Three Men And A Lady
Even though he’d just won his first Oscar, Jim Brooks couldn’t relax. After returning to his seat in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Brooks had placed the gold statuette for writing Terms of Endearment on the floor between himself and his pregnant wife, Holly; now and then they would look down at its shiny head and share a nervous giggle.
But Terms of Endearment hadn’t won any of the technical awards it was nominated for, and Brooks, despite having effectively corralled the star power of Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine, had convinced himself that the directing prize would go to one of the other, more experienced nominees: Mike Nichols, Bruce Beresford, Peter Yates or Ingmar Bergman.
So when the presenter, Sir Richard Attenborough, announced, “And the winner is . . . James L. Brooks,” the winner shut his eves and shook his head violently — no — then walked dazedly up to the podium and blurted, “I feel like I’ve been beaten up.” The audience sat in bewildered silence, not appreciating that he’d just uttered a line right out of a Jim Brooks script: unexpected, painfully honest —and funny.
Oscar night was certainly deepening the creases in Jim Brooks’s forehead — creases telegraphing his two favorite emotions, worry and pleased surprise. A few moments later, Brooks was called up as producer to collect the Best Picture Oscar — for a movie it had taken him four years to persuade anyone in Hollywood to finance.
“I admire the fact that the man won three Oscars in his first directing job,” says Jack Nicholson, “and nobody pays that much attention to him. It matter-of-factly went by the boards that he did something that nobody’s ever done in the history of movies. It’s ideal in a way. No one else is applying that pressure to Jim that he might be feeling himself.”
THE RELENTLESS WORRIES JIM BROOKS CERTAINLY applied enough pressure on his own. “This was clearly when they give you the ticket,” he says today. “I knew to take a ride on it fast, because they can cancel it so easily. That tends to make it not fun but burdensome.”
The ride was a typically tortured one: Brooks chose as his next subject “the fundamental changes” that the Eighties obsession with careers has wrought in young people’s romantic lives. He spent two and a half years researching and writing his first original screenplay, Broadcast News, and then wrestled another trio of intelligent, dedicated and strong-willed actors — Albert Brooks, William Hurt and Holly Hunter — into a perfectly balanced ensemble.
With Broadcast News, Jim Brooks has triumphed over his own insecurity, his actors’ egos and Hollywood’s predilection for pablum. Like all of Brooks’s work — including the classic television shows Room 222, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi — Broadcast News is foremost an embracing of characters, faults and all, and, unlike Terms of Endearment, never panders to the sentimental. It depicts the romantic triangle made up of the TV-news producer Jane Craig (Hunter), the budding anchorman Tom Grunick (Hurt) and the reporter Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks). The backdrop for their personal drama is the chaotic world of an unnamed network’s Washington, D.C., news bureau, which is torn by ethical dilemmas, bottom-line thinking, layoffs and the war between soft and hard news.
Brooks has again elicited utterly convincing performances. The notoriously intellectual Hurt plays against type as the dim and morally vague Tom, who succeeds on his charisma and good looks. As the savvy and talented Aaron, Albert Brooks tempers the self-in-volvement that has sometimes interfered with his own films (Real Life, Modem Romance and Lost in America); while pretty boy Tom romances both the woman Aaron loves and the job he covets, Brooks softens his sardonic wit with a touch of pathos.
But the pivotal role belongs to Holly Hunter as the object of their affections, the tough, obsessive producer Jane Craig. In making Jane abrasive, unglamorous but ultimately appealing, Hunter (whose only other major film role was in Raising Arizona) has vaulted from virtual anonymity to Oscar contention. If her Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics’ Circle is any indication, Hunter is a shoo-in for a nomination, as are Brooks, who was cited for his screenplay and direction, and Broadcast News itself, which won the Best Picture award. At the crux of the film are Jane’s stringent journalistic standards, which get singed a bit by Tom’s sexual heat. Tom represents the new age of network news, in which flash counts for more than substance.
Jim Brooks calls everything important to him “a big deal,” and for him everything about Broadcast News was a big deal. It has been digging wrinkles in his brow ever since he straggled home after 5:00 a.m. with those Oscars nearly four years ago. His standards were so exacting that he nearly couldn’t cast his heroine; and throughout writing and production, he wavered about exactly how to present the film’s deliberately untidy ending. For a long time he feared the movie was a complete disaster. “The balance was so delicate,” he says, “that everything you do is like driving a load of nitroglycerin. No wonder I’m so exhausted.”
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