The 1975 shoot that terrified Ron Howard: “Spent a year being mostly frightened”
By the mid-1970s, Ron Howard was already growing tired of being an actor, but because it paid the bills and nobody was letting him direct, he had to bite his tongue and power through.
He’d always dreamed of stepping behind the camera, but the problem with being one of the most recognisable child stars-turned-young actors of your generation is that everybody only sees you as one thing, and trying to shake off those preconceived notions wasn’t easy.
In the end, like many others before him, it was Roger Corman who finally extended the olive branch he’d been waiting for, but even making his directorial debut on 1977’s Grand Theft Auto wasn’t enough to guarantee a full-time pivot toward filmmaking, not least of all because of Happy Days.
Howard’s Richie Cunningham was a featured player on the show for its first seven seasons, which took him up to May 1980. After that, he continued acting here and there, but having been well and truly bitten by the directing bug, he was more determined than ever to trade performing for wielding the megaphone.
It definitely helped that as the series went on, Richie Cunningham was no longer the focal point. He had been to begin with, but the introduction of Henry Winkler’s Fonzie as a main cast member from the second season on, having been a recurring character in the first, was something Howard had to accept.
Things were made a lot easier by the fact that he and Winkler immediately hit it off, and they remain close friends to this day. However, for Happy Days‘ third run, a seismic change was made to the production, and it wasn’t one that the cherubic ginger was particularly fond of, at least, not to begin with.
When the third season premiered in September 1975, it was the first to have been filmed in front of a live studio audience. Although Howard was by far the most experienced of the ensemble, in terms of how long he’d been working and how many credits he’d built up, it was uncharted territory.
Having never performed in front of a live crowd before, he admitted that he “spent a year mostly being frightened” of the drastic change to Happy Days‘ production, but when Fonzie also began taking centre stage that year, he was left irritated by how the media had seized on his supposedly diminished role.
“The press started making a big deal out of it, and making me feel bad about it,” he recalled. “And also, ABC suddenly started treating me like small potatoes. Even though I was only 21, I didn’t think I really deserved that.” If anything, that solidified his decision to leave acting behind, even if he still had a way to go yet.
