About Steve :: Actor :: Movies
Roxanne
 

1987

Steve wrote and starred in Roxanne, based on Cyrano de Bergerac. He won writing and acting awards for it. You can find information on this movie also in other areas of the site.

 

 		   
   
Los Angeles Times
June 28, 1987, Sunday, Home Edition
Calendar; Page 30; Calendar Desk
CRITIC'S NOTES: 'ROXANNE' HAS ITS HEART IN AN INTELLIGENT PLACE
SHEILA BENSON

There was an interview with Anne Bancroft once that contained one of the most inadvertently revealing glimpses into a marriage I can remember. She said that when she hears the sound of her husband Mel Brooks' car in the driveway, she thinks, "Great! Now the fun begins."

And I also remembered another story attributed to the Bancroft/Brooks menage: They'd been having a brisk family set to, and he put his hand on her arm. Quivering with an actress' indignation, she is supposed to have said, "Don't you touch me. My body is my instrument!!"

To which Brooks' is supposed to have replied, interestedly, "Yeah? Let's hear it play 'Melancholy Baby,' " a remark that ended the hostilities in a fit of giggles.

Now all of this may or may not be true. I hope it is, because it's not only a great retort, it's a great example of one of the most saving qualities in any relationship: a wild and generous sense of humor.

Both these stories popped into my head as I watched "Roxanne" for a second time. It is a movie crammed with marvelous qualities: generosity, invention, an up to date romanticism and an enveloping beauty, but its niftiest qualities by far are its intelligence and its humor.

As many readers may know by now, in Steve Martin's reworking of Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac," Daryl Hannah plays a 1980s Roxanne to Martin's Cyrano, now called C.D. Bales, the fire chief in a small, magically idyllic ski resort town. At a point near the movie's end, the two are having one whale of a fight, which finishes on her porch in the gathering dark.

"You get out!!" she says to him, fiercely.

"I am out," he says, just as adamantly. "You get in!!"

Now there is just enough of the absurd in that exchange to suggest that life together for these two might have some Brooks/Bancroft echoes of its own briskly funny brouhahas. As reinvented by Martin and lyrically directed by Australian Fred Schepisi, this Cyrano and Roxanne are a bright and outspoken pair. And they begin their romance from a rare point in contemporary movies: Each one admires the working of the other's mind.

Not that bodies are exempt from the equation; each one is capable of being dazzled by outward appearances as well C.D. by Roxanne's lioness' looks, Roxanne by the rugged exterior of Chris, the new man at the fire station. She mistakes his paralytic shyness for the reserve of a man who holds a little something back, while we know that Chris will turn out to have something less interesting than kapok between his ears. (In the meantime, we can see as plainly as the nose on his face that C.D. is a rare blend of agility, athleticism and a nicely inquiring mind if only one looks beyond that nose.)

Roxanne, an astronomer, clearly yearns for parity in a relationship; she's hungry for a man she can share things with and whom she can learn from. And when C.D. even contemplates the idea of writing letters to woo her for another man, it's because of the challenge she presents. As he says, "For Roxanne you need something . . . startling. Something so deeply felt, so direct that it would make her incapable of being reasonable."

The movie makers have, in fact, built in a parallel to Rostand's plumed and velveted aristocrats: "Roxanne's" privileged class are its smart people. Not soulless wisecrackers or glib mouthers off those exist in the movie only to be deftly punctured but people for whom the world in all its astonishing forms and variety holds an infinite fascination. People who talk and read and look at the stars and speculate. What a pleasant thesis for a mass market American movie, the snakebite kit for the killer notion that material success at any price is the name of the game we're all playing.

In Martin's canny adaptation, however, he's created a new character to smooth out the intellectual inequities. Rick Rossovich's rough hewn Chris is so in awe of Roxanne that he's a simpleton in her presence. But Chris just as he is, a guy who is knocked out by the redwoods ("I just like to go there and be") and who mentions the meat sandwich he invariably takes for this communion sounds worldly wise to Sandy, the pert bartender who has aspirations of dealing blackjack in Vegas. In turn, Sandy is someone who won't poach on another woman's territory, another relative rarity as movies go.

