Hollywood, Fiction and Shelley Long
If you watch movies, it will come as no surprise to hear that Hollywood moviemakers love making movies about moviemakers making movies. And if you’ve ever read an issue of Entertainment Weekly, it will come as no surprise that what goes on behind the scenes ties these movies together in even more pervasive ways. In knowing the business side of things, we can often appreciate the final product more — or at least better appreciate Hollywood’s tendency to imitate itself, again and again.
This is a story about both of these things. This is also a story about Shelley Long.
In the 1984 dramedy Irreconcilable Differences, Shelley Long and Ryan O’Neal star as two Hollywood creatives who meet, marry, and divorce before their daughter, played by Drew Barrymore, ultimately emancipates. For whatever reason, it doesn’t rank highly among the ’80s movies we associate with Long, O’Neal, or Barrymore, but it’s an effective enough lampoon of Hollywood and a believable depiction of two people falling in and out of love. The script, by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, stands on its own, but the well-drawn characters could also largely be credited to their inspiration: real-life moviemakers Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich, who also fell in and out of love and managed to create some important films over the course of their relationship.
When I started watching Irreconcilable Differences, I didn’t know that it was a riff on Platt and Bogdanovich, whose most famous collaboration was 1971’s The Last Picture Show. Rather, I made the realization about a half-hour in, a serendipitous epiphany because I’d enjoyed the Platt-focused season of the podcast You Must Remember This. Titled “The Invisible Woman,” it explains how Platt’s contributions to Bogdanovich’s films went under-recognized — by Bogdanivich and by Hollywood in general. While Bogdanovich’s career suffered after parting ways from his former wife, Platt would go on to work on major motion pictures such as the 1976 Bad News Bears, the 1976 A Star Is Born, Terms of Endearment, The Witches of Eastwick, Broadcast News, Say Anything, and Bottle Rocket. And it was as executive vice president of James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films that she introduced the Mary Tyler Moore Show creator to the comic Life in Hell, which led to a meeting with the artist, Matt Groening, and, ultimately, the creation of The Simpsons. But whereas I knew Bogdanovich’s name before hearing the podcast, I had no idea who Platt was. Given her resume, that surprises even me.
Hollywood’s habit of forgetting the contributions of women is nothing new, and this past year, this phenomenon partly informed The Shelley Longcast, a Patreon-only bonus series my cohost and I created for people who support Gayest Episode Ever, our podcast about LGBTQ-focused episodes of classic sitcoms. We both love Shelley Long and think her turn as Diane Chambers on Cheers is one of the best sitcom performances ever. In particular, we think her role in the first-season episode “The Boys in the Bar,” in which the regulars worry that Cheers will become a gay bar, is one of the best depictions of LGBTQ allyship ever in a sitcom — made all the more significant because it aired in 1983, when most other TV series’ handling of queer themes was mixed at best. It’s for all these reasons that we wanted to look at all the other work Long had done outside of Cheers.
Long’s choice to leave Cheers was widely considered premature, and with what seemed like a simple wave of the hand, many were quick to call her switch of medium a mistake. Granted, the movies she made immediately after leaving Cheers didn’t make money, but even without my personal bias, I’d say it’s reductive to just dismiss her filmography altogether. For example, her first post–Diane Chambers project, Troop Beverly Hills, earned only $8.5 million in theaters on an $18 million budget. However, as a snapshot of ’80s culture and a parable about how a person doesn’t need to sacrifice their femininity in order to be successful, Troop Beverly Hills’ legacy outlives many other films that fared better in 1989. I could certainly tell you more about Long’s Phyllis Nefler character than I could about anything from Rain Man, The Abyss, Twins, or even Look Who’s Talking (which happens to star that actress who joined Cheers after Long left), and I’m sure many women and gay men in their late thirties, in particular, would agree. But even Long’s more financially successful films — the ones released before she left Cheers — tend to be discounted.
(The 1987 revenant mom romcom Hello Again hit theaters in November, six months after Long’s last episode of Cheers, but production began before her departure was publicly known. Hello Again made $20 million.)
Another major influence on The Shelley Longcast was a 2013 Vulture piece by Kyle Buchanan, who speculates that there is a relative scarcity of female-female buddy comedies because Hollywood tends to fool itself into thinking that they don’t make money:
The hilarious 1987 movie Outrageous Fortune, pairing Bette Midler and a Cheers-departing Shelley Long, was a solid hit generating $52.8 million (more than $100 million when adjusted for inflation), just over $3 million more than a much more famous buddy comedy from that year, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The next year, Midler would team up with Lily Tomlin for Big Business, in which they played buddies twice over (two sets of twins!), and the movie pulled in $40.1 million (approximately $77 million adjusted), or $2 million more than Midnight Run, the Robert De Niro–Charles Grodin comedy that is often held up as being a highlight of the genre.
