Good Morning, Barry Levinson

Danny Devito is naked in the bathtub. Barbara Hershey comes in and sits on the side of the tub. She says they never do things together that are fun anymore. Maybe if they went on a picnic together, it might be fun.

"I don't understand a picnic," says De Vito. "We go someplace, we put a thing on the ground and eat. Why? I don't get it. It's better sitting in front of the TV"

"I happen to think there's something nice about a picnic," says Hershey. "It's fun."

"What's fun about it?" says DeVito. "Ants get into the food, there's bees. I don't get it. You have to drive, it takes maybe an hour to get there, and then what do you do? You sit in grass and eat. Why is that fun?"

"I just thought it might be nice to do something together, that's all," says Hershey. "I thought it might be fun."

"It doesn't sound like fun to me," says DeVito. "A picnic--it's dirty. You take the food you've got here in the icebox, you take it out in a field and eat it. It's more fun eating in front of the TV and we do that together, don't we? No ants and no bees--much more comfortable."

"It's not the same thing," says Hershey.

"Don't get me wrong,"says DeVito. "I'll do anything with you. I'm just a little stymied by a picnic. If you want to go on a picnic, send me a postcard."

Hershey stalks from the room in a huff.

The above is a scene from Tin Men, a film about aluminum-siding salesmen in Baltimore that was written and directed by Barry Levinson in 1987.WithMel Brooks, Levinson has co-written Silent Movie and High Anxiety. With Valerie Curtin, he has co-written ... And Justice for All, Inside Moves, Best Friends and Unfaithfully Yours. Alone, he has directed Diner and Tin Men (both of which he also wrote), The Natural, Young Sherlock Holmes, Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man, and, at the age of 47, the cherubic-faced guy with the longish gray hair has suddenly become one of the hottest directors in Hollywood.

Levinson is sitting opposite me in my funky Hollywood hotel room on the Sunset Strip, wearing a green-silk shirt with the top button buttoned, a cardigan, chinos and sneakers.

I'd been told that Levinson and I had a lot in common. We were both droll, prematurely gray-haired Jewish writers. We had both done stand-up comedy early in our careers, had both been more successful as writers than as standup comedians, had both married writers and gotten divorced, had both remarried, had both become first-time fathers in our 40s and both had four-year-old sons. I wanted to know what insights he had about wome marriage, fatherhood, directing, humor and writing.

Levinson is a wonderful writer. He was not a wonderful student. "In high school, I was five hundred and sixtieth in a graduating class of five hundred and sixty," he says. "I had a hard time concentrating on things, because my mind wandered too much. I was just incapable of following what you were supposed to do."

He went into college, dropped out sold cars went back to college, dropped out, went back to college, then got interested in radio and TV. In 1963, while at American University in Washington, D.C., he got a trainee job at WTOP-TV He worked as a floor director, built the sets for the public-service shows and, on the Ranger Hal Show, worked hand puppets such as Dr. Fox, Oswald Rabbit and Marvin Monkey. At that point, Levinson was about 21. He was doing OK at American University, but he had never taken the school's language requirement seriously, so he couldn't graduate. In 1967, he moved to the Coast.

In L.A., a guy he knew suggested that they both sign up for acting school. Levinson despised acting. "It all seemed kind of fake--people walking around with English accents, talking like they came from somewhere else. They went to the cinema. It always seemed so pretentious." The guy talked Levinson4 into accompanying him to class. He didn't want to be an actor, but there was something interesting there. He met another student, Craig T Nelson (who would later star in Poltergeist), and they did humorous improvs together. After a while, they realized that they could write their improvs down and sell them, and that was Levinson's transition to becoming a writer. Nelson and Levinson teamed up with funnyman Rudy DeLuca at KNBC-TV on the Lohman & Barkley Show and created a soap opera called The Lawyers and the Pigs. "The lawyers and the pigs were just lawyers with suits carrying little piglets, talking all this kind of legalese," says Levinson. "We would never mention these pigs, we'd just have 'Objection.... Overruled.... Sustained'--all that kind of stuff, only with piglets."

