I like to get up in the morning and see people.
I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.
[Beaches] is a pretty picture and I just liked having somebody like Bette [Mudler] who can be flying in the big comedy scenes and have her do more like a realistic part.
When I edit, I'm not from the school of Hello, I'm a genius, so everybody shut up. I'm from the school of Let's play it once in front of an audience, and then I'll tell you where it is going
We can't compete with Mel Gibson, but we figured we could do our part.
He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood.
You do a little more of a record album these days. See I just wanted to put a few songs in Beaches and we did very well. The album of Beaches went gold.
I think I learned a lot on Beaches. A guy I worked with Dante Spinotti is a wonderful cinematographer and it was his first picture and he went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for "LA Confidential" which was great.
I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
I directed fourteen movies. Every movie had Hector Elizondo. He didn't like Beaches. I don't know, it was originally not a happy movie at all, it was much sadder than that. And they brought me in to kind of make it a little more 'warm', I guess you might call it. The original ending was a whole messy thing.
In the middle of Beaches there's a scene from the "Laverne & Shirley" TV show so they see some history of my work in each film.
I'm a little older and I'm gonna do a bunch more movies and then they're gonna put me in a home for old directors.
That's why my ires always come comedic in a way because - can I just say something? See, I sound like such a smooth talker.
I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.
I work with a lot of women and yeah I see totally different... My two sisters were different, I have two daughters that are pretty different.
I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing.
For Joey Bishop, always was kind of the lost soul, so I did a traffic joke.
I was crying when I was editing [Beacher] but I stopped all the screenings years ago because I had a headache but then I had seen it again... Well I always cry at the same place, when they play that song "Wind Beneath My Wings". It gets you.
I'm very excited about is that my son Scott is a director and he just finished his first picture. It's called "Lucky 13", it's a low budget picture, it stars Jeremy Dillon, Daryl Hannah and Jami Gertz.
I think it holds up pretty good because more and more women are coming to the forefront in all areas, and back then they said that nobody would care about women's friendship.
I grew up with two sisters, no brothers. There was Ronny who produced "Happy Days" for me and my sister Penny who acts, directs - she does everything. So they were very strong women in my life.
My mother worked all of her life, she was a dance teacher and I also noticed, to be honest, that most of the male directors wanted to blow things up so there was like an open area for somebody who wanted to direct women movies, chick flicks, whatever you... I don't call them chick flicks.
I think men should go see Beaches too. I think they'll understand women better.
I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on...
Time moves on but Barbara Hershey's doing good and John Heard, they're all people working. I know there were a couple of kids in that movie who I used who have been in other movies since Beaches.
