Put the Blame on Fame

There are a handful of districts in this city known even to people who have never set foot in them: super-chic Chelsea; upscale Mayfair; Westminster, home to the abbey and Britain’s Parliament. Starting this summer, add Notting Hill to that list.

Notting Hill? It’s an intriguingly mixed district a couple of miles west of central London that includes affluent homes inhabited by celebrities and low-income housing. There’s a large number of successful professionals in Notting Hill, a smattering of various immigrant groups, a small bohemian literary scene and a youngish, self-consciously hip crowd newly enriched through working in the media and broadcasting. Think Los Feliz with a lot of rain.

The area has restaurants, boutiques and bookshops galore, as well as London’s famous Portobello Road street market. In short, it is emblematic of the country’s “Cool Britannia” image, which established itself with the accession of Tony Blair’s Labor government in 1997.

Now Notting Hill is the title of a film to be released at the end of the month, and it’s the most talked-about movie in Britain in a long time.

“Notting Hill” is a romantic comedy with Hugh Grant as the male lead, a character with a group of loyal and quirky friends who live in this funky/hip part of town. Grant falls for a gorgeous American movie star played by Julia Roberts--a combination described by one of the film’s producers as “the two biggest romantic comedy stars in the world.”

The Universal Pictures/Working Title film was written by Richard Curtis, produced by Duncan Kenworthy, and the two leading lights of Working Title, Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, are (with Curtis) executive producers. To those who know their film lore, there’s a familiar ring about that premise and constellation of names. All were involved in “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” the British low-budget romantic comedy that swept all before it on its release in 1994.

Made for around $5 million, “Four Weddings” became an enormous global hit, grossing some $250 million worldwide. Until “The Full Monty” it was the most successful British film ever made, and it turned Grant into an international star.

No one could have foreseen the success of “Four Weddings,” which became one of the great surprise hits of the decade. But the stakes are considerably higher for “Notting Hill,” which is looked at as potentially the summer’s big romantic comedy. The budget is substantially higher, too; no one will officially disclose it, and Kenworthy insists that “by far the majority of the money” has been spent on securing Grant and Roberts. But another on-set source mentions the sum of $40 million.

It’s a different proposition from the earlier film, then; so is it useful to regard “Notting Hill” as a sequel to “Four Weddings”? The answer from all parties is a resounding “no,” with minor qualifications.

Curtis concedes there are definite links between “Notting Hill,” “Four Weddings” and “The Tall Guy,” his 1989 London-situated comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson: “I just hope once people get into the cinema, they’ll get swept away with the story and won’t think about other films. I wouldn’t say there are no connections, but on the other hand I don’t want lots of connections made. Hugh’s playing a different character from ‘Four Weddings.’ It’s a different story, different people.”

Yet he agrees that “Notting Hill” will almost certainly be marketed as a film “from the people who brought you ‘Four Weddings.’ ”

“Oh, sure,” he says and sighs, “and from the people who brought you the last ‘boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-wins-girl-loses-girl-gets-girl’ movie. I’m not sure why I write those stories. It just seems to be the rhythm of keeping the film interesting, I think. That seems to have been the plot of three of my films. Though not “Mr. Bean,’ ” he adds wryly. “That was a radical departure.”

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In “Four Weddings,” Grant played an eligible bachelor who attends a series of friends’ weddings but is himself reluctant to commit to a long-term relationship or marriage. In “Notting Hill,” the emphasis is different. He plays William, who owns a chaotic and slightly shabby bookstore in Notting Hill. One day a famous, glamorous American film actress, Anna Scott (Roberts), wanders in, thus kick-starting an unlikely off-and-on romance. On Golborne Crescent in Notting Hill, where a scene between William and a restaurant owner friend was being shot, Curtis mused on fame and celebrity and how it affects relationships.

“A lot of my friends have become famous,” he noted, citing “Mr. Bean” star Rowan Atkinson, British TV comic Harry Enfield and TV personality Angus Deayton as examples. “They’re small versions of the dilemmas writ large in this film--the way [famous] people are protective in their initial dealings with others and have too strong alarm systems. And there’s the problems of the press, which come up a lot.