On the night they were set to do the first live-on-tape episode of The Lawyers and the Pigs, they scrambled into costume and, with two minutes before air time, rushed to the prop guy to get their little piglets. The prop guy had gotten ... pigs. Big pigs. Sixty-pound pigs. "The show begins and we are out there with giant pigs. We're all trying to hold on to these pigs: The pigs start to squeal, Craig makes his opening statement, his pig takes a pee on his leg and the audience goes crazy." The sketch, which was supposed to run two and a half minutes, ran 14 minutes, because they couldn't hear each other between laughs and because of the pigs. "They would pee, they would take a dump, then they would try to break free and there was no talk about this at all. It was quite a memorable scene."

After the Lohman & Barkley Show, they moved to Tim Conway's show, where they stayed through 1970. Levinson and DeLuca began hanging around The Comedy Store, doing sketches about things such as automated priests who do confessions and go out of whack and start forgiving you before you finish confessing. In 197 1, Levinson and DeLuca flew to England and worked for Marty Feldman on his show for about a year, came back and got jobs with Carol Burnett.

Ron Clark, a producer on The Tim Conway Show, got the idea for Silent Movie and thought Levinson and DeLuca would be a nifty choice to help write it, so he introduced them to Mel Brooks. "I met them and I liked them," Brooks tells me in his spacious office at Twentieth century was crazy--you couldn't shut him up. And he had a wonderful laugh--a high, screaming, almost-out-of-control, hysterical, cackling laugh when he would let go, and then he'd hold himself as though he were afraid the laughing would hurt him.

"We'd meet for lunch and take a tape recorder, so that we could talk through lunch. We'd go to Factors most of the time, a Jewish delicatessen. Many cups, many saucers, many plates, much silverware, water, ice in the water, and that's all you heard. You heard a waiter saying, 'Who gets the matzoh-ball soup?' 'Check, please!' Very few ideas for the movie. I heard the word herring maybe a hundred and thirty-five times, but it never ended up in the movie."

Levinson told Brooks about hanging out with his buddies at the local diner in Baltimore. It reminded Brooks of Fellini's film I Vitdloni, "about a bunch of adolescents on their way to adulthood and the rites of passage that had to do with giving up fantasy and childhood behavior and assuming the mantle of adulthood, and the nervous breakdown that came with it." Brooks thought Levinson's experiences with the guys in the diner were a movie he should write.

Levinson worked for Brooks from 1975 to 1977 in a kind of apprenticeship. When High Anxiety wrapped, he realized that he wanted to do his own kind of comedy, so he left Brooks's atelier and went off to write scripts with Valerie Curtin, a comedian-writer-actress he'd met in 1972 while both were performing at The Comedy Store. At some point, they got married, which lasted a couple of years.

"What went wrong with the marriage?" I ask.

"Enough that we split up," says Levinson succinctly. I try to draw him out about it, thinking he may know something useful about why marriages go bad. He won't talk about his private life at all, other than to say he's now married to a Baltimore woman named Diana, with whom he has two sons--a four-year-old named Sam and a baby of almost one named Jack. Throughout the Curtin years, Levinson kept in touch with Mark Johnson, a producer he'd met on High Anxiety. Levinson had written some successful scripts with Curtin, and now he wanted to direct his first film, Toys. Toys was set up at Fox, with Levinson to direct and Johnson to produce. But just before they were ready to go, Fox decided not to make the movie.

Levinson and Johnson were figuring out what to do next. Curtin was away on an acting job and Levinson had time to kill. He recalled Brooks's urging him to write about theguys he'd hungout with at the diner. Levinson sat down to write Diner. In three weeks, he had a script.

Johnson, who'd taken a job as head of production for Jerry Weintraub, gave Diner to him. Weintraub liked it and set it up in a matter of days at MGM. He sent Johnson and Levinson off to Baltimore to make the movie. At first, Johnson was afraid the laid-back Levinson wasn't going to be tough enough on the set. "There's such a private life going on there," says Johnson. "I don't know if there's any panic behind the facade. He seemed at ease directing Diner. Clearly, he didn't know the technical side, didn't know the advantages of using one lens over another, but he knew what he wanted. When he saw it, he knew immediately."

Diner is a small masterpiece on the order of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, but it doesn't have much shape. When Levinson showed the rough cut to the studio, they said, "Listen, the scene where he's asking for the roast beef? Just give him the sandwich and get on with the movie."

