The War of the Roses

On this actual final episode of 2022, we take a look back at our favorite Christmas movie of the decade, Danny DeVito's 1989 film The War of the Roses.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

 

Before we get started, yes, I said our previous episode, on Michael Jackson’s Thriller, was going to be our last episode of 2022. When I wrote that, and when I said that, I meant it. But then, after publishing that episode, I got to thinking about Christmas, and some of my favorite Christmas movies, and it reminded me I have considering doing an episode about my favorite Christmas movie from the 1980s, and decided to make myself an unintentional liar by coming back one more time.

 

So, for the final time in 2022, this time for real, I present this new episode of The 80s Movie Podcast. This time, we’ll be talking about Danny DeVito’s best film as a director, The War of the Roses.

 

The genesis of War of the Roses was a novel by American author and playwright Warren Adler. After graduating from NYU with a degree in English literature, in a class that included Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather, and William Styron, who won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, Adler paved an interesting road before becoming a novelist. He worked as a journalist at the New York Daily News, before becoming the editor of the Queens Post, an independent weekly newspaper devoted to all things happening in that New York City borough. 

 

He would buy four radio stations and a television station in New York City, before opening his own advertising and public relations firm in Washington D.C.

 

Adler would create ads for politicians, businesses and communities all across the nation. In fact, it was Warren Adler who would create the name of the DC complex whose name is now synonymous with high crimes: Watergate. In 1974, he would sell the firm, and the stations, after the publication of his first novel, Undertow.

 

The War of the Roses would be Adler’s seventh novel to be published in as many years, and the first of four to be published in 1981 alone. The novel follows Jonathan and Barbara Rose, who, initially, seem to be the perfect couple. He has a thriving career as a lawyer, she is an up-an-coming entrepreneur with an exceptional pâté recipe. Their extravagant home holds a collection of antiquities purchased over the years, and they enjoy their life with their children Evie and Josh. One day, Jonathan suffers what seems to be a heart attack, to which Barbara responds by asking for a divorce. Very quickly, their mutual love turns to a destructive hatred, especially after Jonathan, trying to save his marriage despite his wife’s de facto declaration of lost love for her husband, decides to invoke an old state law that allows a husband to remain in his house while in the process of divorce.

 

The novel became an immediate sensation, but Hollywood had already come knocking on Mr. Adler’s door seven months before the book’s publication.

 

Richard D. Zanuck, the son of legendary Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck, and his producing partner David Brown, would purchase the movie rights to the book in September 1980 through their production deal at Fox. The producers, whose credits included The Sting and Jaws, would hire Adler to write the screenplay adaptation of his novel, but they seemingly would let the film rights lapse after two years. 

 

James L. Brooks, the television writer and producer who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, was transitioning to movies, and purchased the movie rights to the book, which he would produce for Polly Platt, the former wife of filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich who had made a name for herself as an art director, costume designer, screenwriter and producer, including as the production designer and on-set sounding board for Brooks on Terms of Endearment.

 

At the time, Brooks was working at Paramount Pictures, but in 1986, he would end his association with that studio when Fox would offer Brooks the opportunity to create his own production company at the studio, Gracie Films. When the transfer of Brooks’ properties from Paramount to Fox was being worked on, it was discovered that Brooks didn’t actually own the movie rights to War of the Roses after all. 

 

In fact, Arnon Milchan, an Israeli businessman who had been making a splash in the film industry financing movies like Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Ridley Scott’s Legend and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, had actually purchased the movie rights to the novel before the Zanuck/Brown option seemingly lapsed, which would require Brooks to enter into a new round of negotiations to secure the rights once and for all. Milchan would sell them to Gracie Films for $300k and a producer credit on the final film.

 

Once the rights were finally and properly secured, Brooks would hire Michael Neeson, a writer Brooks had worked with on The Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda and Taxi, to write the screenplay. But instead of spending time getting ready to make her directorial debut, Platt instead took a job as the production designer on George Miller’s adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. In fact, Miller was so keen on getting Platt involved in his production that he would consider shooting a good portion of the movie in Platt’s hometown of Hingham, Massachusetts, although they would eventually spend most of the location shoot in nearby Colhasset, which had more of the historical buildings Miller wanted for the film.

 

Platt would finish her work on Witches before Brooks would begin shooting his Terms of Endearment follow-up, Broadcast News, on which Polly would serve as an executive producer, but her leaving Brooks for several months to work on someone else’s film would begin a fracture between the two that would lead to Platt leaving Gracie Films in a few years.

