Ron Howard being ‘Mr Nice Guy’ almost cost him the greatest night of his career: “I would never”
Every director has at least one movie they’ll always rue as the one that got away, with studio politics or scheduling conflicts often to blame. When it almost happened to Ron Howard, though, it was because he was living up to his reputation and being too nice for his own good.
Hollywood is a place where half-truths, white lies, manipulation, and backstabbing are a regular occurrence, which makes it all the more impressive that Howard has managed to navigate seven decades in a cutthroat industry as both an actor and a filmmaker without letting his halo slip even once.
He was a shining beacon of all-American wholesomeness as a child star on The Andy Griffith Show, and he carried that through to his stint as Happy Days‘ Richie Cunningham. Even when he left performing behind to focus on directing, at no point has he been viewed as anything other than the epitome of ‘Mr Nice Guy’.
It’s made him a lot of friends and very few enemies, but always having your heart in the right place can be a double-edged sword. Fortunately, it wasn’t on this occasion, but Howard’s commitment to being virtuous almost cost him the greatest night of his career, because he didn’t want to step on his friend’s toes.
Even though they’ve been inseparable for over 40 years and co-founded Imagine Entertainment together in 1985, Howard and Brian Grazer aren’t joined at the hip. They frequently develop projects for their company as individuals, which is why the former couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of 8 Mile.
If one of them has a passion project, the other tries to stay away, and, as a result, when Grazer optioned Sylvia Nasar’s John Nash biography, A Beautiful Mind, for the big screen, Howard planned to keep his distance. “I knew about it and was intrigued by the story,” he explained. “But it was Brian’s project, and we never get in each other’s way.”
Grazer did ask, though, but since his business partner and long-time pal was still knee-deep in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, he passed on the director’s chair. That said, from the way Howard tells it, it sounds as though he had another, more personally important, reason: “A project that Brian had nurtured? I would never co-opt and try to control.”
Once he’d wrapped his festive fantasy, the director’s stance started to soften, and when the stars aligned, or schedules, to be more accurate, he was ready, willing, and available to take the reins. When he did, A Beautiful Mind gave Howard everything that he’d dreamed of since he first stepped behind the camera.
The biopic won four Academy Awards, and two of them went to Howard, who claimed ‘Best Director’ and shared ‘Best Picture’ with Grazer. And to think, he almost shot the most important night of his professional life in the foot, all because he didn’t want to run the risk of overstepping a boundary.