Levinson said, "There is no movie--that's the movie."

A major recurring theme in Diner is the lack of communication between the sexes. In one memorable scene, Steve Guttenberg, who has agreed to marry his fiancee provided she can pass a lengthy football quiz, asks married buddy Daniel Stern if he's happy being married. Stern says he doesn't know.

"I'll tell you a big part of the problem, though, when you get married. When(continued on page 134) Barry Livinson (continued from page 114) you're dating," says Stern, "everything is talking about sex, right?Where can we do it? Why can't we do it? Are your parents going to be out, so we can do it? Trying to get a weekend, just so that we can do it. Everything is always, just always, talking about getting sex. And then planning the wedding. All the details. But then, when you get married, it's crazy. I mean, you can get it whenever you want it. You wake up in the morning and she's there, and you come home from' work and she's there. And so all that sex-planning talk is over with. Andy so is the wedding-planning talk, because you're already married. So, you know, I can come down here and we bullshit the whole night away, but I cannot hold a five- minute conversation with Beth. I mean, it's not her fault--I'm not blaming her. She's great. It's just that we got nothing to talk about. But it's good, it's good."

"Well ... " says Guttenberg, lighting up a Pall Mall. "We've always got the diner."

At another point in Diner, Mickey Rourke, who plays the good-looking make-out artist of the gang, tells Stern's wife, Ellen Bark in, "I'm not too good about, you know, talking. I mean, you know me, if I have a problem with agirl, I just split."

In the next scene, Guttenberg is in a strip club with his buddy; Tim Daly, who tells him,"The whole thing with girls is painful," he says. "And it keeps getting more painful--instead of easier." Oh, yes.

Both Diner and Tin Men have taken some flak for being sexist. In the first sequence of Diner, Kevin Bacon has just sold his date to another guy at a dance for five dollars. In Tin Men, DeVito smashes up Richard Dreyfuss' new Cadillac and Dreyfuss gets back at him by seducing DeVito's wife; when Dreyfuss falls in love with her, DeVito refuses to grant her a divorce, so they play pool to see who wins her. Women in both films are possessions with whom communication isn't possible.

"Is the view of man--woman relationships in Diner and Tin Men your own?" I ask Levinson.

"That's my view of it in terms of those times," he says. "Both pieces were using that noncommunicative relationship to show something. That doesn't apply nowadays in the same sense, because even people who can't communicate have these conversations about communicating. Because everybody knows the words, y' know: 'We're not communicating.' I never heard anybody in 1960 talk about how we were not communicating. They just didn't talk."

I acknowledge my own frustrations with man--woman relationships and ask Levinson why he thinks communication between the sexes is so difficult.

"We're talking about tribes," he says. "We are talking about distant tribes that are finally having to come together. And it's probably harder to day, because we have a world with more alienation, and we put more pressures on the relationship than ever before. Because we have nothing to fall back on--the family, the community; we don't have a community anymore. We've let the social fabric of this country totally deteriorate and we don't know what to do about it. And we have a Govern mentth at obviously has no social conscience whatsoever anymore, so, ou can4 understand the alienation."

Levinson talks with passion about sociological issues but is dismissive of psychological ones. After a couple of decades in therapy, I have a few notions about why men and women can't communicate, about fear of intimacy and all the rest, but Levinson isn't intrigued about psychology. He's never been in therapy himselfand is patronizing about all self-help programs. "We've had them for all these years," he says more than once. "How come we're not better?"

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For Diner, Levinson assembled a talented cast of unknowns who have since become quite successful, such as Mickey Rourke (Angel Heart, 9'h Weeks, Barfly),Kevin Bacon (Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Footloose, She's Having a. Baby), Daniel Stern (The Milagro Beanfield War, Breaking Away), Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy, Cocoon, Three Men and a Baby), Ellen Barkin (The Big Easy, Siesta, Down by Law), Michael Tucker (Tin Men, L.A. Law) and Paul Reiser (Aliens, My Two Dads, Beverly Hills Cop II). "He picks all these great strange faces and they somehow work together," says Robin Williams. "Someone once called him the master of the male ensemble, which makes me think he's like a choreographer [gay voice]: 'All right, everyone, work with me, people.

