The box office bomb that made Ron Howard shave off his Andy Warhol-approved moustache
Throughout the 1980s, Ron Howard sported a thick ginger moustache. It became the signature calling card that separated the director from the younger version of himself, who starred as Richie Cunningham in the 1970s sitcom Happy Days. Even iconic pop artist Andy Warhol loved the moustache and wanted to paint it. However, as the ’80s rolled into the ’90s, divorce was on Howard’s cards; it was a divorce from the bushy soup strainer atop his upper lip.
Interestingly, it was the box-office failure of one of the movies made by his production company Imagine Entertainment that convinced a drunken Howard to part with the ‘stache.
1982 was a big year for Howard. After all, this was the year he enjoyed the first big success of his directorial career – Night Shift – and he decided that fresh-faced Richie Cunningham visage had to go. In ’85, when Playboy magazine asked how long he’d had the moustache, he said, “It’s about three and a half years old. There was at least a year of pencilling it in when I went on talk shows. I grew it to look older.”
Amusingly, at that stage, Howard – who had experienced two more hits with Splash and Cocoon in ’84 and ’85 – revealed he was already toying with losing the moustache. He admitted, “I keep wanting to shave it off, but my wife says not to. Maybe one day I’ll need to look younger, and it will go.”
While this may sound like a man having a bit of fun at his own expense, it truly was detrimental to Howard’s directing career that he looked so young and was still immortalised in people’s minds as the kid from Happy Days. He confessed, “Everyone took a fairly patronising attitude with me…It bothered me because my goal had been to direct a feature when I was still in my teens.”
“My looking so young was also a drawback at the time,” continued Howard, “but finally, Roger Corman gave me my first break, and people began coming around.” That break was the 1977 road comedy Grand Theft Auto, which Howard made while still a sitcom star. Still, despite the film making decent money, Howard took five long years to convince anyone to let him direct another movie.
All this is to say: his moustache was much more important to Howard than a piece of facial hair would be to most men. It symbolised him breaking free from the confines of television and establishing himself as one of the hottest young directors in the game. Then Warhol asked him to shave it off.
In 2021, Howard and producing partner Brian Grazer appeared on In Depth with Graham Bensinger and revealed that, at some point in the mid-’80s, Warhol made them an indecent moustache proposal. He floated the idea of painting Howard twice: once with the moustache and then once clean-shaven. He figured it would show the two different faces of an American icon – but Howard admitted, “I went, ‘That sounds weird. I am not doing that. Forget it.”
Grazer tried to reason with him, reminding him that he would get two original Warhol paintings from this – admittedly odd – deal. However, Howard felt, “I respect Andy Warhol, but I’m not going to let him shave my moustache off for his amusement.”
Fast forward to 1990, and the still-moustachioed Howard was sitting in a Los Angeles movie theatre with Grazer on the opening night of John Waters’ Cry Baby. It was a movie produced by Imagine, a company they founded in ’85, and starred Johnny Depp in his first-ever lead role. They had a tradition of attending a regular screening on the opening Friday of all their movies to see how the crowds reacted. On this night, though, there were seven people in a 600-capacity theatre, and they knew the movie would bomb.
The crestfallen-producing partners returned to Grazer’s house for a few drinks before they trekked to the airport. You see, Howard had a midnight flight to catch, and by the time he got there, he was pretty tipsy. He went into the bathroom and had a moment of drunken realisation while standing in front of the mirror. He explained, “I looked at my moustache, and I didn’t like it anymore, and I shaved off my moustache.”
Naturally, Grazer was dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe Howard had turned down the chance to own two original Warhols because he was too stubborn to remove his moustache – but then decided to do it on a whim a few years later. Howard chuckled that he always half-thought Grazer just wanted the Warhol paintings for himself, but he did admit, “At the end of the day, I do wish I had them. Brian was right.”
