Dr. Robert Gardner is chair and professor of media writing at the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

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Sony Entertainment Corporation stretches for city blocks. It used to be Columbia Pictures. Walking down art deco streets over cobble stones so clean they could only exist in a fantasy world, I’m headed for the home of Gracie Films and James L. Brooks, the legendary figure who developed Room 222, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Simpsons and The Critic.

There have been scores of other ventures along the way (Brooks has succeeded as a producer, director and writer in film and tv), but I’m here to talk to him about a series of remarkable films: Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything.

Terms of Endearment flirted with the tragic form and was a monumental success. In 1983 it won Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best actor, best supporting actor. It was Brooks’ first effort as a screenwriter, as a director, and as a producer. In one incredible leap, he made the transition from the small screen to the inner circle of truly great filmmakers.

But how did he have the courage, the first time out, to write a script that dealt with the death of a major character?

He thought carefully for a moment then said: ‘Right from the outset I saw the film as a comedy. For 95% of its length, if the picture wasn’t getting a laugh we were not doing our job. We had to make the audience laugh continually, and I even made sure that I had to get a laugh on the word `cancer.’

‘There was great humor (in the novel on which the film is based). Aurora (the part played by Shirley MacLaine) was a very broad character in the original material. As a matter of fact, I think I pulled her in a little.’

We talked about the fact that Aurora and the Jack Nicholson characters start off in the story as despairing people who have given up on life. Aurora resents aging and the fact that she’s a grandmother; and the astronaut is a kind of paunchy, leering, satyr.

Against that duo is the Debra Winger character who starts off in the screenplay full of life, and then – after failure after failure – succumbs to cancer.

Brooks – somewhat shyly – shrugged off my analysis and said he feels that if that structure exists it was a ‘byproduct’ of his work.

‘My main effort,’ he said, ‘was invested in a little secret that I told myself. I made up my mind that mamma was always right. So everything the MacLaine character says in the movie is correct – it’s an accurate reflection of what is going on in the story – but it doesn’t matter, because the events move ahead remorselessly.

‘And then when I did my research, I found myself around 50-year-old women, and you could just feel the loneliness of a woman like Aurora. I tried to capture that feeling.

‘It took me a long, long time before I could identify Emma’s (the daughter) heroism, because someone isn’t a hero just because they get ill and die. What helped me enormously was the idea that Emma was the least judgmental person I’d ever come across, and that became the nature of her heroism for me.’

Brooks seems uncomfortable with notions of dramatic theory, but he does take great pride in his research. For example, he had a ‘romantic notion’ of the two locales of the story, Houston and Nebraska.

He was relieved to discover that people in Houston don’t necessarily have Texas accents. In fact, he discovered, Texas has a ‘midwestern quality to it.’ This freed him from an effort to reproduce a milieu that was essentially foreign to him.

The locale could be anywhere. Ultimately, he was writing about people he knew and understood.

He had, he said, ‘great help from the book’ in putting together the scenario, and he even found that he could extract key speeches. But even a great novel doesn’t always provide the foundation for a great screenplay. They are two different art forms.

He is incredibly modest about the shape of the film.

‘Because I couldn’t figure out how to maintain the narrative drive of the story dealing with the mother and daughter, there is a `beginning-middle-and-end’ sort of romantic comedy (involving the mother and the astronaut) stuck in there, and whenever we got to the editing we were fortunate to have a compelling subplot we could cut to.

‘Then to get some epic quality in the story, the trip out-of-state became a type of epic journey so that passing the sign leading out of Texas became important to me.’

He sees the MacLaine/Nicholson story as the b plot to the a plot, which focuses on the mother and daughter. To me, the Aurora/ astronaut story was the a plot, while the Aurora/Emma story was the b plot. A total emphasis on Emma (the daughter) makes the film a tragedy. An emphasis on the romance between MacLaine and Nicholson makes the film a bittersweet comedy.

The academic is the only negative character in the film, and yet Brooks paints him as ineffectual more than evil, weak more than malicious. When Emma dies her husband is fast asleep an arm’s length away, totally oblivious of his wife’s passing. He was never there when she needed him.

‘The actor playing the academic was overlooked for an Academy nomination because there was such a resentment of the character,’ said Brooks. ‘To me, I could tell the young man’s story as a man who cheated, was cheated on, and finally hustled out of his own kids by this powerful grandmother.’

Brooks has some sympathy for that character, but ‘everyone else saw him as an oppressor.’

The academic was a man whose only virtue was that ‘he knew his own limitations.’ Brooks seemed to know the type intimately. Again, it was the result of painstaking research. Brooks spent time in Nebraska with a young couple as they waited to find out if the husband had achieved tenure at some small state college.

