The two 1972 movies that almost convinced Ron Howard to star in a porno: “It went through my mind”
While several of them have been acquired and distributed through illicit means, celebrity sex tapes remain big business among their target demographic. However, and with the greatest of respect, how much of an audience would there realistically be for a porno movie starring Ron Howard?
Based on his box office returns over the last decade, people aren’t that interested in turning up for the ones he’s directing, so trying to sell him as the face of a skin flick seems like an altogether taller task. He’s famous, so there’d at least be some sort of twisted curiosity factor. Still, at the end of the day, it’s Ron Howard.
Does anyone want to watch Ron Howard shagging today? Hopefully not. Has anyone ever wanted to watch Ron Howard shagging? It’s debatable, and questionable if you’d say yes. Would anyone have been interested in watching Ron Howard shagging in the early 1970s, when he was barely out of his teenage years and still closely associated with the cherubic kid he played on The Andy Griffith Show? What a troubling thought that is, albeit one he briefly contemplated.
He knew that he didn’t want to commit his long-term future to acting, and he also knew that directing was the goal, but the biggest obstacle to swapping one career for another was that he needed the money to do it and a producer willing to give him the chance, something he didn’t find until he joined Roger Corman’s stable of proteges to helm Grand Theft Auto in 1977.
Several years beforehand, and with the ‘Golden Age of Porn’ in full swing, he had an idea. “It was right at the time where Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat were making millions of dollars, and it was the first wave of the independent film movement,” Howard explained. “Nobody was taking me seriously as a director; I could just see it.”
Thanks to those aforementioned pictures, which were released months apart in 1972, earned a combined total of around $100 million at the box office and brought porn into the mainstream for the first time, the aspiring auteur felt emboldened to give it a shot. “Well, it’s true that it went through my mind,” he acknowledged. “It endured as a serious idea for probably two and a half to three seconds.”
Still, he thought about it, and he even had a title in mind: Opie Gets Laid, to capitalise on his residual popularity and name recognition. It didn’t take him long to abandon the idea, but it continues to haunt his nearest and dearest. “I’m glad he steered away from that,” his brother, Clint, said. “Because I don’t think anyone really wanted to see Opie get laid.”
As for his daughter, Bryce, she had the sneaking suspicion that if her father had followed through on his short-lived desire to enter the porn industry, her career would have been over before she was even born. “If he had done Opie Gets Laid, I just wouldn’t be in this business,” the actor suggested, and she’s probably not wrong, because she’d have been permanently tarnished by association.
Howard did himself, his friends, his family, audiences around the world, and anyone with a working set of eyes a favour by abandoning the idea almost as soon as it crossed his mind, but in an alternate universe out there somewhere, there’s a version of the Happy Days favourite and Oscar-winning director that went through with it, and you should be glad that it’s not this one.
