On this episode, film historian and host Edward A. Havens III briefly talks about one of the quintessential 80s movies, that didn't actually come out until May 1990.
Mel Damski's Happy Together.
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We talk about the creation of the movie, its two lead stars (Patrick Dempsey and Helen Slater), and the one supporting actor who would go on to become one of Hollywood's most successful actors for the next thirty years.
Patrick Dempsey in a scene from Happy Together
Dan Schneider in a scene from Happy Together
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On this episode, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite movies from the 80s, which, technically, isn’t an 80s movie, if we only go by release date. It was written in the 80s. It was filmed in the 80s. It was supposed to released in the 80s. But, because of a tiff between its production company and the original distributor, it would not get released into theatres until May 1990.
I’m talking about Mel Damski’s sweet and funny comedy Happy Together.
Back in the mid-1980s, a young man from suburban Chicago named Craig Nevius had dreams of becoming a writer. When he was in high school, he wrote a short play called Class Dismissed, about an English teacher who, frustrated with his students' lackadaisical approach to their education, takes several of the toughest students hostage in his classroom. It’s The Breakfast Club meets the early Stephen King novel Rage, and when play publisher Samuel French purchased the rights to make the play available for performances, it would make Nevius the youngest person at the time to be a published playwright.
Nevius would go to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he studied playwrighting and directing, and would use his experiences at school to help craft his first screenplay, while he was still a student at Carnegie Mellon. He would enter that screenplay into a Carnegie Mellon screenwriting contest, and while it didn’t win, the reactions he would receive for it would help him decide to drop out of school and move to Hollywood. He was 22, and less than a year away from graduating.
That screenplay was called Happy Together.
It told the story about a serious-minded young man from Chicago who, upon arriving for his freshman year of college, discovers his dorm room roomie Alex has not only moved into their shared space a week earlier but has completely transformed that shared space into their own space, without consideration of Chris’s needs. Chris is a writer, and he needs his space to be able to come up with dramatic works of importance, and it’s bad enough he’s been housed in a near-frat house-like space that has constant distractions like a bunch of frat boys driving a fire truck down the street with a pretty girl out at the front, throwing roses out to the crowd.
When Alex finally does arrive in the dorm room, Chris is shocked to discover Alex is the pretty girl on the fire truck. Her name is Alexandra but she prefers Alex, and the school’s computer system has put them together by mistake.
Chris quickly judges Alex, a gregarious young would-be actress from the Midtown East section of New York City, and decides she will not be a good fit for a roommate, and he does what he can to get moved to another dorm room, to no avail. But, as the old saying goes, opposites attract, and soon, Chris and Alex are seemingly becoming a thing, until Alex takes off one time on her somewhat boyfriend’s motorcycle. Chris and Alex seem to need one another, but keep allowing their own baggage to get in the way of what could be a beautiful relationship. When they finally sort of commit to each other, her acting gets better, and his writing gets stronger. But that old baggage, and that guy on his motorcycle, keep putting up roadblocks, until an incident that could force Chris to quit college altogether.
Chris is a pretentious wannabe writer. A pipe-smoking, Marcel Marceau poster hanging, stick in the mud, pretentious twat.
Alex is a manic wannabe actress. A flirty, flighty, immature, inconsiderate, scatterbrained whirlwind of insecurity.
The secondary characters include Stan, a psychology major, and fellow dorm resident who is always seen with a mannequin, Denny, Chris’s writing professor, Ruth, Alex’s acting instructor, and Slash, a biker, and musician who for a spell finds himself as one of Alex’s many fiancees.
While there was some interest in the Happy Together screenplay in Hollywood, there was one company, a small production company called Apollo Pictures, that seemed to have the desire and ability to get the movie made. They would budget the film at $2m, and set a March 1988 production start date in Los Angeles.
Casting would begin in late 1987. For Chris, they would cast Patrick Dempsey, who had just made a splash on screen in the hit Disney teen comedy Can’t Buy Me Love and in Phil Alden Robinson’s In the Mood. Dempsey also had two movies made but not yet released, the lead of a coming of age dramedy called Some Girls with Jennifer Connelly, and a supporting role in a romantic drama called In a Shallow Grave starring Michael Biehn from The Terminator and Aliens.
For Alex, the production would cast Helen Slater, who had made her big screen debut as the title character in the much-derided 1984 film adaptation of Supergirl. She had also been featured in the hit 1986 film Ruthless People and the even bigger 1987 film The Secret of My Success, but she was not seen as an integral part of those films’ success. The only other film to this point in her career where she was the main selling point was the 1985 crime drama The Legend of Billie Jean, which was reviled upon its release and only remembered today for its tie-in song from Pat Benatar, which would be the final Top Ten hit for the recent inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Dan Schneider, who was coming off his second season as one of the many co-stars of ABC’s hit comedy show Head of the Class, would be cast as Stan. Marius Weyers, the South African actor best known for his starring role in The Gods Must Be Crazy, would play Chris’s writing professor Denny Dollenbacher, and Barbara Babcock, whose role on NBC’s hit police drama Hill Street Blues would win her an Emmy Award for Best Leading Actress in 1981, was cast as Alex’s drama teacher Ruth. And as Brian, one of the other actors in Alex’s drama class, a young actor from Oklahoma who would, after several films as an extra, would get his first on-screen lines. Brad Pitt.
