Ron Howard: The Gratifying Growth of a Director : Movies: With the success of ‘Parenthood,’ the former child star says he’s learned that a film must have ‘something to say’ to be entertaining.

One of the rewards of keeping an eye on Hollywood over a period of years is the chance to watch careers begin and flower, especially when the undertakings grow riskier and the achievements more impressive. You have to bite your tongue to keep from saying too often, “It seems like only yesterday.”

But it was not much more than the day before yesterday that the Jodie Foster of “The Accused” was a Disney moppet in “Napoleon and Samantha,” for example, and Ron Howard a 9-year-old in Vincente Minnelli’s “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” or Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show” and then Richie on “Happy Days.”

More recently, it has been possible to watch Howard’s growth as a director, from his first feature, “Grand Theft Auto,” a box-office winner for Roger Corman’s company. It was followed by “Splash” and “Cocoon,” both substantial hits, and “Willow,” done with producer George Lucas, which did not do well but was a quite-amazing technical and logistical feat.

Now Howard, who will be (only) 36 in March, has directed what appears to be his largest success, “Parenthood,” which at a recent count had grossed close to $100 million. Howard, who lives in Connecticut with his wife, Cheryl, and their four children, was in Hollywood a few days ago on a regular visit to the Century City offices of Imagine Films, the production company he runs with partner Brian Grazer.

He talked about the philosophical road that led to directing and “Parenthood.” He was born in Oklahoma to acting parents Rance and Jean Howard (his father recently appeared in an American Express commercial) and grew up in a curiously mixed atmosphere of show biz and down-home Americana.

Howard did his first stage walk-on in a Baltimore production of “The Seven-Year Itch” when he was just 2 and by his teens was an established star. But, he says, the family lived in Burbank, where his pals’ parents worked for Lockheed or the Sheriff’s Department and he went to Burroughs High.

He worked on the school paper but he wasn’t one of the gang. “The kids couldn’t make up their minds whether it was cooler to hang out with me or to ignore me.” The ignorers appear to have prevailed and it left Howard, he says, with a shyness that has not gone away. There is indeed less of a show-business aura around him than most of the waiters in Hollywood exude.

It didn’t take him long to discover film making. Still in his teens, he took a second prize nationally in an Eastman Kodak competition that involved shooting a roll of Super-8 film and sending it undeveloped to the company. It was planning and editing in the camera with a vengeance. He made a thriller, “Deed of Derring Do,” co-starring with his brother Clint, now also an actor. “There were 37 cuts,” he remembers with some pride.

He was accepted at the USC Film School and talked his way into advanced classes in editing and production. “American Graffiti” and other gigs took him away before he finished but, Howard says, “Going to film school opened my mind to another level of thinking about movies. Nobody around the Griffith show spent a lot of time talking about metaphors and symbols.”

(Years later, when Howard, George Lucas and writer Bob Dolman told the plot of “Willow” to the late philosopher Joseph Campbell, Howard says, “Campbell identified all the themes and symbols.”)

Like other actors-turned-directors, Howard learned a lot from the men he worked for. He remembers Minnelli’s patient attention to details, the time he spent looking through the camera, demanding a different-shaped watch for Howard’s wrist. He found the same meticulous attention to casting--both people and cars--when George Lucas made “Graffiti.” From Don Siegel on “The Shootist” there were lessons in “bold choices, for the camera and in staging.”

At the beginning, Howard discovered, “You tend to make your actors into puppets. It took a while to learn how little you have to say, and usually the less the better.”

He made as well the obvious discovery that you have to back up the story visually. “As an actor, I suppose I was late in coming to the idea that it’s more than shooting faces. You can use visuals to get laughs, and create emotions.”

One of the things that worried him about “Parenthood” was that “a lot of the time there was nothing between the actors and the audience except the camera. That was scary after all the special effects I’d dealt with in ‘Cocoon’ and ‘Willow.’ ”

Indeed, he and partner Grazer thought that “Parenthood” might well break even but was not likely to do a lot better than that. “We figured everybody might get their money back,” Howard says.

On the other hand, he had made still another discovery along the way: “A film isn’t even going to be entertaining if it doesn’t have something to say. People never want to be bored; they want to be captured, engaged. We just had to hope that the simple idea we were putting out there--that parenting is really tough--would hold up. We weren’t even going for nonstop comedy. There were great stretches of people just talking.”

“Parenthood” has been particularly pleasing to Howard because it was the first time he was dealing not with received material but with an idea that he and his regular writing partners, Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, had developed from scratch out of their own parenting experiences. Mandel and Ganz have nine children between them and Mandel’s wife was expecting triplets as the script was in process.

“I’d love to have called it ‘Great Expectations,’ ” Howard says, grinning, “because it’s about the expectations we all have, not only for our children but for ourselves as parents, as against the reality of experience. That pull between the expectations and the reality, you have to accept it and come to peace with it. And that other thing we were about was the corny notion that being a parent is good, hard but heroic work.”

It interests Howard that today’s parents have a harder time telling their kids what it is they do. “In the old days, the son followed his father on the farm. These days, your kids wonder what kind of work is talking on the telephone. One day I took home a working cassette of the film I was doing and showed it to the kids and my daughter said, ‘Ah, that’s what you do.’ ”

Howard’s theory about comedy is that “you have to earn the right to do something outlandish. If you get the audience to relate to the characters and the situation, then you can have someone fall off the roof and not be killed” (as Steve Martin does in “Parenthood”).

“There’s a balance between relatability and full-out high entertainment. I believe in trying to keep the balance.”

He’d like to work his way through all the genres, Howard say, staying with character-centered stories, dealing with material he can relate to himself, and stretching himself on fresh challenges.

“I’m not sure you ever feel you’ve got the process licked. But I like to learn as much as I can,” Howard says, looking as earnest as a kid from Mayberry.