Julie Kavner says she has peaked. These are her good ol' days. The 42-year-old actress says her wish fulfilled was to appear in a movie written, directed and produced by her idol, James L. Brooks.
Unfortunately, the movie she made with him is "I'll Do Anything."Oh, well.
"I'll Do Anything" is the picture on which the music stopped. Brooks, who won both hearts and minds with his hits "Terms of Endearment" and "Broadcast News," envisioned, and filmed, a major musical in which Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks, Joely Richardson and Kavner trilled the nasty truth about movie business in numbers written by the likes of Prince and Sinead O'Connor.
Two test screenings convinced Columbia and Brooks they had a disaster in the making. The song-and-dance routines were dropped, and the movie was reworked as a romantic comedy, though heartless Hollywood still stars as the villain. Even so, it comes to theaters Friday bearing the freight of what it was supposed to have been. So far, reviews have been mixed.
Kavner, who plays a screening researcher in love with a rabidly self-absorbed producer (Brooks), defends the picture. "Movies are always reworked in editing," she says. "What happened is of interest to insiders and film students, but I don't think the audience cares."
Kavner and Brooks go way back. In 1974, he was the executive producer of "Rhoda," the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" spinoff starring Valerie Harper; Kavner won a following in the show as Rhoda's schlumpy sister, Brenda Morgen-stern. (It was also on that show she met David Davis, a television writer-producer and her longtime companion, with whom she divides her year between Shelter Island and Malibu.) Lean years followed "Rhoda," but Woody Allen rescued her from doing dinner theater in western Canada with a small but significant role in "Hannah and Her Sisters." She has since done several movies with Allen ("Radio Days," "New York Stories," "Alice" and "Shadows and Fog") and is slated to be in his next.
Brooks gave Kavner's career another boost in 1987, when he cast her as the second lead on Fox's "The Tracey Ullman Show." It brought her acclaim and her next day job as the voice of Marge Simpson on "The Simpsons," an "Ullman" spinoff produced by Brooks.
But it was Nora Ephron who tried to make Kavner a star in 1992 with "This Is My Life." The movie - based on a Meg Wolitzer novel about a standup comedian who is loved by all but her two daughters - was Ephron's directorial debut and Kavner's first leading role.
Kavner was great in the part but resisted celebrity status. "I just get to speak more lines, that's all," she kept telling interviewers, while Ephron commented: "Even if it was a one-man show, she would find some way to tell you that it is not her show."
The movie faded, Kavner narrowly eluded celebrity, and "I'll Do Anything" isn't likely to advance the star quotient of anyone connected to it. But Kavner says she has just the career she wants.