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John Gregory Dunne to develop a script for Katzenberg. According to Dunne in his memoir, what ensued was a nightmare of greed and whim in La-La Land. From the start, said Dunne, Disney wanted the real-life characters reinvented. Neither Savitch, a bisexual who had had an interracial affair, nor her abusive mentor, Ron Kershaw, were deemed palatable. Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion, who also contributed, quit the project after a dozen dead-end drafts. Thereafter Up Close and Personal languished until Foreman died in 1993 and a team at Touchstone, a Disney division, gave the project to producer Scott Rudin, who brought Dunne and Didion back on board. But Rudin’s subsequent choice of Avnet as director—and the further fifteen rewrites—wore everyone down. What Dunne described was a phalanx of subliterate boors attempting to justify executive salaries by ascribing dramatic gravitas to what was a pulp story line about a long-in-the-tooth TV news hack playing Henry Higgins to a sexy pseudo-Savitch wannabe. The pragmatic Rudin was remorseless, said Dunne. For the umpteenth “fine-tuned” draft he instructed Dunne and Didion: “Deliver the moment.… We need a stronger credit sequence, use the bookend frame, we have a POV deficit, we want another beat here, deliver the moment, stretch it out, this is clunky … cut all the Washington chat in the S&L scene, but save her line, ‘Get the fuck out of my shot,’ it’s who she is, lose the Taco Bell sequence, it’s OTN [for ‘on the nose’] or OTT [for ‘over the top’], split the first newsroom sequence, do it over two days, deliver the moment … deliver the moment.…”

Avnet, fresh from the Academy Award–nominated Fried Green Tomatoes, cast Michelle Pfeiffer as the newsgirl and delivered the umpteenth script in preparation to Redford. “I chose not to be cynical,” says Avnet. “There’s no shame in creating a smash hit. Entertainment need not negate intelligence. It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, is very calculated and incredibly schmaltzy, but it is also now regarded as a masterpiece.” Avnet’s first major work, The Burning Bed, made for television and starring Farrah Fawcett, was superficially racy but about battered women. “That’s the prime example of what’s possible in so-called pedestrian Hollywood,” says Avnet. “What was The Burning Bed? Just another movie of the week. But the hidden text was loaded. It generated one hundred thousand telephone calls from battered women, it changed the national vernacular, it brought the issue to the table. Fellini did it, too, in La Strada. R. D. Laing had a patient who wanted to commit suicide and decided not to after seeing La Strada. That makes for a political achievement. This is what so-called simple entertainment can do.”

Rudin saw no hidden layers in Up Close and Personal: “It’s about two movie stars,” he repeatedly reminded Dunne. In the end, there was no mixed-up Savitch, or shadowy Ron Kershaw. Instead, Pfeiffer and Redford signed on unconditionally to play sexy Tally Atwater and her wise, sexy old-hand mentor Warren Justice.

Fried Green Tomatoes had wonderful wit, most memorable in the scene depicting the mutual lesbian passions of two lead characters in a food fight. No such subtlety inspired Avnet in Up Close and Personal, which played out as a media age My Fair Lady. In the final act, Tally earns her network stripes by broadcasting live from inside a prison during a murderous riot, with Warren Justice coaching her by radio. “It’s the great showdown,” says Avnet, “the gunfight scene, the rite of passage, the big seduction all rolled into one. Michelle knew what I wanted to achieve, as did Bob. It was old-style movie drama.”

Based in Miami and Philadelphia, with interiors at Culver City, the movie was shot over seventy-seven days in the summer of 1995. “Bob engaged all the way,” says Avnet, “from our first meeting with John and Joan at his home in Connecticut until the last day and the wrap. He was a full collaborator, even suggesting the music montage. He loved Michelle, who brought her family along to location, as I brought my son, Jake. Sometimes