Frankie and Johnny
Michelle Pfeiffer & Al Pacino reteam in office romance for adults
Video Days is Mad About Michelle in the month of April, with ten films starring leading lady Michelle Pfeiffer, born April 29, 1958 in Santa Ana, California and celebrating her 67th birthday this month.
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY (1991) is not only based on a play, but adapted by a playwright who’d never been awarded a screen credit. By throwing away the instruction manual on how a romantic comedy/drama was supposed to be written, the filmmakers arrive at something very adult and a bit different, far from a documentary on how men and women over the age of forty meet, come together and struggle to stay together, but a film that doesn’t begin with the conceit that they deserve to live happily ever after, regardless of how attractive its cast might look.
Terrence McNally was born in St. Petersburg, Florida to parents who ran an oceanside bar and grill. After it was damaged in a hurricane, the family ended up in Dallas, Texas, where an Ursuline nun introduced a nine-year-old McNally to opera. He began listening to Live From the Metropolitan Opera on radio and was taken to his first musical theater: Annie Get Your Gun, The King and I. McNally was eleven when the family settled in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1949. A high school English teacher named Maurine McElroy, who may have understood her pupil was gay, encouraged him to apply to out-of-state colleges, and McNally was awarded a scholarship to Columbia University. In New York, he began his cultural education, attending theater, opera or jazz concerts weekly. At nineteen, McNally moved in with a twenty-nine-year-old aspiring playwright named Edward Albee. They remained a couple for five years. At twenty-two, McNally was working as stage manager for the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio when its director got him a job traveling with and tutoring the teenage sons of author John Steinbeck as they embarked on a year-long cruise.
Steinbeck’s advice to McNally when it came to the theater was to spare himself the heartbreak, but in 1964, early versions of McNally’s first produced play–And Things That Go Bump In the Dark–were being workshopped in New York and Minneapolis before opening on Broadway in 1965. Its openly gay protagonist led mainstream critics to assail the play, and despite three weeks of its producers keeping it open largely to make a point, it closed quickly. During its development, McNally had become romantically involved with actor Robert Drivas. It was with his second play–Next, starring James Coco–that McNally credited director Elaine May for teaching him that playwriting was less about what characters say and more about what they do. Next was both a critical and a commercial success. In 1985, McNally began a collaboration with the Manhattan Theatre Club, but the following year began a dark time in the playwright’s life. Drivas died of complications from HIV, Coco from a heart attack a year later, and New York with its homelessness and empty theaters seemed to him at a nadir.
At fifty, McNally observed that people his age–gay or straight–anxious about dating in a time of AIDS were fortifying themselves with videocassettes and staying home, alone. What he wrote next he considered an SOS from those people. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was a two-character play set in a one-bedroom apartment after a waitress and a short order cook finished a one-night stand. McNally wrote with Kathy Bates and F. Murray Abraham in mind. Bates was an actor whose theater work he’d admired from afar, while Abraham had performed in a half dozen of McNally’s plays and won an Academy Award for Best Actor in Amadeus (1984). The play opened off-Broadway in June 1987 on Stage II of the Manhattan Theatre Club and ran for two weeks with Bates and Abraham as its cast. In October 1987, it moved to Stage I with Bates joined by Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh. In December, Carol Kane and Bruce Weitz took over the roles in what had become another success for McNally.
In 1988, producer Scott Rudin contacted director Garry Marshall about directing a film version of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Marshall, who lived and worked in Los Angeles, hadn’t seen the play, so Rudin flew the director to New York to catch a performance and to meet McNally. Marshall saw the play, but before his planned breakfast meeting with its playwright, Rudin notified Marshall that Mike Nichols was interested in directing and they were offering him the job. Dianne Wiest and Richard Dreyfuss were mentioned to play Frankie and Johnny in a movie. Roughly two years later, Rudin and Nichols had moved on to other projects and Paramount Pictures reached out to Marshall–creator of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy for television, then enjoying his biggest commercial success as a film director with Pretty Woman (1990)--to see if he was still interested in adapting the play. As fate would have it, Marshall had just co-authored a play–Wrong Turn at Lungfish–with screenwriter Lowell Ganz about a dying professor’s relationship with the young woman who reads to him at the hospital. Marshall wanted to learn how to direct for the stage, while McNally–a fan of Marshall’s work, particularly The Flamingo Kid (1984) for its depiction of working class Long Islanders in the sixties–wanted to learn how to write for the screen.
