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For a little movie without special effects, dramatic reveals, or cutting-edge sex scenes—a movie about nothing at all, really—Barry Levinson’s 1982 comedy, Diner, caused a tectonic shift in popular culture. It paved the way for Seinfeld, Pulp Fiction, The Office, and Judd Apatow’s career, and made stars of Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Ellen Barkin, and Paul Reiser. Three decades later, S. L. Price reports how a novice director and his raw cast broke all the rules—and stumbled into genius.
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Nick Hornby knew better, but he didn’t care. Because suddenly there was that face—the upturned nose, the lupine grin, the wary expression barely softened by the passage of, what, three decades now? Everyone else in the London club that December night was flittering around Colin Firth, set aglow by the Oscar buzz for his performance in The King’s Speech. Hornby let them flit. For here stood … Kevin Bacon. Undisturbed. That knowing smirk may have derailed him as a leading man, but it has allowed for a career of darker, richer roles—and allows him still to cruise a cocktail party longer than most boldfaced names without some fanboy rushing up to say how wonderful he is.
God knows, Hornby had seen that too often: an actor friend, eyes darting, cornered by a gushing stranger. This belated celebration of Firth’s 50th birthday was a private bash where artists and actors, people like Firth and Bacon—and, well, Hornby—could expect to relax. After all, between best-selling books such as About a Boy and a 2010 Academy Award nod earlier in the year for his screenplay for An Education, he had been cornered plenty himself.
Yet when he saw Bacon, Hornby couldn’t help it. He edged closer. It was like that scene from Diner when Bacon’s buddy sees a boyhood enemy in a crowd and breaks his nose: Hornby had no choice. In 1983 a girlfriend had brought home a tape of director Barry Levinson’s pitch-perfect comedy about twentysomething men, their nocturnal ramblings in 1959 Baltimore, their confused stumble to adulthood. Hornby was 26, a soccer fanatic, a writer searching for a subject. Diner dissected the male animal’s squirrelly devotion to sports, movies, music, and gambling. Diner had one man give his fiancée a football-trivia test and had another stick his penis through the bottom of a popcorn box. Hornby declared it, then and there, “a work of great genius.”
Midway through the movie, the ladies’ man Boogie, played by Mickey Rourke, is driving in the Maryland countryside with Bacon’s character, the perpetually tipsy Fenwick. They see a beautiful woman riding a horse. Boogie waves the woman down.
“What’s your name?,” Boogie asks.
“Jane Chisholm—as in the Chisholm Trail,” she says, and rides off.
Rourke throws up his hands and utters the words that Hornby, to this day, uses as an all-purpose response to life’s absurdities: “What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?” And Fenwick responds with the line that, for Diner-lovers, best captures male befuddlement over women and the world: “You ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”
In all, the scene encompasses only 13 lines of dialogue—an eternity if you’re Bacon at a party and a stranger knows them all. But Hornby wouldn’t be stopped. “I pinned that guy to the wall, and I quoted line after line,” Hornby recalls. “I thought, I don’t care. I’m never going to meet Kevin Bacon again. I need to get ‘What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?’ off my chest.”
The Invention of Nothing
Hornby could not have planned a more apt tribute: Diner introduced to movies a character who compulsively recites lines from his favorite movie—and nothing else. And Hornby’s subsequent books about a fan obsessed with Arsenal football (Fever Pitch) and another obsessed with pop music (High Fidelity)—two postmodern London slackers who could easily have slid into a booth at the Fells Point Diner—are only the most obvious branches of the movie’s family tree.
Made for $5 million and first released in March 1982, Diner earned less than $15 million and lost out on the only Academy Award—best original screenplay—for which it was nominated. Critics did love it; indeed, a gang of New York writers, led by Pauline Kael, saved the movie from oblivion. But Diner has suffered the fate of the small-bore sleeper, its relevance these days hinging more on eyebrow-raising news like Barry Levinson’s plan to stage a musical version—with songwriter Sheryl Crow—on Broadway next fall, or reports romantically linking star Ellen Barkin with Levinson’s son Sam, also a director. The film itself, though, is rarely accorded its actual due.
Yet no movie from the 1980s has proved more influential. Diner has had far more impact on pop culture than the stylistic masterpiece Bladerunner, the indie darling Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or the academic favorites Raging Bull and Blue Velvet. Leave aside the fact that Diner served as the launching pad for the astonishingly durable careers of Barkin, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Timothy Daly, plus Rourke and Bacon—not to mention Levinson, whose résumé includes Rain Man, Bugsy, and Al Pacino’s recent career reviver, *You Don’t Know Jack. Diner’*s groundbreaking evocation of male friendship changed the way men interact, not just in comedies and buddy movies, but in fictional Mob settings, in fictional police and fire stations, in commercials, on the radio. In 2009, *The New Yorker’*s TV critic Nancy Franklin, speaking about the TNT series Men of a Certain Age, observed that “Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.” She got it only half right. They have to talk too.
