A Life Through Film #015: Up Close & Personal
To err is human. To pretend otherwise is to lose the truth of who we are.
Release Date: 3/1/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
The memory of a person passed on can be a powerful thing. Long after an individual leaves this Earth, how they’re remembered by family, friends, and even total strangers can often be their greatest legacy, regardless of their life. The quote about everyone having two deaths, the first when your body ceases to function and the second the last time anyone speaks your name, has been attributed to everyone from the ancient Egyptians to Hemingway, but whoever first said it was speaking the truth.
But memory is a faulty human tool. It’s fluid, never set in stone. Our brains often feed us fiction and convince us it’s the truth. So how do we ensure that the memory of those that came before us remains true to the life that they led?
In-depth written biographies that report a life as it truly was lived are a great way to do this. So long as the record is accurate and remains accessible, the memory of someone we’ve lost can live on for people who maybe even never knew the person.
But what happens when a work is made to depict a life and ends up removing every aspect that made that life unique? What happens to the memory then?
Up Close & Personal is a 1996 romantic drama starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert Redford. In theory, it is the adaptation of Golden Girl, a biography of groundbreaking TV journalist Jessica Savitch, with none other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne responsible for writing the screenplay. You would think that with two of the greatest writers of the 20th century behind the script, this would be a thoughtful, full look at the life of a complicated woman.
We’ll get to that.
Savitch seemed a fascinating person. Born in Delaware in 1947, she never faltered in her dream of being a famous broadcast journalist, despite the fact that, at the time, women had yet to break into that field in any meaningful way. Years of sexist rejections and reactions to her ambitions finally led to the break she was looking for in 1973 when, after years of working her way up the ladder from general reporter, she made the anchor position at KHOU in Houston. This glass shattering role made Savitch the first female news anchor in the American South.
Savitch moved to Philadelphia in 1972 and succeeded there too, despite having to start over as a general reporter again amid accusations of being a “country bumpkin.” Her special multi-night, in-depth reports on childbirth, sexual assault, and other topics won her awards and were massively popular with the television audience. These stories endeared Savitch to the people of the region and made her a household name in Philly even before she had returned to the status of primetime anchor. By the late ‘70s, her ability and popularity as an anchor was undeniable, and she joined NBC as a reporter and anchor.1
Savitch’s ambitions and hard work came at a personal cost. The perfectionism that made her so successful simultaneously made her unable to focus on anything but her work. She abused cocaine and alcohol to get through the stress of her job and the sexism she faced everyday. Her relationships with men were tenuous and, at times abusive. Savitch was married twice, losing her first husband to divorce and her second to suicide.
Savitch was one of the most popular public figures of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but her personal problems were invading her work and making her unliked by her bosses at the network. She took a new job at Frontline for PBS, where her stress and chemical abuses continued to fester. On October 3, 1983, Savitch was criticized for a news update where she appeared to be slurring her words drunkenly as millions of Americans watched.
Twenty days later, Jessica Savitch died in a freak car accident after a date. She was 36.
How are we to remember a figure like Savitch? As a pioneer in broadcast journalism who entered the hearts of Americans through their TV sets? Or as an anxious addict who struggled in her relationships with others and died at the lowest point of her public popularity? Ultimately, I think it’s important to humanize the memory of Savitch as someone who embodied the highs and lows of life as we know it. The struggles of her life were as much a part of it as the triumphs; to forget them is to forget her.
In the wake of Savitch’s death, two biographies of her life were published. The first, Gwenda Blair’s Almost Golden, included some details on the journalist’s issues with domestic violence and alcohol. A Lifetime movie of the same name based on the book was released in 1995, and includes these elements before ending with her death. More than a decade on from her passing, people were invested in the Savitch story; Almost Golden was the second highest rated TV movie of all time when it premiered.
The other Savitch biography, Golden Girl, was written by Alanna Nash with the help of Savitch’s agent and friend, Ed Hookstratten. This book leaned more into the shocking personal details of Savitch’s life, even alleging multiple secret sexual dalliances with other women before her death. I can’t find sales data for Golden Girl, but the salacious details added on top of a story people were already invested in likely made it at least a decent hit.
Almost immediately after Golden Girl was published, Hookstratten purchased the film rights to the biography and began shopping an adaptation around to various studios. It was during this process that Savitch’s story first began to be altered to something less shocking. According to Nash, Hookstratten wanted a movie to depict the late anchor in only the most positive light. “This is not going to be the Jessy from your book,” Hookstratten told Nash.
This is going to be the Jessy I remember.
