America’s Sweethearts

"Years ago I was in Rome and an Italian journalist kept asking about me and Meg Ryan," says Billy Crystal, writer and producer of the new farcical comedy, America’s Sweethearts. "He was saying, ‘I no like when you kiss another woman, and I no like when she kiss another man. You and Meg are together, yes? You married? You no married? You should be married. You are America’s sweethearts. You should always do films together!’"

It was then that Billy Crystal had the idea: "What if Meg and I were married, had done a series of successful films together, then we have an ugly breakup and we are forced to come back together for the junket of a new movie which nobody has seen yet?"

The result is an ensemble piece with Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, John Cusack and Stanley Tucci, written by Crystal with Peter Tolan and directed by Joe Roth who, after years as head of production at Fox and Disney, had founded his own production company, Revolution Studios.

Zeta-Jones plays Gwen, a self centered, capricious, bitchy and glamorous diva who, with her husband Eddie (Cusack), forms a screen couple like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Movie after movie they have become America’s sweethearts (hence the title of this comedy). The magic is broken when Gwen leaves Eddie for a sex crazed Spaniard (played with gusto and incomprehensible accent by Hank Azaria, in a role originally conceived for Antonio Banderas), while Eddie tries uselessly to find solace in a very luxurious and expensive ashram led by a strange New Age guru (Alan Arkin).

Billy Crystal plays the obsessed publicist, asked by the head of the studio (Stanley Tucci) to do anything possible to attract the interest of the press at a junket for the launch of the two stars’ new movie, Time After Time. The film has been secretly edited by an eccentric and maniac director, Hal Weidmann (Christopher Walken, barely recognizable behind long beard and hair) and nobody has seen a single frame yet. Weidmann (a character that Crystal modeled after his idol, Seventies’ independent director Hal Ashby) is holding the movie hostage until the press junket where he is certain to cause quite a stir.

Julia Roberts plays Kiki, Gwen’s sister and assistant who is secretly in love with Eddie. A former chubby young girl, she has now blossomed into a beautiful yet shy and reserved woman, and becomes Crystal’s recalcitrant accomplice in exploiting the tension between Gwen and Eddie to increase the press interest in the film. A junket is organized in a new, secluded hotel outside of Palm Springs, where members of the American and international press are literally held hostage, wined and dined in the hope that the film will show up and can be written about at length. Several television journalists, and the omnipresent Larry King, play themselves in the course of this crazy circus, which is the junket where journalists interview the stars in assembly line-like interviews, until the inevitable happy ending.

"This kind of romantic comedy never goes out of fashion because people fall in love all the time," says writer producer Billy Crystal. "And it was attractive for actors to play in an ensemble film that reminded them of the movies of the Thirties and Forties, but with a frenzied and more contemporary style, and relieved any of them from the pressure of carrying a movie on their own shoulders.

"This is a movie about selfish people, marriages, infidelity, the press and buffet lunches: with all these elements, any actor who wouldn’t want to be in this movie would have been stupid!"

The movie afforded all its cast members the opportunity to poke fun at their own world. "People take show business way too seriously. That’s what makes this fun," says Julia Roberts.

Far from the actors to think that these are real characters being portrayed. "People think everybody we talk about is someone we know, and it’s not real," says Crystal. "Peter and I created people, all of them in the right position: the studio head, the publicist, the star and the assistant. They are right. We just made them crazy. It’s not real people."

Joe Roth sees it differently: "There is a lot more than just a grain of truth behind the movie. In fact, I think it’s completely truthful! What I thought was so clever is that if you took a composite of all these people and took them at their worse, you have this movie. It all adds up to a farce. But I have known actors and actresses that are every bit as narcissistic as Gwen."

"Let’s be honest, I play a bitch!" laughs Zeta-Jones. "She is a grand diva, and also she is very fragile, everybody walks on eggs around her. There are fragile people like her, who need to be cajoled and be constantly told how great they are in order to get anything done. I had a great time playing Gwen. I just picked up some experiences I had along the way and just created this nice monster."

Julia Roberts comes in: "Nobody is as bad as Gwen, who is so narcissistic as to be a caricature. I can’t imagine somebody so convinced to be at the center of the universe that she asks, ‘Did we brush my teeth this morning?’ I don’t think that even if you get so much success you’ll ever need help in brushing your own teeth!"

Both Zeta-Jones and Roberts claim they would never treat their assistants like Gwen does, with anything less than respect. "We all served somebody else at some point in our lives," says Roberts. "Some time ago my sister was making a movie and I went there to help, and she had me making sandwiches for the crew all day long! But I did it with love, and I would never treat anybody with lack of respect. I do most of my things by myself, except when I am working on a set and some things I can’t physically do," she continues. "I have bad feet and often need to file my nails and sometimes I have to ask my assistant to get me a nail file from the store: he hates that!"

Probably one of the real surprises for a lot of audiences worldwide, not just in America, is the machinery behind the so-called junkets: a necessary evil to promote a movie? "If it were up to me I would be in bed asleep instead of being here doing interviews," Roberts says candidly. "Everybody says how powerful I am, but nobody listens to me! Honestly, I don’t have to do junkets but I think they are necessary. A junket is a fast and efficient way of promoting a movie and it is only right to support all the efforts that so many people put in a movie."

Roth and Crystal were surprised by the reaction of some journalists who took the movie as if it was an indictment of their behavior during interviews and junkets. "I never thought of it as a way to get back at them. I just thought of it as a romp," clarifies Crystal.

Roth says: "We encountered a lot of objections from journalists who didn’t want to be seen or thought they were being ridiculed or, in some cases, didn’t want to help us because they work for newspapers or television stations owned by competitive corporations. It was interesting because we discovered a microcosm of that very world which we were making fun of and which made us realize that we were making the movie for the right reasons."

America’s Sweethearts, a Columbia Pictures film, opens in Metro Manila on Oct. 3.