What Franklin really meant is that, more than any other production, Diner invented … nothing. Or, to put it in quotes: Levinson invented the concept of “nothing” that was popularized eight years later with the premiere of Seinfeld. In Diner (as well as in Tin Men, his 1987 movie about older diner mavens), Levinson took the stuff that usually fills time between the car chase, the fiery kiss, the dramatic reveal—the seemingly meaningless banter (“Who do you make out to, Sinatra or Mathis?”) tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries—and made it central.
Of course, kitchen-sink films had been made before, featuring snippets of halting, realistic dialogue, as epitomized by Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. And in 1981, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre elevated one long conversation into an art-house hit. But producers and editors mostly found the imperatives of plot and pacing best served by verbal ping-pong matches where nobody is at a loss for words—snappy His Girl Friday lines that keep the viewer awake until the next thing happens. When making the 1973 Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand hit, The Way We Were, director Sydney Pollack had to argue furiously with producers to keep a scene where Redford and his friend Bradford Dillman lounge on a boat, trying to top each other by ranking the best city, day, and year. But it ended up saying far more about time and regret than did Streisand crooning about memories.
During postproduction on Diner, MGM/UA executive David Chasman complained to Levinson about one of its most famous set pieces, when Guttenberg’s Eddie and Reiser’s Modell argue ownership (“You gonna finish that?”) of a roast-beef sandwich. Chasman wanted it cut because it didn’t advance the story. “You don’t understand,” Levinson explained: between the lines about roast beef lies all you need to know about their fear, their competitiveness, their friendship. The roast beef is the story.
“I wanted the piece to be without any flourish, without anything other than basically saying, ‘This is all it was,’ ” Levinson says. “These conversations that can go on endlessly through the night—bets over the stupid fucking things that you can bet on—is it. Without gimmicks: nothing. Without gimmicks. This is it. Period.” John Wells, the executive producer of the kaleidoscopic 90s hospital series, ER—nominated for a record 122 Emmys during its 15-year run—and former president of the Writers Guild of America, West, was a graduate student at the U.S.C. film school when Diner came out. Mesmerized by Levinson’s “tremendous empathy for those characters even when they were being idiots,” Wells estimates he saw it 30 times in 1982 alone. He still makes a point of watching Diner once a year.
‘It influenced a whole generation of writers,” Wells says, “revolutionizing the way characters talk and how realistic we were going to be. And it was particularly influential with actors—this notion that you could play someone who was extremely real and at the same time be humorous and emotional. It had a complexity that not a lot of movies at the time had—they tended to be tremendously dramatic or broadly comic—and this was landing in a territory between, where somebody could be entertaining and humorous and also make you cry.”
And do so in a vocabulary at once familiar and new. Because, while movie audiences lived in an outside world cluttered with names and faces from newspapers, TV, politics, and the products of the Hollywood machine, movies themselves didn’t much reflect popular culture. There was, beyond plot, a practical reason: TV was still viewed by movie executives as the enemy, and to acknowledge its omnipresence must have seemed like free—and suicidal—advertising. So even movies set in the here and now played out in a hermetically sealed universe: the bank robbery, the romance, or the bankrupt farm was the only story to tell.
There were occasional references here and there, and, at the time, Steven Spielberg was spelling out TV’s place in suburbia like never before. But Diner threw open the windows to a constant flow of brand-name appliances and soda, TV shows from soap operas to Bonanza to GE College Bowl, Bergman films, President Eisenhower, newscasts, real N.F.L. players like Alan Ameche, and real actors like Troy Donahue. Levinson even playfully mixed his own dialogue with that of a background TV.
But, while Seinfeld mass-marketed Levinson’s focus on minutiae, the ultimate film geek made it cool. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction won praise for its ultra-stylized, ultra-violent take on the L.A. underworld. But what made the movie click were the jazzy back-and-forths between hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson about Big Macs, foot massages, and the virtues of eating pork like “that Arnold on Green Acres.” Tarantino’s genius, first demonstrated in 1990’s Reservoir Dogs, sprang from the decision to make his reprehensible characters sympathetic—to make the audience laugh in recognition while wincing at the blood—through dialogue that any truckdriver would recognize. Guy talk. Diner talk.
Pulp Fiction became, arguably, the most influential movie of the 1990s, but Levinson’s reach didn’t end there. Between the release of writer-actor Jon Favreau’s Swingers—with its dinner-table riff on Reservoir Dogs, no less—in 1996, and the debut of HBO’s Entourage, in 2004, comics Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant began dreaming up a BBC series, fated to reboot in a still-running American version, that all but assaulted the viewer with hilariously dead-end dialogue. “Ricky and I often talked about how, in The Office, we featured life’s boring bits—the bits other shows would cut out,” Merchant says. “That’s something Diner taught me: that there is charm and interest and value in capturing the way real people behave. You don’t have to have 90 minutes of shouting or fist-fights or blue aliens. Eavesdropping on the people who drink in your local bar can be just as interesting.”