Levinson does seem to know how men talk to one another and behave with one another--the loving and competitive and distrustful and tender and cocky way that men act toward other men because they've been brought up to be successful and macho and not show their vulnerability--and he manages to make that behavior seem extremely natural when it gets translated to the screen.

All six films he has directed are extremely well crafted. The two he wrote himself, Diner and Tin Men, are probably the best--certainly the most intimate and naturalistic. And they're both as far as you can possibly get from The Natural, a heroic and unrealistic baseball fable that stars Robert Redford and that is no less impressive for its lack of realism. And it's hard for me to see what the six films have in co stylistically.

"Probably at the end of his career, you'll look back and the five or six Baltimore movies will be the body that he's remembered by, "says Reiser. "They're small in scope, small in action, rich in people, and they're all about people figuring out their lives."

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I've heard Levinson referred to as the West Coast Woody Allen and wondered how he differs from Allen as a director. "Woody is more structured," says Her-shey, who has worked for both. "Woody blocks scenes more strictly, he's more precise in the structure of the scene. Like, he will often shoot something in one shot. He rarely comes in for close-ups. There's a high concept on the structure of the scene, whereas Barry is much more freewheeling and lets the music of the words lead you where it's natural to go. With Woody, you have to bend more to his idea."

I ask Levinson how much direction he gives actors. "I try to give them very little. I try to give them very little nudges, y' know, so it almost feels like total freedom out there. They can only go so far, because you have something in mind of what you want, but I like to give actors the sense they can try anything they like."

"He knows very much what he wants, yet the way he gets it out of you is very casual and unspecific," says Reiser. "He'll sometimes give you directions and have entire sentences with no words in them, where he'll go, 'You know what I want? Ya do a thing, y' know, ya kinda, y' know, like, the two of ya sittin' there with the thing, and the thing, and ya just kinda, ya don't know what it is, but it's a thing.' And, amazingly, you walk out and you go, 'Got it, Barry.' How do you tell somebody what he said? 'I don't know what he said, but it's something with a thing.' He has a shorthand that can be frustrating. There are not words, it's body language and that sort of gently approving manner that he has.

"On the set, when all your confidence is falling away and you're reaching for straws for reassurance, we'll do a take five, six, seven times and he'll go, 'Uh, let's do it again.' You do it again and, obviously, you're doing it because it wasn't what he was looking for, and he goes, 'Uh ... let's move on.' And you go, 'Barry, is that "Let's move on," as in "Thank you, I got it; beautiful" or "Let's move on," as in "We could spend all fucking day and we'll never get it" ?' And he goes, 'Uh, let's just move on.'"

"He has that Baltimore cool," says Williams. "He's so fucking easygoing that it puts a lot of people off, I guess. They're looking for someone to tell them everything and he's just, like, 'Hey, let's see what happens.' For me, he sets up, like, those road cones they have in driving school, and you know when you go over them, because you hear a little 'Foof.' He's not going, 'Get back there!" It's just that you knew when something wasn't funny."

"Barry plays his cards close to his vest," says Dreyfuss, "so you do all the work. You assume that he's OK, that he's safe, that he's in control. Inside, he may be having the screaming meemies, but you don't know that. So you assume the strength. It'sone of the ways that you learn about not being an emotional spendthrift. It's smart."

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I ask Levinson which he likes better, writing or directing. "Directing," he says. "I don't care if I ever write anything again." I ask him how he writes. "Fast. I'll just talk it to a secretary and she takes it down in shorthand. On Diner, I wrote it longhand. I dictated Tin Men. It doesn't make any difference to me. I'm always amazed at what's coming out, because I don't know what the hell it is. I don't write outlines, I just suddenly get this thing. I try to go as fast as I can go until I get tired. I can't think about it a lot.I never think of myself as a writer."

"The scripts come out of him almost like children," says Williams. "He gives them about a year's gestation and then they come out of him in, like, a two-te peri'

He's the great writer," says Dreyfuss. "They are unique pieces, Diner and Tin Men. There is literally rhythm and music in the prose. You can, as Laughton did, approach your prose as poetry, and that's what you can do with Barry's. You can literally get it going like jazz."

