Danny DeVito
Ruthless People
Looking at my portrait of Danny DeVito, if I had panned my lens slightly to the left, you would have seen dozens of people hurling themselves off the end of the Santa Monica Pier, splashing madly into the sea thirty feet below, trying to gather more than two million dollars in loose bills floating to the surface from a ratty Ford coupe that had plunged off and sunk seconds earlier. A parade of cop cars in hot pursuit of that Ford came to a screeching halt behind them. Then everybody got ready to do it all over again — at least part of it: Take two!
I was visiting the set of Ruthless People, a 1986 movie starring DeVito and Bette Midler, to photograph DeVito for a Time feature story. (Bill Pullman had a small part, too, his screen debut.) First things first, visiting members of the press have to kiss the boss’s ring. So Danny’s publicist introduced me to director Jerry Zucker, one of three co-directors on this production (very unusual). He was getting ready to shoot the next scene, a continuation of what I just described. With his blessing, I was ushered over to meet Danny in his trailer cum dressing room. Because I was on a deadline, I whisked him away for our portrait, reserving introductory remarks for our walk toward a stairway leading down to the beach from the pier. On the way, I grabbed Danny’s folding cast-member chair (with his name stenciled on the back) and —…