But, at heart, Diner is, as I Love You, Man director John Hamburg says, “the Cadillac of male-bonding movies,” and no one has tapped that vein better in recent years than director Judd Apatow. With The 40-Year-OldVirgin and Knocked Up, Apatow was credited with creating the “bromance,” one of the few genres capable of luring the increasingly elusive male audience into theaters. When Apatow was asked in the spring of 2009 to speak at the U.S.C. film school and screen his favorite movie, the choice couldn’t have been easier.
At 14, Apatow sneaked in alone to see the R-rated Diner in a Huntington, Long Island, theater, then pestered his mother to take him again. Ever since, he’s been trying to match the shaggy, improvised dialogue that Levinson encouraged during his tabletop scenes. The part in Knocked Up when Seth Rogen and his pals are talking about the vengeance-seeking Eric Bana in Munich? “That was my version of a Barry Levinson run from Diner: finally they’re letting Jews kill people,” Apatow says.
But, really, he adds, “anytime I have four or more people sitting around a table, I think about Diner. It’s a different spin and more my experience, but the naturalness and the humor that he created—that’s the bar I’ve always tried to reach. Whether it’s in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where everybody’s sitting around talking about sex and you realize [Steve Carell] doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or ‘You know how I know you’re gay?,’ or any of the scenes with Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People—they’re all at some level influenced by the dialogue style that Barry Levinson is the master at.”
“Influence” can be a tricky word. “When people talk about influential movies, what did they influence?,” Nick Hornby asks. “It’s a very good question. Come on, then, what did Raging Bull influence? What did Blue Velvet influence? Can you see it anywhere else? It seems to me those movies were so sui generis—you can’t see their ‘influence’ anymore. People just mean that they were really good movies. Whereas Diner did start a way of thinking about writing about popular culture. It did create a mind-set where people like me and Jerry Seinfeld and all sorts of others thought, Oh, I can see how to do this stuff now.”
No Concept
In *Diner’*s early days, though, it was easy to miss the point. Forget high-concept; this script was nearly no-concept: A half-dozen young guys talk over a table; one fears getting married; one’s semi-girlfriend is pregnant; one worships his record collection. There was oldies music and a plot geared to culminate in the stands at the ’59 Colts championship-winning game—except the game-day payoff never ended up being filmed. Levinson had been an Emmy-winning comedy writer for Carol Burnett and Mel Brooks, and, with co-writer and then wife Valerie Curtin, had received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for 1979’s … And Justice for All. But Diner—written in just three weeks in 1980, at their home in Encino—was his first solo shot.
The first-read response from his agent, Michael Ovitz, wasn’t good. “I don’t know what the hell this is,” Ovitz said. Halfway through her own first reading, Barkin hurled the script across her New York apartment and into the garbage. Even after immersing himself in the character of Fenwick for months and working intimately with Levinson for 42 days, Bacon walked out of his first viewing of the movie puzzled. “I didn’t get it,” Bacon says. “In my mind we had made this raucous comedy, and there weren’t that many laughs. It was dark. I kept thinking, Can people really tell us apart? Can people tell that’s Tim’s character or mine or Paul’s?” As the credits rolled in the Manhattan theater, Bacon made his way to the men’s room, where a stranger at the next urinal recognized him.
“You’re in that movie, right?”
“Yeah,” Bacon said.
The man’s free hand fluttered in ambivalence. “Eh,” he said.
Unlike Iron Man 2, in which Downey seemed to skate through scene after scene, Downey plays Stark almost effortlessly, delivering his lines with relative ease allowing his charisma, charm and smugness to shine through; Robert Downey Jr. The cast does a great job of bringing these iconic characters to life, beginning with Robert Downey Jr. Whedon has an utter love for comic books, and it is proudly put on display in The Avengers. Avengers 123 movies. IS Tony Stark!
In the fall of 1980, though, any early doubts had been submerged by a wave of yeses. Ovitz came around, and enough people who mattered—from Mel Brooks to Levinson’s fellow Brooks alum Mark Johnson, to his immediate boss, independent producer Jerry Weintraub, who called Levinson as soon as he finished reading the script—recognized *Diner’*s merits. “I love this,” Weintraub told Levinson. “I understand these guys. I know these guys. We’re going to make this movie.”
Levinson insisted on directing, and Weintraub agreed, with one caveat: If I don’t like what I see after two days of dailies, you’re fired. Weintraub got a green light from Chasman and then MGM/UA chairman David Begelman. The $5 million budget—big enough (at the time) to do the job right, small enough that the suits wouldn’t hover—gave Levinson plenty of rope.
Casting would make or break the movie, and it wasn’t just a matter of finding a bunch of ethnic, East Coast talents. This story was about guys who’d known one another since elementary school; the different types had to mesh into a convincing whole. Led by casting genius Ellen Chenoweth, Levinson and Johnson planted themselves in New York, scouted countless comedy clubs, and auditioned some 500 actors. Michael O’Keefe—just off an Oscar-nominated performance in The Great Santini—turned down the part of Billy, which was given to Timothy Daly. John Doe, the lead singer of the punk band X, read for Fenwick and made the 23-year-old Bacon, whose bedroom then was a kitchen-floor piece of foam in an 85th Street S.R.O., very nervous.
He needn’t have worried. Bacon was known for his work Off Broadway and for his role as “Tim the teenage alcoholic,” on Guiding Light, and the 103-degree fever he brought to the audition only made his growly take on the half-baked brainiac stand out. Stern had been memorable in Breaking Away, Rourke’s role as an arsonist in the yet unreleased Body Heat was already getting attention, and Guttenberg’s ability to play loopy naïveté proved irresistible. Levinson took a chance on the 24-year-old Daly, whose show-business experience consisted mostly of watching his actor dad, James, and older sister, Tyne, and, just months before, tiling Lorne Michaels’s bathroom. (“First time,” he says, “I’d seen a urinal in a private house.”)
When it came to casting Beth, the wife of Stern’s Shrevie, Levinson saw only one actress—the 26-year-old, Bronx-born Barkin—and sensed that she could deliver trapped confusion like no one else. Pushed by her agent, David Guc, Barkin had fished the script out of the trash and, after reading through the coruscating “flip side” scene with Levinson, realized that this was hardly a dippy teen comedy. But after two years of soaps and Off Broadway stage work, she had just gotten her big break: a part in a Broadway production about the Warsaw Ghetto, the perfect platform for a Jewish girl determined to be “a serious actor.”
She called Guc in tears. “I’m begging you,” Barkin said. “Please don’t make me pull out of this play.” “If you don’t do this movie,” Guc said, “I will kill you.” She gave in, finally, “and while we were shooting, David sent me the review of the play,” Barkin says. “It closed in two days.” As the one female set adrift in a sea of male lunacy, Beth had to be a convincing mix of vulnerability and toughness, but Barkin’s offbeat looks—now sexy, now off-putting—were a problem. The studio and Weintraub didn’t like her—“not a little bit,” Levinson says—and wanted someone prettier.
Levinson dug in. Without the director knowing, MGM had other actresses tested, but Czech cinematographer Peter Sova—working on only his third feature film—took it upon himself “to make Ellen look really good and the other girls look really bad,” he says. “The other girls, I used these obscure angles and wide lenses and it wasn’t fair, maybe, but it was fair in one way. Ellen was way above the other girls.” Weintraub backed down and has since become one of Barkin’s great champions. When told, last spring, about Sova’s piece of counter-sabotage, he said, “That’s not very nice. If I was him, I’d keep that quiet.”
But Levinson’s most inspired move was the casting of Reiser, a 24-year-old New York stand-up comic, as the hanger-on Modell. On paper it was a minor part, just 18 lines of filler dialogue. Reiser’s shambling shtick and non sequitur asides (“You know the thing about Sinatra? He’s good, but he’s too thin. I don’t like that”)—much of it ad-libbed and all lightning-quick—rattled his conventionally trained castmates and imbued the movie with a quality that no writer or director can force: whimsy.
“He elevated the competitive comedy, because he was so sharp and you had to keep up,” says Stern, “and it made everybody, like, FOINK!, right on the edge of their seat—because, hey, this guy’s going to steal the fucking movie! And Barry let it run, and that elevated the energy, the comedy, and when you finish and look back, you go, ‘Well, I don’t know how it holds together as a plot … but it was funny as shit. It was true.’ ” And, Stern adds, “Barry cast him totally by accident.”
One of Reiser’s buddies, a comic named Michael Hampton-Cain, was heading downtown to audition for the movie and asked him to come along. Reiser needed socks for a show in Florida; he figured he’d hit Macy’s. While Hampton-Cain auditioned, Chenoweth stepped out, heard Reiser riffing, and asked for a headshot. He told her he wasn’t there for the movie; she told him to come back the next day. Reiser had just started acting classes, and for Levinson he tried investing his scene with all the “projection, motivation, focus, and energy” that he’d been hearing about.
“Don’t do that,” Levinson said. “Don’t act.”
“But then it sounds like I’m just a guy sitting and having a cup of coffee,” Reiser said.
“That’s what we’re looking for.”
Two weeks later, the male leads began gathering in Levinson’s room at a seamy Holiday Inn in downtown Baltimore. While they were checking in, a corpse was being rolled out a side door. “A hooker got murdered up the stairs,” Rourke remembers, “where they were bringing us to our rooms.” Now it was the first read-through, and here came Rourke, late, as he would be for much of the shoot, making an entrance with a white scarf tossed around his neck. After a pause, someone said, “What the fuck is that?,” and the room broke into laughs.
Just 22, Guttenberg was probably the most experienced; he had already shared sets with Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, Geraldine Page, Valerie Perrine, and Karl Malden. This felt different. “People ask what was my favorite time: Police Academy making a billion dollars? Three Men and a Baby, the highest-grossing movie of … whatever?,” Guttenberg says. “No. It was when Mickey walked in and all of us started reading. I looked around and thought, These guys are like me.”
Action!
Everyone was raw. Egos were huge, but held in check because no one had been warped yet by fame and money. The production felt like college—all-night shoots, six A.M. drinks, hormones surging—with everyone working together, sort of, toward the same goal. “There wasn’t anybody who was unhappy or didn’t want to be there,” says Johnson, Levinson’s executive producer and right-hand man. “We couldn’t believe it: we were making a movie.” Weintraub, the experienced renegade who had promoted Elvis, Sinatra, and Dylan, and had been the executive producer of Nashville, showed up at the hotel for the first day of shooting, in March 1981. Barkin, mistaking him for a bellhop, told him to take her bags to her room.
The first scene was set in a pool hall. Actors took their places, cameras hummed, everyone waited … and waited. “Barry,” an assistant director finally whispered, “you have to say ‘Action!’ ”
Levinson lost half of the first day when the video on a TV set in the background malfunctioned. The second day began with Claudia Cron, the actress playing Jane Chisholm, losing control of her mount. Levinson had been assured that Cron knew how to ride, but as he lined up the first shot, “I can see her on a horse, like, disappearing over the horizon,” he says. “I can hear this walkie-talkie: ‘Yeah, the wranglers are trying to get her … ’ Two hours later they get her back. We lost half that day, too.”
Quickly, the cast’s offscreen dynamic began to unfold in an uncanny shadowing of Levinson’s script. Daly, so green that he didn’t know how to hit his mark, and Reiser were both film novices playing men unsure of their place. Rourke, 28 and just married, trafficked in a world-weary patter, much like his character, the gambling hairdresser Boogie. Earnest Eddie was played by the wide-eyed Guttenberg, who found himself startled by Barkin’s swearing and was soon under Mickey’s spell. “[Guttenberg] kept coming up to me,” Daly recalls, “and saying things like ‘Mickey says that if I don’t have sex or beat off the whole time, my acting will get a lot better: I’ll have this endless tension.’ I’m like, ‘You listen to this shit?’ ”
Guttenberg and Rourke would retreat to a hotel room after hours for acting workshops. Once, Guttenberg and Rourke began a mirror exercise, face-to-face, their palms pressed together. “Fucking David Keith!,” Rourke chanted until a mystified Guttenberg repeated it. “No fucking David Keith!,” Rourke yelled, and Guttenberg repeated that too, over and over, until at last Rourke roared, “He gets all my fucking parts!,” and whirled away to punch a window.
Rourke considered hair and makeup to be one of the few things a young actor could control. “If there was a problem over what I was going to wear or how I was going to do my hair,” he says, “I’d walk.” But the results were often comical. Rourke would leave the makeup trailer, shampoo, wash his face, and do it all over again himself; that’s why one scene’s pompadour is the next scene’s Eraser-head. He went so heavy on eyeliner and eye shadow that he himself laughs when he sees the movie today. Sova finally took him aside. “Mickey,” he said, “we’re not doing Dracula.” But the performance from Rourke is all but perfect: tough, fragile, warmer than anything he’s ever done. Midway through, Guttenberg and Rourke went to Levinson and asked him to write them a scene together; 15 minutes later he came back with the moment at the diner counter when Boogie figures out Eddie’s a virgin. The idea of taking a mouthful of sugar before washing it down with Coke, though, was Rourke’s own, scene-stealing flourish. “I was like, ‘You fucker!,’ ” Guttenberg says.
But the movie’s heart—the place where male confusion about commitment, growing up, and the ethos of loyalty gets teased out most explicitly—is the triangle featuring the tense married couple, Shrevie and Beth, and Boogie, an old flame with whom she’s eager to have an affair. Off the set, Barkin and Stern barely got along, to the point where they spent an entire night filming in a car without speaking. Why? “I don’t know,” Barkin says. “I like Danny Stern a lot now. But he seemed to have a problem with everything I did.”
Rourke became her refuge, and the animus between Rourke and Stern built up with little digs (“You ever think of doing your own hair?” Stern ad-libs in one scene) until the two had to be pulled apart in a snarling, chest-shoving tussle. The tension served Levinson’s purposes; the scenes with Barkin and Stern crackle with hostility. And Barkin’s portrayal, whether in the flip-side showdown (“Because I don’t give a shit!”) or in the beauty-parlor scenes with Rourke, is shattering. Of her three dozen films, she says, no character has felt closer to her own experience than the insecure Beth. “I was this part,” Barkin says. “I revealed the most painful aspects of myself. It’s something all women think: I don’t care if you look like Michelle Pfeiffer; there are times in your life where you think you’re not pretty and don’t know who you are, and you’re lost.”
