Published February 11th, 2010
By Sara Gentry
[caption id="attachment_5049" align="alignleft" width="460" caption=" Director Garry Marshall, right, talks with Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts on the set of New Line Cinema’s romantic comedy Valentine’s Day, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Ron Batzdorff"]

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TV and film icon Garry Marshall lights up Hollywood with a star-studded addition to his first-rate career
The living room set on The Dick Van Dyke Show was painted beige.
This fact may seem inconsequential to the general public, but to me, it’s a pot of gold.
When interviewing Garry Marshall became a very real possibility, I had to harness my enthusiasm into a manageable number of questions — questions that didn’t make me look like a crazy person — and finding out the color of the set topped my list. It’s in black and white, so I always wondered. (Trust me — compared to some of the questions I initially wrote down about minute details of my very favorite television show, that question didn’t look crazy.) As I’m only 26, being such a passionate fan of a show that ran from 1961 to 1966 may seem odd. But even as a kid, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and Garry Marshall were household names to me.
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Writer/director/producer/actor Garry Marshall and his writing partner, the late Jerry Belson, wrote 18 episodes during the third, fourth and fifth seasons of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and they consulted on many more. He went on to write for other sitcoms, including The Lucy Show and The Odd Couple, and to create and produce Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley (starring sister Penny) and Mork & Mindy (which basically means he discovered Robin Williams).
As a director, his film credits include Overboard, Beaches, Pretty Woman, The Other Sister, Runaway Bride, both Princess Diaries movies and Friday’s Valentine’s Day. Not bad.
You’ve heard of ensemble casts, but check this one out: Julia Roberts, Bradley Cooper, Patrick Dempsey, Anne Hathaway, Shirley MacLaine, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Hector Elizondo, Kathy Bates, George Lopez, Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Jessica Alba, Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, Eric Dane, Jessica Biel and Emma Roberts grace the screen in Marshall’s new flick.
Valentine’s Day
Directed by
Garry Marshall
Friday, February 12
PG13 • 135 minutes
www.valentinesdaymovie.com
The film takes place over the course of one day — three guesses as to which one — and follows several integrated story lines. Valentine’s Day, as Marshall said, is a controversial holiday. Some love it; some hate it.
Among the advantages (many of them obvious) of having such a large, mega-watt cast: “Nobody can be a diva,” Marshall said. One challenge was keeping all the stories straight. “It was a lot of fun to do all the different ages,” he said. But accurately portraying a modern-day teen romance isn’t like it was in 1974, when Happy Days premiered.
“Today, young people often make love with their thumbs,” Marshall said of the rampant texting in teen society. “They fall in love looking down at something, so we shot a lot of inserts.”
One such teen romance involves Lautner and Swift, who play young athletes in love. “He’s a very interesting guy to work with,” Marshall said of Lautner, chuckling. “He seems to work a lot with his shirt off.”
“Working for Garry is like getting paid to go to film school. Even with all of his experience and success, he is such a great teacher. He’s kind and generous, patient and funny, very wise and surprisingly humble. I think that’s what sets him apart from all the other Hollywood directors.”
- Greg Wilson,
Director of Development and Casting for Henderson Productions, Marshall’s company
On the stage, Marshall explained, you have to act with your whole body. On television, you act waist-up, and in movies, you act with your face.
“Dick Van Dyke is one of the best waist-up comedians of all time.”
- Garry Marshall
Marshall and Swift found they had something in common: an “unlucky” lucky number. He has a shirt emblazoned with the number 13, and she has the numerals tattooed to her wrist. When I asked him about her towering height and whether they had to make any adjustments for it (as I’d read has happened with tall actresses in the past), he said, “Tall people don’t stand up straight until they’re 25.”
The adult love stories, more in his comfort zone, were nothing he couldn’t handle. Cell phones weren’t exactly a factor in the Elizondo-MacLaine plot.
Looking at his resumé, it’s clear that Marshall likes to tell love stories. “I don’t blow much up,” he said. “Some people will tear up, but from happiness.” The important thing, he said, isn’t casting the right stars; it’s casting the right couples. The two biggest stars in the world will fall flat if they don’t have chemistry.
He didn’t have to worry when it came to casting Anne Hathaway’s other half. After she signed on, they had formulated a list of available young actors. When she saw Topher Grace’s name on it she gushed, “Oh, I used to have a crush on him!” After that bit of information had been disclosed, there was no question as to whom the role should go.
