Director James L. Brooks looks back at ‘Terms of Endearment’ as film turns 40
Before settling into Houston to shoot “Terms of Endearment,” his first feature film, James L. Brooks stopped by the Washington, D.C., bookstore owned by the story’s author Larry McMurtry, who promptly ejected Brooks from the store.
“He said, ‘I did my book; you go do your movie,’” Brooks says. “It felt bad, but it was freeing. … It was the best thing he could’ve said to me.” With the Texas novelist’s curmudgeonly blessing, Brooks headed to Houston to scout locations and talk to locals, looking for a way to tell his own version of “Terms of Endearment.”
Brooks’ film proved successful by any measure. The film opened in a few theaters 40 years ago and then expanded in December. Its box office was $108 million, roughly tripling when adjusted for inflation. The film won Academy Awards for best picture, director and adapted screenplay, as well as acting awards for Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson.
This month, a new ultra-highdefinition Blu-ray version of “Terms of Endearment” was released to mark the film’s 40th anniversary. Looking back, Brooks credits both good fortune and good instincts for the success of “Terms.” Brooks, a New York native, knew he didn’t want to extract the story from Houston and place it elsewhere.
“The book was glorious about Houston,” he says. “There’s a strange thing when I went there. There was an atmosphere about Houston. You feel it. You feel the humidity in a certain way.
“It informed the picture enormously just being there and doing it there.”
Houston as a main character
McMurtry’s 1975 novel focused on Aurora Greenway, a Houston woman navigating life and a complicated relationship with her daughter after the death of her spouse.
Brooks — at that point known for TV comedy, including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — sussed out further the humor McMurtry seeded in the book. He also further developed some of the characters, particularly Aurora’s daughter, Emma. He invented another character completely: astronaut Garrett Breedlove.
Though his cast members didn’t always get along, Brooks found a trio of actors to play the three: Shirley MacLaine as Aurora, Debra Winger as Emma and Jack Nicholson as Garrett.
“There’s always an angel on your shoulder that is the casting of your picture,” Brooks says. “And that angel was just wrapped around me for that one.”
Famed filmmaker Alan J. Pakula handed Brooks the project. Brooks co-wrote and co-produced Pakula’s 1979 film “Starting Over.” Pakula had another film in development and passed McMurtry’s book to Brooks.
At that point, McMurtry’s novel was around 6 years old. A native of Archer City, McMurtry wrote his early novels about the people and places observed during his youth in and around the Panhandle. He studied at Rice University in 1960 and returned to teach between 1963 and 1969. This period informed a series of novels set in Houston. “Terms of Endearment,” published in 1975, was the third.
Tracy Daugherty, author of the just-published “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” says that some of McMurtry’s early readership fell away when he published his Houston novels.
“Those readers were looking for more stories about the Old West and its passing,” he says. “His city novels are a little ironic and cynical and tougher-edged in a way. I think those Houston novels are his best work.”
The heart of the matter
Brooks had an immediate emotional response to McMurtry’s “Terms.”
“At that point — this is not true anymore — I’d only cried once in my life,” he says. “Once it reached me like that, it was unusual for me. I said, ‘Gee, there’s a biological reaction I can’t question.’”
Daugherty says two women were widely believed to be the inspiration for Aurora: Grace David, a Houston bookshop owner and socialite; and Polly Platt, a writer, producer and production designer who worked on Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation of McMurtry’s book “The Last Picture Show.”
“Polly didn’t really resemble Aurora,” Daugherty says. “But she had a volatile relationship with her daughter. At one point, Polly said Emma and Aurora were based on the two of them.”
Brooks knew the emotional content of the book would resonate no matter the alterations he made to the story. He also wanted to lean into the humor. “I needed to make it a comedy,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to explore the pain and the wisdom in that book. I just wanted it to live as a comedy.”
Which brought him to McMurtry’s bookstore. Though McMurtry sent Brooks away initially, Brooks says he had regular conversations with the author about the story.
Biographer Daugherty notes that McMurtry, unlike many authors, enjoyed his long relationship with Hollywood. McMurtry’s first novel, “Horseman, Pass By,” was adapted into the Paul Newman vehicle “Hud.” He is the only person to have a story adapted into an Oscar-winning screenplay (Brooks for “Terms”) while also winning an Oscar himself for adapting a story into a screenplay. McMurtry and Diana Ossana won an Academy Award in 2005 for their take on E. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
“He loved Hollywood,” Daugherty says. “At one point, he told an agent that Hollywood money didn’t feel like real money to him. He loved spending it. He’d sell rights to whatever filmmakers were interested. And he felt what they did with it was not his business.”
With the book as his introduction, Brooks also did his own homework visiting Houston.
“The research was so important,” he says. “I remember the most important part: There was a woman I was interviewing. A widow with her children out of the house. It was about 4 o’clock, and you could tell she was waiting for her drink at 5. I felt the loneliness. It was nothing she said. But somehow, empathetically, I think in that moment we were both quiet for a long time. I think I was getting part of it. And just that minute of empathy was so important to the picture.”
His production team found Aurora’s home at 3060 Locke Lane in River Oaks, with a suitable house next door for Garrett, the retired astronaut Brooks created as a love interest.
The elevated garage apartment on Heights Boulevard, where Emma lived with her husband and child, is no longer standing. When Emma and her family left for Nebraska, the narrative split between Houston and the Midwest. But Houston still shows up after Emma’s departure. Brennan’s served as the setting for a lunch scene with Aurora and Garrett. The couple also drives onto East Beach via Boddeker Road in Galveston.
Reel representation
In 1983, the year “Terms of Endearment” was released, the only film among the Top 25 at the box office directed by a woman was Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl.” Like “Terms,” Streisand’s film kept company with “Scarface,” a Dirty Harry film, a “Porky’s” movie and two James Bond movies, one of which was “Octopussy.”
Times have changed. And times haven’t. The number of women who directed Top 25 box office films this year doubled from 1983. And one of those was Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which has done more than $1 billion worldwide. But in 2021, male characters outnumbered female ones on the silver screen 2 to 1 in 2021, according to a report from San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Women filled only 34% of all speaking roles.
For much of its 40 years, “Terms of Endearment” was framed with vague (and not-sovague) pejoratives as a protochick flick. Some film critics bristled at the sentimentality of the story. Others, like Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, offered praise. The former pointed out its deft handling of humor and sadness. The latter called it “one of the few American movies of the last few years to tell a genuinely epic story of a woman.”
Brooks bristles at the way the film has been categorized.
“My whole thing, that’s the experience looking at the movie now sitting in the room with the family,” he says. “In the theater, it played as a comedy, and that was the most important thing to me. It was about clocking laughs, making sure they happened where we needed them. Or else it was going to be a cancer picture. And cancer, at the time, was a word that was so amazingly frightening.
“I’m pleased with where it lives emotionally now. But in a room full of people, it gets its laughs.”
Though McMurtry’s biggest success would be “Lonesome Dove,” he did center several of his novels on women.
When McMurtry died in 2021, Houston novelist Chris Cander told the Houston Chronicle, “He wrote deeply fleshed out characters, especially women. I don’t know many male writers that got women so right as he did consistently,” she said.
Daugherty says McMurtry was “just a great listener.”
“That was an attraction to him for a lot of women who would tell him their stories. Growing up, all he heard were men’s voices, those were the great storytellers. His uncles telling stories, while the women didn’t speak up very much. So much of his career was about giving the women in his life a voice. He took that seriously.”