To this day Stern can’t tell if their offscreen dislike was just that, or Barkin’s Method-y attempt to keep their scenes fresh, or, as Daly theorizes, the product of her bid to be the “sexual vortex” of a male-dominated set. Stern became even more confused, he says, during the filming of the classic popcorn-box scene (where, for at least one take, Rourke planted a dildo in the box to surprise actress Colette Blonigan), when Barkin hopped into Stern’s lap in the movie theater and whispered how much she wanted him. Before he could react, she jumped off and was gone, never to say another word about it. “It was mystifying,” Stern says. “I’m playing her husband and I’m just married to my real wife and I’m thinking, Do you really want to fuck me, like, for real? Or in the movie?”
Barkin says that Stern might be remembering correctly about the lap hop, but “I’m incapable of a mindfuck, to tell you the truth,” she says. “If I did [jump into Stern’s lap], it was to forge a connection, because there was tension between us and I did know when the camera rolled I had to be his wife and he was someone I was supposed to be in love with who was hurting me and ignoring me. It was important for me to establish a connection with the actor. Would I go to those lengths to do it? Yeah.”
Finding Fells Point
The diner itself was a central cast member. Levinson couldn’t use Baltimore’s old Hilltop Diner, where he and his boyhood pals had once gathered nightly and no one dared bring in a female. Another greasy spoon fell through when the owners demanded too much money. Johnson and Levinson found a diner graveyard in New Jersey and their mythical “Fells Point Diner” squatting in the mud; they trucked it down and planted it on a vacant lot fronting Chesapeake Bay. Early in the movie, the place is seen just after dawn, windows and neon glowing, gray emptiness to either side. It looked so authentic that, as Levinson was setting up the shot, a trucker pulled up looking for breakfast; the crew chased him off in time to catch the last moments of perfect light. Months before, Levinson had asked a venerable British production designer, Richard Macdonald, for ideas on the movie’s look, and Macdonald had unloaded an incomprehensible torrent before ending theatrically, “And the diner … stands alone!” Levinson peered into the monitor at the diner on the vacant lot, and it hit him: The son of a gun was right.
Apatow took a smart shortcut when casting Knocked Up. He wanted improvised, *Diner-*like banter and picked five actors who knew each other, who “actually hang out” offscreen, because “I knew that they could sit and talk and something natural would evolve.” Levinson’s cast didn’t know one another at all. He had held a week of rehearsal beforehand and saved filming the diner scenes for last, hoping that 42 days and nights together would create chemistry. When nerves frayed and cliques hardened as the shoot wound down, Johnson rolled in a Camaraderie Camper, a tin-can trailer where the leads could hang out between calls, “which for us was supercool,” Bacon says, “but in retrospect was a complete shithole.” The guys fought over who got the lone bed, lost patience, snickered, and cursed one another out. Somehow, in that fetid air, the six men found a rhythm.
Meanwhile, two production crises serendipitously played into Levinson’s hands, allowing his ambition to “do the ordinary” to take flight. The first occurred when Johnson learned just how expensive it would be to rent a stadium and film a crowd scene, with the actors hanging from a goalpost in celebration. So the idea was dropped. Oddly, Levinson didn’t mind. “For a first-time director? That was really ballsy,” Stern says. “Take your own script and mush it around and just have a vision of a movie that’s about nothing? I mean, we took out the one plot thing: it was about a football game, we were going to the game, we were at the game—and they cut it.”
The detour helps explain why MGM executives proved so resistant to the movie when they finally saw a rough cut: Diner wasn’t the movie they thought they’d bought.
The second crisis hit when an on-set fire cost another night of shooting, and MGM refused to budget another day. Levinson needed more time. Sova suggested breaking out a second camera in the diner, to speed things up by filming actors on both sides of the table simultaneously. That, however, created a problem with sound: instead of clipping a lavalier microphone to just one actor and allowing him to say his lines cleanly—that is, without overlap from other actors, so it can be edited into a scene later—the new situation demanded that all the actors, on-camera and off, be miked. Robert Altman aside, at the time it was still rare to use overlapping dialogue, especially for trivial, tabletop chatter. “What Levinson did in a revolutionary way 30 years ago,” John Hamburg says, “is something we’re doing now.”