"Roxanne's" surroundings go a long way toward creating the idea that bright is beautiful. This British Columbia town of Nelson, standing in for an Aspen like ski town in July, has been lit and decorated so that it glows with homeyness and reassurance. It has white frame houses, convivial front porches, a sense of almost enchanted timelessness and warmth. C.D.'s house is a magpie's nest of interests, crammed with books on every subject from seashells to carpentry, with the Chagall print that he will write about so seductively over his fireplace and the Chicago Manual of Style on top of his desk.

Martin is even clear eyed enough to suggest that these idyllic looking retreats where the ski bum is king can be something of a trap for someone whose interests extend beyond the tips of his ski poles. As he sees the newly arrived Roxanne for the first time one evening, doe naked and locked out of her summer rental house, there's an exchange between the two on the subject of irony. C.D. comments that, living in a place "where people ski topless while smoking dope, irony is sort of wasted," and he's become tired of being its only practitioner.

We probably shouldn't be surprised at this tack from Martin as a writer; most of his films have had a springboard that could only be called philosophical. In "The Man With Two Brains," he wooed a disembodied cerebrum, and in "All of Me" he became entangled in a literal mind body split. More than one reviewer has noted that he was a philosophy major in college, after all. What gives "Roxanne" its zing is that both Martin's loose limbed, authoritative physicality and his un show offy mental dexterity are combined so sweetly and so successfully.

Although the heart of the story is still C.D.'s struggles to be seen for the wonder he is, there's a suspicion that the Roxannes of today's world may have their work cut out for them as well. Imagine, prizing romance above all, preferring a fully rounded man to one whose development stops at his shoulders. As we walked out of the theater in Westwood, a Chris clone was grumbling to his buddy: "I wouldn't want a girl with an attitude like that." Hang in there, Roxanne. Nobody said it would be easy, but "Roxanne" shows us its infinite rewards
 		    
  New York Times
July 12, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 2; Page 1, Arts and Leisure Desk
STEVE MARTIN REVISES 'CYRANO'
ALJEAN HARMETZ

HOLLYWOOD: THE ROOMS IN STEVE MARTIN'S house flow into each other like tributaries joining a giant river.

There are no doors, and each white wall is dominated, almost totally covered, by the bold brush strokes of some huge painting a Hockney, a Kline, a Noland. The choices are bold but at the same time meticulous. They echo the kind of large but by no means reckless gestures that Mr. Martin has written into the character of C. D. Bales in his screenplay for the current film, ''Roxanne.''

C. D. Bales is, of course, Cyrano de Bergerac, the swordsman with a big nose who helps another man win the woman he himself loves, a woman who cannot bear ugliness. Edmund Rostand's 19th century French play ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' ends as a tragedy. Roxane flees to a nunnery after Christian, the beautiful man she loves, is killed in battle. During her years of mourning, Cyrano gallantly keeps the secret that it was he who wrote the love letters through which Christian wooed and won Roxane. Only after he is mortally wounded does Cyrano tell Roxane the truth.

In Mr. Martin's much praised screenplay, Roxane has an extra ''n,'' an ex boyfriend, and one night in bed with Christian, renamed Chris. Seventeenth century France becomes an off season ski resort in the state of Washington where Cyrano, played by Mr. Martin, is the fire chief. The odyssey that changed Rostand's 1897 poetic drama into a romantic comedy that is hip enough for the summer of 1987 began in Mr. Martin's head nearly 10 years ago.

''I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized,'' says Mr. Martin, who saw the 1950 movie version starring Jose Ferrer on television when he was 12 years old and, for reasons he doesn't quite understand, never forgot it. ''I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It's hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.''

It is a cliche to say that film is a collaborative art. A director can change the screenwriter's tone and intentions. An actor can make a psychopath out of a character the author created as a blithe eccentric. An editor can salvage a movie by creating the excitement that escaped an inept director. The perfect musical theme can unify and supply a necessary emotional comment, as music did in ''Chariots of Fire.''

What is not so obvious is that a screenplay itself almost always becomes a collaboration, even when one writer gets and deserves sole credit, as Steve Martin did in ''Roxanne.''

