The Night off the Great Prom

By Gerald Clarke

James Brooks'Terms of Endearment wins five Oscars

Over the past decade and a half, James Brooks, 43, has made a career out of writing and producing such unpredictable TV comedies as Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore. But last week, after winning three Oscars for Terms of Endearment, the first movie he ever directed, the normally pessimistic Brooks reacted in an uncharacteristically predictable way: he was ecstatic. "I'm nuts," he said. "I'm programmed for about two minutes of joy, and this has been going on for 48 hours."

His own statuettes were for best picture (he co-produced Terms), best director and best screenplay adaptation, and two of his picture's stars also came in first. Shirley MacLaine was named best actress for her role as Aurora Greenway, the film's impossible but ultimately likable mother, and Jack Nicholson was chosen best supporting actor for playing Aurora's lecherous astronaut lover. The other major awards at the seemingly endless (a record 3 hr. 46 min.) ceremony went to favorites: Robert Duvall won the best actor Oscar for his role as an alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies; Linda Hunt received the best supporting actress award for playing a male dwarf in The Year of Living Dangerously; and Fanny and Alexander, the last major feature Ingmar Bergman has said he will ever direct, took the prize for best foreign picture.

The night, however, really belonged to Brooks. In a Hollywood story older than the Oscars themselves, he had been turned down by almost every studio in town before Paramount finally said yes, it would help him make a comedy in which one of the leading characters, Aurora's daughter Emma (Debra Winger), dies of cancer. "The script was always killed with kindness," says Brooks. "People really liked it but perceived it as a small, dark, emotional comedy. I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards."

Brooks thought of his movie (based on the novel by Larry McMurtry) as not dark but very light comedy--humor arising not out of plot but out of the endless vagaries of the human character. "I always felt that if Terms of Endearment lives as a comedy, I would be proud. If not, I would be a little lost." Trying to translate that kind of humor onto film was not easy however. Brooks tinkered endlessly with his script and added a new romance for Aurora, the Nicholson character who was not in McMurtry's novel. Sometimes he made his actors go through half a dozen takes, with half a dozen different approaches, so that he could choose the version he wanted in the editing room. "Jim wanted his choice of different levels of comedy," says Winger. "It got crazy at times. It was sometimes grueling to get it right."

Despite his years of TV experience, the fledgling director was not totally prepared for moviemaking. Every day, he remembers, "was like walking into a propeller. It was murder. I lived every moment in fear of how bad the picture could be." MacLaine and Winger displayed real mother-daughter tensions, and he performed a delicate balancing act to keep peace on the set. Since much of the film was set in Texas, Brooks, who grew up in New Jersey, spent four months in the Lone Star state, interviewing people who were like his characters. He would write "In search of Emma" on the bathroom mirror of his house in Malibu, then spend a week watching and talking to teen-age girls in River Oaks, the section of Houston where Emma was supposed to have grown up. He would then return to Malibu, think and write about Emma, then take out the Magic Marker again and scribble "In search of Aurora." And off again he would be to Texas.

The result of all that searching was what MacLaine calls Brooks' "sense of truth," and audiences responded. Made for under $10 million, Terms of Endearment has already taken in about $100 million at the box office and, with five Oscars and the best picture title, will probably go on to make millions more. Although he has no projects lined up, Brooks will doubtless find a warmer reception next time he approaches the studios with an unusual idea.

Right now, however, he is still in a kind of daze. He and his wife Holly held hands and trembled through the whole awards ceremony, he says, and then made the round of parties, ending up at On the Rox, a hip club on Sunset Boulevard, with MacLaine, Winger and Nicholson. "We took a great prom picture on the stairs," he says. "To me it was the great prom picture I never got because I never had the great prom."

Only two days later could he seriously begin to think about how he felt. "This morning I figured it out," he said. "We're all a mix of emotions. But right now what is totally missing from me is anger. I am a man without anger now. Every once in a while I think my mood is going to dip, and then my legs start trembling and the good feeling starts all over again." --By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles