I went to the DMV to get a special vanity plate for the Bus. It had the word film on it, but with four m’s: FILMMMM.
21
Roger That
RON
I said the word filmmmm with ostentatious relish when I spoke with friends, drawing out those m’s. I was simultaneously mocking the lofty Cahiers du Cinéma approach that aesthetes take to the cinematic arts and acknowledging that filmmaking had become a kind of religion for me. Filmmmm was my mantra. Come hell or high water, I was going to make movies.
But how? It was no easy goal to achieve, even for someone with a track record in the business and a hit TV show. Actors are often thought to be striving above their station when they display the ambition to be filmmakers. It’s a long-running industry joke: the pretentious, delusional kid who says, “What I really want to do is direct.”
From a distance or a quick scan of my IMDb page, it seems like it was a foregone conclusion that I would transition effortlessly from acting in sitcoms to directing major films for the big studios. In reality, it was an arduous grind that required hustle, determination, and luck. I carried a lot of worry with me in my Happy Days years. Did I stand a chance of having a fulfilling adult career? Would I ever be taken seriously enough for someone to give me a chance?
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.