This essay won’t break down Shelley Long’s filmography title by title — I mean, that is what the podcast was for; all bonus content available on Patreon for just $1 a month! — and it won’t try to say that Polly Platt’s and Shelley Long’s experiences in Hollywood mirror each other perfectly. However, both had their talents undervalued in ways that don’t usually happen to men, and both eventually struck out on their own, free from the associations that first made them known quantities. Platt, divorced from Bogdanovich, found much success. Long, divorced from Cheers, found less success. I do wonder if Long reflects on her very Platt-like character in Irreconcilable Differences, however — about her path through Hollywood and this character’s path, to what degree she thinks her these two diverge.
In the movie, Long plays Lucy, an aspiring novelist who ends up marrying O’Neal’s Albert, who gets the opportunity to re-edit a famous director’s latest picture, which is stalled in production hell. He does so, but only with the help of Lucy, who by virtue of being a writer who shares a roof with Albert becomes his de facto collaborator. She is never credited as such. The movie turns out so well that Albert is given the chance to direct his own movie, and he and Lucy decide to adapt an obscure French novel. Again, Lucy’s contributions go unrecognized, and to complicate matters further, the young unknown they cast as the film’s heroine (Sharon Stone) ends up moving into Albert and Lucy’s home so they can thoroughly prepare her for the role. Albert ends up falling in love with the actress, and Lucy ends up a bitter ex-wife, gritting her teeth when she drops off her daughter for a weekend at the mansion that used to be hers. Albert’s next movie is a Civil War-era musical starring that same actress that tanks his career — itself a nod to Peter Bogdanovich’s 1975 Cole Porter musical At Long Last Love, which flopped and was the first sign that he perhaps made better films when he made them with Platt.
(Oddly, the Irreconcilable Differences credits bill Stone as “Introducing Sharon Stone,” even she’d made her credited film debut in the 1981 Wes Craven slasher Deadly Blessing. And for what it’s worth, You Must Remember This host Karina Longworth insists that At Long Last Love is actually better than the negative reviews would have you believe.)
Irreconcilable Differences goes on from there, but this is where the film is most clearly a riff on Polly Platt and Peter Bogdanovich. While filming The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich fell in love with its star — a young unknown named Cybill Shepherd — and left Platt, though she would continue to collaborate with him on What’s Up Doc? in 1972 and Paper Moon in 1973, both of which starred none other than Ryan O’Neal. And even that point merits a moment of consideration, just because what must O’Neal have thought of eventually playing a thinly veiled version of his former collaborator? And given the strained nature of O’Neal’s own relationship with this daughter and Paper Moon co-star, Tatum O’Neal, did he ever look back on his character’s arc in Irreconcilable Differences, where he becomes an increasingly absentee father of a daughter who suffers as a result of being raised in Hollywood?
For the record, Drew Barrymore would in 1989 emancipate from her mother, who actually has a small role in Irreconcilable Differences and whose first credit film appearance is, of all things, Shelley Long’s 1982 sex comedy, The Night Shift. In 2009, Barrymore said on 60 Minutes that she actually learned about emancipation from filming Irreconcilable Differences. To date, she’s seemingly the only one who’s publicly acknowledged that the plot of this film would end up having real-life parallels for its stars.
Maybe what’s most interesting about this movie about husband-and-wife collaborators whose marriage dissolves, based on real-life husband-and-wife collaborators whose marriage dissolved, is the fact that co-writers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer were themselves husband-and-wife collaborators whose marriage would eventually dissolve. Shyer gets sole credit as the director, but would you bet that his spouse had more influence over the final product than would your average co-writer who didn’t live with the director and wasn’t privy to his creative process? Yeah, I would guess that Nancy Meyers had a lot of input on this film.
Together, Meyers and Shyer are credited with writing Private Benjamin, Protocol, Jumpin’ Jack Flash (though both using pseudonyms), Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and its sequel, I Love Trouble, and finally the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan. In addition to Irreconcilable Differences, Shyer directed Baby Boom, both Father of the Bride movies, and I Love Trouble. His most financially successful was Father of the Bride, making $89.3 million on a $20 million budget. Meanwhile, Meyers’ first directorial credit, The Parent Trap, brought in $92.1 million on a $15 million budget. Meyers and Shyer divorced the following year, and she has gone on to have a successful directing career, helming What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated, and The Intern, all of which were massive financial successes and brought in more than $100 million each at the box office. (Yes, even The Intern.) Shyer, meanwhile, has only directed two subsequent films: 2001’s The Affair of the Necklace and the 2004 remake of Alfie. The latter made $35 million on a $60 million budget. The former cost $30 million to make, and its total box office gross was $471,210.