Mel Damski, a long-time television director who had also directed the 1983 Graham Chapman comedy Yellowbeard and the 1985 Kelly Preston comedy Mischief, would call the shots here.
Most of the movie would be shot on and around the UCLA campus, and the eight-week production scheduled would be completed on time and on budget.
Screenwriter Craig Nevius would get a write-up about himself, one of his plays that was about to be produced in Chicago, and the movie in the August 19th, 1988 edition of the Chicago Tribune, where he said he expected the film to be released into theatres later that fall.
Except that wouldn’t quite happen just yet.
Several major and independent distributors would consider the film, but it wouldn't be until March 1989 when Apollo Films would make a deal with MGM/UA to distribute the film theatrically.
And that’s when things went south.
Apollo Films would, a few months later, dispute the contract with MGM/UA, which lead the distributor to sue the production company for $3m, plus additional punitive damages, and get an injunction barring Apollo from releasing the film through any other distributor.
Apollo would take that last part literally.
If they couldn’t release it through any other distributor, they’d get it out to theatres themselves. And on May 4th, 1990, while they were still dealing with the MGM/UA lawsuit, Apollo would release Happy Together into ten theatres in the Los Angeles area, including the prestigious AMC Century City 14. Of the 18 major film critics in Los Angeles at that time, only one, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, would review the film, and he would give it what could be considered a qualified favorable review.
In its first three days, Happy Together would gross $32, which would put it 49th on the national box office chart. Pedro Almodovar’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, which also opened that day, would gross double that on only three screens. 40% of the opening weekend gross would come from the AMC Century 14 alone.
In its second weekend in Los Angeles, it would only lose on theatre, and would only lose 14% of its first-week audience, which would indicate that, for a movie from a first-time distributor with a very limited advertising budget, that word of mouth on the film was decent.
Its third week in theatres would find the film going up against the first two summer movies, the Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawk comedy Bird on a Wire, and the Robin Williams/Tim Robbins comedy Cadillac Man. The theatre count would drop from nine to six, and the gross would fall to just $6. And in week four, it would be at the AMC Century 14 in Los Angeles. But it would also open at the Chestnut Station Cinemas in writer Craig Nevius’s hometown of Chicago. About the only people seeing the movie in Chicago were friends and family, and it would gone from theatres by the end of the month, with a final gross of only $75. It would never open in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, or anywhere else. Apollo Pictures would close shop soon thereafter.
I didn’t discover the movie until late 1990, when the movie was released on home video. I don’t remember if it was a local video store or a Blockbuster, and I don’t remember why I specifically chose it.
I’m guessing it was the fact that it was a recent movie with a fairly decent cast that I had never heard of before. And I’m glad I did. I wasn’t aware at the time that Craig Nevius was only a year older than I was, but the movie felt like it was speaking to me. Like Chris, and the Andrew McCarthy character in St. Elmo’s Fire, I was a pretentious wannabe writer, although I smoked Export A cigarettes from Canada instead of a pipe. They were a little more expensive than Marlboros or Camels, but they also came 25 to a pack. But unlike Chris, I didn’t go to university straight out of high school, and by the fall of 1990, I had been in what I thought was a very stable and healthy relationship for nearly two years, although that presumption would be shattered some months later. Regardless, at the time, I was happy, and when I went to the video store shortly after I rented the videotape, I noticed it was already in the bargain bin. It hadn’t been rented but four times after a couple of months, and the video store needed to make room on the shelf for something else that would hopefully rent more often. I bought it, and for a number of years, I watched it on a somewhat regular basis. I moved ten times in the next dozen years, from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to Denver to New York City, as I switched jobs, got married, got divorced, and got married again. Somewhere along the way, I lost that tape, along with a lot of other sentimental items, and I forgot about the movie for the longest time.
But doing a show like this gives me the opportunity to remember long-forgotten films, and to introduce those films to an audience who may have never heard of it. Now, I’m not going to pretend Happy Together is some kind of perfect movie, because it’s not. But what it is, is a sometimes funny, sometimes serious look at what it’s like to be young, on your own, away from home for the first time, you don’t know anybody, you don’t really know anything, everyone you meet could be your friend for life or someone you’ll never see again after that semester is over, oh my God, what the hell am I doing here, what the hell am I doing with my life, did I make a huge mistake, oh wait, this isn’t so bad, these people are kinda okay, this is kinda nice, this whole eating at the cafeteria with everyone else is kinda cool oh my god oh my god oh my god, my finals are next week and I haven’t studied, oh wait, I know all this stuff, no I don’t, I don’t know anything, I am going to fail in life, why did I do this to myself and my family, oh wait, I passed everything, this is awesome kinda movie, with one of the sweetest, unsarcastic, unironic endings from a young adult movie of its time. The music is regularly reminiscent of a made-for-TV movie, and Chris’s regular changes from fuddy-duddy to carefree dude and back to fuddy-duddy mostly happen for no good reason other than to propel the plot further. But despite its flaws, Dempsey and Slater have some real chemistry together, and Damski does a good job in capturing the often-confusing lives of young adults.
As of May 2022, there are several very good transfers of the movie available on a very popular video website, although since the transfers are from a full-frame video transfer, things like boom mics can occasionally be seen on screen. The film is only 95mins long, and it’s worth the time to check it out.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again in two weeks when Episode 79 is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about Happy Together.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.