Call Him Mr. Nice Guy

Howard Stern is a nice guy. This is what people who know him say, and this is what his new movie, “Private Parts,” based on his best-selling 1993 autobiography, may demonstrate.

However, it is the “awful” Howard Stern--the one who draws 18 million listeners to his nationally syndicated radio show (airing locally on KLSX-FM)--who is on display on a relatively cool summer day in New York’s Bryant Park. The makers of “Private Parts” are staging a scene in which Stern (playing himself) appears dressed like Louis XIV before 3,000 or so fans. Preceding him is his real-life radio gang: sidekick Robin Quivers, engineer Fred Norris, producer Gary “Baba Booey” Dell’Abate and writer Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling. Stern then makes an entrance, introducing his parents and his wife (all played by actors) and the rock group AC/DC (played by themselves). While the band performs, Stern’s wife, who is pregnant, tells him that her water has broken, so he rushes her through the crowd and into a waiting police car. End of scene.

They go through it many times, all for 30 seconds of film. Stern varies a speech that begins, “People of New York! We are gathered here in praise of--me!”

As the afternoon wears on, the tops come off. A number of women have “HOWARD” written across their chests. In fact, Stern has done some of the handwriting, prompting his stand-in to remark, “They never do that for the stand-in. They never go there.”

“There” is even encouraged by the director, Betty Thomas, who at one point yells over the public-address system, “Women of Howard! This is your last chance to be topless. I have a very long lens that will capture you.”

“Wow, yeah,” says Stern, grinning at a woman bouncing up and down on someone’s shoulders. “A masterpiece.”

The crowd is fairly well behaved, but at least one person does get out of hand. While the police and the production assistants move people aside to create a corridor for Stern and his wife, Alison, to rush through on their way to the police car, one of the extras steps into their path and exposes herself. A cop roughly pushes her aside.

“That wasn’t in the script,” says one of the crew members.

But it could have been.

*

A week later, the other Howard Stern is in attendance. He is seated in the first-class section of an L-1011 parked at Newark International Airport’s now-abandoned North Terminal. Seated beside him is supermodel Carol Alt, who plays a fellow passenger who can’t stand the sight of him. To win her over, Stern proceeds to tell her his life story. The film will flash back to his childhood and then move on to his college years, his marriage, his early days in radio, his struggles with ignorant program directors and his eventual triumph. We then return to the “present” (actually, 1992), where Alt delivers her verdict.

The scene is a simple framing device. It also represents, in a way, the journey taken by a number of people associated with this film, which is planned for a February release. Not all of them were Stern fans, so, as with Alt’s character, he had to win them over. Even those who like him had problems.

“I think there’s a level of perceived danger that comes to people in our profession in being associated with him,” says producer Ivan Reitman, who has shepherded the project and is a longtime Stern fan. “It’s certainly controversial for me. I did two ‘Beethoven’ movies, ‘Ghostbusters,’ ‘Dave’ and ‘Twins.’ They’re all perceived as broad-range entertainment, and this is going to be a pretty edgy picture. But I felt I had to stay fresh.”

“I’d never heard his show before I went out to meet him,” says Mary McCormack, who plays Alison (she’s also a regular on the TV series “Murder One”). “I’d heard things about him, and I was sort of like, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing, what have I done?’ And then I listened to the show--I remember it was right around Easter--and he was painting a woman’s breasts like Easter eggs in the studio.”

“I didn’t hate Howard, but I didn’t love Howard either,” says Thomas, who directed “The Brady Bunch Movie” but might be better known as Lucy Bates on “Hill Street Blues.” “I was always forced to listen to the show because my boyfriend was a huge fan. So many a morning I awoke to his show, and I didn’t want to.”

Both of these women have completely turned around about Stern.

“There’s such great loyalty amongst his people,” Thomas says. “I guess that was the one thing that shocked me. But then when you get to know him, you go, ‘Of course.’ You’re almost protective of him.” When her friends try to give her a hard time about working with Stern, she tells them, “You’re me a couple of months ago.”

