Category Archives: movies

But Eventually I Want To Direct

movies, NYC

I wanted to write a book about how exciting and unique every day can be working in various parts of the entertainment industry. After struggling with how to structure such a book I settled on writing in first person present tense and breaking out some of the wildest and most evocative days. The book went on sale at Barnes & Noble on April 7th, 2023 and this is the description from the back cover:

Come along on dozens of days with Kurt Henricks working as a stand-in for an actor that portrays a version of you, attending film premieres full of A-List Hollywood actors and directors, working security at the 1984 Olympics gymnastics venue to keep the most famous Soviet bloc athlete from causing an international crisis, working your first day in Hollywood on the same soundstages that hosted Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Bewitched, The Monkees and Dexter, winding up as an on-camera “black belt” stuntman with less than 2 minutes of training in karate, working as an Extra with the producers and crew of The Wire as they craft an equally intense and immersive HBO drama and being Vice Admiral Lord Mountbatten while wearing his original uniform in the most expensive miniseries ever made.

Written engagingly in first person present tense, this book puts you in the middle of about 30 very different individual days working in the television, film, streaming and recreation industries. A stranger-than-fiction behind the scenes look that spans six decades while using detail and specifics to let the reader experience the uncertainty, surprises and excitement of each day.

-Barnes & Noble

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/but-eventually-i-want-to-direct-kurt-henricks/1143259000?ean=9798369217177

But Eventually I Want to Direct
Front cover

The image on the cover is courtesy of America’s most skilled and prolific photographer: Carol Highsmith. This is the back cover:

back of the book
Back cover for ISBN 9798369217177

You can buy it at this link:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/but-eventually-i-want-to-direct-kurt-henricks/1143259000?ean=9798369217177

Stage 5 – Young Frankenstein

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For 7 weeks in 1974, Stage 5 at 20th Century Fox hosted the production of the most beloved comedy in a generation. Terri Garr was the unknown daughter of a costume designer when she got her part. She was paid only $1000/week but she loved every minute of the work and it launched her career.

Gene Hackman was tennis partner to Gene Wilder and when he heard how much fun they were having on Stage 5 he talked his way into the role of the blind hermit in the farm house. Cloris Leachman showed up unable to do an authentic German accent and that made her character all the more unique and memorable. Peter Boyle came to the set even on days when he had no work scheduled.

Mel Brooks and Wilder believed the core of the story was really about parenthood and they found unlimited humor in Wilder’s struggle to parent an awkward monster “child.” The original film came from a parent and child relationship — that between Carl Laemmle and Carl Laemmle Jr.

Carl Sr. was the father of Universal Studios. He is remembered as bold and paternalistic with those outside his real family calling him “Uncle Carl.” When control of Universal passed to Carl Jr, the son pursued edgier horror films. The studio had a major hit with “Dracula” and their follow up was “Frankenstein” in 1931. The film was heavily censored in many states with Kansas demanding the most cuts — 32 scenes (!), nearly half of the 71 minute film. The death of the little girl was cut so frequently that it took decades to find a remaining print of the film that still had the scene and it was not restored until the 1980s with the help of print kept by the British National Film Archive. The film was banned outright in Northern Ireland, Sweden, Quebec, Italy and Czechoslovakia.

Bela Lugosi had hoped to play Dr Frankenstein but was offered the monster role which he turned down. The first director had conceived the role as a mere killing machine and Lugosi told Universal, “I was a star in my country. I will not be a scarecrow here!” That director was replaced but since Lugosi had already passed the part went to Boris Karloff. The concept got revised to have the monster be more tragic and sympathetic and that quality was enhanced much further in “Young Frankenstein.”

A young member of the union crew remembers “Young Frankenstein” as the first film he worked on . He kept hearing “most sets aren’t like this, they aren’t this much fun.” He wandered over to a neighboring stage where they were shooting “Towering Inferno” and found that indeed no one was laughing at the end of takes. On that stage when Irwin Allen called “Cut!” he followed it up by asking “Is anyone hurt?”

Back on Stage 5, on the last day of shooting, Gene Wilder asked if they could improvise more scenes and keep going. Mel Brooks said ‘Unfortunately, that’s a wrap.”

“Home Alone” and the Gulf War

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I was working at 20th Century Fox in 1990. The studio had lured Chris Columbus away from Universal and the story goes that within 2 hours of  Columbus agreeing to leave Universal, the new studio sent a van and 2 mover to help him pack up.  1989’s “Uncle Buck” a family comedy that showcased John Candy and Macauley Culkin, had done $70 million at the box office, very respectable.  John Hughes, who wrote and directed “Uncle Buck” had another film cued up — “Home Alone.”

