Splash

The mid-80s was a time when a few filmmakers made movies in the magical realism genre that almost felt like spiritual throwbacks to comedies of the 1930s and '40s. Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo was an intentional paean to Depression-era cinematic escapism, while the Carl-Reiner/Steve Martin film All of Me, though firmly grounded in 1980s trappings, feels like the magical realism comedies of Hollywood's early Golden Age. Splash falls more in line with the romantic fantasy genre, but despite all its 1984 trappings, it too evokes an earlier era of film romances built around a single fantastical element.

The movie started life as an idea by producer Brian Grazer. If you ever meet Grazer at a party or sit him in front of a microphone and ask him what a producer does, he will be only too happy to tell you all about Splash. And this won't be self-aggrandizement. Grazer came up with the high-concept premise, "What if an everyday guy fell in love with a mermaid," hired great writers to develop a screenplay, assembled a cast and crew, put together the financing, and made the movie. That is indeed what a great producer does, and Grazer is a great producer who has shepherded many notable films to great acclaim like Real Genius, Parenthood, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, 8 Mile, Inside Man, American Gangster, Frost/Nixon, Tower Heist, American Made, Hillbilly Elegy, and Tick, Tick... Boom! Grazer met Ron Howard while working in TV, and the two hit it off. Learning that Howard was eager to make the jump from TV actor to movie director, they teamed up and made their first picture together, Night Shift, in 1982. The successful comedy starred Howard's Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler and up-and-coming manic funny-man Michael Keaton. Night Shift was written by sitcom scribes Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who had penned many teleplays for The Odd Couple and Happy Days, with Ganz co-creating two spin-offs from the later—Laverne and Shirley and Joanie Loves Chachi.

Grazer pitched his "Mermaid in New York" idea to every studio, but the only bite he got was from Walt Disney Pictures, of all places. This was during the studio's lean years when Walt's son-in-law, Ron Miller, was running the operation and trying all kinds of things to keep the flailing studio afloat. Always more interested in less expensive live-action movies than animated features, Miller wanted to expand the Disney brand into PG-rated films for audiences that weren’t just kids and families. He created the Touchstone Pictures label for these PG-rated pictures. Touchstone's very first release was Splash, which made more money for Disney than nearly any other film produced during the Ron Miller era. Grazer had initially hired novelist, playwright, and pop-culture commentator Bruce Jay Friedman to write Splash, but when Disney green-lit the idea, Miller wanted more of a romantic comedy than the urban satire Freedman had written. Grazer brought on his Night Shift scribes Ganz and Mandel to rewrite the script.

Unable to land a big-name actor to star, Ganz and Mandel suggested Howard and Grazer see Tom Hanks, as he gave a memorably over-the-top guest performance on a Happy Days episode playing a former classmate of Fonzie with a chip on his shoulder. They urged the director to put him in the lead rather than the comical brother part Howard envisioned him in. The writers felt Hanks had a vulnerability and sensitivity not yet seen in any of his work, which could make him an ideal "everyman." It was inspired casting, as was Daryl Hannah for the role of the lovely and mysterious mermaid. The fact that the two actors were known quantities in the industry but not big names in the public eye actually worked to the film's advantage. Without major stars in the leads, the premise and approach were the main draws, and critics and audiences were quick to praise every aspect of the film because it's the kind of movie that doesn't work unless you willingly suspend disbelief across a host of areas and care only about the character relationships. This certainly works for me, and I'm someone who gets very hung up on internal logic issues, even in fantasy films. Hanks and Hannah are so winning that you just want them to end up happily ever after, as impossible as that seems.

This was a major turning point for both actors. After Bill Murray became an unexpected movie star, studios were desperate to cultivate more actors who could be irreverent, charming, and unpredictable rapscallions but who were also just a little more "camera friendly" than Murray. That's how we got Tim Matheson, Michael Keaton, Steve Guttenberg, Judge Reinhold, Robert Hays, Dana Olsen, and dozens of less talented, clean-cut, good-looking white guys who oozed confidence and dominated every scene they were in as if their non-stop impish, wise-cracking, shtick was the most charming thing imaginable. Twenty-four-year-old Hanks played one of these guys on the sitcom Bosom Buddies, which impressed even critics who hated TV. Everyone who worked with Hanks in television, be it on game shows, guest shots on Happy Days and Family Ties, the TV movie Mazes and Monsters, and his own freshly-canceled sitcom, knew he was destined for the big screen. But Hanks could have ended up playing nothing but zany on-screen wiseacres in movies like the films he signed on for as he made the jump to the big screen—Bachelor Party, The Man with One Red Shoe, and Volunteers—and then disappeared after a few years.

Looking at Hanks's career up to this point, you can see why he was originally considered for the supporting role of the crude, womanizing brother eventually played by John Candy. That part seemed far more suited to the screen persona Hanks was developing. It's always fun when you can trace a career back to a sliding doors moment like this, as I truly believe that Hanks would not have become the "Jimmy Stewart of our time" without the lucky break of getting cast in this role in this film. For the first time, Hanks wasn't trying to be funny in every second of every scene. Casting SCTV alums John Candy and Eugene Levy helped make the zany Hanks seem like a straight-man by comparison. Similarly, Hannah could have wound up just another talented, beautiful ingenue who made a few movies in her twenties and was then forgotten by Hollywood. But starring in Splash burned her into the annals of cinema history for all time—and she was almost single-handedly responsible for hundreds of thousands of little girls being given the first name of Madison after 1984.

Candy's performance is also a wonder. His character is kind of despicable, yet we love him because of how much we love Candy. By far the biggest star in the cast, Candy was paid something like five times everyone else's salary, but he delivers the goods. Hank's fraternal bond with Candy makes him as endearing as his romantic chemistry with Hannah grounds this broad comic fantasy in genuine emotions. Levy gives, in my opinion, his only truly great big-screen performances as the hapless Dr. Walter Kornbluth, a character played just as broadly as all of Levy's other movie roles but without the sense of desperation to get laughs that usually put me off him.

The film is not all that visually impressive, but Howard brings an elegant simplicity to the directing that feels appropriate. The New York locations ground us in a specific reality, and the underwater shots are mystical enough to cast a spell. The make-up effects are also impressive. Hannah's mighty mermaid tail was created by visual effects artist Robert Short, who would win an Oscar for Best Make-Up for his work on Beetlejuice in 1988. Hannah had had a lot of practice swimming like a mermaid with her legs bound together as a kid just for fun, and when she was in the tail for Splash, she could shoot through the water with incredible speed and grace. In addition to the great box office and mostly warm reviews, Splash was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Grazer has been trying to remake it for over a decade, but I hope he never gets a new version afloat. This is one of those wonderful '80s one-offs that should just live forever as the near-perfect little comedy it was and remains.