All of Me by Phil Alden Robinson
On the rainy morning of July 15, 1983, I joined Carl Reiner and Lily Tomlin at Steve Martin’s house for an unusual rehearsal. It had only been four months since I’d finished a screenplay that included this sentence: “His left side moves like a man, his right side moves like a woman.” This was not a difficult sentence to write, even for the inexperienced screenwriter that I was. But it’s quite another thing to physically do that. And this was the morning the grown-ups would have to figure out how.
Carl had the first suggestion: Don’t even try. Instead, he worked with Steve on ideas for how to portray feminine movement using his full body. Then Lily, whose portrayals of male characters in her act have always been as hilarious as they were well-observed, tutored Steve on exaggerated male physicality, again, using the whole body. After a few minutes to get comfortable with these wildly opposite styles of movement, Steve said, “Let me try something.” He did the male walk with just the left side of his body. Once he mastered that, he did just the female walk with the right side. It took a while, and when he finally got comfortable with each one, he put them both together, and promptly fell on his ass.
When he got to his feet, Carl and Lily joined him, and all three began galumphing back and forth across Steve’s living room with one half of their bodies walking like a man, and one half like a woman. I wisely kept my seat, staring in absolute wonder. It was like a hallucination, and the only funnier thing I’ve ever seen in my life is the moment in the movie when he actually does it.
But while Steve had a wide canvas in which to portray his unique gifts, Lily had the opposite. She had to play a complicated, three-dimensional character mostly within the confines of a two-dimensional plane: a mirror. With limited range of motion, she had to make you understand and care about the character, and she had to get laughs doing it. Again: not that hard to write. Really hard to do. She does it brilliantly; she’s surprising, touching, hilarious.
Guiding and shaping it all was our gifted and generous ringmaster, Carl Reiner. Every day he skillfully and playfully created a frame in which everyone was free to do their most inspired work. He elevated what were chuckles on the page to belly-laughs on the screen. And he taught this wannabe director about the creative values of sanity and kindness.
But all good things must come to an end, and so on October 25, 1983, we gathered at Laird Studios in Culver City for the 47th and final day of photography. There was a steep, wooden staircase that led from the stage floor to the top of the lighting grid, some three stories above. While the crew was lighting a close-up of Lily, I climbed those stairs to the very top, and looked down. Almost the entire stage was pitch black, except for where crew and cast huddled around a tiny island of light. I confess I got a little misty-eyed thinking about how all those good folks down there had come together a few months ago, worked long hours hard and well to turn our little screenplay into an actual movie, and the following day we would all scatter to the four winds. Some I would see intermittently over the years, some I never saw again, and some, thankfully, remain friends to this day.
The intervening years, however, were not so kind to the look of All of Me. Photographed expertly by Richard Kline, it was a very handsome film in 1984, but it was never brought up to date for today’s viewing technologies. Now, 41 years after its release, Lionsgate has given us a lovely new high-definition transfer of All of Me, all the better to enjoy its warm silliness, its remarkable performances, and all those things that were far easier to write than to actually do.
Back in bowl!
— Phil Alden Robinson