Chris Columbus was red hot at this point. He wrote and sold “Gremlins” and “The Goonies” before directing “Adventures in Babysitting.”  All of these films sold well in VHS in addition to doing very well in theaters.  Hughes had used Culkin in “Uncle Buck” and thought Culkin was exactly what would make “Home Alone” work. Chris Columbus, who would eventually direct “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone,” was a good fit as director of yet another film where kids triumph over adults.

I read the script long before I saw the film and I thought it was a bit weak.  The first 20 minutes are boring set up — kids saying snarky, mostly unfunny things to each other while the parents scramble to get everyone to the airport. There was no hook, no reason to care about any of these vapid, 2-dimensional people. Then there are scenes of Kevin (Culkin’s character) being at home, alone. Much of it made no sense — why does he shave (leading to the iconic scream)?  Do kids in the audience even know that aftershave burns? why would they? Why don’t Kevin’s parents call a neighbor to check on Kevin once they land? etc.  Finally Pesci and Daniel Stern come into the story and we get slapstick. Kevin turns out to be some kind of natural McGuyver and can rig any kind of Rube Goldberg trap for them.  After injuring them in various ways and triumphing, Kevin becomes a nice person, misses his family, welcomes them home. The end. I was mystified by why they thought this script was good and started to suspect that it was just a deal film — a film that the studio finances in order to get other films from the same writer, director or a film that gets made because some box office draw actor agreed to make it. The only thing that fit there was that Hughes and Columbus were so sought after that Fox had agree to make this turkey.

I went to a pre-release screening on the Lot. The film played a little better on screen than on the page but still seemed very uneven.  I saw it in Zanuck with about 20 other studio people. No one was laughing in the first 40 minutes and the last half is this kid burning, shocking, BB-gunning and torturing Joe Pesci.  Pesci was the funniest thing in the film.  Funny how? Slow burns and great timing.

We were prepping the release and we tried to get The TODAY Show to book Culkin. They declined.  Siskel and Ebert gave the film 2 thumbs down.  Meanwhile the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm was ramping up into a full blown war.  “Home Alone” opened November 16, 1990, a week before Thanksgiving and the film is set at Christmas time so the idea was that it would run for 6 good weeks.  President George HW Bush went to Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving and visited the US troops staging there for the counter invasion of Kuwait and Iraq. Months of saber rattling and coalition building was coming to a boiling point.

Universal was giving shit to Fox for luring Columbus over. They faxed the bad reviews of “Home Alone” to Geoff Ammer’s machine, taunting us.  They made jokes like ‘Thanks for stealing our Thanksgiving Turkey. Stuff it.’

Fox had done well with “Die Hard 2” that year but everything else seemed to be struggling.  “Edward Scissorhands,” another deal film which had been financed to get Tim Burton to Fox,  was a flop in theaters.  Alan Parker’s “Come See the Paradise” was a love story set in a the US internment camps for Japanese Americans.  A difficult film to sell in any environment but theater owners would not even give it a chance in the pre Gulf War environment.

“Home Alone” did respectable in its first week, $18 million. We called TODAY again — “Hey we’ve got this kid, he is really funny and weird, kind of Dennis the Menace meets Robin Williams. You should have him on.”  Still not interested.

Word of Mouth

Then somehow it all turned around. Word of mouth sold seats. We had given away tickets in the first week to try to get the fire going for Thanksgiving and it worked. Kids told other kids that film was funny and by the time schools were out for Thanksgiving break the film was starting to sell well.  After Thanksgiving break the film really got traction and the studio had to order more prints.  Multiplexes were putting it on more screens and just passing the prints they had between projectors. It grossed $100 million more between Thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas break.

The TODAY show called us, “Hey can we get that kid?”

Siskel and Ebert changed their review.  Their critique of the film had not stopped it and at some point they decided to CYA and they re-aligned their review with the success of the film. They gave it one thumb up and one down. Not sure they had ever done that before.

Ammer started faxing the box office numbers over our rivals at Universal on a daily basis. Universal’s competing film was “Kindergarten Cop” which did okay but “Home Alone” was stomping it. By New Year’s “Home Alone” had done $152,000,000 and we expected it to wind down. On January 16, 1991 the 42-day blitz of Iraq began. Smart-Bomb footage, nose cameras on bombs, Wolf Blitzer reporting from Baghdad all seemed to give the film a second wind. “Home Alone” was war for kids.  For 12 weeks during the competitive holiday season “Home Alone” was the top grossing film.

