on a baseball team with a slugging young superstar batting cleanup—why wouldn’t you want your manager to play him every day? Especially if this slugger was a considerate, collaborative man who was impossible not to love. Marion, Tom, Anson, Donny, Erin Moran, me—none of us begrudged Henry for becoming so popular or the show’s creatives for running with what worked. I was particularly impressed by Lowell Ganz, a tall, rail-thin guy who had a facility for writing fun, playful scenes for Henry and me. Lowell made me laugh off camera, too; he told me he came from an area of Queens that he pronounced “more Jewish than Tel Aviv.” We became good friends, and, eventually, creative partners; Lowell cowrote four of my first seven features, Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho, and Parenthood.

But sometimes, the changes to the show made me feel a little out of my depth. The Andy Griffith Show was built on heart and gentle, idiosyncratic humor. That was where my skills and taste lay. Apart from a few set pieces for Don Knotts or Howard Morris, we seldom went for hard laughs. The first two seasons of Happy Days were like that, too. The new format, by contrast, was predicated on getting hard laughs: framing up jokes, setting them up beat by beat, and building to an explosion. Playing to that live studio audience, going for the comedy throat.

Garry Marshall expanded the writing staff to include sharper, hipper minds from the ’70s comedy scene, some of whom were working as stand-ups. Jerry Paris, our director, was absolutely in his element. He had made his name directing The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of the first sitcoms to have a live studio audience. Jerry was a tall, manic man who always wore a bright red V-neck sweater on shooting days and kept a motormouth Don Rickles–style patter going at all times. When I expressed worry about nailing a comedy beat, he grabbed me by the face and said, “Look at this cute little punim! How can someone with a punim like this act so neurotic and Jewish? We should just bar mitzvah you and get it over with!”