I don’t know why Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer divorced, but I think it’s fair to say the fork in their filmographies fits a larger pattern here.
Meyers has not yet written her memoirs, and I could not find an interview in which she reflects on the process of making Irreconcilable Differences in regard to her own life, so I can only wonder how often that movie pops into her head. When and if it does, I would be curious to know if she had any idea she’d be writing her own story, years in advance. In the final third of Irreconcilable Differences, which is allegedly inspired less by Polly Platt and more by Nora Ephron, Long’s character becomes a success in her own right for writing the novel He Said It Would Be Forever, a thinly veiled recounting of her failed marriage; she gets all the money and fame that her husband, now a director of B movies and sitcoms, doesn’t have anymore. She even buys back the mansion.
I explained all this to a friend with a better perspective on the slights women endure just living in Los Angeles, to say nothing of what it’s like pursuing a creative career while female, and she relieved me of any notions that this pattern was unique to the orbit of Irreconcilable Differences. Rather, this is just the story of working in Hollywood, of being a woman married to a powerful man in this town, of men who have fragile egos and can’t look at female success as anything other than an affront to their own. It’s also not terribly surprising that Ryan O’Neal ended up estranged from his daughter, or that Drew Barrymore had to formally end her relationship with her mother because it wasn’t the healthy relationship she needed. These are all common enough arcs in Hollywood stories — or wherever fame and large sums of money abound, really.
Still, tracing the throughline in Platt’s and Meyers’ respective careers and in the fictional Hollywood of Irreconcilable Differences gives me a bit more clarity on Long’s trajectory. Ask anyone old enough to remember, and the thing they’ll tell you about her is that she was on Cheers until she wasn’t, usually followed by comments ranging from “How could she walk away from all that?” to “She thought she was too good for that show, and look where that attitude got her.” I guess it’s a testament to how much people loved Cheers, but a lot of viewers took her departure personally, in one way or the other, and still do. Long has explained that she left Cheers because she wanted to be a mother to her daughter, and she also had grown tired of doing the same thing over and over — in terms of the repetitive nature of sitcoms, not the inescapably cyclical nature of Hollywood, which no one can ever free themselves from, apparently.
She was right to do it, I say as someone who loves Diane Chambers and who loves Cheers. As we discuss on Gayest Episode Ever, Cheers would give the role initially performed by Diane to Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane: the cultured one who attempts to elevate the lives of the people who work at or frequent the bar. And after Grammer’s promotion to series regular, Long wasn’t given the same great material they gave her in the first two seasons. So she struck out on her own in hopes of finding something better, something she didn’t think she’d get in this environment that was familiar and safe but also creatively stifling. Again, the narratives don’t line up precisely, but I can see similarities in Shelley Long’s choice to leave television for movies and Polly Platt and Nancy Meyers’ respective decisions to forge solo careers. They each strove to reject Hollywood’s perceptions of them and achieve more, create more, and do it on their own terms. Meyers came out on top. Platt succeeded but still became, at least per the telling of You Must Remember This, an invisible woman. Long’s movies, alas, did not make enough at the box office — at least not right away.
It’s a huge bummer that the movies Long released after Cheers didn’t earn more money. It’s also a huge bummer that there weren’t more of those movies. A successful film run would have been the Hollywood ending that Shelley Long deserved. I suppose you could say that it’s very much in the spirit of Phyllis Nefler that the world wouldn’t realize what a gem it got in Troop Beverly Hills until years later, because the sort of success it did achieve was the kind that the Velda Plendors of the world wouldn’t recognize as legitimate.
After Troop Beverly Hills, it’s just Don’t Tell Her It’s Me in 1990 and Frozen Assets in 1992 before Long would finally strike gold at the box office with the two Brady Bunch movies, the first earning $46 million in 1995 and the second earning $21 million in 1996. It’s just cosmic irony that the movies to break her losing streak would have her playing a warped, big-screen version of a character Florence Henderson originated on TV — the very medium that Long tried to get away from. The Brady Bunch Movie, I should point out, was directed by Betty Thomas, who played the villainous Velda Plendor in Troop Beverly Hills. Delve into old gossip about Long and you’ll encounter the assertion that some co-stars may not have loved her perfectionist style. (Bette Midler sure didn’t.) My personal rule for how I should receive information like this about a woman is to wonder if a man in the same position would be criticized for the same things; the answer is usually no. Besides, either Betty Thomas worked with Long just fine or, if she didn’t, she nonetheless realized that Long would knock the role of Carol Brady out of the park. But I can see a world in which an already critical Cheers fan base would view any perceived distaste for Long as proof of concept.