While CNN raved about how wonderful all the new “Smart” weapons were, kids were going back to see Kevin’s clever defense of his home.  Kids who grew up watching the same movie 50 times on VHS were now going to theaters and watching “Home Alone” multiple times. A habit created by the VHS boom was now unexpectedly feeding theaters.  Perhaps the internal tension and uncertainty of seeing their first US war drove kids back to the fantasy violence and happy ending of this movie.

Pieces of Culkin

The general consensus in Hollywood was that Culkin was key to the success of this otherwise forgettable film.  Pesci showed more the great comedic ability that was only a tease in “Goodfellas” but it was Culkin that this audience wanted to see more of.  The mania surrounding this tiny kid got as crazy as anything I have ever seen in the film business. In one crowd a woman ran up and pinched Culkin’s cheek so hard she left a mark.  Threatened with arrest, her excuse was  “I didn’t think he was real” (?)

We started sneaking Culkin into screenings after the lights went down so that people would not swarm him.  I imagine it was very scary to have that much hysteria aimed at you. You’re one kid, not the Beatles, and adults are screaming and demanding that you scream and civility is going out the window. Someone tried to pull out some of his hair.

My boss was in his 70s and had been my age when Shirley Temple was on the Lot.  I asked if people were worse now and he said ‘No. It has always been like this. A young woman slit her wrists at the studio gate when they wouldn’t let her in to see Errol Flynn.’

The film ran in theaters until August of 1991. It grossed $534 million, killed on VHS, did 3 sequels and a video game. It is today a touchstone of many childhoods, a happy memory that obscures the uncertainty and carnage of the first Gulf War.

Decades later I saw Mac on the sidewalk on the Upper Westside of Manhattan. He was unshaven, thin and smoking a cigarette while he thumbed through used books outside of Shakespeare and Company.  Although I wanted to ask him about his life after 1990,  I had seen how fame treated him. I left him alone.

 

 

 

“The Facts of Life” in my Italian Class

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One day in the early 1980s I was in “Italian 102” at UCLA and the prof announced that we would have some new students joining us. She had been tutoring 3  actresses on the set of a sitcom where they worked but the sitcom was on hiatus and so they would be joining us in Westwood.  She didn’t say who they were or what show they were on but was asking us not to make them feel uncomfortable or ask for autographs.

There were only about 15 of us left in this class since about 8 students had been dropped out of it. I don’t remember much speculation but I was curious to find out who it was since the teacher had made a point of not saying who it was.

2 days later I show up and some of the other students’ mouths

clooney
The inspiration for George Clooney’s character on “The Fact of Life”

are literally hanging open. They are staring silently at these 3 young women who have joined us and I still have no clue who they are because I don’t watch much television.  To me they are just a vaguely Italian-American looking girl with beautiful eyes, a smartly dressed African American teen and a sort of non-descript middle American young woman. We go through the regular class with all the usual Italian dialog practice, question and answer, repetition and all that. The class breaks and no one says anything to the new students despite obvious interest.

I’m not the most outgoing person in the world but the teacher asked us not to make them uncomfortable and the whole situation was making me uncomfortable so I went over and said something like “Welcome to the class.  My name is Kurt…”  They smiled oddly and then introduced themselves to me “I’m Kim,” “Nancy,” “Mindy”   And now I can feel this ring of the other students has formed around us, still just watching intensely.

“You work in television?” I asked.

“Yes” was all that Nancy McKeon offered me so I went right on to talk about how I was repeating this class because UCLA’s course was much harder than UCSB where I took Italian the first time. One of them said they had been chewing through the course with tutors and it was nice to be in a bigger class.  They stayed in a little pack so it was me talking to all three of them at once and I’m asking “What’s your Major?” “Why did you pick Italian?” “Are you taking Italian Cinema?” stuff like that. Eventually someone else asked “Where is Blair?” and Nancy looked at her watch and said they needed to leave.

They were with us for another 3 weeks or so and they liked me because I had no interest in the show, had never really seen it. I had heard of it and knew “Different Strokes” but never saw an episode of “The Facts of Life” until years later. By the second week, some other students were asking Kim Fields about rollerskates, stuff like that. Just one or two odd questions at a time.

I remember Mindy Cohn being sort of easy going and approachable. Nancy McKeon had a dry sense of humor and Kim Fields was kind of quiet with a calm maturity.  Fields reminded me of other young people I have met who have grown up in the business like Christina Ricci and Sean Astin, the son of Patty Duke and John Astin.

(I’m of course kidding about the Clooney inspiration thing)