James L Brooks is in a ruminative mood. “Mike Nichols had this wonderful thing he used to say when anybody was making a movie: who’s your buddy? By that, he meant that person who watches your back, who you can say anything to, hear anything from. It’s the person who shares the insanity that you have to feel when you’re making a movie, the kind of madness that any film deserves on the part of the director.”
Brooks is trying to describe the role he played on Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the new adaptation of the Judy Blume novel, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, and for which Brooks is credited as a producer. “Empathically, I can share the madness a little,” he says. He’s worked with Craig before, producing her debut feature The Edge of Seventeen – and was reportedly a key element in persuading Blume to allow Craig to adapt her book for the screen.
It’s true that these days Brooks, now 83, is more a mentor and a guide, and with his astonishing record, who wouldn’t want his input? Brooks’s CV includes era-defining, legacy-creating TV hits The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Simpsons, Oscar-winning movies Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets, and the nurturing of early features by up-and-coming talents like Penny Marshall, Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson (Big, Say Anything … and Bottle Rocket respectively).
Shepherding Are You There God? … to the screen was a case in point. “Judy Blume is a national treasure in the US, she’s so beloved. So the pressure on this film was to do right by Judy.” Blume, for her part, has said that she had resisted all Hollywood approaches of the book for nearly 50 years, until an email from Craig landed in her inbox. “Kelly and I immediately got on a plane and went across the United States to Key West, Florida, to see her. And it worked.”
In fact, Are You There God?’s teen-girl rites-of-passage material is well within Brooks’s ballpark; for an authentic film-industry legend of the 1970s and 80s, his reputation has emerged unscathed from the #MeToo movement; in fact rather enhanced. Looking back, his work is dominated by female protagonists and themes, right back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which in a radical act for the early 70s, gave primetime TV space to a career-driven single woman. “It was exquisite timing,” says Brooks, “because it was just at the beginning of the feminist revolution.” Rhoda, its equally popular spin-off, continued the women-in-the-city theme, but Brooks says it wasn’t part of a “conscious mindset”. “I remember saying: let’s just do a show about men.” Taxi, another massive 70s TV hit, was the result.
Hollywood in this era was not a female-friendly environment, to say the least, but when Brooks transitioned to movies in the early 80s, he brought the same ideas with him. Terms of Endearment, which in 1984 won Oscars for best picture, best actress for Shirley MacLaine, best supporting actor for Jack Nicholson, and best director and adapted screenplay for Brooks, was a triumph in its variegated portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship. Its follow-up, Broadcast News, understood the way women – and specifically Holly Hunter’s TV producer – are undermined in the media industry. Later films followed the same route: Spanglish, released in 2004, added the pressures of immigration and class to the mix, as housekeeper Paz Vega fends off her wealthy American employers’ influence over her daughter.
His 80s film work now looks like an unrepeatable moment in the sun, very much the kind of ambitious, character-centred, literary-themed work that was decimated by Hollywood’s commitment to the tentpole blockbuster. (Though when I suggest that Hollywood wouldn’t want to make those kind of films again, Brooks indignantly replies: “I think you absolutely could!”) His films were part of new sensibility to emerge from the wreckage of the Hollywood new wave, which had largely foundered by the end of the 70s: impassioned domestic epics such as Ordinary People, Kramer vs Kramer and Terms of Endearment claimed the ground recently occupied by Raging Bull, Being There and – lethally for a certain kind of film-making – Heaven’s Gate. Being a known TV name didn’t help. “Back then there was an iron wall. I was on the Paramount lot: on one side were the TV people and you did not ever wander over to the movie side, you know?”
Brooks talks fondly of Terms of Endearment, as well he might: he did it, he says, because he cried when he read Larry McMurtry’s original novel. “I had cried maybe twice in my life before that so I thought: I can’t question a biological fact of myself like that.” He also had a pivotal encounter with McMurtry: “He had a bookstore in Washington DC, so I went to pay homage to him. He kicked me out and said: ‘I wrote the book, you do the movie.’ It was a blessing, because it got me out of that feeling of humility and made that I was serving the film instead of the book.”
Broadcast News, released in 1987, looks particularly prescient in the era of Tucker Carlson. Brooks looks a little mournful. “The picture was meant to observe a great institution slipping but, you know, I never imagined anything like it is now.” Americans, he says, used to trust news anchors like Edward R Murrow, or Walter Cronkite implicitly. “There’s something about everybody agreeing on who we trust that made everything so good. In retrospect. And now, of course, we don’t have that at all.”
And then there’s The Simpsons. Its origins have been exhaustively documented, how Matt Groening came in to pitch animated interstitials for The Tracey Ullman Show (yet another female performer Brooks had shepherded into the TV limelight), and had made up the Simpsons family while he was waiting for the meeting to start. Was that really how it happened? Brooks laughs. “I don’t know if he did his first sketch of the characters right then. But he certainly had given them names.” Brooks’ prior sitcom experience was undoubtedly vital in making the subsequent show a hit (“just depth of character, and the importance of story”) but he bats away any idea that the series might have, to put it delicately, outlived its popularity. “No! There’s actually a resurgence right now, because it’s on Disney+. People are doing binges, you know, and it’s reached a new audience. We feel it’s sort of a great reawakening of it.”
Brooks hasn’t released a film of his own since 2011, the Reese Witherspoon/Paul Rudd romcom How Do You Know, which was, to put it mildly, poorly received. (The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it an “ordeal”.) While he ponders whether to make another film – he has a script in hand that he says he “cares about enormously” – before he takes his leave, he has words of comfort for the industry as a whole. “You know, the franchise movie is king and all that, but I always think the heart beats true, and right now, as we’re talking, somebody somewhere is writing a screenplay for all the right reasons. And somehow it will get made. It’s tough, but theatrical film still is a great dream.”
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is released in the UK on 19 May.
