Good Morning, Vietnam!

Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam.

Last week I wrote about my brief assignment working in the Creative Film Services department at The Walt Disney Studios.  It was the in-house ad agency at the studio that produced the lobby posters, print ads, trailers and TV and radio ads for all the releases from Walt Disney and Touchstone Pictures.

As I mentioned last week, Three Men and a Baby was the big blockbuster that got and took everyone's attention in our department in the Fall of 1987; while another small, low-budget film starring a young Robin Williams, as an Air Force deejay on the Armed Forces Radio Network during Vietnam, was flying under everyone's radar.

Robin Williams was not a big box office movie star in 1987.  His starring roles in Popeye, The World According to Garp and Moscow on the Hudson had shown he could act, but not that he had any star power that drew moviegoers to watch his films.  Good Morning, Vietnam was both his critical and commercial break through role.

Like Three Men and a Baby, I had not heard of the film project Good Morning, Vietnam before I started working at Disney.  It was loosely based on the life of Adrian Cronauer, who actually was an irreverent, popular deejay on the Armed Forces Radio Network in Vietnam in 1965.  Cronauer later said the film was about 50% accurate.  In other words, he wasn't any Robin Williams.

Also like Three Men and a Baby, the first time I saw Good Morning Vietnam was when I watched an early "rough" cut - it still needed music, sounds effects, transitions and color correction - on a small TV in an office at work by myself.  We are so bombarded as moviegoers with images, reviews and other people's opinions of  a movie before we see it now, that I can't tell you what a joy it is to see a good movie for the first time without knowing anything about it.  Admittedly, it helped that I was getting paid to watch it.

(The first time I saw E.T. was at an employee screening at Universal a month before its release, and seeing it before all the hype made the film even that much more magical.)

I enjoyed Three Men and a Baby and felt it was a can't miss hit, but the film I really was rooting for was Good Morning, Vietnam.  I had been a fan of director Barry Levinson since Diner - he also directed Tin Men, Avalon, Rain Man and Wag the Dog, among others - and he had done a brilliant job alternating between Williams' hilarious, improvised manic bits and quieter, touching moments of love and loss.  The film was shot in Thailand on a shoestring budget.

Studio honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg was fond of saying in interviews around that time that his management team's movie philosophy was not to go for lots of big budget "home runs," but to try and crank out a series of low risk, low budget, high concept "doubles."  Buy good scripts cheap, cast them with known actors who were at a point in their careers where they could be paid below market rates and get talented directors.  Every emphasis was made on keeping down costs and expensive movie star "perks."

It was really a Moneyball philosophy of Hollywood movie making long before the term Moneyball had been invented.  It also proved to be very profitable.

There are several small moments I remember about working on the marketing of Good Morning, Vietnam before its release.  One was that Robin Williams' box office clout was considered so low that all the early concepts for the movie's posters and print ads didn't even feature Robin Williams!  All the studio's early research had shown that audiences had no interest in seeing a film just because of Williams, so they felt they had to sell the film itself without him.

Around this time, a couple of months before the movie's release, I was in the lobby outside Jeffrey Katzenberg's office, holding a group of large "composite" lobby poster concepts - we called them "comps" - printed on hard poster board.  The door to his office opened as the meeting started to break up, and I could clearly hear him yelling at everyone in the room, "We don't sell movies; we sell the audiences' perception of our movies."

That's how studio executives view their "product."  How can it be sold to the public?  How can they convince audiences to pay their ten bucks to go see the movie?

While Robin Williams was at times hysterical in his role in Good Morning, Vietnam, the film's tone is as much a drama as a comedy.  The studio made the decision to sell the comedy, and that's the impression you would get of the movie if you watched the trailer (below).  The perception of the film as an irreverent, laugh riot was very deliberately crafted.

I shared a large office with a couple of other guys - a copywriter and two artists - and our office was right next to the office where they developed all the trailers.  There were numerous versions of the Good Morning, Vietnam trailers that we heard played loudly over and over again from the other side of the office wall.  You couldn't walk through the hallways without hearing Williams' frenetic voice coming from one of the offices.

From all of Williams' comedic riffs in the trailer, somehow, the line that stuck for us was "Big dogs - landing on my face!"  It seemed to be in every variation of the trailer that we heard.  It was fun to say then and it's still fun to say today.  We would say it constantly around the office.  Even when I hear it today, I am immediately transported back to that office.

As I mentioned earlier, this was a difficult picture to market and the final poster didn't coalesce until the very last minute.  The studio was so sure of the inability of Robin Williams to draw movie goers, that they actually did an initial print run of thousands of movie posters WITHOUT Robin Williams in it.  It was just a picture of an old microphone and the logo from the film.  I thought it was terrible, and having seen the film and how good Williams was in it, I was completely baffled why they weren't pushing his likeness in the ad campaign.  I was just the new guy.  What in the hell did I know?  Plenty, as it turned out.

A few weeks before the film was set to open on just a few screens between Christmas and New Year's in L.A. and New York - a sign the studio didn't really have much faith in the picture or a firm grip on how to market it - the comments and scores started coming back from the preview screenings.  Audiences liked the movie and they LOVED Robin Williams in it.

Williams was unavailable at this late juncture to do another new photo shoot to get a picture of him for the poster.  We were sent scrambling to look at all the publicity photos that had been shot of him on location in Thailand and a long forgotten photo shoot done months ago in Los Angeles.  They poured through hundreds of pictures and finally chose the one that made its way to the final lobby poster (pictured on the left).  Like was so often the case, it was shot early in the process, discarded, and then brought back in at the last minute.


Pouring through the hundreds of pictures of Williams in my boss' office, what amused us both was to discover that in all the pictures Williams wore a small Mickey Mouse ring on his pinkie finger.  We had no idea if he put it on just for the photo shoot or if he always wore it - I still look for the Mickey Mouse ring if he's making an appearance on TV or there's a picture of him in a magazine - and I've seen him wear it many times.  If you look closely in the picture on the poster, you can see the ring - turned around so Mickey isn't visible - on the pinkie finger of Williams' right hand.  His little inside joke.

I watched the film last night for the first time in years.  It's not a landmark film, but I think it holds up well.  It's amazing the look Levinson was able to get on such a low budget.  Every dollar is up on the screen.  It's very well edited.  Williams is incredible in the first act and the film gets a bit dark and maybe slows down towards the end, but it's a terrific performance.  It also has a stellar supporting cast including Forest Whitaker, J.T. Walsh, Robert Wuhl and the late, great Bruno Kirby.  Levinson, as in virtually all his films, has a great touch for what songs to use to highlight - and in the case of Louis Armstrong's version of What a Wonderful World - run counterpoint to what's happening on the screen.

Good Morning, Vietnam opened on only four screens in December, 1987 and went on to earn over $120 million in domestic box office - a huge smash.  A home run.  The film made so much money on such a low budget that even the studio's notoriously creative accountants probably had a difficult time hiding all the money.

Robin Williams earned his first Academy Award nomination for his performance.

As I watched it last night, I couldn't help thinking if a major studio would have the guts to make this film today?  Not a chance.  Everyone in Hollywood today - even Disney - is so obsessed in trying to make a home run picture, or series of pictures, like Iron Man, Twilight or Harry Potter that they would be wasting their time on a small, personal movie like that.  The stakes are now too high to waste your time with "doubles."

"Big dogs!  Big dogs landing on my face!"  It's still fun to say.