Leave ‘Em Laughing – Newsweek

Funny Business: How the writer-director of Jerry Maguire got hooked on the small, quiet moments of comedy. In other words, how he learned the lessons of Lubitsch.

The year was 1982, and this was the afternoon I would see a rough-cut screening of the first film I had written, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Already it was a gloomy day, legendarily bad. John Belushi had died the night before, and we stood on the lot of the studio whose films had turned him into a sensation. A few of the film-company executives, along with friends and family, filed into the theater to view our movie. The worst kind of depression filled the air.

We watched a jumpy black-and-white copy of the film. The movie looked ragged, and it played even worse. Only a few embarrassed laughs cut the silence. Every few minutes I leaned over and whispered urgently into my girlfriend’s ear. “I’m dying,” I said. “I’m dead.” The movie was shuffled off to the dregs of summer, released in far fewer theaters than the studio had originally discussed. There were no champagne-filled, self-congratulatory limousine rides across the city on that opening Friday night. No cruising of the theaters to check the lines. The studio itself seemed to be in denial that it was even releasing it at all. Its hopes were pinned to the film that had occupied all the bigger stages and all its dreams of a huge cash windfall, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

I was in denial, too. I took off on Saturday morning with a buddy, and we drove to the Arizona wedding of a fellow journalist. Somewhere past the California state line, curiosity got the better of me. I persuaded my buddy to cruise some rural Arizona theaters to see how we were doing. We were shocked to find a lobby of moviegoers in a theater showing “Fast Times.” Convinced it was an aberration, we drove a little farther and checked a theater in Tucson. Another packed house. We got out of the car and sneaked into the lobby. I’ll never forget the kid standing near the popcorn line, already wearing checkerboard tennis shoes like Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) wore in the movie. “I know that dude!” he kept saying, cracking up his friends. It all felt like someone’s cruel and elaborate practical joke.

Quietly, I stood at the back of the theater and listened to the oddest thing—waves of laughter at lines I had written. And the biggest laughs were coming from the smallest moments. Quiet looks. The terrified behavior of The Rat (Brian Backer), faced with a brazen advance from Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the girl he was infatuated with. The simple act of Spicoli entering All-American Burger like a stoned emperor. The audience was already hooting and applauding him, and he hadn’t said a word.

It is the most delicate, surprising and indefinable thing—what makes an audience laugh—but I knew I was hooked. I had expected to attend the wedding as a failure; instead I arrived with a lifelong job. I tried to say it as often, and as cooly, as I could. “Me? I’m a screenwriter.”

There are no lasting formulas to comedy, but I’ve found a few theories over the years. Comedy is like bass fishing. Everyone is an expert, the fish is smarter than all of them, and the flashiest, shiniest lures never work. Always, the audience will make its own discoveries. The mere whiff of someone working overtime, straining for a laugh, is the biggest laugh killer of all.

With a tip of the hat to manic geniuses like the Marx Brothers and Jim Carrey, who manage to make their intricate and bizarre humor look spontaneous, the great moments of comedy tend to be stolen moments. The joke you never expected. Director Ernst Lubitsch was an early master of this, building elegantly hilarious jokes, one on top of the other, until his audience was charmed and satisfied. In “Ninotchka” (1939), a sterling example of the “Lubitsch touch,” watch what comedic mileage he gets out of a hat. Greta Garbo portrays an unbending Russian envoy who has come to Paris to supervise the sale of some jewels for the benefit of the socialist republic. Upon arriving at her needlessly upscale hotel, she is already in a bad mood. She sees a window display featuring a flamboyant hat. The chapeau strikes her as a frivolous display of capitalism, and she comments darkly to her Bolshevik accomplices: “How can such a civilization survive which permits their women to put such things on their heads? It won’t be long now, comrades.”

Passing the store again later, Ninotchka shakes her head with disdain. Even later in the film, we begin to wonder if the charms of an American suitor, Melvyn Douglas, will ever wear her down. She gives us no clue. Then one morning, Ninotchka sends away her comrades and secretly opens a drawer in her suite. Out comes the flamboyant hat. She tries it on, sternly examining her communist ideals crumbling before her in the mirror. The movie spins to giddy new heights. The idea came during a grueling writing session. Lubitsch emerged from a bathroom break and announced, “The hat is the answer.”

Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, co-writers of “Ninotchka,” looked at each other. There was no hat yet written in the script, but Lubitsch was right. The hat is the answer. The hat is everything. And it was a pure example of the Lubitsch touch—let the audience add up two and two. Lubitsch’s protégé, the treasured Billy Wilder, is now 92, the last of the great comic writer-directors. On the wall of his small Beverly Hills office are no garish posters of his masterpieces, “Some Like It Hot,” “The Apartment,” “Sabrina” or even “Sunset Boulevard.” Just a small sign by his door, reading: HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?

Today Lubitsch would do it not unlike modern film-comedy masters like James L. Brooks, Mike Nichols or Woody Allen. If only for the sparkling exchanges of dialogue that mark their work, each of them has long been in the big-screen comedy hall of fame. But the timeless images of their films often come not in the banter but in the devastating dialogue-free moments like Jane Craig’s (Holly Hunter) daily cathartic cry in “Broadcast News.” Or in “The Graduate,” when Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) takes a puff of that cigarette, and the painfully inexperienced Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) lunges for a kiss. He pulls away, yearning for a reaction, as Mrs. Robinson coolly exhales. It’s embarrassing, it’s voyeuristic, you almost shouldn’t even be watching … and it’s funny as hell.

In the quest for fast-moving global entertainment, these days studios often trim these quiet moments. Move things along! The audience is ahead of you! The result can be catastrophic, a quicker version of less. Sometimes the audience doesn’t want to move ahead; they’d rather luxuriate in what they imagine the character is thinking. Those supposedly unimportant moments often mean the world, especially in romantic comedy. In preparing to direct “Jerry Maguire,” I found a couple of movie frames that became important visual touchstones for the relationship between Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) and Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger). The stills came from George Stevens’s “Woman of the Year” (1942), freeze frames of two simple looks between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, sizing each other up, regarding each other. There was a lot of history, much of it sexual, in those looks. The stills were pasted onto the first page of my script. We often looked at them before shooting. Perhaps I overdid it. By the last few weeks of filming, when I headed over to talk to them, the actors would often see me start to open my script book and say: “Got it! We’re gonna regard each other!” It was no empty exercise. I left most of those moments in the movie.

It’s fashionable these days to say that romantic comedy is dead or dying. There are far fewer things keeping characters apart than in the days of Lubitsch, or so the theory goes. It’s not true, of course. There will always be achingly funny differences between people, and vive la différence. Those awkward moments that we might never have expected to see on a big screen will continue to create comedy. Life is funny, it’s just a matter of editing out the boring parts … or, hell, you can give up and go for a fart joke. That’s funny, too. There will always be a glorious surprise, a happy accident that makes an audience laugh and saves a worried director’s neck. It’s a serious business, the honorable pursuit of those elusive moments. To quote Ernst Lubitsch himself: “A laugh is not to be sneezed at.”

Courtesy of Newsweek Extra – Cameron Crowe –  Summer 1998