''When I was looking for a writer, I went to a screenwriter friend, David Goodman, and I told him, 'I want to update ''Cyrano de Bergerac,'' but I need a reason for doing it and how can I make it different,' '' says Mr. Martin. ''He said, 'Cyrano gets the girl!' ''

Four years ago, when he began seriously to think about a modern version of ''Cyrano,'' Mr. Martin had what he calls a ''verbatim translation'' of the play made. ''In a literal translation the language is already flattened,'' he says. ''Only the ideas are there. My very early drafts were so close to the original as to be embarrassing.''

Mr. Martin wrote 10 drafts of the screenplay before the script was shown to a studio, Columbia, in April 1985. However, somewhere after the first few drafts, he had acquired a producer Daniel Melnick, with whom he plays in a high powered Friday night poker game. Mr. Martin sees the finished film of ''Roxanne'' as a pie with equal shares of credit or blame to Mr. Melnick; the director, Fred Schepisi, and himself.

''I told Dan, 'I'll fool with it and we can bring somebody in to finish it off,' '' says Mr. Martin of his screenplay. ''And he said, 'No.' So Dan and I worked on it for maybe a year until I just couldn't write any more without a third eye.''

Mr. Melnick, who has headed production at M G M and Columbia and produced Bob Fosse's ''All That Jazz,'' says: ''Some writers play it close to the vest. They're afraid of revealing the emperor's lack of clothes. Steve would ask me to give the script to various friends of ours for criticism.''

Eventually Mr. Martin would write 25 drafts of the script, although in some only a single scene or two was changed. ''It was layer upon layer,'' says Mr. Martin. ''The secret was to have the courage to throw things away at any point when they didn't seem to be working. I'd get a better idea and it would affect everything else, so other things would go out of balance. I'd work from noon until midnight. I felt so insecure that I thought, 'If I accomplish this, I'm going to allow myself to say to myself, 'I've really accomplished something.' ''

Mr. Martin had always written most of his comedy material. By the age of 21, he was a writer on the Smothers Brothers television show. And he has been a co author on the scripts for most of his films, including ''The Man With Two Brains'' and ''Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.'' But he had never written a screenplay by himself before. He says that his technique was simply ''to get as many gags into a film as possible. The story didn't matter much and characters didn't matter much.'' ''Roxanne'' was different. ''Thanks to Edmund Rostand, the story was there,'' he says. There was also a believable impediment to the hero and heroine falling into bed at their second meeting, an impediment that allowed wistfulness and yearning.

From the beginning, he tried to parallel Rostand's play in every way possible. Cyrano's confidante, the pastry cook Ragueneau, has turned into Dixie, the cafe owner, played by Shelley Duvall. A duel is fought with ski poles and tennis rackets. Cyrano, the captain of a band of men, is now the chief of a volunteer fire department, but just as much an aristocrat as the original.

Some of the parallels were easy. In play and movie Cyrano invents 20 more creative insults when a boor hoots at his ''big nose.'' Rostand's ''When it bleeds, it is the Red Sea'' becomes Martin's ''You know, it might de emphasize your nose if you wore something larger, like Wyoming.'' One insult is even the same: ''You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on.''

Other parallels were more difficult. ''My first thought was that C. D. would be a policeman,'' says Mr. Martin. ''But then I felt that a fighting policeman would be too hostile. Yet, to parallel the play, C. D. needed men. Later I realized that fireman was the proper metaphor. C. D. is constantly quenching fires in his heart.''

And certain things could not be paralleled at all. ''You can't go into a monastery in 1987. Nor would Roxanne put Christian's last letter around her neck and be celibate for the rest of her life,'' Mr. Martin says. ''And by today's standards, the character of Roxanne was wimpy. She melts when Cyrano finally tells her the truth. In real life, she would be angry at being tricked. And C. D. is smart enough not to fall for beauty alone. What happens to C. D. and Roxanne when the movie's over, how they get along, doesn't matter at all to the audience, but it was important to me.''

The movie makers opted for beauty with Daryl Hannah as Roxanne, rather than choosing an actress like Sigourney Weaver who exudes intelligence. ''How do you make a person look smart on the screen?'' Mr. Martin asks plaintively. The answer they came up with was to have Ms. Hannah play a student of astronomy who wears glasses.

