Film
Hot Doug
With a starring role in a new film alongside his friend Woody Allen, Midland's Douglas McGrath may find the spotlight at last.
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"I remember seeing the show many, many years later," he says, "and I thought, 'Maybe we weren't so terrible. Maybe we weren't so awful.' Comedy Central started rerunning them, and I saw who was hosting one program and I thought, 'I've got a sketch on that show.' I kind of remembered it was a witty, little droll piece about something, and I thought, 'Well, I'll watch.' So I sat down to watch and the show is stupefyingly bad. It's like a gas is being sprayed at you. But I thought, 'Hold on, your sketch is coming up.' I thought, 'It's going to be a little jewel in the rough; it's going to be delightful.'" Long pause. "I could not turn the TV off fast enough. I thought, 'How could I get this off every home in the nation right now?'"
Needing to find other writing jobs after leaving SNL, he began to write in a variety of media. He wrote two screenplays that were sold but never produced: Loose Women, co-written with SNL cast member Terry Sweeney, and Just Married. He and Patty Marx wrote a play called Dominoes—about a small town in Maine that fakes a communist infiltration in order to get federal funding to fight it—that was never performed, as well as a brilliantly funny book, Blockbuster, that satirized the making of the worst movie of all time. At one point in the book, the nephew of the movie's director describes one of his uncle's first films, which was called Stripping the Bed: "It was about three minutes long. My mom starred in it. She stripped the bed. It only took her about two minutes, so a lot of the movie was of the bed itself. Of its type, it's good. Very realistic." Says Marx: "Normally I wouldn't try to come up with work for myself to do, but when Doug was involved, I would feel eager to come up with a project to work on because it was fun."
Still, none of his efforts gave him the career boost he needed. It wasn't until the early nineties that one of his scripts was made into a movie: the disastrous 1993 adaptation of Garson Kanin's play Born Yesterday, which starred Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. But all was not lost. Jane Martin, who was then McGrath's girlfriend and is now his wife, had been working as Woody Allen's assistant. She introduced McGrath to Allen, and after several dinners, Allen decided they should collaborate on a film script. Why? "Experience in the business doesn't mean anything, because I have enough experience in the business," says Allen. "But what you really want is someone you enjoy spending a lot of time with, pitching ideas with, and someone whose ideas you respect and who, when they shoot down your ideas, you respect their criticism on it. And Doug has all those qualities."
"One day he asked me to come by his house," McGrath says. "It was right around Christmas, and I thought maybe he wanted me to help him out with a present for Jane or something. And I went—he was on the telephone and he waved me in and I sat down but I was very nervous; I had never been to his house by myself. So I was reading a book—upside down, blurred—and then he came and said"—he goes into Woody Allen mode, slapping his hands together and rubbing them—"'Okay, do you want anything to drink?'
'No.'
'Okay, so here's how I like to work . . .'"
They proceeded to write Bullets Over Broadway, about a young playwright (John Cusack) whose writing talent is upstaged by that of a gangster (Chazz Palminteri). Nominated for seven Academy awards—Dianne Wiest won best supporting actress for her portrayal of a theater diva—it had an inspired plot bolstered with great dialogue. Even the actress' agent got witty lines: "It's a little idea she's wanted to do for years," the agent says about the diva's next project. "She plays Jesus' mother. It's a whole Oedipal thing. He loves her, wants to do in the father—well, you can see the complications."
"I just remember thinking that when Bullets comes out, I may have an opportunity to work," McGrath says, "but I may have to exploit this because people are thinking, 'Who did Woody collaborate with?' And I thought, 'I have to be in a position to take advantage. Don't blow this.'" Since he had always liked Jane Austen's novel Emma and knew that it would make a good movie, he told himself, "This is the time, write it on spec, have it ready. And you're going to have to say you want to direct it." So in 1994, at the age of 36, he wrote a screen adaptation of the novel and pitched it—with himself as director—to Miramax.
He had never directed a feature film before, but Donna Gigliotti remembers how comfortable he was in his new role. "We were on a distant location from London in a very beautiful house," she says. "It started out as a really lovely sunny day, and suddenly the sky got dark and it was pouring rain. We were all huddled under umbrellas waiting for the rain to pass, because in England it usually does. But there's not much you can do when you're sitting under umbrellas waiting for rain to pass. Other directors would have been biting their fingernails worrying about making the day, but Doug, who may have been worrying about all those things, certainly never showed it and started this conversation. I was standing next to him and Doug said, 'O-kay! Where is the place where you have had the best roast chicken in the world?' By the time everybody was done telling where their favorite chicken was, the sun had come out."
Emma made Gwyneth Paltrow a star and won McGrath praise from the critics and a nomination from the Writers Guild of America for the best adapted screenplay. Wrote the New York Times's Janet Maslin: "With anachronistic snap bordering on irreverence, Douglas McGrath's agile first feature manages to be nearly as savvy as Clueless."
Since then he has had a few small roles in Allen's movies Small Time Crooks,
In Company Man, which was also directed by Askin, McGrath plays a prep school teacher named Allen Quimp who is recruited by the CIA to help overthrow Fidel Castro. The role—which has been described as one part Inspector Clouseau, one part Mr. Bean—may mean that McGrath's days of walking the streets incognito (and being ignored at the Oscars) are over. Not that he's craving recognition. "When I was young I thought fame was the goal," he says. "But as I got older I've been able to analyze what it is that drew me to this work in the first place. And having known a lot of famous people through my work, I'm sure they'd agree that the worst part of succeeding in the business, in a way, is the fame. People just stare at you. It's a great pleasure for me to go out—right now I'm in an outfit that, if I were to describe it to you, you'd start crying, it's so unattractive."
McGrath has already begun working on a new project, a script currently titled The Gambler that is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his unimpressed stenographer. "What you're really going for," he says, "is the opportunity to do the work you want to do with the people you want to do it with." And that should be no problem.
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