By David Geffner
Photos by Ron Batzdorff

Director Garry Marshall in between takes on the set of The Princess Diaries.

What else is Garry Marshall, a man who has spent a lifetime making America laugh, serious about? Well, aside from his dream project on Joe DiMaggio, Marshall's pretty darn serious about directing. "After all," as he deadpans amidst the clutter of Happy Days lunchboxes, Laverne & Shirley beer mugs, and enough family baby photos to fill a zillion high school yearbooks, "somebody in Hollywood has to be an adult if the film's ever going to get finished."

Being serious about directing comedy was not predestined for Marshall. Known in his tight-knit Italian family as "the sick one," Marshall grew up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and barely made it out of his bed, let alone childhood. Besieged by allergies (128 known foods and pollens to be exact) and frequent mishaps (as a kid, Marshall rammed his head into a moving blue Oldsmobile and was smashed in the eye with a golf ball), the director's love for scrapbooks came from his many hours in bed.

"We have a long history of pasting in my family," Marshall notes. "My grandfather made baseball scrapbooks from the '20s and '30s--the pre-Topps trading card era--which are now really valuable. I pasted stamps so I'd get to see the world, even though I never left the Bronx. Penny and I are lucky in that we both have photographic memories. I remember what was going on from every single photo I've pasted, which can be useful on the set."

Penny, of course, is Marshall's sister, also an established director, who got her start in show biz via her big brother's eye for talent, and his penchant for making work a family affair. [Marshall's daughter, Lori, wrote his 1995 biography--Wake Me When It's Funny; Marshall's other sister, Ronny, became a film and TV producer; and Marshall's son, Scott, has done second unit directing on Garry's last five films.]

But as one of Marshall's Catskill comic-mentors once said: "I regress." This is a story about the sick director, not the ones "with the real talent in the family--Penny and my son, Scott," as Garry repeated several times during our interview. And what a story of long-lived success it is. Days before the release of his first-ever G-rated feature, The Princess Diaries, Marshall is still amazed by a career that has only seen eight weeks of unemployment in 40 years.

"I didn't direct my first movie until I was 47 years old, which is kind of late in life to start a career," Marshall says. "The big thing now is all the technical changes in the business--digital, fancy lenses, moving camera, flash editing--but I've never had patience for any of that stuff. My son, Scott, did 74 takes of grapes rolling off a table in The Princess Diaries. I get to take seven and I start getting very antsy.

"My movies are about faces," he explains. "Ever since I was cutting out those pictures in bed, I've loved to study people's faces. I'm going to be 67 years old and my newest picture is one of the summer's biggest releases for teenagers. So working with faces like Robin Williams, Matt Dillon and Julia Roberts, when they were younger, and Juliette Lewis [in The Other Sister], and Anne [Hathaway in The Princess Diaries] has kept me young, I think."

Marshall may profess to love faces, but for many years it was words that paid his way. The director graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism, and worked as a night editor at The Daily Northwestern. He was a sports-stringer for The New York Journal American, a sports statistician for The New York Daily News, and a writer for the Armed Forces Radio Network while stationed in Korea in the '50s.

From left: Larry Miller, Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews in a scene from The Princess Diaries.

"I fell in love with directing while I was doing television because I realized I could write with a camera," Marshall says. "I started doing physical humor with Robin on Mork & Mindy, and with my sister Penny and Cindy Williams on Laverne & Shirley. Of course, I loved Chaplin and Keaton, but it was Jacques Tati who really influenced me. He understood how to do physical comedy for film, which means using the entire frame and doing visual things in the background. The lesson I learned when I went from television to features was, 'You've got a really big screen, dummy. Use it. You just left a little screen.'"

Marshall told a story from his debut feature, Young Doctors in Love, which changed his ideas about directing. "One of the things they never tell you in the DGA Magazine," Marshall laughs with a wink, "is how uncooperative a crew can be if they don't like the director. I was forced onto Young Doctors in Love because ABC Television produced the film and they wanted a TV director they had worked with. I'd stage something and ask how it looked. And the crew would yell back that it looked like the living room of Happy Days! Whenever I'd ask for something, they'd do what Jim Brooks and I call 'eye-rolling time.' It got to the point where I was walking around the set and mumbling to myself: 'I have to come up with a shot that will impress them. They don't believe I'm a film director.'"

