The show that Ron Howard grew to hate: “Disrespect”
Jack Tudor, that’s the co-worker I hated from my days in construction. He was the foreman who demanded the loudest laughs for his subpar jokes. He’d sabotage fine work just to be able to criticise it. Jack Tudor was a bastard. These clowns are in every workplace, pathological lunatics hellbent on berating others with their own misery. This is evidenced by the fact that even the Hollywood great Ron Howard had to endure a slew of these human slugs.
Howard, who went from a child star in The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days to the happy-faced director behind the likes of The Da Vinci Code, Rush and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, is a bit of a cheery hero of the screen. His filmography, both behind and in front of the camera, is a little scattergun, typified only by his enthusiasm. But he almost had this knocked out of him from the get-go, thanks to callous commercialism that saw people as mere numbers.
His big break nearly broke him. Howard entered the world of Hollywood when he was only six. He set the tone for The Andy Griffith Show when he tosses a stone into tranquil lake water in the opening credits, even though his young arms could barely lift the rock. This was symbolic of the sweet face he had to put on to hide the hardships he faced while making the show. The set was routinely awash with swearing, smoking and alcohol, with a fair chunk of people drunk by lunch. Howard was overawed and overworked.
But that was just the half of it. Back in the days of The Andy Griffith Show, it was apparent that Howard was just a child in an adult’s world, having to deal with the dysfunctions of this struggling adult co-stars who attempted to show him kindness but were blindsided by their own battles. But in Happy Days, he began to see how egos entered the fray in a more directly bruising way when he was a little bit older.
He began the run of Happy Days as the show’s leading star, he was hailed as a hero on set during this period. But then the Fonz came along, and he was cooler, fresher and far more profitable. Even Howard had to admit that Henry Winkler was “remarkable” in the role. But at the time, he had only just turned 20, and suddenly, the adults on the set started to shun him in favour of Winkler. It wasn’t that Howard cried out for an arm around his shoulder – though this might’ve been nice from an experienced producer – but he got the antithesis.
“When we would go out of the road to promote the show, it was just insane, focused on Fonzy, clearly that was very exciting,” Howard told The Graham Norton Show. “Except the executives, studio heads, network heads, you know, they started treating me with a lot of disrespect from a business standpoint [and] in terms of interaction.” This felt uncalled for, and the strange rudeness came from producers simply finding a way to take some of their own problems out on the young former lead.
Thankfully, this only galvanised his zeal. “I recognised that it’s a business, and it’s a tough business, and it’s a competitive one,” he reflected. “You have to understand it from all perspectives.” But what he found hard to comprehend was the sudden abusiveness, something he endeavoured to turn against if he ever got a shot at running a project. “More than anything, it reminded me…to pursue my own dream, which was to be in charge of productions, the stories I wanted to tell and be the filmmaker,” he declared.
Ask any co-star, and they’ll tell you that he has stayed true to this promise, remaining the anti-Jack Tudor of Hollywood.
