A Vintage Approach to Filmmaking : Script Gets Star Treatment in Old-Fashioned Romance Caper

Inside a 17th-Century room, now used as an administrative headquarters by a water company, a movie is being made. There are a cast and crew, a director, a couple of dozen extras in evening dress, and at the center of what purports to be an auction room, an enormous bottle of wine on which the film’s story hinges. Most of these people have just returned from filming in the South of France; in a few days the movie will take them to Scotland.

Why should all this be so?

Because William Goldman wanted it that way.

Goldman, the acclaimed veteran screenwriter with a penchant for writing books that expose the uglier side of the film business, is the man who wrote the movie being shot here--”A Very Good Year,” an $18-million romantic adventure comedy for Castle Rock Productions, the people behind “Misery” and “When Harry Met Sally. . . .” The film will be released in April by Columbia Pictures.

“I wanted to write the kind of movie they don’t write so much any more,” Goldman said. “And I wanted to put it in the most romantic places I knew. I love the Scottish Highlands, I love the French Riviera and I love London. Oh yeah, and I love red wine too. So here we are.”

He has concocted a caper in which a wine-tasting session in London leads to a hunt for $1 million worth of wine--a nebuchadnezzar (that’s 20 quarts) of vintage 1811 claret. There’s romance, a murder and the kind of hair-raising adventures that keep stunt men in business.

The romantic lead roles went to two actors hovering on the brink of real breakthroughs--Timothy Daly, star of the NBC Thursday-night sitcom “Wings” and a member of the ensemble cast of the movie “Diner,” and Penelope Ann Miller, who has enjoyed meaty supporting roles in “Other People’s Money,” “Kindergarten Cop” and “The Freshman.” Louis Jourdan, fondly remembered from “Gigi,” and Art Malik of “Jewel in the Crown” co-star. Directing “A Very Good Year” is Peter Yates, who last worked with Goldman on 1972’s “The Hot Rock,” which starred Robert Redford.

But “A Very Good Year” is by no means a new script from Goldman, writer of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “All the President’s Men,” “Marathon Man,” “The Princess Bride” and last year’s “Misery.” He originally wrote it for producer Joseph E. Levine. When Levine died, it passed to his widow, Rosalie.

“Bill and I live across the street from each other in New York City,” said Yates, “and we’re friends. He was staying at our house in France and was talking about resurrecting this script he’d written for Joe Levine.”

Castle Rock, with whom Goldman had worked on “Misery,” bought the script from the Levine estate at his suggestion, and ordered rewrites. Then Goldman suggested Yates as director.

“They’re amazingly script-oriented,” said Goldman of the Castle Rock top brass. “You sit with them--that is, Rob Reiner, Andy Scheinman, Marty Shafer--all three of them friends for 15 years. And they go over the (script), line by line, comma by comma. It’s amazing to me that they’d be willing to do that. They all have a writer’s mind, it’s remarkable. Their theory is that they get the script right first, then shoot it.”

Goldman has spent plenty of time on the set of “A Very Good Year,” more time than he has spent combined on all the other movies he has written. This seems strange for a man who throughout his trenchant book on Hollywood, “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” observed that writers tend to be treated like lepers once shooting starts.

“The locations played a great part in my being here,” Goldman said over lunch in the commissary at Pinewood Studios, a few weeks before the auction-room scene. But it’s for little things--something will happen in the staging that will obviate a line. It’s little stuff, but Peter (Yates) likes having a writer around.”

“That’s true,” Yates said later. “I had Steve Tesich and Ronald Harwood on set when we did ‘Breaking Away’ and ‘The Dresser.’ I use writers as a (sounding) board, to try ideas out on them. I find they’re much more useful than having producers around.”

It’s not only through teaming up with Yates again that “A Very Good Year” is a nostalgic experience for Goldman; the first film he worked on, 1966’s “Masquerade,” was also shot at Pinewood. “That was a script I doctored,” he said, “and I sat at that table over there by the window for lunch with (director) Basil Dearden and Jack Hawkins. I can still hear Hawkins’ fabulous voice and (recall) his constant smoking. This was a busy lot then. Now we’re the only people here.”

