Milwaukee filmmaker explores life of TV’s Garry Marshall
Making a documentary about TV and movie legend Garry Marshall may have been one of the sunniest projects of John Scheinfeld’s busy career.
“I did not find one person, in the year I worked on this project, who had a (negative) thing to say about him,” said Scheinfeld, the Fox Point native who’s made about 40 movies, nearly all of them biographical documentaries.
Scheinfeld’s latest project, “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall,” debuts at 7 p.m. Tuesday on ABC, locally on WISN-TV (Channel 12).
The title is an homage to Marshall’s best-known creation, the Milwaukeeset sitcom “Happy Days.” But it’s also a tribute to Marshall’s joyful approach to show business — and the stories he told on the big and small screen.
“Garry doesn’t dark,” Rob Lowe says in the documentary. Lowe got his first break when Marshall cast him in a pilot for a sitcom that never made it to air.
He’s not the only performer whose career got a jump-start from Marshall. Over a half-century of work in movies in television, Marshall — who died in 2016 at age 81, of complications of pneumonia after having a stroke — helped launch a surprising number of stars, from Henry Winkler (Fonzie on “Happy Days”) and Michael McKean (Lenny on “Laverne & Shirley) to Julia Roberts (”Pretty Woman”) and Anne Hathaway (”The Princess Diaries”) — all of whom share stories about their mentor in “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall.”
In all, the two-hour documentary includes anecdotes, memories and testimonials from 29 stars. The only people who said no, Scheinfeld said, couldn’t fit it into their schedules.
“Old friends, new friends — they were all crazy about Garry,” McKean says in the movie. “They would do anything he wanted.”
A coincidental Milwaukee connection
Scheinfeld got involved in the project through Marshall’s family, who were looking at having a documentary made about his life and work. Some of the biggest challenges for any documentary — funding and distribution — weren’t challenges after all: ABC came on board early, Scheinfeld said, since “Garry’s TV shows helped propel ABC to the top” in the 1970s, and many of Marshall’s hit movies were made for the network’s corporate parent, Disney.
About a quarter of “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall” is taken up with his involvement in “Happy Days” and its two spin-off hits, “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & Mindy.” For Scheinfeld, the Milwaukee connection to those shows was a happy coincidence.
When he was growing up in Fox Point, “I always thought it was really cool that somebody had set a TV show in my hometown,” Scheinfeld said. Like Thomas L. Miller — one of the original producers of “Happy Days,” who died last month at age 79 —Scheinfeld is a Nicolet High School grad; Miller’s memories of Milwaukee gave the sitcom its Milwaukee accent.
Marshall’s accent, heard throughout the documentary thanks to narration borrowed from the audiobook edition of his memoir, is from the Bronx.
But, Scheinfeld said, “I think he had a Midwest sensibility to him,” something Marshall tapped to keep the stories he told onscreen grounded.
From John Lennon to Garry Marshall
Scheinfeld doesn’t always get to focus on such upbeat characters. Many of his best-known documentaries are about complicated, often difficult performers, as in “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” “Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary” and “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?)”
But there is a common denominator, he said.
“As a filmmaker … I pick a project because it inspires me,” Scheinfeld said.
And Marshall’s dogged efforts to make people laugh, for more than half a century, were compelling material.
“I don’t try to bend a subject to my style. I try to capture the spirit of my subject,” Scheinfeld said. For this project, he added, “it’s to capture the humor, the heart and humanity” of Marshall.
One of the things you take away from “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall” is just the huge number of hits he had, both in TV and the movies. The documentary doesn’t take a “andthen-he-made …” approach, Scheinfeld said, because there was just too much material.
But there are tastes of Marshall’s impressive reach, from a look at his early years writing for “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to mentoring the young Chris Pine on “The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement,” 40 years later.
Throughout, “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall” celebrates the good vibes of Marshall’s work, suggesting his approach — he often compared what he did to recess — is especially welcome in a time when we all feel uncertain about, well, everything.
“I think, more than ever, Garry’s work is important,” Hector Elizondo, who appeared in 18 of Marshall’s movies, says in the documentary. “It gives you hope. It gives you inspiration. It gives you ice cream, a happy ending, juggling and a parade. What do you want? C’mon!”
While the documentary was a year in the making, Scheinfeld acknowledged that Marshall’s voice seems timely now, “having dealt with all the darkness and division … and now with all the attendant uncertainty.”
That could be why, when “The Happy Days of Garry Marshall” airs Tuesday night, it’ll be the first entertainment documentary to air in prime time on ABC in 20 years, Scheinfeld said.
Scheinfeld, who is living in lockdown in California, has two more documentaries that were supposed to be in theaters but got caught up in the shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic: “Herb Alpert Is … ,” on the music industry legend: and “Sergio Mendes in the Key of Joy,” about the Brazilian pop performer and bandleader.
He’s eager to get those movies into theaters, and to get back to other signs of normal life. Although he’s lived in California for decades, he hangs onto his Wisconsin roots.
During football season, he gets together with other Wisconsin expats in L.A., including “Airplane!” filmmakers Jerry and David Zucker, to watch Packers games. And Scheinfeld thinks back to growing up in Milwaukee, seeing his first movie at the old Fox-Bay Theatre (a revival of “Lawrence of Arabia”), and seems determined to stay connected.
“I’m always, at some level, Johnny from Milwaukee,” he said.