James L. Brooks On ‘Ella McCay’ Origins, Meeting Albert Brooks & ‘I’ll Do Anything’ War Stories – Crew Call Podcast

A widow’s relationship with an astronaut, the love triangle of a broadcast news team, and now a state lieutenant governor-turned-governor who is bogged down by the men in her life, chiefly her knuckleheaded husband in 20th Century Studios’ dramedy Ella McCay.

The characters on the surface may appear as though they’re not in our immediate sphere, but James L. Brooks in his seven picture directorial canon, has a knack for holding a mirror up to ourselves. Read, Albert Brooks’ Aaron Altman and his romantic confession to Holly Hunter’s Jane Craig in Broadcast News and immediate rejection. It’s a heartbreaking speech any teenager can relate to, forget that it’s coming from the mouths of middle-age working professionals.

On today’s Crew Call, we speak with Brooks about his first directed feature in 15 years, Ella McCay, out on Dec. 12. He says he’s been working on the screenplay for four years, but acknowledges he may even be fibbing about that.

The inspiration?

“I started to do research and I was talking one day to someone who had been a two-term governor…it came up that the governor had forgotten to thank the mate on inauguration and it was still a raw wound. It was still palpable. That was key for me,” the 3x Oscar winner of 1983’s Terms of Endearment says. Brooks won for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay.

We chat with Brooks today about how he met one of his muses, Albert Brooks “the late Penny Marshall’s (house)…one night there was this guy who’s pretending to tell fortunes with cards and he was hilarious, being crazy funny.”), as well as the ambitious swing he took with the 1994 Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Julie Kavner movie I’ll Do Anything. Brooks initially shot the movie as a musical, and it was promptly rejected by a test a audience (“It was murder, man, it was murder and as bad as it gets”). He turned it into a family comedy about a working actor single dad, however, the word was out about the recut with critics crucifying the picture and the movie bombing with $10.4M at the domestic box office. We also talk about the director rolling the dice on British fresh face Ella McCay actress Emma Mackey as his lead, and getting a feature dramedy off the ground in a motion picture system impacted by streaming.

“These days, data dictates what gets made to a larger extent than we’ve ever had. Just to get the chance to have an idea of your own and to get somebody to support you and make the movie, you better appreciate it these days, because it’s not easy to come by,” Brooks advises.

“One of the top guys there just, read my script twice when he got it,” he says about Ella McCay landing at Disney’s 20th Century Studios, “that never happened before in my life.”

Do we need to wait another 15 years before the next James L. Brooks movie?

Says the filmmaker, “I do have some notes. I do have some, I swear. I have some preliminary notes.”

Listen to our conversation with Brooks here: