Leslie Dixon started out as a script reader. Her first published screenplay was Outrageous Fortune, which is a funny film, and she followed it up with Overboard. Refreshingly, she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 “I don’t know of any executive that has ever looked at the title page of a script, seen that it was written by a woman and thrown it in the ‘I’m not going to read this’ pile. They’ll give it a few pages, and if you catch them in a narrative, they don’t care whether it’s a man or a woman. It’s much tougher for female directors because there’s so much physical stamina involved, and there’s an unspoken prejudice that ‘the little lady might not be up for being general of an army.’ But a writing job, there’s never been so many of them for women. ‘Come on down!’”
As this article tells us, she was starting to feel boxed in to comedy, changed direction, adapted an Edith Wharton novel, was then offered The Thomas Crown Affair and then read Catherine Ryan Hyde's novel 'Pay It Forward' which she 'just had to do'. But check this out: 'Things went awry during filming when Spacey and Hunt lived up to their reputations as extremely difficult people to work with and began demanding script changes and were improvising ridiculously corny lines...Screenwriter Leslie Dixon has been very candid about the awful experience on Pay It Forward, saying of the actor’s script demands, “I began making the script worse. There weren’t wrenching changes; it was more the death by a thousand little razor cuts.” She (and I can't substantiate this) quit the project and the film did badly, thus derailing Mimi Leder's career.
Well. We can of course only comment on what we can see. (And hear. I suggested it as part of a Tom Newman retrospective. But more on that later.) We overall thought it was good. The subject matter is intriguing and Spacey and Haley Joel Osment play their characters well, and the cross cutting of Jay Mohr's investigating journalist works. For me, the main problem with this film is Helen Hunt - I find she gives exactly the same mannered performance in everything she does. But no problems with supporting characters played by Jim Caviezel ("Have a coffee with me. Save my life"), David Ramsey (loved the scene where he gets the asthma girl help), Angie Dickinson (great as alky homeless women) and (briefly) Jon Bon Jovi.
Oliver Stapleton's photography (loved the huge crane shot at the very end), David Rosenbloom's editing and Mimi Leder's direction are all good. And Tom Newman's score is recognisably his and provides great atmosphere. I was thinking some of his scores like this sound like they're easy to do, but when other people try to emulate the style, they will certainly find it's harder than it looks (sounds).
We last watched it almost twenty years ago.
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| The unmistakable backdrop of The Bradbury Building |
And then not really knowing what to watch next, I thought 'Why not stay with Leslie Dixon?' Overboard is a hugely enjoyable film, almost in the old Hollywood forties style - you think of amnesia movies like the William Powell / Myrna Loy I Love You Again (1940).
My favourite scene - and it is a key scene - remains the one where Goldie's being ticked off by the school principal for her unruly children but then realises they have poison oak and turns the tables - because she's acting like their mother. We hadn't seen it since 2018, so it was well overdue. John A Alonzo delivers some nice pretties but he also catches Goldie Hawn in a beautiful light, as I'm sure husband Kurt Russell would agree:
Goldie and Kurt have been married - no they haven't, they've been together - since 1983. Forty two years. Pretty good. I'm gonna toast to them this evening.
By the way, Roddy McDowell steals the film.
