Neil Simon’s Suite Deal

With a film crew crouched round her, Julia Louis-Dreyfus sits alone at a table in a hotel bar. As cameras roll, she starts fishing an olive from her drink with a cocktail stick. Behind her, through a window, traffic hurtles down Park Lane, on the eastern edge of Hyde Park.

At last she extricates the olive, but drops it on the carpeted floor. Horrified, she searches frantically for it beneath the table. “Aaaaaaand cut,” director Jay Sandrich says as everyone chuckles at Louis-Dreyfus’ antics.

This will be a scene in Neil Simon’s “London Suite,” a two-hour TV film from NBC comprising four separate but intercut stories--in the vein of Simon’s stage play “Plaza Suite” and his film “California Suite.” They all take place in a 24-hour period in various suites in a London hotel. The film will air during this year’s November ratings sweeps, and features several of the network’s biggest series stars: Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards from “Seinfeld,” Kelsey Grammer from “Frasier” and Jonathan Silverman of “The Single Guy.”

The Louis-Dreyfus scene may be a tiny piece of physical comedy, but there’s a significant element in it. It’s not the olive, nor the cocktail stick. It’s the cars behind her, which are real traffic, not stock footage.

And this bar isn’t some replica of a London watering hole, realized by a cunning set designer. It really is a hotel bar: the Terrace Room of the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. With 453 bedrooms and 142 apartments, the Grosvenor House is one of the biggest hotels in London.

For an entire month, the cast and crew of “London Suite” have commandeered parts of the Grosvenor House to shoot the film, as well as going out into London to shoot exteriors. Viewers can expect to see scenes shot at genuine locations including Horse Guards Parade, Heathrow Airport and Bond Street (arguably London’s upscale shopping mecca).

“I like the smell of real things,” said “London Suite” producer Robert Halmi Sr. “This is a real hotel. People are walking through the lobby. It feels unique. Even the best designers can’t make a sound stage more real. If there’s a scene with a London cabdriver, you can’t fake a character like that. It’s best to get the real London, so I always wanted to shoot here.”

Halmi, the producer who has helped bring prestigious, big-budget fare such as “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Gypsy” to network TV, approached NBC with the idea that Simon should adapt his stage play “London Suite” for television, with NBC series stars in key roles.

“It was an easy sale,” said the Hungarian-born Halmi, who does not hide behind false modesty. “My reputation in the business is pretty solid, and when I suggest something, people are sometimes scared to turn it down. Things like ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ are event television, not run-of-the-mill movies of the week. I don’t do those. So people pay attention to me. And in this case, Neil Simon and this cast created an attractive package.”

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Well--yes and no. It’s certainly true that Halmi has a splendid track record for creating television events that a large proportion of Nielsen families want to see. It’s equally true that no American playwright in recent years can touch Simon’s ability for writing commercial and critical hits; he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his play “Lost in Yonkers.”

Yet there is some risk involved. Simon has had a series of setbacks lately; his “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” and the musical version of his play “The Goodbye Girl” failed to take Broadway by storm. “London Suite” itself was the subject of controversy last year when Simon opted to open it off-Broadway; when it did open, critics were less than enthralled and it ran for only six months. At the time, Simon called it “a questionable play.”

It’s also the case that Simon’s name does not necessarily strike a chord with a mass TV audience. His TV adaptation of his play “Jake’s Women,” starring Alan Alda on CBS, was warmly received by reviewers, but failed to deliver ratings gold last March. The same network has delayed the transmission of another adapted Simon play, “The Sunshine Boys,” with Woody Allen and Peter Falk, which is now scheduled to air this fall.

“Yeah, I know,” Halmi said. “It’s unique to take a play which didn’t work on stage and do it different for TV.”

The phrase “do it different” is understatement. Simon, who was on the set here for all but two days of the monthlong shoot, actually ditched one of the four stories that was in the stage version of “London Suite” and wrote another for the TV film, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in mind.

“We did the play in Seattle and it was received well,” Simon recalled. “But in New York, one of the four pieces didn’t work so well. It was about a businessman who absconds with a writer-client’s money.

“They didn’t laugh at it off-Broadway and, while some of the other pieces went well, what happened was I was rewriting under pressure. We had a week of previews, so I didn’t have time to write another story.

“With NBC, they said we could have Kelsey, Julia and Michael, so I said, ‘Sure.’ The stage play turned out to be a tryout for what this movie will be. So I got rid of one of the stories and wrote Julia something new.”

Louis-Dreyfus said that when she was first approached about the part, Simon had written no material for her to peruse. “We spoke by phone and he told me where he wanted to go with the character,” she recalled. “He couldn’t show me any pages, but I’m such a fan of his, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ I mean, Neil Simon writing for me? Was I flattered? I should say so.”

