De Niro: A Life (77 page)

W
HEN HE STOOD
beside Elia Kazan on the stage that controversial night of the Oscars, De Niro gave the world at least one thing to think about beyond the morality of Kazan’s HUAC testimony: his haircut. Throughout his life, just like his dad, De Niro maintained a full, flowing head of hair, which he could wear flopping into his eyes or back in a ponytail or in a leonine mane. For an actor so possessed by the external details of his characters, it was an immense asset. But that night in March 1999 he had it buzzed down to military length from the sideburns to near the top of his skull, where a thatch of full-grown hair stood untrimmed, neatly parted, like the green tops of a root vegetable. For those who watch the Academy Awards with an eye on fashion rather than film or politics, it was a puzzlement. Clearly he had cut his hair for a role, but was he playing an SS officer? A 1930s chain gang convict? A death row inmate facing the electric chair? No, none of those, but in retrospect, any of them would’ve been better than the truth.

De Niro had cropped his hair so eccentrically for the unimaginable role of Fearless Leader in the partly animated, partly live-action film
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
, a big-screen adaptation of the absurdist, pun-drenched Jay Ward TV cartoon series that had been popular in the 1960s. Even in the age of
The Simpsons
and
Beavis and Butt-head
there was real salt and vinegar in Ward’s parody of Cold War espionage, with his title characters, a flying squirrel and moose from rural Minnesota, pitched in constant struggle against their Eastern bloc nemeses, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, and their ruthless master, the Pottsylvanian tyrant Fearless Leader. There had long been interest in developing a feature film of the property, but Ward and then his estate had always held the rights to the characters very closely, and nobody had succeeded.

And then came Jane Rosenthal. She had adored
Rocky and Bullwinkle
as a girl, and her husband, real estate investor Craig Hatkoff, had made a Valentine’s Day present to her of the collected series on DVD. She, like others before her, thought there was a potential film in Ward’s iconic characters and surreal sensibility, and in 1998 she
negotiated a deal with Universal Pictures to acquire the rights and produce a $75 million film for the summer moviegoing season. A script was commissioned from Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright who’d had a hand in
Analyze This
and had some experience in TV animation; he came up with a story in which Ward’s heroes and villains were alive in the modern day, after the end of the Cold War and the popular heyday of their TV show, surviving on memories and dwindling royalty checks but still pitted against one another in the final throes of their rivalry. Des McAnuff, a Tony-winning director with a distinguished stage pedigree and a bit of animation on his resume as well (he produced the fine but commercially unsuccessful adaptation of Ted Hughes’s
The Iron Giant
), was hired to direct.

As Boris and Natasha, the unlikely pair of Jason Alexander and Rene Russo were cast. That left the matter of Fearless Leader, a role for which Rosenthal thought De Niro was perfect. When she asked him, she recalled, “he really laughed at me.… He didn’t grow up watching it. It wasn’t his thing.” But she persisted. “I was always joking with him about it. Then I finally said, ‘Okay, you’ve got to get serious here. It’s a three-week role. Do you want it or not?’ ” Amazingly—perhaps because he knew the film was, as he called it, “Jane’s baby”—he did.

Aside from the haircut and specific reminders on how he wished to play the role physically (“
hands behind back … only mouth moves … pinkie out when holding cig holder … Von Stroheim collar”), De Niro spent a good deal of time ginning up a vocal approach to the character. Fearless Leader appeared on only a dozen or so pages of the script, but De Niro and a dialect coach worked out a plan for every line, every word, even every vowel and consonant, and transliterated them into an alternative text. The line “How would you like to produce the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie” was thus rendered in De Niro’s script: “
Hah-oo woot yoo lyke ta pRa-dyooce dhe Rocky unt bull-wink’ll moo-vee?
” And, depressingly, as the inside jokes included jabs at De Niro himself, the following also turned up in the pages: “
Ah yoo tawking to mee? Ah yoo tawking to mee? Ah yoo tawking to mee? Dhen hoo dhe hell elllce ah you tawking … Ah yoo tawking to mee? Well eye-eem dhe ohn-lee wahn hih-uh. Hoo dhe fahk doo yoo t’hink yoo-uh tawking too …?
”

