INTERVIEW: New ABC doc remembers life, legacy of Garry Marshall
Photo: Garry Marshall directs Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Photo courtesy of ABC Photo Archives / Provided by press site with permission.
There are few careers in film and television that come close to matching the breadth and success of the late Garry Marshall. The TV pioneer behind such hit shows as Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy didn’t rest on his laurels when he became an in-demand force in the sitcom world. He then moved on to feature-length films and matched his dominance in the new medium. Counted among his hits are Overboard, Beaches, Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, The Princess Diaries and Raising Helen, among many other romantic comedies.
ABC, the network that was home to Marshall’s TV work, is set to premiere a new documentary remembering his life and legacy. The Happy Days of Garry Marshall, directed by John Scheinfeld, will premiere Tuesday, May 12 at 8 p.m. on the network.
“I would say the first conversation that I had about this documentary was about a year and a half ago,” Scheinfeld said in a recent phone interview. “Garry had passed away before that, about a year and some, and I was talking to my fellow executive producer. … And we were saying, ‘You know, Garry deserves a documentary,’ so I put some thoughts together on how best to approach his story. And we then went and met with Garry’s family — his widow Barbara and children Kathleen, Laurie and Scott — and laid out what my vision was for this, and they got very excited. And they gave us the rights.”
Scheinfeld, who has also directed documentaries on John Coltrane, Sergio Mendes and John Lennon, then sat down with his agent and tried to develop a plan to have the documentary properly funded. The two started to look at Marshall’s career and realized that the big mouse (Disney) owned many of the director’s properties.
“It occurred to us that Garry’s TV shows helped propel ABC to being the #1 network in the 1970s, and then when he went off to become a feature-film director, of the 18 films that he did, nine were for Disney, which owns ABC,” the director said. “So we thought, ah, we should go to ABC, so a meeting was set up with the head of specials, late night and alternative programming at the network, whose name is Rob Mills. Rob is a big fan of documentaries, but that being said, ABC has not put a documentary in primetime that’s entertainment-based in like 20-some years. They, of course, have done news documentaries or documentaries that came out of the news division, but never a straight-ahead documentary like this in decades, and so I love having that challenge.”
Scheinfeld said that Mills was his champion from day one and did not look over their shoulders as they were developing and producing the film. The path was simply made smooth, and the creative team entered into production about a year ago.
“I was able to make the documentary that I wanted to make, and [Mills] has been behind us 100 percent,” the filmmaker said. “Then between July and November last year, we shot all the interviews. Part of my approach was I wanted to have this be more intimate. I wanted this to be his story told through the eyes and experiences of his stars who worked with him everyday, some of whom owe their careers to him. Other careers were enhanced because they worked with him.”
The stars that he rounded up are impressive — everyone from Julie Andrews to Jennifer Garner to Richard Gere to Anne Hathaway to Julia Roberts to Henry Winkler to Ron Howard and Jimmy Kimmel.
How about Richard Gere, one of the stars of Pretty Woman? Yep, him, too. Ditto for Ashton Kutcher, Kate Hudson, Chris Pine and John Stamos. This outpouring of memories and support is somewhat uncommon for Hollywood.
“Show business is not quite as glamorous as everyone thinks, and there are a lot of resentments,” Scheinfeld said. “It’s sometimes hard to not hear snarky remarks that one person will make about somebody else. This is the exception. Garry was so beloved by the people that knew and worked with him, and that just impressed and amazed me. In everyone that I spoke to, not one person had a bad thing to say about him. They had funny things to say about him because he was an eccentric guy in some ways. So you got the humor, but you also got the heart because they got very emotional when they talked about Garry.”
Scheinfeld also wanted the documentary to have Marshall telling his own story. Luckily, the famed director had recorded the audiobook for his autobiography a few years ago, so Scheinfeld had plenty of narration from Marshall himself.
The main challenge of putting The Happy Days of Garry Marshall together in time for this network premiere was scheduling the interviews with this level of talent. They all wanted to talk, but they were all quite busy. And Scheinfeld needed to be flexible.
“I would say that scheduling all of these interviews was a challenge,” he said with a laugh. “They are people in demand. They work all the time, so finding a time to sit down for an hour and talk about Garry Marshall became quite challenging. Nobody said no to us; Garry was that beloved. There were a few people we weren’t able to get because of scheduling, but a challenge yes, a bit of a jigsaw puzzle fitting everything together. … The last one we did though was Dame Julie Andrews because she lives in Switzerland most of the summer, so we weren’t able to sit down with her until she came back to this country in November. So that is one example of the kind of challenge that we had.”
When Scheinfeld began the project, he was familiar with many of Marshall’s projects. He grew up watching Happy Days and carried that love over to the director’s other shows. In fact, it was virtually impossible to avoid a Marshall project in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. If it wasn’t something he directed, then it was something he acted in, such as the supporting role he had in his sister Penny Marshall’s modern classic, A League of Their Own.
“I would say I was very familiar with his work and his career,” Scheinfeld said. “I had only met him twice when I interviewed him for other documentaries that I had made. I didn’t know his personal story in great detail, so there was an element of research to be done there. I certainly knew Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley and Mork, but when making a documentary like this, you want to make sure that it’s filled with clips that are representative of the work, but also that fit the point that we’re making at that point in the documentary about Garry and his work.”
That meant the filmmaker and his team needed to watch every episode of every season of Marshall’s TV work, plus the many films he directed. That doesn’t sound like that bad of a homework assignment. Heck, some people are voluntarily doing some of this cinematic immersion of Marshall’s films during quarantine.
“I was familiar but also needed to reacquaint myself because we wanted to make sure that we had just the right clips in there to help tell the story properly and to entertain the audience because that was a big goal of ours,” he said. “I can’t speak for other documentarians, but for me I don’t feel it’s important to impress my style upon the subject. … Rather I try to make a documentary that will be in the spirit of my subject, so in the case of Garry, his life and his work was all about heart and humor and humanity and how they informed him as a man and the work that he created.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Happy Days of Garry Marshall, directed by John Scheinfeld, premieres Tuesday, May 12 at 8 p.m. on ABC. Click here for more information.