“I think Julia appreciated the stretch,” Simon said, “but I think she’s terribly funny. I’m a ‘Seinfeld’ fan. I must have seen 100 episodes. That she agreed without reading it not only gives me a sense of wanting to do my best for her, but a responsibility to repay her for her confidence in me.”

In the story Simon has written, Louis-Dreyfus plays Debra, a newlywed who arrives at Heathrow with her husband, Paul (Silverman). They have been arguing on the transatlantic flight, and at the airport Debra’s luggage disappears. And then so does Paul. So Debra checks into the hotel, convinced her husband has left her.

In the other stories, Richards and Julie Hagerty play American tennis fans Mark and Annie, in London to see Wimbledon; first they lose their tickets, then Mark’s back goes out so badly he can only writhe on the floor in agony. Madeline Kahn plays a middle-aged woman captivated by an eccentric Scotsman (Richard Mulligan) who loves driving fast in his Aston Martin DB7 convertible.

Patricia Clarkson (“Murder One”) plays a wealthy TV star, in London to promote her TV show; Grammer, her ex-husband, flies in from Greece to beg her for money. She thinks he has never stopped loving her; in fact, he wants money not for himself but for his male lover.

If film fans think this last story sounds familiar, they’re right: Two similar people appeared in Simon’s film “California Suite,” played by Maggie Smith (who won an Oscar for her work) and Michael Caine.

“They’re the same characters, but when it came to doing it for TV, NBC didn’t want to go with older people,” Simon said. “It’s fine. Remember, ‘California Suite’ was 20 years ago, and 90% of the TV audience won’t have seen it. I’m very pleased with this story. Kelsey’s a fine actor, and he did a lot of serious stage work in his earlier days. He liked the idea of doing what he did before ‘Cheers,’ I think.”

In fact, most of the cast seemed to enjoy themselves greatly; they came in to London for about a week each, worked only with the other actors in their particular story, and stayed at the Grosvenor House.

“It was certainly nice to push an elevator button to get to work,” joked Silverman. “But you can’t blame the freeway traffic if you’re late.”

Silverman, like other members of the cast, went off to relax at Halmi’s house in southern Spain after completing his work: “Quite a good perk of the job, wouldn’t you say?” he said, deadpan.

He added that the whole cast only got together once in Los Angeles--for a “table reading” of “London Suite” in January.

“The whole experience has been excellent,” he said. “This is my sixth association with Neil. I was in three of his plays and two movies. But this is the first time I’m not playing someone who’s basically Neil, or a member of his family.”

Silverman described the new story Simon wrote for the film as “very polished. It was nice for Julia and me knowing we were totally creating these characters, that they hadn’t been done before.”

Louis-Dreyfus agreed: “It’s a meaty part. I’m loving it. It’s comedic but different from ‘Seinfeld.’ Debra’s sweeter and more grounded than Elaine. I love comedy. I’d like to do other things, and I can do other things, but it’s very gratifying to make people laugh.”

This sense of an enjoyable experience is even shared by the Grosvenor House staff, whose lives have been turned upside down by the demands of the film crew. The “London Suite” personnel have been lunching in the staff canteen, alongside waiters and receptionists; the Grosvenor House even closed its main entrance for a day to allow filming of a scene where Mulligan whisks Kahn off in his racy sports car.

“It’s been a lot of fun, if rather exhausting,” said Howard Hartley, the hotel’s apartments manager. “But well worth it. I know the Plaza Hotel in New York still gets requests from visitors to stay in the Plaza Suite, which they named after Neil Simon’s play. So I shall be pressing for one of the apartments here to be renamed the London Suite.”

That would suit Simon, who admits he enjoys writing for TV; he has a deal with Halmi to adapt more of his plays for American networks, and Halmi, who produced “Jake’s Women” and “The Sunshine Boys,” says he has “maybe six more” Simon works to adapt after “London Suite.”

“In the first place, it feels no different from writing a film,” Simon noted. “But this may be seen by 25 million people, and I like the thought of getting a bigger viewing audience for some of my work.”

By a stroke of fortune, Simon is enjoying a certain vogue in London currently. His “Chapter Two,” with Tom Conti and Sharon Gless, is a West End success, while “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” with Gene Wilder in the lead, opens this fall. Plans are also afoot for a version of “The Goodbye Girl” to be reworked as a play with music rather than the musical with big production numbers that failed to work on Broadway.

If “London Suite” fails, it will not be the fault of Halmi, who coaxed a generous license fee from NBC and made up the deficit himself, while retaining international rights. “The average license fee to a two-hour movie on TV these days is $2.8 million,” he said. “You might get $3 million if you’re doing something really special. I won’t tell you the amount on this one, but I can say the five lead actors here got that much.”

Halmi has no doubt “London Suite,” which Simon has written in styles ranging from slapstick to sophisticated verbal wit, will succeed. “When it happens,” he said, “I can see the tail might wag the dog. I might decide to put it back on stage here in London.”