Ivan Reitman – An Appreciation

My friend David and I worked with film director Ivan Reitman fairly intensely for a few years in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. We wrote the movie Evolution for him and worked on a second project together immediately after. If you grew up in the 1980s, as we did, you understand what it meant to two movie geeks like us to work with Ivan, producer of Animal House, director of Meatballs, Stripes, and Ghostbusters. Much of our childhood together was spent quoting dialogue from his movies from memory. Ivan was a legend. Not because he made the most successful comedies of the era, which he did, but because he made the funniest and most influential. Ivan’s movies captured something in the zeitgeist and became cinematic touchstones for writers, directors, actors, and audiences for generations.

Working with Ivan was an all-in proposition, at least it was in our case. He expected us to be available to him all day, every day, for the entire time we were developing a script. We’d get a call from his office in the evening, letting us know if we should report to the Beverly Hills office the next day or to the office in Montecito, a hundred miles away. On the days we made the trek to Montecito, Ivan’s personal chef would prepare lunch. When Ivan learned that I kept kosher, and couldn’t eat what was served to the rest of the group, he had the chef prepare special meals for me. To my knowledge, Ivan did not enjoy a reputation for being particularly accommodating. But he seemed to take genuine pleasure, maybe even pride, in making it possible for an observant Jew to share a meal at his table. It was over these extended meals that Ivan asked about us and our families, about how a couple of Jewish day school kids from Philly ended up together in Hollywood, and shared with us his own family’s remarkable story as Czech refugees fleeing the Nazis, and then Communism, in Europe.

We turned in our first draft of Evolution to Ivan on a Thursday and expected to hear back from him sometime the following week. He called the next afternoon. He said that he wanted to reach us before Shabbat to tell us that he loved the script, that we’d written one of the funniest comic set-pieces he’d ever read, and that he was going to make the movie. This is one of those calls a screenwriter does not forget.

Ivan was very particular, always tinkering to get things just so. He seemed to get up every five minutes to adjust the temperature in the room. So it was with script revisions. Something might be perfect, hilarious to him on Tuesday, and on Wednesday he’d have us rewrite it from scratch, exactly to his specifications. After working this way together for several months, David and I started to feel beaten down, by the process and by Ivan. We were afraid to share this with him because a) we were, and remain, generally conflict-averse, b) he was our hero, and c) we were pretty sure he’d fire us. But he didn’t fire us. He apologized. He admitted to a tendency to micro-manage, pledged to do better, and asked if we’d continue. I can’t say if this was in character for Ivan or not. At the time, we thought not. But it’s part of why we loved him.

Some time around 2002 Ivan got a little miffed at us. He’d read something else we were writing for another studio and thought it was better than the work we’d done for him, or, at the very least, that we’d put more care into it. It’s possible that it was better, but it wasn’t because we cared more or were trying harder. Sometimes the will for something to work is not enough, even a will as strong as Ivan’s. After this second project together fizzled, we lost touch.

Then, a couple years ago, David and I received an email from Ivan’s office. He wanted to speak with us. It turned out that he’d read an interview David and I had done with a writer for Forbes marking the 18th anniversary of Evolution. He wanted to tell us how much he appreciated the things we’d said about the movie and about working with him. We chatted for a while, caught up about our families, and talked a little bit about what we were all working on. And then, after he thanked us again for our interview comments, David and I took the opportunity to tell Ivan directly what it meant to us to have worked with him.

Evolution was probably bad for our career. The movie was panned by critics and performed poorly at the box office. I’m so glad we worked on it. One year at Passover seder, a teenager at the table learned that David and I had written Evolution and began quoting lines of dialogue to me from memory.

To this day, David and I have an inside joke that began more than twenty years ago on the set of Evolution. Any time we pass a power generator at a construction site or sound stage, an emergency shut-off valve or a panic button, one of us will turn to the other and say, “Ivan wants you to pull that lever,” or “Ivan wants you to press that button.” I think this joke will continue even though Ivan is no longer with us. Because he is still with us.