RIP Garry Marshall, America’s Most Mainstream (And Unlikely) Auteur

By Joe Reid @joereid
Published July 20, 2016, 9:14 a.m. ET

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Pretty Woman

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Acclaimed film director and TV producer Garry Marshall died on Tuesday at the age of 81. He leaves behind a legacy that includes the legendary television series Happy Days, eighteen feature films, and numerous acting appearances.
Born in the Bronx in 1934, Marshall broke into the television industry as a writer for The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Lucy Show. With his writing partner, Jerry Belson, Marshall co-created the TV series The Odd Couple, based on the Neil Simon play and the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau movie. Going solo, Marshall created Happy Days in 1974, and it was a massive hit, one of the defining shows of its era. Happy Days spun off its own little shared universe of TV series, including Mork and Mindy, Joanie Loves Chachi, and in 1976, Laverne and Shirley, which would star Garry’s sister Penny as Laverne.

Marshall made the jump to feature films in 1982 with the soap opera spoof Young Doctors in Love. His work in the ’80s included The Flamingo Kid with Matt Dillon, Nothing in Common with Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason, Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, and Beaches with Bette Midler.
Marshall’s film work made him the most unlikely of auteurs, directing big, mainstream romantic comedies aimed right at the breadbasket of America. He worked with movie stars in the most classic sense, and he worked hard to have them shine their brightest. His biggest film success came in 1990 with the release of Pretty Woman, which finished in the box-office top 5 that year and turned Julia Roberts into the biggest movie star in America. Roberts would team up with Marshall thrice more in her career, with Runaway Bride, Valentine’s Day, and this spring’s Mother’s Day. Those latter two films represented this last decade of Marshall’s career, where he made exclusively ensemble comedies with star-studded casts revolving around one common holiday or another, featuring the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, and Shirley MacLaine.

Besides Roberts, other repeat contributors to the Garry Marshall filmography include Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson, but by far his most frequent star is Hector Elizondo, who has appeared in every single one of Marshall’s 18 feature films, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Pretty Woman.

Marshall would also often appear in front of the camera, very often as authority figures in a nod to his status as director and producer extraordinaire. He was the network president on Murphy Brown, again a network president in the film Soapdish, Drew Barrymore’s editor in Never Been Kissed, and the owner of the All-American Girls Baseball League in A League of Their Own, directed by Penny Marshall. Just last year, he was the voice of film director (and catfish) Abe on Bojack Horseman.

Shonda Rhimes, who was a screenwriter on Marshall’s The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, tweeted this about Marshall this morning.

Garry Marshall’s prolific career spanned six decades and includes the TV and movies that will be part of our cultural patchwork forever. He made made films with Michelle Pfeiffer, Julie Andrews, Jane Fonda, and Al Pacino. He created the Fonz and is the reason we all know the words “schlemiel” and “schlamazel.”
Click on the links below to see where you can stream Garry Marshall’s work:
TV:
The Odd Couple
Happy Days
Laverne and Shirley
Mork and Mindy
Movies:
Mother’s Day (2016)
New Year’s Eve (2011)
Valentine’s Day (2010)
Georgia Rule (2007)
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004)
Raising Helen (2004)
The Princess Diaries (2001)
Runaway Bride (1999)
The Other Sister (1999)
Dear God (1996)
Exit to Eden (1994)
Frankie and Johnny (1991)
Pretty Woman (1990)
Beaches (1988)
Overboard (1987)
Nothing in Common (1986)
The Flamingo Kid (1984)
Young Doctors in Love (1982)