The epiphany for Marshall came moments before an interior stage scene was set to roll. "A little voice in my head finally said that I was not a film director, at least not yet," Marshall relates. "I thought about it and asked myself: 'Well, if I'm not a film director, why am I here?' The answer was clear. 'I'm here, because I'm funnier than all these other people on the set.'"

Overhearing the camera crew say that 17mm was their widest lens, Marshall confidently gave the order to put a 17 on the camera and not move anything. Just shoot. "I told the actors to say all the words as written," Marshall continues, "and I staged a gag behind them involving a short person who could not hang up a telephone. We did two takes, and the crew was startled.

"'Look what he did with nothing,' they said. 'He made it hilarious.' After that, they all said, 'He's not a film director, but he is funny. So let's see what we can do to help him.'"

For Marshall's sentimental comedy, The Flamingo Kid, the director got the best directing tip of his career.

"Bo Goldman didn't want any screen credit on The Flamingo Kid, even though he came in and did a rewrite," Marshall explains. "One day I was complaining about a scene Bo wrote that was really boring. There was nothing funny about it. Bo says to me: 'Garry, you don't understand. It's not about what they say. They could be saying anything--it's where you put the camera that matters.' This made me understand that I had to tell the story with shots, rather than just words, as I had done in television. That, and quitting smoking, were turning points for me as a director."

Marshall may have gotten his best directing tip from a writer, but few would argue his biggest strength, indeed his prime reputation in Hollywood, has been forged with actors. Marshall may be one of the few directors working within the Hollywood system who actually has a reputation for improvising with his actors--a technique that makes most studio executives quake with fear.

The director acknowledges that "improvising scares a lot of people," so he has devised a three-pronged approach that respects the writers' craft and serves to calm the fears of those watching the budget. "I always shoot the scene as written first, because sometimes it sounds better than it reads, and that way I have a film record of the script. Then I give the actors starting points to talk about. You can't just say start improvising, and set someone to cut away to. I did this in Pretty Woman. There is a scene where Larry Miller is sucking up to Richard Gere, and it's all improvised. Julia Roberts asked me why she was sitting on the counter during this scene. I told her that these two guys are going to improvise and some of it will be funny and some of it won't. Every time it's not funny, I'll have you to bail out to. In The Princess Diaries, I cut away to my daughter (Kathleen Marshall plays Julia Andrews' secretary) so many times, her name in the end credits is Charlotte Cutaway!"

Garry Marshall (right) and actor Hector Elizondo are all smiles on the set of The Princess Diaries.

Marshall is equally fussy when working from the screenplay. "When you have two stars in a scene, like Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny, you have to have them work off-camera. Some people say you can use the dialogue coach. But the best performance comes from having the actor act off-camera during the other one's close-up. Stars or day players--I use the same approach."

The director also explained how difficult it can be to reconcile two different acting techniques. "On Frankie and Johnny, Al didn't even get cooking until about the 15th take. Michelle gave you her best stuff in the first two or three takes. It became a process of compromise and negotiation to keep both of those great actors happy. But the worst thing you can do is to give an actor of that caliber, any actor really, a line reading.

"Penny does this thing where she'll repeat the line to the script supervisor the way she wants it to sound, and make sure she says it loud enough for the actor to hear it. She'll say, 'Let's pick it up from...' Of course, the smart actor hears her and picks up on the way Penny said it on the very next take. My sister is a brilliant director."

While some directors zealously guard their feelings about "the work," Marshall loves to pass on what he's learned to a new generation of filmmakers. In lecturing at film schools all across the country, Marshall relates some key notions about getting laughs on-screen.

"Never pay attention when the crew bursts out laughing after a take," Marshall says. "You can't trust that if it was funny while you shot it, it will work for an audience. However, you can always tell when you've gotten nothing from the scene and it's not funny. I like to wait until dailies, or later, during the testing process, which I happen to love. Not the cards and all the focus groups. I like to sit at the front of the theater and turn around to see the faces. Those faces in the preview audience always tell me where the big laughs are in a film."