 

But not before she helped with the creation of The Tracy Ullman Show, one of the earliest shows on the then-brand new Fox television network, which included a short animated segment each week about a quirky family in a town called Springfield. 

 

The Simpsons.

 

While Platt was in New England working on Witches, James L. Brooks would visit an old friend, Danny DeVito, who was shooting his feature directing debut, Throw Momma From the Train. DeVito had known about The War of the Roses for years, and really wanted to make it as a director, but knowing how important the project was to Platt, he would defer his interest in the film. 

 

In a July 2020 episode of Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast You Must Remember This, Danny DeVito tells Longworth that he only became involved in the film when Brooks told him the project was not going to move forward with Polly Platt. 

 

And sidebar, if you aren’t familiar with Polly Platt or her importance to cinema and pop culture, I highly encourage you to listen to Ms. Longworth’s entire season about Ms. Platt. Polly Platt was an amazing, complicated woman who deserves a better legacy. Just trust me on this. Please.

 

Okay, so now were at the end of 1986. Polly Platt was out as the director of The War of the Roses, even if she didn’t know she was out at the time.

 

So what could DeVito bring to the project that Platt could not?

 

DeVito had just finished his first feature film as a director. And while Momma wasn’t a big hit when it was released in December 1987, it was successful enough at the box office, and the film would garner an unlikely Oscar nomination for Anne Ramsay, the actress who played the film’s diminutive title character. But more importantly, DeVito could bring in Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, his co-stars on Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, to play the now Oliver and Barbara Rose. The three actors had had spent years looking for another project unrelated to that other series they could make together. Douglas would sign on to the project before his amazing fall and winter 1987 run, first as the star of the mega-hit Fatal Attraction, and then as the star of Wall Street, which would garner him an Academy Award for Best Actor.

 

Turner had been taking some time off from acting after finishing Peggy Sue Got Married in July 1985, and was pregnant with her daughter Rachel when DeVito approached her about The War of the Roses. Turner was already working on a comedy called Switching Channels, which had to finish shooting by early July 1987, as Turner’s pregnancy would be rather visible if shooting lasted any longer. She had also committed to being a featured actor in Body Heat director Lawrence Kasdan’s The Accidental Tourist, which would also re-team Turner with William Hurt. 

 

But she would agree to star in The War of the Roses if they could give her some time being a new mom before shooting began.

 

DeVito and Leeson would continue to work on the script. As there was no character in the novel that would work for the compact actor/director, the two would create a framing device for the story. DeVito would play Gavin D’Amato, a divorce lawyer who was friends with Oliver Rose, who tells the story of Oliver and Barbara Rose to a potential client, played by Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, as a way of trying to get his client to reconsider splitting with his wife. The character of Gavin D’Amato would take the place of Murray Goldstein in the novel, an overweight former rabbi who would only meet Oliver Rose during the course of the story.

 

Sean Astin, who had made a splash a few years earlier as the lead in The Goonies, would be cast as the Rose’s teenage son Josh, while newcomer Heather Fairfield would get her first major movie role playing the Roses’ daughter Evie, who would be renamed Carolyn for the movie.

 

The other major change DeVito and Leeson would make to the story would be to change the Roses’ sitter from a teenager to a fortysomething woman, as they would be able to get German actress Marianne Sägebrecht, who had just found international stardom as the star of Percy Adlon’s surprise global hit Baghdad Cafe, to come aboard.

 

Although the $26m film took place on the East Coast, the scenes not shot on the sound stages at Fox Studios in Los Angeles were filmed in Coupeville, WA, a small town on Whidbey Island, about forty miles north of Seattle, which had never been used as a filming location before.

 

Filming would begin on Stage 6 on the Fox lot, which was set up as the main living area for the Roses’ house, on March 21st, 1989. The production would shoot as much of the film on the soundstages until April 7th, which was the first day they would be allowed to shoot in Coupeville. The evening of April 6th, though, would be spent on the backlot of Universal Studios, which was the only available space in Los Angeles at the time to accommodate shooting a massive, snowy Christmas Eve scene standing in for Cambridge, MA.

 

Two days after arriving in Coupeville, DeVito would discover a note on his rental car parked at the hotel where the production had its base, stating that thieves had stolen the dailies from the first day of location shooting, and demanded a ransom to have the footage returned. But DeVito was quickly able to find the dailies had not been stolen, and just laughed the note off as a prank.