“Fame genuinely is a virus. It does change your life and the way you have to behave. When you walk down the street and people know who you are, it makes you self-conscious. Yet it hasn’t fundamentally changed the people I know. Hugh is a classic example. We haven’t seen each other in four years. He’s taking films more seriously--he was involved in producing his last two films, so he’s now genuinely interested about the context in which he’s acting and asks more questions. But as a person he’s gloriously unaltered.

“So I felt confident in saying in this story that this very famous girl could have a proper and happy relationship with a bloke who wasn’t famous because she’s also just a girl.”

On the subject of fame and its vagaries, who better to talk to than Roberts and Grant, two people who in different ways have experienced its pressures firsthand? A week after Curtis offered his reflections, Roberts was to be found in her trailer on a stretch of waste ground behind Paddington rail station, with her own thoughts.

“When the story was pitched, I thought, ‘It doesn’t seem something I want to do, go play a big movie star girl,’ ” she said. “It sounded stinky.”

Her admiration for “Four Weddings” and Curtis changed her mind. “I’d seen ‘Four Weddings’ on a particularly horrible day for me. I was spitting tacks, and my sister said, come to the movies. And I thought that film was the invention of comedy. I laughed so loud, people were turning round. I was one of those horrible, overenthusiastic audience members.”

She laughed at the “Notting Hill” script too. She insists the story has little relation to her life: “But I understand the feeling. You go to a dinner party, meet people and say, ‘Hi, I’m Julia.’ And they say, ‘Oh, I know who you are.’ If there were any way for it not to sound rude, I’d say, ‘You think you do, but you don’t really, so let’s start from there.’

“People see you in movies going through these stories, and to them you’re that person on screen. They feel it’s information they have about you.”

She added that people have recited at her the plot of her hit film from last summer, “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” as if these were events in her real life. “It’s bizarre. Yet I can understand it too. There are people I come into contact with that I want to stare at, or look at what they’re wearing.”

Another week later and Grant is in his trailer at Shepperton Studios, where interiors for “Notting Hill” are being shot. On the subject of fame and its effect on people, he is his usual insouciant self, despite his brush with the underside of notoriety (remember all that nastiness with a prostitute named Divine Brown on Sunset Boulevard in 1995, a very public humiliation that culminated with Jay Leno’s question to him on “The Tonight Show”: “What were you thinking?”).

“I think Richard has largely got it right,” he noted. “My experience in England is that 60% or 70% of people are genuinely as cool about fame as the characters in this film. They’re excited to meet a star, and it’s fun for five minutes, but it doesn’t really mean that much. But there’s another 30% who are very excited by it. It’s like some people have moles and some don’t. It really rattles them, and they have to tell all their friends.”

And does that rattle him? Grant flashed a brilliant smile: “It’s slightly less attractive. I don’t like people completely shrugging it off, because my ego quite likes a little bit of attention. But some get over-excited, yes, especially those friends and relations you were never particularly close to, who want to invite you to every tea party and christening. That can be galling.”

Back on Notting Hill, a crowd of curious passers-by has gathered at an intersection, where a photographic shop has been transformed by Oscar-winning production designer Stuart Craig (“The English Patient”) and his team into a restaurant.

It’s not exactly a dramatic scene. Grant, in a pink shirt and black jeans, simply strolls across the street to the restaurant and greets its owner. Still, onlookers seem content to watch him do it repeatedly.

This is typical of location shooting on “Notting Hill.” Much of London seems entranced by the film. At one night shoot last summer, no less than 30 paparazzi showed up, eager for candid snaps of Roberts and Grant, each of whom have been assigned security guard.

Traffic along Golborne Crescent must be halted for each take, and when the flow of vehicles resumes, a passenger in one car, irritated at being delayed, directs a stream of obscene invective at the crew in broad Cockney. Director Roger Michell (“Persuasion”) raises one eyebrow in exasperation and scans the skies for approaching aircraft. This area is directly beneath the flight path to Heathrow Airport to the west. More than one take today has to be aborted because of jet plane noise. I’s not easy shooting on the streets of Notting Hill.

Yet the amiable Curtis, who actually lives in Notting Hill, badly wanted the flavor of his neighborhood replicated on film. Indeed, his own front door is used for one exterior scene. “I started out setting the story here on the basis I could get up later on the days we’re filming,” he said ruefully.