The film shot in the first half of 1999 and didn’t make it into theaters
until the July Fourth weekend of the following year, where it landed with a catastrophic thud. It had been programmed as family fare against two other blockbusters: Wolfgang Petersen’s
The Perfect Storm
and Roland Emmerich’s
The Patriot.
Both of them trounced
Rocky and Bullwinkle
, as did the previous week’s premieres, Aardman’s
Chicken Run
and the Farrelly brothers’
Me
,
Myself and Irene. Rocky and Bullwinkle
opened fifth, with only $6.8 million of box office in its opening weekend and $12 million total in its first full week of release. By the time the thing had lost all its steam, Universal’s investment of more than $75 million had resulted in a mere $26 million in ticket sales.

“
It was a big disappointment,” De Niro reflected with detached understatement. Rosenthal took it much harder. “The failure felt so personal,” she said. “I’m always worried about my career, but this wasn’t ‘I’ll never work again,’ it was ‘I don’t know if I
can
work again.’ ”

A
S IT TURNED
out,
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
limped along in theaters until the first days of October, and it was immediately replaced by a De Niro film that wiped all memories of its failure away for everyone involved—save, of course, those who’d endured it.

In some ways, the new film, entitled
Meet the Parents
, was among the least ambitious, least interesting, least challenging, and least accomplished movies De Niro had ever undertaken. But there was no mistake that it was also the most commercially successful film De Niro had ever made. In retrospect, it changed his life, his work, and his image forever.

Analyze This
had reminded both critics and audiences that De Niro was a deft comic, but the role of a mafioso, however broadly pitched, was familiar, and the ground covered by the film was well trodden. In
Meet the Parents
and its sequels he would play a generic comic antagonist whose misdeeds and trespasses were somehow pitched as lovable and funny; it was as fake as
Raging Bull
was real, and it was a license to print money.

De Niro was cast as Jack (originally Ben) Byrnes, a retired Connecticut florist with an obsessive need to control things around him,
particularly as they relate to his family, and even more particularly as they relate to his daughter, Pam, who is almost unhealthily the apple of his eye. What Jack doesn’t know—what the women in his family have, in fact, hidden from him—is that Pam has a live-in boyfriend (strike one), named Gaylord Focker (strike two), a male nurse (strike three) who smokes (strike four) and is willing to do anything to convince Jack of his worthiness as a beau for his daughter (strikes five through infinity). And what nobody in the family knows about Jack is that he was never a florist but rather a CIA agent; when he meets—and takes an instant dislike to—Greg (as Gaylord understandably calls himself), he turns his experience as a spy and a doubter of humanity on him full force.

The broadly farcical script was brought to Tribeca by the indie producer Nancy Tenenbaum; Jane Rosenthal saw the possibilities and enlisted Jay Roach, who’d directed the first two
Austin Powers
films. Supervised by Roach, the script went through various revisions up to the time of shooting, which was done mostly around New York starting in November 1999. (At least one draft was by the team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, who would soon be winning kudos and prizes for the likes of
Election
,
Sideways
, and
About Schmidt.
) Roach’s involvement led to Ben Stiller coming aboard to play Greg. Teri Polo would play Pam, Stiller’s chum and frequent co-star Owen Wilson would play Pam’s former beau (and Jack’s preferred prospective son-in-law), and Blythe Danner would play Jack’s wife, Dina, replacing Beverly D’Angelo just a month or so before production.

There was almost nothing required of him in preparing to play the role. Not only was Jack Byrnes drawn thinly, but his one complex attribute—that he’d been a spy—drew upon De Niro’s relatively recent experience making
Ronin
, in which he had profited from the technical advice of Milt Bearden, an espionage veteran who was still consulting with him about prospective film projects. De Niro’s notes for the character and for bits of physical business and line readings were, by his standards, minimal. He was credited as a producer, yes, but Jane Rosenthal was doing the heavy lifting at Tribeca. In most regards, in short, it was a sleepwalk.