But, I say to Dreyfuss, Levinson downplays his writing--says he's a director and doesn't think of himself as a writer. "If Barry could say that, it's crazy," says Dreyfuss, and he goes on to question the progression from writer to director. "Writing is so solitary and directing is so social. It's not a logical progression to go from being a writer to being a director. It's logical to become a colonel in the Army, and then a general, and then a director, because that's what you gotta do, you gotta run a war."

"Barry has an amazing ear for dialog," says Hershey. "The way that people misunderstand each other, their bumbling way of speaking. Like the scene with me and Danny DeVito in the bathtub: I say'I want to go on a picnic' about eight different ways, he says no about eight different ways. The whole scene is 'I want to go on a picnic,' 'No,' and it goes on for three minutes. That kind of ability was staggering to me. He also writes each character differently. Lots of times, I'll read scripts and every character is a reflection of the writer in terms of dialog, but Barry really creates different characters."

Levinson tells me he leans toward characters who are cockeyed and off center, people who can't express themselves, people who don't know they're funny. He eavesdrops on conversations, on arguments:" An argument very seldom focuses on the dilemma," he says. "It's, like, seven steps removed from the problem. That to me is sort of funny, because it's the cockeyed conversation that I'm interested in. The argument has drifted away from its essence down to something that is frivolous to the conversation, and all of a sudden, people are arguing about that." He describes a recent incident on the L.A.-'freeway in which a motorist shot another driver for cutting him off, and imagines the shooter recounting the story to a buddy. "Normally, the person you're with is agreeing, anyway," says Levinson. "'The guy cut me off, so I shot him.' 'Well, you had to.''Yeah, I know; what could I do? I had course you had to--he cut you off; that's what I'm saying.' 'I wouldn't have shot him if he wasn't cutting me off.' You can have a reason for anything now."

"I've had conversations with Barry about low-fat milk that were so funny you couldn't finish a meal," says Jeff Katzen-berg, head of Disney Studios. "One time, wewere looking at a can of Coca-Cola and he said tome, 'I've got a fantastic idea; it'll make a lot of money. You see this Coca-Cola can? It say"' Less than one calorie."' He said, 'Now, I figure that to say "less than" must cost about nine million dollars a year in paint.' He said, 'Who cares that it's less than one calorie-why can't they just say "one calorie"?' He said, 'We should call Coca-Cola and make a deal with them.'"

"Barry did a bit about a priest coming in to exorcise a guy who thought he was a chipmunk," says Reiser. "It was hysterical. [Priest's resonant voice]: 'Do you know what Satan is?' [Chipmunk's high voice]: 'It's a fabric, right?' [Priest's voice]: 'No, that's satin.' [Chipmunk's voice]: 'Oh.'

"He has these kind of old-mannish Jewish qualities," says Reiser. "Someone asked him, 'You don't like snakes?' and he said, 'I don't trust anything that doesn't have ears.' I said, 'That's the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.' It's so specific and it's so unimportant--the danger to you is not that they don't have ears. Why is that so funny to me? But he's right--it's like if the snake had ears that you could hang glasses on, you'd go, 'All right, I could deal with it.' But it's the ears, that's what it is. It's not the fangs or the venom, it's the lack of ears."

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Good Morning, Vietnam is Levinson's most successful film to date. It has grossed more than $125,000,000, which makes it one of the five biggest films of 1988.

"I had trouble getting in to see Good Morning, Vietnam," says Brooks. "I went to the assistant manager and said, 'I'm a friend of Barry Levinson's; I'm Mel Brooks.' He said, 'You're not Mel Brooks; Mel Brooks is bigger.' I said, 'I'm forty feet on the screen, but in real life, I'm just a little pisher like you.' The picture was starting 1and the guy said, 'Do something.' I said, 'Did you see High Anxiety?' I said, 'Listen to this' [sings "High ang-zi-et-eeee!"]. He says,'Oh, yeah, you're Mel Brooks; go in.' It was a lot of work to get in, but it was worth it. It was worth doing impressions of Mel Brooks."

