Flirting With the Classics

Everyone knows that behind filmmaking’s glamorous facade, there lurk legions of toiling technicians, directors harassed within an inch of their production schedules, actors resigned to endless waiting-around tedium between grueling multiple takes. As anyone in the industry will tell you, making entertainment is hard work.

It would appear someone forgot to pass this truth on to the cast and crew of “The Wedding Planner.” The sky is a cloudless blue, the temperature balmy this spring afternoon; wisteria, tulips and crab apple trees in full bloom sway in the breeze. Formal English-style gardens of ponds with lily pads, and sculpted hedges provide backdrop to a shoot discreetly roped off from tourists wandering about Filoli, a historic estate just south of San Francisco.

“I feel synchronicity and love. . . . Does anyone have a problem with that?” asks director Adam Shankman with an alarming lack of sarcasm, before calling action on a sixth take. No one disagrees. Really, aren’t these people supposed to suffer for their art?

Not today, they won’t, nor seemingly for the remainder of the “Wedding Planner” shoot. Few things are more depressing than working on a sunny romantic comedy beset by production woes and ego wars. But everything is positively hunky-dory here, in keeping with the champagne tenor of Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis’ screenplay. “There’s Something About Mary”-style comedy this isn’t.

Instead, “The Wedding Planner,” which opens Friday, aims toward Golden Age Hollywood’s bedrock formula: Put beautiful people in beautiful settings, aim their amorous sights in mildly problematic directions, and let cupid sort the whole thing out for a final clinch.

Sixty or even 70 years ago, such material might have had Irene Dunne being reluctantly wooed by Cary Grant or Joan Crawford by Robert Taylor. This time around, the best-dressed career gal with no time for canoodling--or so she insists--is New Millennium It Girl Jennifer Lopez. Her character, Mary Fiore, is a tightly wound San Francisco wedding consultant who has built a career out of choreographing other people’s happy endings. Previously unlucky in love, Mary’s emotional icecap experiences some global warming upon meeting pediatrician Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey).

Their at-first-sight idyll occurs within throwing distance of the opening credits, however, and for today’s location shoot the requisite Later Comic Complications are well under way.

Mixing business with displeasure, Mary is stuck showing Filoli’s Georgian Revival-style manor and manicured grounds to client Fran Donolly (Bridgette Wilson, of “Love Stinks” and “Beautiful”), a high-powered, babelicious Internet executive. The latter’s fiance is along for the ride, squirming mightily: Dr. Steve’s engagement preceded his meeting Ms. Fiore.

But the tour is interrupted by hedge-leaping Massimo (former Calvin Klein model Justin Chambers), a breezy Sicilian who wastes no time introducing himself as the wedding planner’s very own betrothed--the one imported by Mary’s tradition-minded Italian American father (Alex Rocco) whether she likes it or not.

The tenor is all very screwball-larky, as in the Hollywood 1930s, even if these characters seem wedded primarily to their cell phones. Further updating classic love-trouble conventions are Kevin Pollak as Steve’s wise-guy best friend, Judy Greer as Mary’s daffy one, and Charles Kimbrough and Joanna Gleason as Fran’s terminally snobbish socialite parents.

“It’s an old-fashioned romantic comedy with elements of drama, hopefully along the lines of the original Wilder, Sturges and Hawks films,” Shankman explains during a break. “Those all felt like musicals, without having musical numbers in them. I hear dialogue musically and wanted that kind of old-fashioned, crackling dialogue--so I have to push the actors, because actors aren’t used to talking like that anymore.”

Shankman doesn’t seem like the pushing type. He’s unnaturally cheery for a man who’s directed just one short and now has a budget of $35 million or so to worry about. But these intended musical cadences come to him honestly--his primary work had been choreographing dances and physical comedy routines for features as diverse as “Boogie Nights,” “The Flintstones,” “She’s All That” and the animated “Antz,” as well as videos for the fleet-footed likes of Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson.