It was Hookstratten who signed Didion and Dunne on to adapt Golden Girl, citing parallels between Savitch’s life and the characters in A Star is Born [Didion and Dunne had worked on the screenplay for the 1976 version of A Star is Born starring Barbara Streisand and Kris Krisotfferson. It’s a 3.5/5. The 2018 version with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper is a 2.5/5]. Didion and Dunne had been married since 1964, and though they were mostly regarded for their many essays, columns, reports, and novels, they did have the screenwriting experience necessary for a project like this. Though I’m sure part of them was excited to tell the story of a fellow journalist, Dunne told Charlie Rose in 1997 that the main reason the pair took the job was to ensure that they had health coverage for his upcoming heart surgery.
Disney picked up the adaptation in 1989 under their Touchstone banner, and immediately got to further sanding down the memory of Jessica Savitch.
“Does she really have to die?” asked head of Disney Studios Jeffrey Katzenberg at an early pitch meeting.2
Working on and off for over a decade, Didion and Dunne wrote 27 drafts of the script that would end up being Up Close & Personal. The many, many notes from Disney were not concerned with maintaining the accuracy of the true story. ''Keep it light. Keep the fun level up,” read one. ''Better, but not good enough. Don't let it go dreary,” read another. The screenwriters quit the project multiple times over the years, wooed back by the producers each time. The last time this happened, Disney agreed to waive their confidentiality clause, allowing for Dunne to write his tell all book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen a year after the movie came out.
From what I’ve read, Monster is a scathing takedown of the capitalistic Hollywood practices that lead to projects like Up Close & Personal. The titular monster within the film industry, Dunne writes, is money. Greed is so powerful that truth and humanity can be eroded away for the sake of a bigger box office return. The book is highly acclaimed, and being the inspiration for it may actually be Up Close & Personal’s biggest claim to fame.
The more scripts that were written, the less Jessica Savitch existed within them. Any allusions to drug addiction or alcoholism were struck from the pages. The rumors of bisexuality were never addressed. Her multiple abusive relationships were congealed into one perfect love interest. The time period was made contemporary the ‘90s, a time filled with female reporters and anchors that had followed Savitch’s footsteps to local and national acclaim.
In this new version of her life, Jessica Savitch no longer struggled to break the glass ceiling, no longer struggled with a system that wanted to keep her down, no longer struggled with her vices, no longer struggled in love. The real woman who inspired the movie was no longer a part of it. As Dunne later put it:
As long as Disney was footing the bill, Jessica Savitch would cease to be in the Jessica Savitch screenplay.
Director Jon Avnet, who in my opinion produced more interesting movies than he directed (Risky Business [4/5]? That’s what I’m talking about!), was fully on Disney’s side during the creative process. When the house of mouse cuts them a fat check to make a movie like this, some people don’t question the ethics of it. “This movie isn’t about Jessica Savitch,” Avnet told 60 Minutes, “[It] is suggested by Jessica Savitch.”
This reduction of the original story down to small crumbs of truth was done in the interest of making the movie more palatable for a general audience. But based on the success of the Almost Golden Lifetime movie, there was plenty of mainstream desire for something resembling history. Jessica Savitch was one of the most well-liked personalities on television in her prime. Her story on the big screen surely would have drawn a large audience without the need to sand off all the edges. What is the appeal of the movie if not to see the living memory of someone you once knew?
If the movie wasn’t meant to be an accurate reflection of reality, or an inspirational true story of overcoming systemic sexism, or about anything that could be gleaned from the Jessica Savitch story, what was it about then? As ex-producer Scott Rudin told Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Up Close & Personal is about “two movie stars.”
The version of Up Close and Personal that was released to theaters in March of 1996 bears little resemblance to the memory that inspired it. Jessica Savitch was now Sally Atwater (Michelle Pfeiffer), the multiple men in her life now one great guy, Warren Justice (Robert Redford). Atwater comes from an unlikely background with a dream of TV journalism. She works in Philadelphia at one point before moving onto a network job afterwards. And that’s basically where the similarities between Atwater and Savitch end.
The actual content of Up Close and Personal is almost not worth talking about. Everything in this movie is technically competent. The shots are fine, the editing is serviceable, the fashion and set design left me with no feeling at all. The central performances by Pfeiffer and Redford are actually solid, but the script itself feels too weak by half.
Atwater’s professional struggles are never so dramatic as to make us worry for her job security. Plus, all tension on whether she’d reach success was removed the moment the movie started with a flash forward of her as a network anchor. Sure, we know going into the movie that the actual Savitch had made it to that position, but this movie is no longer about her. Atwater is a wholly new entity whose life details are entirely unknown to us.
There are also no stakes in the romantic plot of the movie. In an effort to get as far away from the upsetting reality of Savitch’s relationships and marriages as possible, Atwater and Justice never clash, personally. They may disagree professionally on matters of broadcast journalism, but there’s never any doubt the two will end up together. And once they are a romantic unit, there is no struggle between their personalities.