One of the first problems Mr. Martin had to solve was where the story could conceivably take place. ''I needed a setting where people could run into each other on the street and be believable,'' Mr. Martin says. ''That cut out New York.'' The comedian had lived in Aspen, Colo., between 1975 and 1978. A ski resort, he decided, ''was the perfect size, and everybody hung out in the same place.''

But the most important decision was how to get away from Rostand's tragic ending. The solution of having Chris go off happily with a girl who would look up to him which has been much admired by critics came very late in the process.

''In one draft, Chris dies in a fire and several months go by and one day Roxanne calls C. D. and tells him she's pregnant,'' says Mr. Martin. ''She rereads the letter, realizes it was written by C. D., and they have something to do a child to raise together. I changed it when I started to explore the character of Chris. It seemed arbitrary to have him die. My big breakthrough was when I asked myself, 'If I keep Chris alive, what is he thinking?' and I realized that after his one night of glory, he would be tremendously uncomfortable with Roxanne. Then the scene in the bar with the barmaid wrote itself two people hitting it off perfectly.''

Throughout two and a half years of working intermittently on the screenplay, Mr. Martin solicited suggestions. The director Mike Nichols suggested that Mr. Martin replace the rhapsodizing in Cyrano's letters with less flowery descriptions meant to startle and challenge Roxanne. ''So I deflowered the balcony scene,'' Mr. Martin says. The choice of that wicked pun is one of the few times he is deliberately funny in an interview that lasts two hours. He sips tea and has no need to show off.

Dan Melnick suggested that the volunteer firemen be made funny. When Fred Schepisi joined the project in May 1986, he made a graph of the characters in each scene in different colored pencils. ''And I would realize, 'Hey, this character isn't in the movie for 50 pages,' '' says Mr. Martin.

The director Herb Ross suggested that ''something'' happen on a tennis court. That eventually led Mr. Martin into rethinking a karate duel with which he had begun the movie. He changed it to C. D. parrying ski poles with his tennis racket. ''Carl Reiner says, 'You must set up in the first 10 minutes how far you're going to stretch reality,' '' says Mr. Martin. For example, in ''The Jerk,'' which was directed by Mr. Reiner, Mr. Martin's first line was, ''I was born a poor black child.'' ''A very important thing happens in the opening swordfight in 'Roxanne,' '' says Mr. Martin: ''a little heightened reality.''

At one stage Mr. Martin met Gore Vidal at a party and asked him to write the movie. Mr. Vidal declined but said Mr. Martin should use the modern device of the telephone in the deceiving of Roxanne. ''That made me think about other forms of communication,'' says Mr. Martin. It led to a hilarious scene where C. D. feeds Chris lines via short wave radio to say to Roxanne.

David Chasman, another poker playing producer friend, said Mr. Martin would have to deal with why C. D. didn't simply get a nose job. Mr. Martin is not entirely happy with his decision to make C. D. allergic to anesthetics. ''Perhaps the wiser choice would have been not to mention it,'' he muses, ''and to let the audience buy into it as a fairy tale. After all, in the play, his nose is Cyrano's badge of honor.''

The one thing that Mr. Martin did not write was a role for ''Steve Martin.'' ''I just thought, 'I'll figure out a way to play it,' '' he says. Then, two weeks before shooting began, I got very worried. The most important thing to me in writing and playing C. D. was that I avoid self pity. In the play, Cyrano's self pity is noble. Today self pity turns people off. The most dangerous scene was when Dixie asks why I don't get a girl, and I see my shadow on the wall. My line was melancholic, and it was important that I say it matter of factly.''

Although he says it is ''almost depressing'' how many of the big laughs in the movie come from material that was spontaneously created on the set, he also says, ''I consider those spontaneous gags as much a part of the screenplay as anything I spent two and a half years creating.'' For example, the funny and character illuminating moment at the beginning of the movie when C. D. buys a newspaper from a dispenser box, looks at the headline, shrieks, and pays another quarter to put the paper back, came after Mr. Melnick had a newspaper dispenser put on the street just as a throwaway bit of set dressing.

But Mr. Martin did write all 20 of the nose jokes, and he wrote an extra 10 for good measure. ''What happened, did your parents lose a bet with God?'' asks C. D. Bales, making fun of himself. With ''Roxanne,'' Steve Martin has won his bet. 		 
       
   
   
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