The 1999 movie character that hit too close to home for Ron Howard: “It is a very odd feeling”
Countless filmmakers have used their work as a form of personal catharsis, but Ron Howard has rarely been among that number, with the director more of a populist than a tortured artist or auteur.
He’s done it a few times, though, with Parenthood the first time he’d actively drawn from his own experience to inform one of his movies, taking a story credit and using his four children, who were born between 1981 and 1987, to inform plot, story, and character beats.
The two-time Academy Award winner wouldn’t take a similar approach to one of his productions until Ransom, and while a big-budget action thriller with Mel Gibson in the leading role doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would be drawn from the life of the most inoffensive man in Hollywood, a terrifying ordeal and threats made towards him and his family saw him relate to the film on a base level.
Of course, identifying and resonating with the material or having lived through something similar doesn’t guarantee whether or not a movie will succeed or fail, something Howard discovered first-hand when 1999’s EDtv tanked at the box office, although it wasn’t necessarily to do with its quality.
It was a decent enough dramedy, but arriving in the wake of The Truman Show saw it labelled a blatant rip-off and cynical cash-grab. It wasn’t, at least not in the strictest sense, which stung the director because he could see more and more of himself in Matthew McConaughey’s Ed Pekurny as shooting progressed.
A lot like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, Ed spends his days under constant surveillance that’s beamed around the world as a form of entertainment. It makes him famous, but it comes with its own set of pitfalls. Having grown up in front of the cameras on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, Howard knew exactly how his protagonist felt.
“I empathise with Ed,” he confessed. “I related to him when I was shooting the film. Ed had no idea of what the hell he was getting into. People go up to him, and after having seen him on television, think that they know him well enough to say anything about him. Like his character, I had no idea who these people were. It is a very odd feeling.”
Their circumstances were slightly different, with Ed being hand-picked for reality TV stardom while Howard grew up in a showbusiness family and got his start in the industry when he was still a child. Still, the notion of being approached by strangers who feel a personal connection to the star of their favourite show without knowing anything about them was something he knew all about.
EDtv was still ahead of the curve in its own way, not that anyone noticed or really cared when The Truman Show had already pre-emptively stolen its thunder, but at least it had a director who fully understood the parasocial relationship that can develop between a performer and their audience, having been there, done it, and got the t-shirts and trauma.