(Betty Thomas won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama in 1985 for her role on Hill Street Blues, but her last major acting role was Troop Beverly Hills. She has continued to direct, earning another Emmy for directing an episode of Dream On in 1993, and has most recently directed 2009’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. Before you roll your eyes, know that this film made $443 million at the box office, which is more than any of Nancy Meyers’ films have made, let alone any of Charles Shyer’s. Also, I want to point out that another of Long’s Troop Beverly Hills co-stars, Mary Gross, later reunited with Long in an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, so I’d like to think the the film’s themes of feminist solidarity actually meant something.)
Shelley Long did eventually return to the Cheers extended universe in the third-season Frasier episode “The Show Where Diane Comes Back.” It’s not Long’s first appearance on Frasier, but it is the “real,” canonical return of Diane to Frasier’s life and Long to the medium she tried to leave behind, all in an effort to wrap up the unresolved thread of Diane leaving Frasier at the altar at the end of the fifth season of Cheers. In the context of this essay, it seems notable that Diane lives in Los Angeles, where she had been working as a TV writer on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman until she accidentally set Jane Seymour on fire. She has arrived in Seattle to stage her play, which turns out to be a re-creation of her time at the Cheers bar, with lookalike actors playing versions of her, Frasier, Sam, Carla, Norm, and Cliff. Frasier, of course, recognizes this immediately and is horrified to be trapped in a theater watching a bizarro version of his own story play out. I would imagine it would have been like if Peter Bogdanovich had ever sat through Irreconcilable Differences, which, in all fairness, he probably didn’t. I wouldn’t blame him.
(Technically, Long appears on Frasier once in the second season, before Diane’s canonical return in the third. However, it’s in a dream sequence only. Long also returns in the ninth season, but only as a sort of psychic projection, alongside those of Bebe Neuwirth as Lilith, Rita Wilson as Frasier’s mother, and Dina Spybey as Nanny G, Frasier’s oft-forgotten first wife and a role previously played by Emma Thompson and Laure Metcalf. Jean Smart is also there. It’s kind of hard to explain, and I’m only including this because, as a gay man, I can’t resist mentioning this many comedic actresses being in the same place at the same time.)
Again, to my knowledge, the only person we know for sure has ever looked back on Irreconcilable Differences and seen the parallels with her own life is Drew Barrymore. Well, aside from Platt herself, who did acknowledge the connection in a 2011 interview with my friend Alonso Duralde, saying “Well, they got more right than wrong.” But it must have occurred to everyone else, though, right? These artistically minded people would have to appreciate the strangeness of writing or acting out their own future. I say that never having been in this unusual position myself, I admit, so I couldn’t say whether that awareness would help or hurt.
At least on this one episode of Frasier, it helps: Watching fake versions of themselves act out a fake version of their own story helps Diane and Frasier resolve their long-simmering tension. It’s a touching, well-acted moment, wherein Diane admits that she still hasn’t figured out how the play’s stand-in for her should say goodbye to the play’s stand-in for Frasier, and Frasier, who has spent years wanting to unload on Diane for breaking his heart, instead offers up a tender, deeply felt way to fix the scene: to acknowledge that parting ways was difficult but that it didn’t take away any from her presence in his life. Yes, these two collaborate.
Frasier: Well, I suppose he’d tell her that he feels the same way. That she’s touched him in a way she can never imagine, he’s glad she was in his life.
Diane: All that would be left would be the “goodbye.” How do you see that?
Frasier: Well, I suppose he could say, uh, “until we meet again,” probably certain that they never would.
Diane: But mightn’t there be a part of him that hopes they would?
Frasier: Oh, I suppose so, yes. All right, then, don't have him sum things up. Just let them say their goodbyes, and if their paths happen to cross again, so be it. Goodbye, Mary Ann.
Diane: Goodbye, Franklin.
Frasier then attempts to exit through a stage door in the same place where the main entrance was on the bar on Cheers. “Force of habit,” he says. “I’ve been doing it all week,” Diane replies. Old patterns are hard to break.
If Hollywood must pretend like Long’s movie career doesn’t count, at least it apparently can’t forget that she was so very good on the small screen and utterly unforgettable as Diane. That doesn’t represent the whole of what she’s done as an actor, but at least we all agree on this much. This Frasier episode is a celebration of that through the very final seconds of the last scene, where Frasier walks off camera and Diane remains on stage, looking proud of what she’s done. In what is already becoming a pattern in this essay, it’s maybe not how Long would have wanted it, especially because the episode ends with Diane deciding to head back to L.A. to revise the script, in a sense dooming her to be trapped forever in her past. But it’s realistic, not only based on Hollywood’s tendency to make art that imitates life that imitates art, but also based on Hollywood’s profound love for telling stories about telling stories.
I am biased in favor of Shelley, but I like to think that Diane eventually got the play to work perfectly.
You can subscribe to this blog’s feed here.