“I’ve tried to restore glamour and cachet to the film choreographer profile in my tenure,” he says, tongue halfway in cheek. “There have been a lot of choreographers who successfully made the jump (to directing)--Bob Fosse, Herbert Ross, Stanley Donen. Most of the recent ones like Kenny Ortega and Jeff Hornaday didn’t, but I think that’s because they tried to force the ‘musical’ card. What I wanted is to enter with a piece of material that had a definite musicality to it but wasn’t an actual musical in any way.”

Nonetheless, he admits “The Wedding Planner” is being groomed to echo classic films in which the stars might burst into song at any moment. (This new, non-crooning romantic roundelay settles for three scenes that call for dancing.) “We just pored over old movies and went right for it. My inspiration for the design of [Mary’s] wedding-center office was the Vogue offices from ‘Funny Face’ [the 1957 Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn vehicle]. I moved the location from New York to San Francisco. I told the location scout I wanted no visible wires or power lines, just clear skies--it’s a real love letter to the city. I’m not going for a fantastical ‘Ma Vie en Rose’-type world . . . but she [Lopez] plays a production designer; it’s her job to see the world as beautiful. So I had to make everything look gorgeous.”

While the casting, locations, and costume and production designs all reflect an old-school fantasy of the good life, Shankman notes his biggest single inspiration was Norman Jewison’s 1987 working-class whimsy “Moonstruck.” “We’re going for a much more glamorous world, but that film’s heart was in such a great place.”

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The modern screen Love Goddess doesn’t get much more modern than Lopez, whose first romantic-comedy role follows stints as a hip-hop hottie (TV’s “In Living Color,” her “On the 6” disc and videos), model Latina (the movies “Mi Familia” and “Selena”), dangerously curved vixen (“Blood and Wine,” “U-Turn”), take-no-prisoners action heroine (“Anaconda,” “Out of Sight”), and invader of a serial killer’s mind (“The Cell”). Whether baring nearly all in that Versace “dress” at the Grammys or enduring less voluntary exposure in tabloid headlines, she’s the male fantasy of the moment. But can she do “chick flick”?

“Jennifer I resisted completely,” Shankman concedes. “Her agents forced a meeting. We were thinking of Renee Zellweger, Minnie Driver, Jennifer Aniston, Sandy Bullock. . . . Then Jennifer walked in and was very charming, very funny. . . . She knew who this character was, and she was ravenously passionate about doing it. She’d just come out of her divorce, she hadn’t met her boyfriend [rap star Sean “Puffy” Combs]. She was just [focused on] career, and that’s fine--that’s who [the character] is.

“I think Jennifer is nobody’s idea of the perfect romantic-comedy heroine [yet], but she’s an undiscovered jewel, a comic revelation. She’s not a va-voom figure at all here. Her hair is so pulled-back, everything she wears is tailored and rigid and straight. I mean, you can’t stop Jennifer’s sexuality. But you can definitely curtail it.”

Perhaps staying in button-down character, or just wary after being the last year’s celebrity gossip Target Zero, Lopez doesn’t exactly exude sex appeal as she settles onto the Filoli lawn for a chat between setups. She’s wearing Mary’s chic, prim designer suit, and her manner too is strictly business.

“I’d been looking for a romantic comedy for a long time, and this was one I really liked, just a well-written script,” she says. “Whenever you relate to material, whether it’s a script or a song, it’s always something that touches you, that you understand. Maybe it’s happened to you. . . . I’m more loose than this character in terms of mannerism. She’s a little uptight, very organized, meticulous--but I like playing that, it’s fun. The emotions and the place that she’s at in her life really appealed to me. I understood what it’s like to be so focused on your career that your personal life just takes a back seat for a while. Then all of a sudden you meet someone, and it all goes crazy for a while.”