Marshall goes on to note that: "The easiest way to get a laugh is to have the audience love the character. That all comes from Milton Berle, who literally could say 'fish for sale' and the audience would burst into laughter. In The Princess Diaries there is a scene where Julie Andrews arm-wrestles a machine in an arcade, as her granddaughter, the princess, looks on. We called that 'the fish for sale scene' because it became clear when we were testing the film, the audience adored Julie's character and she could get away with anything."

Despite several critically praised "dramadies" in his bag, Garry Marshall's feature career has been measured by the blockbuster, Pretty Woman. The film not only remains the modern bellwether by which all romantic comedies are judged, but it also placed expectations on Marshall to crank out mega-commercial hits every time at the plate.

"When you do a picture that costs $14 million, all in, and it makes $400 million, somebody says let's see if we can make him do that again and again and again," Marshall laughs. "But you have to resist falling into that trap and go against the grain as much as possible."

Going against the grain meant creating a sitcom in the mid-'70s with blue-collar female characters when there were none on the air. It also meant following up Pretty Woman with his most intimate film of his career: The Other Sister, which the director calls his favorite and most complete film, and Frankie and Johnny, a tale of working-class characters, just like Marshall's childhood in the Bronx.

"Let's be brutally honest here," Marshall notes wryly. "Since the success of Pretty Woman I get very fluffy scripts. And God knows I do fluffy very well. But even if I take a movie for the money, as I did in the '90s to help support my baby, The Falcon Theater, I have to find something in the project I love. I did The Princess Diaries so my grandchildren would have something to go see. There are no movies out there for little girls. They're all for boys and the trend is gross humor. So I went against the grain, and decided to make a G-rated picture."

Does Marshall harbor any regrets about abandoning television at the height of his success? Not many. He laments that television seems like a world where the director is often on to the next job while the show is still in the editing room. Marshall calls himself a director who makes his pictures in the editing room.

"Now I'm on the Western Director's Council," he notes, "and we talk about how the director must stay to edit the picture in television. Personally, I always felt the track was too fast for the director to perfect a weekly TV series, comedy or drama. It's tough to do enough takes to make the work special. Of course, things have changed a little since I had four out of the top-five-rated shows on the air. [During the week of January 28, 1979, four of the top-five-rated Nielsen shows were produced by Marshall: Laverne & Shirley, Happy Days, Mork & Mindy and Angie.] The showrunner, who was the executive producer in my day, is all-powerful. They tell the director what to do. Some directors are getting to become showrunners. That's really the only way the director can control the work in television."

Marshall has been a DGA member since 1964, yet this is his first year on the Western Director's Council. Marshall calls his recent involvement with the Council a "process of giving back. It's such an interesting time for directors. I think it's important to recognize this youth push in the Guild. Like that HBO show, Six Feet Under, where the director wanted to have the title of the show flash on after the final directing credit. It's controversial, this stuff, because it changes how things have been done for so many years. But that's the movie industry. Kids don't even want to sit still for a linear narrative. We used to have fast MTV editing--now those old MTV videos look really slow compared to how films are edited today. We have to respect and adapt to these changes."

Yet another issue Marshall hopes to explore while serving on the Council is payments. "I remember as a writer how upset we'd be when they'd shoot a documentary of a TV show we had worked on and we never got paid for our scenes that were in the film. All these biography shows that are so popular--somebody directed that footage, and they should be paid every time a producer puts it on television."

Andrews, Marshall and Hathaway between takes on the set of The Princess Diaries.

"The story of schmaltz-plus-funny was in my book. When Jerry Belson and I were freelance writers, we had a meeting with a producer from a show that shall go nameless. He told us the formula for success was schmuny--schmaltz plus funny equals money," Marshall explains. "The guy from The New York Times grabbed that story and turned it on me. But that's not what I do. [Director/writer] George Abbott said it best: 'No matter how farcical you get, the characters must have feelings.' If you want to call feelings schmaltz, then so be it. But don't call it schmuny. We work too hard on the emotional lives of these characters to reduce it to a formula like schmuny. Besides, Jerry and I didn't even take that job. Who wants to work for a guy who only cares about schmuny?"

David Geffner is a freelance writer who contributes to DGA Magazine on a regular basis.

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