 

After several weeks in Washington State, the production would return to Los Angeles to finish the remainder of the set shooting on the Fox Lot, as well as a few additional shots of homes in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, standing in suburban Washington D.C. Shooting would finish on July 25th, which would give DeVito and his team less than four and a half months to get the film ready for its planned December 8th release date.

 

Because the editing team lead by Lynne Klingman had been putting together an assembly cut for DeVito during production, the director was able to screen his first cut of the film for Fox executives in mid-August. That cut would run three hours and four minutes. But that’s what an assembly cut is for. You get to see all the stuff you shot put together, and see what you need to whittle down, what you need to move around, and what you need to get rid of completely.

 

Over the course of the next few months, DeVito and the editors would get the movie down to a tight one hour and fifty six minutes. And unlike many movies then and now, there were very few scenes that needed to be reshot or added in. One shot that would be added after the audiences at several test screenings was horrified at the suggestion that Barbara’s pâté may have been made with the family dog. DeVito would later state that he always meant to have a shot of the dog later in the movie, but it was definitely a late addition after the first few test screenings.

 

The War of the Roses would hold its world premiere at Century Plaza Cinemas in Century City, about a mile from the Fox lot, on December 4th, 1989. It would be a star-studded affair that included DeVito, Turner, and Douglas, who brought his father Kirk along with him, along with Courtney Cox, Olivia Newton-John, Kelly Preston, Mimi Rogers, Christian Slater and Samantha Morton, Oliver Stone, and Jennifer Tilly, followed by a New York City premiere two days later at the Gotham Theatre. The film would open in 1259 theatres on Friday, December 8th, and would be the highest grossing film in the nation, taking in $9.5m, knocking the previous week’s #1 film, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, out of the top spot. It would fall to second place in its second week, as Christmas Vacation retook first place, and it would fall to third place during the long Christmas weekend. However, in its fourth week of release, the long New Years weekend, The War of the Roses would retake the top spot for the second and final time. At the end of the year, after 25 days of release, the film had grossed $43.85m, or the equivalent of $105m in 2022 dollars. The film would continue to stay strong for several more weeks, staying in the top ten until mid-February, before ending its run in theatres in the spring with $86.89m.

 

The reviews were pretty good, with particular praise heaped upon Douglas and Turner’s performances as well as DeVito’s direction. But, sadly, there would be little awards love for the film.

 

The Golden Globes would nominate the film for Best Comedy, and both Turner and Douglas for lead comedy performances, and the British Academy would nominate Michael Leeson for his screenplay, but would be completely shut out at the Academy Awards.

 

I love the movie. It was one of the first movies I bought on Laserdisc back in the early 1990s, and when I call it a box set, I mean it was actually two discs and a four page booklet about the movie not in an album-like slipcover but an actual box. The movie was on the first disc, with roughly an hour on each side, which included a separate audio track for DeVito’s commentary and a personal introduction to the film by DeVito, while the second disc featured deleted scenes, theatrical trailers, a copy of the shooting script, production stills, and a gallery of the theatrical posters. For a guy who had spent years building an enviable VHS videotape collection, this was next level stuff most people wouldn’t get to experience for nearly another decade.

 

More than thirty years after Warren Adler published The War of the Roses, he would release a sequel to his novel, entitled The Children of the Roses. Josh and Evie are now adults. Josh is married with two children himself, a boy and a girl, Michael and Emily. Much like his parents’ marriage, Josh’s marriage to Victoria seems to be picture perfect on the outside, but after their son gets caught up in a caper at his elite private school involving stolen Milky Way bars, Josh finds himself in his own War of the Roses.

 

Evie, who still copes with her depression by eating, comforts her niece and nephew with loads of food, since to Evie still, food is love, while Michael and Emily decide for themselves that their parents will stay together no matter what.

 

While the book was not a best seller like the first book, it would still sell quite well, as did almost every one of the other 43 books Adler would write and publish until his passing in 2019 at the age of 91.

 

Thank you for joining us for this year’s Christmas episode of The 80s Movie Podcast. We’ll talk again in early 2023, when Episode 98, about Neil Diamond’s sole attempt at movie acting, The Jazz Singer, is released.

 

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about The War of the Roses.

 

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

 

Thank you again.

 

Good night.