The conversation seems to edging toward . . . well, all that: the famous boyfriend, the dates that somehow ended up involving police, the many downsides to the public scrutiny a certified diva attracts. Lopez checks herself and speaks more slowly, guardedly. “At the beginning when [fame] first starts happening, you go through a period where you think, ‘Omigod--people want to know about my life!’ It’s part of the business. You just learn to adapt, find a way to deal best with it.”

She smarts at the recollection of a “Saturday Night Live” skit in which cast members portrayed her and Combs in couples counseling, their high-profile relationship negotiations constantly interrupted by guns that tumble from every hidden crevice in his customized threads.

“Malicious is not necessarily funny, you know what I mean?,” she grimaces. “For them to try to make out Puff to be dumb and me to be some sort of whore or something is ridiculous. If there’s anything you can’t be to become a mogul of several different companies, it’s dumb. And before anybody ever knew I was dating Puffy, I was married--you never heard about me dating anyone else. It’s crazy, crazy.

“Now you got your sound bite,” she says tersely. Subject closed. Maybe playing a seriocomic heroine who’s “closed down because of being hurt,” as Lopez puts it, isn’t such a stretch after all.

It’s McConaughey’s job to be the warmhearted, easygoing Mr. Right who defrosts her chilly careerist--before and after wacky complications--and off-camera, the 31-year-old Texan seems just the guy you’d want to bring home to meet Mom and Dad. Strolling around the estate, he’s so aw-shucks-nice you can almost hear global femininity sighing.

Like Lopez, he knows something about being Hottie of the Month, a crown briefly his after starring in the thriller “A Time to Kill.”

“Where was there to go from there?” he muses. “Folks couldn’t go much higher, as far as an automatic ka-boom. But I’m actually much more comfortable now. I’ve got a couple stories at my production company that are gettin’ really close, and, yeah, I’d love to direct one day. But I don’t have a timetable . . . and the acting’s goin’ really well. I’m lovin’ and enjoyin’ it.” Still, wasn’t it hell being the official dreamboat of 1996? “Naw, that’s a myth. I get asked that question all the time: Is it tough goin’ in the public and gettin’ mobbed? I don’t know if it’s [because] I change my hair or grow a beard or what, but I’m always able to not get recognized. And there’s never been droves of women runnin’ after me.” Uh-huh.

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McConaughey was a last-minute draftee to “The Wedding Planner” when Brendan Fraser had to bow out. He was ready. “I just came off a military film, ‘U-571,’ where I had to be the Man. The world was kinda on our shoulders. . . . This is a bit lighter fare, much more relaxed.”

The leading man’s laid-back manner syncs with “Planner’s” some-pratfalls, no-major-injuries take on modern romance, he reports. “One thing I liked about this story is in this triangle that’s created, no one’s the antagonist. Havin’ cool and healthy and loving relationships with two women, that’s my favorite thing here. There’s optimism and goodwill on all sides.

“Hey, man, I’ve experienced that in real life. I think our generation has evolved--there’s a lot more amiable breakups . . . Whereas our mothers and fathers--at least mine--well, you hear all these stories about ‘We don’t speak to each other anymore.’ . . . I think relationships are more healthy now.”

Meanwhile, recess is over, and personal assistants hasten to inform that this romancing business is ready for another take. The actors ready themselves once again to inhabit what Shankman calls a “world populated by truly beautiful people wearing better clothes than they probably should be able to afford,” as in silver-screen days of yore. Hedges must be leaped, frozen hearts melted. Lattes are set aside as the technicians concentrate on making an exquisite spring day look even better. Everyone looks like they’re having actual fun. What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing: That’s what’s wrong.

“This day is totally typical,” the director purrs, more serene than any first-timer has a right to be. “No creepy star behavior, no good stories to tell. I have not dropped a shot, and we are on schedule. We laugh, we are happy; it’s not fake--it’s just an incredibly good-spirited project. I hope that comes across on screen. It’s just been the greatest experience of my life.”

Oh, get a job already.