The subject of Grace brought us back around to The Dick Van Dyke Show. As a self-confessed, lifelong super-fan, I have been mentally casting my TDVDS movie for years — choosing to ignore the fact that the movie versions of classic TV shows don’t always fair well at the box office — and Grace is one of my top picks for the main character, Rob Petrie.
For those who have never seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show — and by now I’m sure you’ve realized your life is desperately incomplete without it — it centers around Rob (played by the limitlessly talented Dick Van Dyke), a television writer for the weekly Alan Brady Show, his wife (played by Mary Tyler Moore), son (Larry Mathews), co-writers and producer (the hysterically funny ensemble of Rose Marie, Morey Amsterdam and Richard Deacon) and, often times, his close friends and neighbors (Jerry Paris, who often directed the show and worked again with Marshall as a director on The Odd Couple, Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and TV wife Ann Morgan Guilbert).
The sitcom was created by comedy icon Carl Reiner and was based on his life while living in New Rochelle, N.Y., and working on Sid Caesar’s Show of Shows. Marshall came to TDVDS with Belson after writing night club acts for comedians like Joey Bishop and for the Jack Parr-era Tonight Show.
He said Reiner was hesitant to trust the duo at first because they were “jokesmiths” and weren’t as adept with visual comedy as the show’s creator deemed necessary. (Reiner, Marshall said, could fix a flat scene in a flash with a good bit of visual comedy.) But they gained their sitcom chops with Reiner and crafted some of — in my expert opinion — the show’s very best episodes. The writing staff, often consisting of Reiner, Marshall, Belson and writers Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, would build shows around the men’s most embarrassing moments, Marshall said. “And none of us were suave guys,” he added.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was innovative. It pushed boundaries and made physical comedy — even slapstick, at times — intellectual. From their first episode, the viewer can see that Marshall and Belson had their own style. Each of their episodes has at least one semi-obscure comedic reference, often too intellectual or too dependent on a show-biz perspective to connect with the general audience. The two often discussed how only a handful of people were going get their jokes about Machiavelli, Ingmar Bergman or homosexuality. “More than enough!” Belson would say.
One of the most elemental themes of TDVDS involved the antics of Rob’s wife, Laura. In the course of the show, she dyes her hands black, gets too curious with her husband’s mail, appears with half-bleached hair, has multiple instances of insane jealousy, is presented with the gaudiest necklace in existence, opens a secret bank account, dances for The Alan Brady Show, exposes Brady’s baldness on national television and overdoses (not harmfully) on her neighbor’s “calming-down” pills. And those are just a few. In more than one episode, Rob is in the doghouse for using her antics in sketches (which consist of, as Rob explains to his son’s first-grade class, a series of comedic ideas with an underlying theme). As it turns out, Marshall’s wife was the inspiration for a few of his sketches. At one point, he even started paying her for ideas — she got an extra $25 any time he used one of her experiences on a show.
Marshall and Belson enjoyed including the Alan Brady character (played by fellow Renaissance man Reiner) in their scripts. Reiner had always played the star of the eponymous variety show, but it wasn’t until the fourth season that Alan Brady showed his face. (Keeping the comedian somewhat anonymous allowed Reiner to play — dexterously — some of the most eccentric bit parts in television history.) In the fourth and fifth seasons, Brady was featured more prominently in the show’s plots and his rapid delivery and sharp tongue fit perfectly with Marshall and Belson’s quick-fire style.
In “Baby Fat,” a fourth-season episode, Brady agrees to star in the new play by a Tennessee Williams-inspired playwright. It’s an important achievement for him; he even considers ditching his “hair” (his toupée) for the part. But when the play isn’t funny enough for him, he asks Rob to do an under-the-table punch-up (something Marshall had done with scripts in his early days). Hilarity ensues. Rob is required to pose as a tailor, a sardine sandwich flies through the air and a dog is referred to as “a widower.” Marshall and Belson outdid themselves — all in under 30 minutes.
In Valentine’s Day, Marshall said he included a joke about poet e.e. cummings, even though he knew the joke might not resonate with his audience. He thought, “Four people are going to get that joke.”
And in his head, he could hear Belson proclaiming, “More than enough!”
Valentine’s Day opens nationwide tomorrow. The Dick Van Dyke Show Complete Series is on sale right now at Amazon.com for $182.49. It includes a DVD commentary by Marshall of the Baby Fat episode, and it’ll be the best $200 you’ll ever spend — short of seeing Valentine’s Day 20 times, of course.