“The worst moment was meeting Stuart, who said they’d build it all at Shepperton Studios, re-create the whole district an hour away from here. My feeling was, it’s a very interesting area which I’m lucky enough to live in, so why not set it somewhere you know?”

The last time Notting Hill was this well-known was in the late 1950s, when it was the scene of race riots, and skirmishes between local working-class whites and recently arrived immigrants from the Caribbean. But now racial harmony prevails; the multiracial Notting Hill Carnival attracts huge, exuberant crowds and dominates its streets for one weekend each year.

Curtis and Kenworthy formed a company, Notting Hill Pictures, specifically to produce the film. “It was an idea about fame,” Kenworthy says. “The central idea was, wouldn’t it be great if one evening you went ‘round to your friends for dinner and turned up with someone incredibly famous?

“And as is the way with Richard, he spent several years writing it. I saw a draft back in ’95. Between then and now we’ve worked on it. I lost count of how many drafts he’s gone through.”

“More drafts than ‘Four Weddings,’ I think,” says Curtis. “My original plan was to write about two girls--one famous, one not, and the lead male character possibly having to choose between them. But I hated the thought of having to make up my own mind. So we turned [the non-famous girl] into Hugh’s sister.”

Kenworthy believes this comic-poignant tone and the surface similarities of their romantic comedy conventions form the extent of comparisons between “Four Weddings” and “Notting Hill”: “They’re just not the same characters. And it’s very different in one other respect. . . . : ‘Four Weddings’ may have loomed large in our lives, but to most people this will be Julia Roberts’ next film. And in many ways that’s right. I would hope the two films work in similar ways--funny and romantic, but quite real and touching--but their stories are constructed very differently.”

The shooting experiences were poles apart too. In his trailer Grant points at his refrigerator and says: “That literally was the size of my trailer on ‘Four Weddings.’

“We may have 20 times the budget, but the biggest difference isn’t the money; it’s the lack of panic. This is the most relaxed film set I’ve ever been on in my life, partly due to Roger, who creates a wonderfully Zen-like atmosphere.

“We have a 10-week shoot on this, whereas on ‘Four Weddings’ it was 36 days. It was a miracle it got made. It was high panic all the way. I can remember [director] Mike Newell standing in the middle of a churchyard and saying: ‘I can’t [expletive] do it.’ ”

Grant is, in his own words, “guardedly excited” about “Notting Hill.” “The script is almost actor-proof,” he says. “Even when I’m at my worst, I think it’s pretty funny. On good days I think it’s very funny.”

It is fair to say Grant has never quite recaptured the initial flush of success he experienced with “Four Weddings,” though he has had some major successes (“Sense and Sensibility”) and modest hits (“Nine Months”)--both in romantic comedy roles.

So does he think romantic comedy is his forte? “Well, yes, I see that now,” he admits cheerfully. “I realize with my other films that if you’re going to do a thriller or an action film or a heavy drama, you might as well get someone else.” He giggles at this. “Because they’ll probably do it better.

“And if it’s broad comedy, Jim Carrey-type funny faces, get someone else, don’t get me. So, yes, I think my range is sinisterly narrow.”

Of course, the success of “Notting Hill” depends largely on the on-screen chemistry between him and Roberts. On set they have nothing but praise for each other.

Roberts described a scene in which she and Grant attend a wedding reception and talk to various guests, played by extras, in a series of long shots. “I felt immense pressure to do or say something dazzling. Hugh knew just what to say when he introduced me to people. He was always cracking jokes: ‘This is my cousin Bobby, he has no testicles. This is my crazy Aunt Betty.’

“This wasn’t in the script. You have to be really sharp around him. It was fantastic because it changes everybody, they feel they’re really participating, so visually it increases the reality of everything. Thank God it wasn’t left to me; I’d have become paralyzed.”

“Julia?” said Grant, teasingly. “I wish I had dirt to give you, but I don’t. She turns out to be my favorite kind of American. She’s Southern, and I love Southern girls. They have the best sense of humor and the least agenty eyes.”

Agenty eyes? “Yes, Southern girls have real eyes, not those hard ambitious buttons you see on some women in L.A. or New York. Julia’s also quite silly, which is an endearing characteristic. We’ve had quite a bad giggling problem in some of our scenes, which I also like.”