The haunting moment Ron Howard almost starred in a porno movie: “I was desperate”
Acting may have paid the bills for the first two decades of his career, but Ron Howard always saw his long-term future as a filmmaker. However, those chances were very hard to come by, and he almost had to take drastic measures to realise his dream.
By the time he left his teenage years, Howard was already a household name after spending almost 250 episodes on The Andy Griffith Show, where he played Opie Taylor. Even when his run on the series came to an end in 1968, Howard remained in demand as a performer despite his reluctance to continue down that path.
Sharing the screen with John Wayne in The Shootist, playing a major role in George Lucas’ ‘Best Picture’ nominee American Graffiti, and striking small screen gold for a second time as Happy Days‘ Richie Cunningham kept Howard gainfully employed and financially stable, but his eyes were constantly drifting behind the camera.
It wasn’t until Roger Corman came along and handed him the reins on 1977’s Grand Theft Auto that Howard was finally able to dive in at the deep end and helm a feature, and he hasn’t looked back since. For the better part of half a century, he’s kept his acting to a minimum and established himself as one of the most reliable hands in the game, not to mention his position as a two-time Academy Award winner and one of the highest-grossing directors in cinema history.
And yet, things could have turned out very differently for Howard’s nascent auteurism had he followed through on his tentative plan to make a porno. It’s a bizarre scenario, and it’s hard to imagine there being much of an audience for it, but he confirmed that at one stage, he was so desperate to secure funding to direct a movie that he nearly bared all for the cameras in the most graphic way imaginable.
Not only that, but it would have sought to capitalise on his residual fame and name recognition from The Andy Griffith Show. When Howard was asked flat-out if there was any truth to the rumours the unofficial X-rated spinoff Opie Gets Laid was a genuine possibility, he rather hauntingly answered in the affirmative.
“That’s true,” he confessed to The New York Times. “I was desperate to find a way to finance an independent movie. I thought I could make a killing by giving the public what it really wanted.” His tongue may have been planted firmly in his cheek, but that doesn’t make the prospect of a Howard-led porno any less galling.
Legendary producer and career-maker Corman was instrumental in launching dozens of names who’d go on to become Hollywood fixtures, but the greatest thing he ever accomplished may well have been preventing the world from being darkened by a Ron Howard porno flick.