For at least one person, however, this transformation from indifference, apprehension or downright hostility was even more extreme.

“When I started this picture, I wasn’t a Howard Stern fan,” says the film’s screenwriter, Len Blum, whose credits as writer or co-writer include “Beethoven’s 2nd,” “Stripes” and “Meatballs.” “I thought he was an opportunist, a demagogue who would vilify anyone who didn’t like him.”

When Reitman called Blum to see if he would be interested in taking on the movie, it obviously required some persuasion. Reitman told him to give Stern a chance. Read his book, meet with him, sit in on his radio show.

“When I was on the plane flying home, I realized I had laughed harder in two days than I had in the last 20 years,” Blum says. More to the point, he says, he came to realize that Stern’s humor was about saying the things that we all think but are too polite, repressed or timid to say. “I believe his deepest enemies are people who are afraid of the voice of the unconscious,” Blum says. “He’s changed my life. I don’t think before I speak as much as I used to.”

Although he wants the film to put these ideas across, Blum believes that his real mandate is to convey the real Howard Stern. In his view, the real Stern is sort of schizophrenic: “Very kind off the air, an extreme person on the air.” There are lots of examples of the latter. Of the former, he says, Stern “collects these odds and ends and makes them radio stars” and takes care of them.

*

To anyone who has listened to Stern’s radio show for any length of time, meeting him in person offers no great surprises. To Reitman’s way of thinking, this is the point of the movie--it will acquaint the rest of the public with the Howard Stern regular listeners already know. He’s smart, articulate, funny, alternately self-deprecating and proud of his success. Most of all, he’s honest, or appears to be, even about being dishonest.

“I’ve had moments where I win over people,” he says, seated between shots in the coach section of the L-1011. “I can tell when someone is disgusted by me or has an attitude. I’ve actually changed them around. But I’m consciously doing it, so that’s being a phony.”

When told that many of the people who know him think he’s a decent guy, he says: “No, I’m just a rational person who knows the difference between being on the radio and being in real life, and in real life it would serve no purpose to say exactly what I feel. If we did that, we’d all end up killing each other. I’ve analyzed this to death, and I’m positive that there are two or three complete personalities inside me. But I’m sure I feel most comfortable when I’m on the radio. It’s real life that I’m most uncomfortable.”

And yet it’s real life that this film purports to be about. Aside from feature film production values, that’s what differentiates “Private Parts” from his radio show (his TV show, on the E! Entertainment Television network, is an edited version of this), his videos (such as “Butt Bongo Fiesta,” featuring a series of spankings) and his New Year’s Eve pay-per-view special (a ribald beauty pageant).

“What’s interesting about this movie is that it dwells more on the business side of broadcasting and the relationship between me and my wife,” says Stern, 42. “What kind of woman marries a guy who is a total jerk? There’s got to be something charming or funny or witty about this guy, or this woman is a total masochist.”

Stern hastens to add that in addition to these tender scenes of domestic bliss (they live with their three daughters on Long Island) there will be material for his hard-core fans. In fact, there is more of that than the script originally called for.

“The only thing I fought for was to give more controversial pieces that were done in the broadcast studio,” Thomas says. “I thought it was very important not to soft-sell that whole aspect of Howard. And I caught myself the other day. Howard improvised something in a certain scene, and I caught myself going, ‘Howard, do you have to say that?’ He said, ‘What? I think it’s funny.’ A couple of people were cringing, especially women, but even a couple of guys. In a way I thought, ‘Well, if they’re cringing, it’s where we should be going.’ ”

*

Of course, none if this matters if Stern can’t convincingly play himself--in other words, if he can’t act. Some in the media thought Stern was afraid to put himself in front of the cameras, especially because it took so long to get “Private Parts” off the ground. Originally, Stern says, New Line came to him and asked him if he wanted to do a movie (this was before the book “Private Parts” was written). The idea was to develop a story around one of his noxious characters, Fartman, with another script in development. According to Stern, the deal unraveled over merchandising rights. After it fell through, he put his energies into writing “Private Parts,” which attracted the interest of Hollywood (in the form of Rysher Entertainment). The interest he was getting, however, was not to his liking. He passed on script after script.

