The 80s Movie Podcast
Edward Havens
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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. ----more---- 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
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