And it was an immense and instantaneous hit.
Meet the Parents
was released on October 6, 2000, to generally appreciative reviews and massive box office. Its opening weekend gross of $28.6 million accounted for more than half of its estimated $55 million budget and was more than one and a half times the earnings of its nearest competitor, the football story
Remember the Titans.
The film held the top slot at the North American box office for three more weekends, finally falling to second place behind
Charlie’s Angels
en route to a total domestic gross of $166 million and a global box office of $164 million. De Niro’s previous record box office, $107 million for
Analyze This
, couldn’t compare, and his third-highest grosser,
Cape Fear
, with $79 million, represented less than half. After more than thirty years in the movies, he was well and truly a box office superstar. On the strength of the performance of
Analyze This
, he had been paid $13.5 million to star in
Meet the Parents
, and his potential earnings as the film’s producer would equal or even surpass that impressive sum.

If De Niro was uniquely poised to play Paul Vitti in
Analyze This
, which capitalized on his decades of playing gangsters with real comic relish, the role of Jack Burns, the former CIA profiler (and, by the way, Vietnam POW), is so generic that anyone might have played him. Oh, De Niro’s solidity and history of menacing roles definitely figure in the part, if only as a kind of residue that inevitably accrues to his screen persona. But there’s no reason that, say, Gene Hackman or Harrison Ford or Tommy Lee Jones or Michael Douglas or Al Pacino couldn’t have played the part, for instance. Jack Burns has no particular ethnicity, no eccentric tics, no dark obsessions, no unforgettable bits of business; any reasonably capable actor who generically fit the description of the character could have played him and, probably, had just as big a hit.

The film is really about the uncanny ability of Greg Focker to do the wrong thing—verbally, physically—in just the wrong spot at just the wrong time. In the film’s most riotous sequence, a truly fine movie gag that Buster Keaton or Blake Edwards would have been proud to build, Focker opens a bottle of champagne, and the cork knocks over an urn containing Jack’s mother’s ashes, which, scattered on the floor, are immediately used as kitty litter by the precious Mr. Jinx. The uproarious moment is built of details laid carefully in the script up to that
time—and having almost nothing to do with the human qualities of the characters. It’s hilarious, but, like much of the film, it’s mechanical.

De Niro is drolly funny, no doubt: “I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?”; “As long as you can keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life, you’re in no immediate danger”; “A dog is very easy to break”; and a series of jibes about Focker’s suspected drug use. But nothing of it seems organic or specific to him as an actor. He’s a piece of a vehicle—a slick, breezy, and, as it happens, insanely popular vehicle, but a vehicle nonetheless. In time, generations of young moviegoers would come to him first as Jack Byrnes, knowing nothing about Johnny Boy Civello or Vito Corleone or Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta or even Al Capone. Whether he had been aiming for it or not, he had finally achieved truly massive box office success, and all it cost him was the accrued aura built of his life’s work.

T
HE MONEY THAT
flowed from
Meet the Parents
helped Tribeca jump-start a number of ventures. The company had acquired the rights to Nick Hornby’s novel
About a Boy
before it was published, and they went ahead to film it in London, quite well, with Hugh Grant in the lead and the Weitz brothers, Chris and Paul, who’d made the
American Pie
films, directing. Also in London, Tribeca backed a stage extravaganza (
play
didn’t seem to be the right word) based on the music of Freddy Mercury and Queen,
We Will Rock You
, which proved a massive hit, being performed nonstop in London for more than a decade and traveling all over the world, in traditional theaters and sports arenas, well into the 2010s. De Niro was a classic rock guy himself, but there was nothing wrong with a little glam, particularly when audiences ate it up so appreciatively.