It was, for the final two weeks, a kind of liberation. “Because we didn’t have to worry about overlaps, we could really ad-lib,” Guttenberg says. “You could ad-lib offstage and throw the guy a fastball, and he could catch it and throw it high. That’s what made the experience so unique in filmmaking: you didn’t have to match ‘what we did last time.’ It was ‘Just give me something extraordinary. Take it wherever you want to go.’ ”
That kind of freedom isn’t always welcome. Barkin, Daly, and Bacon didn’t have that kind of chops—nearly all their lines come straight from the page—and Rourke, *Diner’*s breakout star, never connected with the process that became its great legacy. “The whole movie for me was an effort, because it wasn’t a film that I particularly wanted to be in,” he says. “I didn’t get that middle-class sort of humor. I never hung out or rolled with guys, like what this movie was about. All this shtick and the bantering back and forth: man, I didn’t get it at all.”
It didn’t matter. Levinson knew Reiser would be his rogue element—“a sensibility, a motor, that I knew how to play with.” He encouraged him to explore off-script riffs like “Nuance: It’s not a real word … ” or “You don’t chew your food; that’s why you get so irritable. You get lumps … you have roast beef in your heart that just stays there.” By the end, Reiser had so hijacked the patter that Levinson had him serve as the movie’s literal final word, layering Reiser-dominated banter over the closing credits—another nuanced touch that Hollywood had yet to employ—and closing the story with his unscripted wedding speech. And as Reiser spiels on, the camera follows in slow motion the bouquet tossed by Eddie’s unseen bride until it drops onto the guys’ table. They freeze, staring, so stunned by the idea of marriage that it leaves them speechless.
Banter is a delicate thing, crippled by obvious effort, destroyed when, as so often happens on sitcoms, it’s reduced to point scoring or put-downs. Reiser was so quick, so on, that there are moments in Diner when he sounds as if he’s trying out material. But Levinson was also going for something deeper, a casualness implying dynamics and affections that reach back years, and even the screw-ups nail that quality. The best comes when Guttenberg’s Eddie asks Boogie, “Sinatra or Mathis?,” and Rourke brushes him back with “Presley.” “Elvis Presley?,” Guttenberg’s Eddie says. “You’re sick … ” He starts to improvise, but it’s like watching a kid let go of the handlebars for the first time: he knows he’s going to crash. “You’ve gone like two steps below … ,” Guttenberg stammers, “in my … my, uh, book.” Clearly, a blown take: The actors giggle, Stern spits up his drink, breaks character, and says, “Once again … ” But rather than splice in a cleaner run, Levinson went with the mess.
At first blush, the result suggests a director with no hand on the controls. “I thought you were going to write it,” Levinson’s father, Irvin, told him after seeing Diner. “It sounds like they made it all up.” But Levinson had been waiting his whole life to create that effect. As an 11-year-old, he’d been oddly thrilled to hear Chayevsky’s Marty mumble, “Whatta you wanna do?” (“the most amazing dialogue I’d ever heard in my life,” he says), but had little chance to explore the possibilities while writing broad comedy for Carol Burnett and Mel Brooks. He dropped his first true Diner-like exchange in a forgettable movie called Inside Moves, where guys riff about gangster John Dillinger’s penis and the rumor that it traveled around, like a talisman, after he was dead. Still, the way that played annoyed Levinson: too smooth, too actor-y. In real conversation no one gets another take. We start off full of it, say “er,” get lost in syntactical hell; our brilliant insight dies because we’re never as smooth as we think we’ll be. In Diner, Levinson caught that: the lines unspool tangled, kinked just enough to be irresistible.
We know this because for a certain 40-plus demographic—wordy, nerdy, and planted mostly on the coasts—the movie became, like Annie Hall, Caddyshack, or The Big Lebowski, a touchstone experience, its lines serving as passwords, signifiers of like-mindedness. “Our group of guys had this thing—more in theory than in practice—for when you meet a girl,” says Peyton Reed, the director of The Break-Up and Yes Man. “If she loves Diner? Amazing. If she loves St. Elmo’s Fire? She’s dead to me. And we still quote it today: all the time. The movie itself has become what sports and music are to those guys in the movie.”
Levinson was hardly the first filmmaker to celebrate male bonding, but it’s no reach to credit him with revealing the process. When a woman asks a man—back from golf, the bar, a game—what he and his buddies talked about for the last four hours, the mumbled reply of “Nothing” isn’t designed to drive her insane. It was, indeed, four hours of “nothing” which, for guys, is … everything. It’s in what’s not said—the tone, the pauses. “We come at things sideways,” Levinson says. “Guys’ criticism of each other might be more exact in certain movies, but here it’s not as direct. Everything is slightly elliptical—which is the way guys behave mostly. It all comes from these peculiar angles.”
That Diner talk has reached overkill—see Two and a Half Men or any N.F.L. pre-game show—only underscores Levinson’s achievement. He created a story about guys who did some stupid and cruel things—faking a car crash, wrecking a Christmas manger, coming very close to cuckolding a friend—yet made you love them. Bromances, for lack of a better word, aren’t buddy movies; you may love Butch and Sundance and Lethal Weapon, but you’re not yearning to die in a hail of gunfire or sit on that bomb-rigged toilet. But Diner makes you want to order a coffee and listen in. You want to be with Eddie and Modell. Like Nick Hornby, you want to be in the movie.