Brooks saw Levinson recently. Hewants Levinson to direct a film about Lenny Bruce's mother. "We went right back to making each other laugh and holding our bellies and falling over, "says Brooks. "He said, 'You know, my life is getting a little too serious--1 miss a lot of the stupid, silly stuff we used to do together.' I'm sorry that he, like the kids in Diner, had to grow up and become this big, important commercial commodity. Before Vietnam, he was swinging with all of us. Now, suddenly, the capitalism has got that big klieg light on him, and so all the studio heads will want him for anything just because he has turned such a profit."

Levinson's latest film is Rain Man, the Dustin Hoffman--Tom Cruise picture that is likely to be nominated for several Academy Awards. Cruise plays a fast-talking foreign-car salesman whose autistic-savant brother, Hoffman, inherits $3,000,000 when their father dies. Determined to trick Hoffman out of his inheritance, Cruise kidnaps him from a sanitarium. They begin a touchingly humorous odyssey across America in their dead father's 1949 Buick Road master, in the course of which each learns surprising lessons about the other and about life.

Levinson was Rain Man's, fourth director. Martin Brest, Steven Spielberg and Sidney Pollack all bowed out of the project because of problems with the script and, one has heard, with Hoffman. Mark Johnson told me he and Levinson always want to make movies that are a little bit dangerous. A comedy about a con man and his autistic brother, starring Hoffman and Cruise, that three other directors dropped out of seems to satisfy that requirement.

Predictably, Levinson claims he had no problems on Rain Man. "It was the easiest movie I'd ever done," he says, chiefly because it's the first he has directed that isn't set in period. What's it like not to have to worry about weeding anachronisms out of every shot? "Like a fifty-pound weight has been lifted from you."

Levinson's pregnant wife was on location in Cincinnati, but even her giving birth to their second son during the filming didn't ruffle his composure, nor did it delay his schedule: "We finished shooting Saturday night about midnight. I got back to the hotel about one-thirty, we went to bed and about four minutes later, Diana went into labor. Jack was born early Sunday morning and I was back on the set on Monday. The crew was upset. They thought they'd at least get one day off."

I ask if there were any problems with Hoffman, but I needn't have. There weren't. Both Hoffman and Cruise were great, he says. True, both like to rehearse, and Levinson doesn't much like to but it was never a problem.

Hoffman has had several well -publicized run-ins with directors in the past. Why does Levinson think he got along so easily with him? "Maybe because of my writing background, I'm more willing to play with the material," he says. "You play with the script just like the gorilla in that Sam sonite luggage commercial--you bang it around and you throw it around and eventually, it kinda shapes up."

Is his unfazable demeanor genuine, or is he a mass of repressed and boiling emotions beneath an impassive facade? It's probably the former, but it hardly matters, because the bottom line is that he gets the job done. However he manages it, and whatever he may have to go through to do it, Levinson's goofy maturity enables him to keep his cool under the enormous pressures of working on difficult locations with temperamental stars and to turn out beautifully crafted films with remarkably accurate language and detail in an industry that is more than willing to settle for less.

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As I said earlier, I'd been told that Levinson and I had a lot in common as droll, prematurely gray-haired Jewish writers and remarried dads. I'd had this fantasy that we'd hang out in a diner and swap shy, droll, prematurely gray-haired Jewish insights about writing and wives and small sons and that we'd become fast friends.

It didn't quite work out that way. First of all, you don't become fast friends with somebody by interviewing him for a magazine. Second, men in middle age don't form friendships as easily as they did in their diner days. And, third, Levinson strikes me as a rather private and inaccessible fellow. I had asked people who knew him if they thought they knew him. Most said no.

"I like him," said Dreyfuss. "I like what he lets me see of him. I enjoy Barry. But he's not forthcoming. He doesn't, you know, take out his little Barry book and read it to me. I doubt that he would do that for anyone except his wife. Or maybe Mark Johnson."

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I'm having a final meeting with Levinson at dinner, not in a diner but in a noisy restaurant in Westwood. I ask how he sees himself now that he's such a huge success.

"It basically feels the same as when I was working in alocal TV station," he says, "when I was hanging out in Baltimore and doing nothing. I really enjoy what I do. I get a kick out of making films and putting them together. I'm fascinated by the process. I like to just play around with that stuff. I don't want to take it too seriously. Then it gets to be pretentious."

" 'I've had conuersations with Barry about low-fat milk that were so funny you couldn't finish a meal.' "