Up Close & Personal occasionally tries to have commentary on the nature of truth in journalism, but it rings so hollow given the context of its existence. Seeing Atwater learn to combine journalistic skill and personable charisma in a way that still gets the facts across is fine and all, but this whole movie is a lie. It tries to offer memories of Jessica Savitch that never happened using a fiction as far from the reality of her life as Disney could get.
The resulting story-telling is as bland as you can imagine such a sanded down product can be. The film lacks a compelling story at the center, and even if you know nothing about Savitch’s life, I can’t imagine you’d find the romance angle at all compelling thanks to a lack of personal drama. Though I walked away from Up Close and Personal enjoying the performances by Redford and Pfeiffer, this movie about two movie stars mostly just washes over me, leaving little to no impression.
For the record, those stars admit to being more interested in Savitch’s original story than what we got. Pfeiffer said she “would have liked for it to stay closer to her story,” and that there was “very interesting stuff about Savitch that I would have loved to have kept.” Redford felt the same way.
“There was a scene in which my character just hauled off and slugged her,” he said to Entertainment Weekly. “And then she kneed him in the groin. I loved it.”
A film with those sorts of story beats probably would have been more interesting. Meanwhile, Up Close and Personal was corny enough to get a Diane Warren ballad written for it. A career songwriter since the ‘70s, Warren is most notable in my eyes for writing a whole bunch of sappy ballads for a truly random assortment of movies (that Hot Cheetos movie from last year? That got a Diane Warren ballad!). “Because You Loved Me,” the song she wrote for Up Close & Personal and performed by Celine Dion, is your pretty typical mid ‘90s chintzy ballad. I don’t think it would have felt too out of place on the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack with a few production changes. I don’t love it but if you like that sort of style, check it out I guess.
Despite leaving me with zero emotional response to it at all, “Because You Loved Me” (which soundtracks a romantic vacation montage about halfway through Up Close and Personal) topped the US Hot 100 for six weeks, way longer than the movie that inspired it stayed on top of the weekend box office. The song was nominated for an Oscar at the following year’s show, losing to Madonna’s “You Must Love Me” from Evita. Personally, I think “That Thing You Do” was robbed.
Anyway, back to Up Close and Personal. Critics didn’t like it. Whether it was the lackluster depiction of a TV newsroom, the weak romance between Pfeiffer and Redford, or the differences between the movie’s story and Savitch’s life, there were plenty of targets for their criticism. It did have a few notable defenders though; it inspired a great row between Siskel (who hated it) and Ebert (who liked it), especially over the lack of chemistry between the leads.
Truly, I can’t be bothered enough by the content of the movie to get worked up over it one way or the other. America enjoyed Up Close & Personal enough to have its debut at the top of the box office, but it slipped the following weekend thanks to the release of a much better movie (more on that next Friday). Still, this echo of Jessica Savitch ended up taking home $50 million at the domestic box office and about the same amount abroad. Disney had successfully removed all truth from the memory of a public figure and earned $100 million because of it.
This is not a movie that has lived on in the public mind. If you’ll notice, I was not able to link my usual amount of clips from the movie in between paragraphs. If this movie has a bunch of fans, they’re not the kind to rip footage from it and upload it to YouTube or to flock to the film’s Letterboxd page, which has one of the lowest review counts I think I’ve seen for one of these box office toppers. A well-executed version of this story could have extended the Savitch’s memory further into the 21st century. Instead, most people born after her death have never heard her name.
I had never heard of Jessica Savitch or Up Close & Personal before this week’s column. My research on both topics was done in parallel, and I went into the movie knowing the general strokes of Savitch’s life. As a movie, disconnected from the origins of its script, Up Close & Personal is a blank white wall. Pleasant, gets the job done, nothing to write home about. As a result of a major corporation twisting and altering the memory of a human being to the point of total dissociation, it’s really quite depressing.
Rating: 2.5/5
What Else Was at the Theater?
The only other major release this weekend was the Kelsey Grammar Navy comedy Down Periscope. As far as crude workplace comedies that haven’t aged all that well go, this is certainly one of them. I dunno man, I think I would have skipped the theater this week. 1/5
Next Week: Incredible how mediocrity can make me so sad! Thankfully next week’s movie is a great one. 1996 finally comes alive at the theater as we review The Birdcage.
See you then!
-Will
Though still a groundbreaking TV journalist, Savitch did not end up being the first woman to serve as an anchor for the network news. Barbara Walters has that distinction thanks to her taking the job at ABC in 1976.
Regular fans of this column will remember that this is not the only time Katzenberg offered insane creative notes. Read my review of Toy Story for more.