I know the feeling. The day after his new—and soon canceled—TV series about older guys hanging out premiered on NBC, I sat down with Paul Reiser. He ordered a black-and-white cookie in a Beverly Hills deli. He cut it in half. I didn’t touch it, and after 20 minutes he finally made his move.
“So I was giving you half this cookie, but fuck it,” Reiser said. “You didn’t take it—I’m eating it.”
“Is this for me?”
“It was, but now it isn’t,” he said, then gave a little snort. “ ‘You gonna finish that?’ ”
“There was never an offer … ”
“It’s self … understood.”
You gonna finish that? Even with the prompt of that line from Diner, it took a moment to realize that I had just lived out some surreal, 30-year dream: a tabletop exchange with the master himself.
A Bit of Luck
When Weintraub, in late 1981, first screened Diner for MGM/UA executives, he insisted they give it their full attention. “Promise me you’re going to watch this movie and not answer phone calls,” he warned. “You need to really watch and listen.” Ten minutes in, the phone next to Begelman’s chair flashed, and he picked it up. Weintraub stood, walked into the projection booth, packed the reels, and went home. The execs listened the next time—but still couldn’t figure how to market the movie. The head of marketing and distribution, Nathaniel Kwit, opted to test in smaller cities such as St. Louis, Phoenix, and Baltimore—with ads directed at teens billing it as a *Grease-*like nostalgia trip—but the response was grim. Ticket sales flatlined, even in Baltimore, and after a month it was shelved. By late March, Diner was an orphan, and nearly a dead one at that.
Guttenberg’s publicist called him. “Bad news,” the publicist said. “No one’s ever going to see this movie.” Levinson figured his directing career was finished—that he had “completely failed.”
A studio executive tried to cheer him up. “Look, you got your first chance to direct,” he said. “If the movie doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t do anything. But if it’s a little flashy and it’s got some real camera things going on, you’ll get yourself some attention. You’ll do all right.”
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“But I don’t have anything flashy,” Levinson told him. “I don’t have any camera tricks. There’s nothing that stands out. It was designed to be so … ordinary.”
The man stared. “Oh, shit,” he said.
What they didn’t know was that the movie still had backers below top management, and that publicists on both coasts were determined to get critics to pay heed. Then came a bit of luck: when Mark Johnson’s mother, Dorothy King, visited one weekend from Massachusetts, he noticed the initials “P.K.” on her luggage. “Oh, that’s my friend Pauline,” she said. Johnson, the movie’s executive producer, obtained a print without MGM’s knowledge; he flew it personally to New York for *The New Yorker’*s Pauline Kael and her friend and fellow critic, James Wolcott, to watch.
Kael loved it. MGM/UA had no plans to open in New York, but Kael made it clear that she’d be running a rave regardless—and that other New York critics planned to do the same. Meanwhile, *Rolling Stone’*s Michael Sragow, in Los Angeles, told the studio that the magazine had already laid out a review—calling the movie “a modest miracle”—along with a profile of Levinson. The studio hustled to get a print on one New York screen—the Festival, on 57th Street—just in time for Janet Maslin’s April review in The New York Times (“Movies like ‘Diner’—fresh, well-acted and energetic American movies by new directors with the courage of their convictions—are an endangered species. They deserve to be protected”) and another story detailing MGM’s missteps. By then Kael’s piece had also appeared, calling Diner wonderful, lyrical, and transcendent, crediting Levinson’s “great ear” for dialogue and lauding everyone’s “amazing performances,” especially Barkin’s, whom she went so far as to compare to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.
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Diner soon set house records in New York. A string of high-profile studio disasters such as Cannery Row and Pennies from Heaven had set up Kwit for a fall, but Diner may have been, as one MGM exec put it to The New York Times, “the mallet that hit the camel on the head.” On April 13 the studio fired Kwit and replaced him with one of the movie’s champions, Jerry Esbin, who had good reason to declare a month later: “Diner is Lazarus.” Though the film never received a wide release, moviegoers nationally were still paying to see it seven months later. Soon, nearly everyone involved would be rich and famous.
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Reiser, having just turned 25 and still doing stand-up, was living in a dead-end apartment on East 76th Street on the Friday morning the first great reviews hit. He bought a paper at a newsstand, opened it, and nearly made it across the street before the words stopped him cold. He looked down: just short of the curb. A garbage truck had passed, and now a wash of water, brown and thick with trash, flowed over his ankles. He looked west. A crystal-blue light streamed across the island over the usual dry cleaners, the same dull Hertz office.
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“I just crossed through,” Reiser thought. “I’m in another place now.” His baptism, he calls it still, but actors are the last to know. Done right, the movies are always about us.