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TIME: Almanac 1993
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TIME Almanac 1993.iso
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1992-08-28
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SHOW BUSINESS, Page 98The Whole Town's TalkingHollywood has a wisecracking, baby-faced sleeper hit
You earn $60 million in your first four weeks, and
everybody has an explanation for your success. As the surprise
movie hit of the fall season, Tri-Star's baby-love comedy Look
Who's Talking has inspired plenty of retrospective wisdom. It
came out at the right time of year, when its only competition
was heavy dramas. It hits yuppie moviegoers where they live: in
the narrow margin between careers and parenthood. It carries
echoes of When Harry Met Sally in the loving friendship of a
thirtysomething mom (Kirstie Alley) and the cabdriver (John
Travolta) who moonlights as baby-sitter. It has Hollywood's
favorite premise, the fish out of water -- or, here, fetus out
of womb. For the main character is a talking baby, in the
worldly wise-guy voice of TV and movie star Bruce Willis.
A month ago, though, few people were predicting a smash.
The movie's star, Kirstie Alley of TV's Cheers, was an unproven
marquee draw. Its male leads, Travolta and George Segal, were
long past their luster. Critics mostly dumped on the picture or
ignored it. Savants figured, in fact, that it had about as much
chance of being a hit as, say, a single sperm has of fertilizing
an egg.
They forgot about Mikey, the embryo (and then infant) with
star quality. Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen,
through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of
hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of
the Beach Boys' I Get Around. "The sperm comes on and people go
crazy," says Jonathan Krane, the film's producer. "From then on
they're laughing at the picture." Not quite. They're laughing
with it, in the easy, conspiratorial laughter any domestic
comedy would kill to get.
Moviegoers love babies, of course. A lame comedy like 3 Men
and a Baby earned $168 million by offering little more than Tom
Selleck diapering a child. The talking baby is another familiar
Hollywood tradition; street-smart infants narrated the film The
First Time (1952) and a 1960 sitcom called Happy. Spermatozoa
have schmoozed (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex),
and in this year's Me and Him even a penis got chatty.
But writer-director Amy Heckerling, 35, had an adult agenda
in mind. "It's not who do you want to sleep with; it's who can
you depend on," she says. "Babies don't need fathers, but
mothers do. Someone who is taking care of a baby needs to be
taken care of. I was trying to deal with those issues. The
talking baby was comic relief."
It has brought blessed relief to a few careers. For the
Kansas-born Alley, "this is my big blockbuster. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz, I'm clicking my heels." Travolta, back on top
after years of languishing, says the movie "makes people happy.
It makes them feel good about having a family. Men tell me,
`You're giving me lessons in how to be a dad.' Women say, `Will
you be my husband?' I gotta tell you, it thrills me to pieces."
It thrills Hollywood too. The town is always pleased to welcome
a baby with such a humongous silver spoon.