Suggesting that Frankie and Johnny was a more palatable title for movie crowds, Marshall offered to work with McNally on a screenplay if the playwright would coach him on directing a play, Wrong Turn at Lungfish set to open at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. McNally started his adaptation from scratch, opening the world of Frankie and Johnny in what grew into 94 speaking parts, with supporting characters to be played by Nathan Lane (who’d star in McNally’s 1991 play Lips Together, Teeth Apart) and Kate Nelligan (who’d appeared in a revival of his 1974 play Bad Habits). To play Johnny, Paramount sent McNally’s script to Al Pacino, who’d never made a romance and was interested in trying something different. To play Frankie, the studio wanted a star as big as Pacino, leading them to pass over Kathy Bates. Michelle Pfeiffer lobbied Marshall for the part, convincing the director that loneliness and rejection weren’t doled out on the basis of a person’s looks, but were feelings anyone could experience. Pacino and Pfeiffer–who’d played husband and wife in Scarface (1983)--were joined by Hector Elizondo (who’d appear in eighteen of Marshall’s films), Nathan Lane, Kate Nelligan, Jane Morris and Laurie Metcalf (who’d share the fate of Lorraine Bracco in Sea of Love and have her role opposite Pacino cut from the film).
Garry Marshall served as his own producer, with Nick Abdo, Marshall’s associate dating back to Happy Days, as co-producer. Paramount set a budget of $29 million and late January 1991 as a start date. “Nick’s Apollo Café” was constructed on the Paramount lot, with a New York street and sidewalk outside, and inside, a dining room and kitchen. Pacino insisted on conducting research as a short order cook, so Marshall arranged for the actor to spend two or three evenings in the kitchen at Vitello’s in Studio City. The experience led Pacino to suggest Johnny give Frankie a rose carved from a potato and celery. Marshall took notice of Pfeiffer’s strong hands and despite her self-consciousness about them, worked in a running gag where characters hand Frankie jars to pry open. The bowling alley scene was filmed in nearby La Canada Flintridge at Montrose Bowl, with Folsom State Prison as the institution where Johnny is introduced. Despite Marshall’s preference to film in New York, a strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees limited location work in Manhattan to five days as the stage union negotiated a new contract with the major movie studios.
Frankie and Johnny opened in October 1991 in 1,150 theaters in the U.S. Nearly every review mentioned its Hollywood casting, with Michelle Pfeiffer replacing Kathy Bates as a homely waitress, but most reviews were begrudgingly positive. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert split, with Siskel commending Pfeiffer for her portrayal of an objectified and victimized woman who was fed up with dating. Both critics agreed Pacino’s character was one-note, quoting literature that sounded scripted. Ebert found the picture slow, with two lead actors too attractive to be plausible as lonelyhearts. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin credited Pacino for being at his most “uncomplicatedly” appealing since Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Maslin got around to crediting McNally, Marshall and the cast for retaining the weariness and intimacy of the play. Frankie and Johnny spent five weeks among the top ten grossing films in the U.S., a commercial disappointment considering its budget and stars. Marshall later acknowledged that the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas hearings in the U.S. Senate had a negative impact on the film’s box office returns, current events making it an unfortunate moment to open a workplace romance, but was proud of the movie.
Garry Marshall, Terrance McNally and the play they were adapting had so much prestige that Paramount gave the filmmakers space to try something different, two stars in Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer considered an adequate insurance policy. One refreshing aspect is that Frankie is depressed for no obvious reason. There’s no dead husband or child. There’s no fiancé who ran off with her sister. She hasn’t lost a job or failed to realize her dream, whatever it was that prompted her to move from Altoona, Pennsylvania to New York. McNally understands that to give Frankie a stated reason for withdrawing from life would also give her a simple way back in, and he’s not interested in taking it that easy on his couple. They don’t even see each other outside of work until the 45-minute mark, a courtship process that feels realistic given how little tolerance either character has for wasting their time. Having taken a detour to prison, Johnny is a rocket, a free man who wants the love of a good woman and isn’t timid about going for it. His dedication might seem desperate if he were pursuing an unattractive waitress, but for one played by Michelle Pfeiffer, his intensity makes sense.
The film’s sensuality is bold, something Marshall didn’t have to risk as a director of popular entertainments like Overboard (1987) or Beaches (1988). McNally leans a little hard in his depictions of New Yorkers, playing up the city’s renowned lack of empathy, but the world the filmmakers create inside in the café is wonderful, a self-contained play, and Frankie and Johnny is an excellent film about work, its actors playing servers or cooks credibly. The casting is what makes Frankie and Johnny work as well as it does. Pacino gives a performance closer to his early, scruffy work in films like Serpico (1973) than the blowhards that directors couldn’t put back in the bottle after the success of Scent of a Woman (1992). He seems younger and more invigorated, and doesn’t come on as intimidating as an actor like Jack Nicholson might’ve in the part. Pfeiffer, who never conveys any doubt she can protect herself from him, is instead challenged to open up, and booked another terrific role, playing a woman exhausted at being valued for her looks and service, her complexity coming to the surface the more time she spends around Johnny (as part of the film’s excellent set dressing, her refrigerator has a bumper sticker reading I SURVIVED CATHOLIC SCHOOL and a newspaper clipping of the comic strip Cathy, both of which warrant a deep discussion about religion and humor).
Video rental category: Romantic Comedy
Special interest: Office Romance