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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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1990-09-19
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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.