Tim Daly fidgets uncomfortably under the lights of the auction room set. The Oak Room, as it is called, is a preserved 17th-Century room; the rest of the water authority’s building has been constructed around it. The room features a ceiling portrait of William of Orange by British court painter Henry Cooke. Coats of arms celebrate the English king’s signing the treaty of Ryswick with Louis XIV of France, ending the War of the League of Augsburg in 1697.

It’s magnificent, but Daly is not in the mood to appreciate it. “I feel so uncomfortable in this tuxedo,” he says with a groan.

“It’s a great role,” he says of his hyperactive character, who is sent to retrieve the bottle of wine for its owner. “This movie has an old-fashioned feel to it--in the best possible sense. It’s almost swashbuckling. My character is the kind of guy I’ve been dying to play for a long time. He’s got a lot of strings--he’s tough, resourceful, funny, irreverent, he has a skewed view of things and a few emotional walls that he keeps up.”

The film has given Daly the chance to engage in a lot of “boy stuff”--action scenes including riding a motorcycle, swimming and climbing sheer mountain faces. “It all brings me back to the reason I went into this business in the first place. It’s like playing make-believe when you’re a kid in the back yard.”

Daly opted to do a lot of his own stunts--more than Yates had planned for him. “They stopped me from doing some, because the insurance guys get all nervous,” Daly says. “When I got the role, I said to Peter, ‘You didn’t even ask me if I could ride a motorcycle or anything,’ and he said, ‘What would have been the point? You’d have said “yes” whether you could or not.’ And I guess he was right.”

Acting permeates Daly’s life. His father, James, was an actor and his sister, Tyne, is a TV and Broadway star. So is his wife, Amy Van Nostrand. She and their two children were with Daly in London, but when Amy landed a role in a movie she flew back to the United States with the couple’s young daughter.

“For me it was a mixed introduction to the business,” says Daly of being an acting brat. “I always knew it was something people did for a living. Actors weren’t mythological, just ordinary schmoes working for a living, who came over to my folks’ house for dinner. I also got a sense of what kind of work it was. It took tremendous commitment and the rejection was staggering.”

He’s content on “Wings”: “Doing a half-hour show is the ultimate day job for an actor. It means you can go home at night, see your wife and kids.”

But features hold a huge attraction for him: “It’s the right time for me to start getting into them. I was a little too old (he’s now 35) to ride the crest of that (Brat Pack) thing. That started to happen after ‘Diner.’

“But now I’m starting to look like a man, not a boy. I never thought my career would take hold until I was in my 30s, anyway. It takes 10 years to learn to act at all, and now I’ve started to know what I’m doing. And at my age I still have all the great roles in front of me.”

This is Yates’ 20th film in 30 years, and his credits include such films as “Bullitt” with Steve McQueen and “For Pete’s Sake” with Barbra Streisand.

“I’ve never really had trouble with star egos,” he says, choosing his words with care. “I seem to get them before they develop their egos, or something. McQueen and Streisand were fine.”

But he approves of Castle Rock’s tendency not to pay big money for star vehicles: “The movie’s the star, that’s the ideal. Budgets and prices are so ridiculous nowadays. Castle Rock is really intelligent in their approach--they make sure their average budget is about $20 million, they hone their scripts to an enormous degree, they don’t spend money on big stars. And they’re successful. This must be saying something to the studios.”

For Penelope Ann Miller, “A Very Good Year” is the latest in a series of gradually more prominent roles. Now for the first time she, along with Daly, is carrying a picture.

“Every movie has been a steppingstone for the next,” she says, sipping on a bottle of water. “I haven’t been limited, pigeonholed or stereotyped, and I’ve been given an opportunity of showing my range. Now I’ve arrived at this point, I can’t worry too much. I don’t get overly concerned. I mean, if the picture’s a success, great, but if you can’t enjoy the experience, what’s the point, really?”

Like Daly, she comes from industry stock, being the daughter of actor-producer Mark Miller. “Tim and I have a nice rapport,” she says. “We banter a lot. We work similarly, and that’s only going to enhance the chemistry of the film. It reminds me of those old William Powell and Myrna Loy movies, the way those two worked together.”

Miller claims not be hung up on the goal of stardom, but adds: “The more power you have, the more you can do those roles and productions you want. They think of you as marketable box office, so therefore you have power.” She cited Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as two actresses “who have another life outside of work and who seem to have a handle on things.”