“There was a threat once when I was not approving all these scripts, they said, ‘Well, you’re afraid to do this movie, so we’ll bring in Jeff Goldblum to play you,’ ” Stern says. “I said, ‘If you think anyone is going to come to the movie theater to see Jeff Goldblum play Howard Stern, I don’t think you’ve got much of a movie.’ ”

“The scripts I read were going at it the wrong way,” Reitman says. “They were creating a fantasy life for him that was silly and salacious, when I thought his real life was much more fascinating, frankly outrageous, and would make a much better film. Finally, both Rysher and he asked if I would step in as a producer and help develop a script.”

Even after Stern approved the Blum script, it went through another 24 drafts, with Blum obsessively trying to work in Stern’s improvisations and replicate his speech patterns. At this point, Stern wanted Reitman to direct the movie, but Reitman had other ideas. It turns out that the world’s most renowned misogynist (at least in the eyes of some people) works best with women: Quivers on his radio show, editor Judith Regan on his book and its follow-up, “Miss America,” Fran Shea on his television show. So Reitman brought in Thomas, and, after some initial hesitation, Stern was sold on her.

“I’m thrilled that Betty is the director,” he says now. “Betty is so good with me and has such a calming effect on me and collaborates so well with me.”

It’s a good thing, because it’s not easy to play yourself, especially your 20-year-old self. The filmmakers have done what they can to ease him into it. They’ve replicated the radio stations that he worked at. They scheduled the early scenes on the air, where he’s most “himself.” They’ve accommodated his grueling schedule. On a typical day, Stern gets up at 4 in the morning, does his radio show from 6 to 10, works the rest of the day on the movie, and is in bed by 8 or 9.

“The first day on the set, Ivan was there, Betty, the whole gang,” he says. “I was having a real hard time with it, the pace was so slow. I’m just so used to doing something spontaneously. I was going crazy. I went home that night and said, ‘I don’t want to be doing this. This is a mistake.’ I was practically in tears.”

“It took him three days to get it,” Blum says. “The first day, he was a little tight, trying too hard.”

“What they’ve given me on this film is the luxury of taking it where I want to,” Stern says. “When we first started, I was all over the place. Betty and Ivan sat me down and said, ‘Listen, there are points in the script that have to be hit. There’s a certain logic to it.’ I’ve made the adjustment between ad-libbing and throwing my own shtick in.”

“After the first two or three weeks,” Reitman says, “you could see him get comfortable with the lens. A real movie star is the guy you want to watch on-screen, not just the quality of the acting, but it’s the energy center of any moment on the screen, and there it was. You just can’t take your eyes off him. I think people are going to be shocked at how good he is.”

Stern has already been approached by several parties about doing another movie, but he says he wants to see how this one does first. Reitman says Stern is good enough to play a lot of different things, but will the public let him? The irony is that now that Howard is finally allowed to be Howard, he may not be allowed to be anyone else.

*

Stern returns to the first-class cabin, where Alt is preparing to look at him with utter disgust. Before the camera rolls, he starts bantering with her.

“Look at the beautiful Carol Alt,” he says. “You’re a dream. I feel so revitalized. God bless you. God bless you, Carol Alt.”

“Imagine if I were standing closer,” she says, staring at him with disdain. She must be at least 10 feet away.

“Carol, if I was with you, I wouldn’t have any problems.”

“You don’t have any problems.”

“Carol,” he says beseechingly, trying to wear her down. “Cheer me up.”

“I can’t,” she says, smothering a grin. “I’m trying to hate you. Don’t make me laugh.”