Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing
I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'
I played a lot of ball and got hurt, stitches and this and that. That, sometimes they said, built character. I don't think it built anything.
Time moves on but Barbara Hershey's doing good and John Heard, they're all people working. I know there were a couple of kids in that movie who I used who have been in other movies since Beaches.
I am a total believer of making the process a good time - make it memorable, have some fun, try to shoot high in your quality and then dont get crazy, see what happens.
I was very proud of that, of taking women and making them vulnerable and so I continued doing that. Right after Beaches I did "Pretty Woman", then I did "Frankie and Johnnie" and then I did "Other Sister" and "Princess Diaries" so that helped me get into the vein there of understanding women and trying to make them very pretty and very interesting.
I directed fourteen movies. Every movie had Hector Elizondo. He didn't like Beaches. I don't know, it was originally not a happy movie at all, it was much sadder than that. And they brought me in to kind of make it a little more 'warm', I guess you might call it. The original ending was a whole messy thing.
I wrote three years for Lucille Ball. She taught me everything I know about physical comedy...
In the middle of Beaches there's a scene from the "Laverne & Shirley" TV show so they see some history of my work in each film.
I think men should go see Beaches too. I think they'll understand women better.
I like to get up in the morning and see people.
For Joey Bishop, always was kind of the lost soul, so I did a traffic joke.
I'm too old to be forced.
He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood.
I made nepotism an art form, so I get to work with a lot of relatives and they're part of it.
Now women are rising to great positions and they run most of the studios now.
Learn to work with people you wouldn't go to lunch with.
I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.
I work with a lot of women and yeah I see totally different... My two sisters were different, I have two daughters that are pretty different.
My mother worked all of her life, she was a dance teacher and I also noticed, to be honest, that most of the male directors wanted to blow things up so there was like an open area for somebody who wanted to direct women movies, chick flicks, whatever you... I don't call them chick flicks.
I had never done a Director's Cut narration on Beaches so I did in time for the release of the DVD. It was a great visit and I do a whole-behind-the-scenes thing and I tell stories about Bette [Mudler] and Barbara Hershey and everybody and that was fun. It made me cry again.
I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.
I think I learned a lot on Beaches. A guy I worked with Dante Spinotti is a wonderful cinematographer and it was his first picture and he went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for "LA Confidential" which was great.
I'm very excited about is that my son Scott is a director and he just finished his first picture. It's called "Lucky 13", it's a low budget picture, it stars Jeremy Dillon, Daryl Hannah and Jami Gertz.
I don't know about immortal, but I must say that to me to touch more women and to have them understand friendships is important. I've had girls come up to me who said, "Yeah, after I saw 'Beaches' I called up my friend Denise who I was really mad at. She got me so aggravated and I called her and we made up." So if I could do that with this new release, yes, that would be very pleasing to me because, hey, it's a tough world. You need friends out there.
I'm a little older and I'm gonna do a bunch more movies and then they're gonna put me in a home for old directors.
You do a little more of a record album these days. See I just wanted to put a few songs in Beaches and we did very well. The album of Beaches went gold.
I grew up with two sisters, no brothers. There was Ronny who produced "Happy Days" for me and my sister Penny who acts, directs - she does everything. So they were very strong women in my life.
I think it holds up pretty good because more and more women are coming to the forefront in all areas, and back then they said that nobody would care about women's friendship.
People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.
When I edit, I'm not from the school of Hello, I'm a genius, so everybody shut up. I'm from the school of Let's play it once in front of an audience, and then I'll tell you where it is going
Never underestimate the power of your sister.
I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.
It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.
I dont sit well. I like to move around as I talk.
I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on...
[The movie Beaches] was really about how women fight. Women fight, say terrible things to each other and an hour later they make up and go shopping. I think they got the better idea of how it should be done.
If you're creative, they let you be the showrunner, producer. The first thing my partner and I did as producers was hire ourselves as directors - because who else would hire me?
That's why my ires always come comedic in a way because - can I just say something? See, I sound like such a smooth talker.
I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing.
There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it
One of my thrills of the business is to find young people, there's a window. I like young people who are in that brief window between on their-way-up and rehab. In that window I can make stars. It's not really true but it's not so far off.
[Beaches] is a pretty picture and I just liked having somebody like Bette [Mudler] who can be flying in the big comedy scenes and have her do more like a realistic part.
You can't have an actor where the audience says, aw, that poor, sweet guy. You got to get somebody who's, like, nondescript in a way or just somebody that looks a little like they should get it. So this is all I learned actually learn from Lucy [Ball].
You go to a theater now and you literally see parents watching the movie and they suddenly cover their kid's ears. I figured I'd make one movie where they didn't have to do this.
Women are pretty good. Women usually fight about some stupid guy and then when they figure out it's just a stupid guy they make up and move on.
I think a lot of creative people have no sense of numbers and economics.
We can't compete with Mel Gibson, but we figured we could do our part.
If you’ve got the comedy eye, you can look at any situation and see the humor in it while others don’t.
My partner after Fred Freeman was Jerry Belson. And Jerry Belson, after I was doing so well writing situation comedy, said, this is not good enough. We got to create our own shows. I said, but we're very happy doing this. No, no, no, you got to get your own show. So he made me - and he and I created our own shows. And we actually - everything we created failed. "Hey, Landlord" was our first show - 99th in the ratings. But imagine this - it's a great reflection on the years.
I was crying when I was editing [Beacher] but I stopped all the screenings years ago because I had a headache but then I had seen it again... Well I always cry at the same place, when they play that song "Wind Beneath My Wings". It gets you.