We talked about how, at the beginning of the film, the Nicholson character is seen as a burned out womanizer trading on his past as a space hero, and in the course of the film he becomes more human.

Brooks reminds me that there’s a key line in the film, spoken by Aurora: ‘Who would have believed that you were a nice guy.’

But Brooks is quick to point out that even though the astronaut might be a ‘nice guy,’ he would never stop being a womanizer. ‘He couldn’t,’ said Brooks. ‘He would have gone crazy if he had lived with Aurora.’

There’s subtlety here. Villains aren’t completely bad, and heroes and heroines are flawed in some way.

Given that the film touched into the death of a child – not normally the stuff of great box office success – I wondered if he could believe the raves the film received when it was first released. His response surprised me. He said he accepted the impact of the film because he ‘didn’t know any better.’

‘It was the first time I had directed and I was passionately involved with the project. I had spent four years getting it madeÉI had lived with it, and I’d almost broken down trying to get the script right, so by the time it all started to come, it all started to come.’

I suggested that Terms of Endearment transcends craft, partly because it is at odds with normal dramatic conventions.

He looked a bit uncomfortable, then said: ‘That’s because it’s a comedy. I swear it! I know when you see it alone, it’s the emotional life that you remember. That’s because so many of us have been through these kinds of life and death experiences. That’s what makes it an intimate film.

‘My only overall effort was invested in how to keep narrative flow alive and to serve character.’

Again he referred to the book, where there are ‘wonderful moments, like the little granddaughter kicking the post just as Emma finds out she has cancer.’ That, he seemed to suggest, deflects some of the pain.

‘There was some very black comedy that I cut out of the picture that was based on research and truth. But I knew it had to be seen as a comedy, otherwise it would have been disastrous.’

He spoke, frequently, about the role of luck in this whole enterprise and how he had consciously paired Emma (in her adulterous affair) with an essentially sexless man. That way the audience could accept the liaison without blaming Emma. He had originally cast a much different type of man in the role of the lover, but that actor had a perverse quality and a higher level of sexuality, and that would have tainted Emma and ‘ruined the picture.’

He sighed slowly, ‘It’s always amazing how many things have to be right before your movie will work with an audience. That is always staggering to me.’

Recalling a myth that dealt with a Titan who could only be destroyed when his feet were lifted from the ground because he lost his connection with the earth, I wondered aloud how Brooks could retain his sensitivity when his position took him away from the world of ordinary people.

I struck a chord when I asked about the effect of being buffered by this elegant world of privileged entry and massive security:

‘I think that’s the battle of my life, and it’s a real struggle. I find myself starving to go out and do some research. It’s a highly competitive industry with really high stakes and there’s some pressure on you to work all the timeÉeventually you do lose your way.

‘Calling it `losing your way’ may be quaint because young writers come into the industry now with no problem accommodating the studios and giving them what they want.’

The conversation moved to Broadcast News, another popular and critical success. I asked him what he saw in that project that interested him.

He paused, and said thoughtfully, ‘You know, it was the most luxurious way to work. I had an intellectual conviction that fundamental change had taken place. And since this fundamental change was happening everywhere, it might be affecting essential things like love. So I thought it would be a good time to do a romantic comedy.

‘Again I hit the road and attended a political convention. I decided to do the film about the press and television news. That always fascinated me.

‘I got the basic story from a girl I was having lunch with one day. I got the characters from a number of people I met, and I built the story brick by brick. By basic story, I mean that I devised a basic romantic triangle, and I committed to making it a real triangle by not telling myself how it would end up. And then I found that the heroine wouldn’t end up with either guy. And I let that happen.

‘I looked at that film, long after I made it, and was happy to realize that it was about something. It was about three people who had lost the chance for real intimacy in their lives. The hardest character for me to deal with was Tom (the great looking anchorman played by William Hurt), but for the audience he was the closest thing to a hero in the film.’

Tom won out in the story and did well in the industry. ‘And that,’ said Brooks, ‘is exactly what happened to the news business where appearances have won over substance. Everyone I know who was one of the good people at the time (back in the ’80s) has become totally commercial and they’ve been beaten up by the drive for ratings.’

Again, Brooks had taken a tremendous risk. He took a romance and had permitted it to end unresolved; just as in Terms of Endearment he avoided the trap of the easy way out and chanced alienating the audience by having an extremely attractive character die.

He also played a dangerous game with I’ll Do Anything with Nick Nolte. I saw something autobiographical in that film – the two sides of Brooks dealing with the two sides of that Los Angeles world where winning big and losing big are very close. Nothing is guaranteed. Luck is respected here because, in the final instance, talent guarantees nothing.

As I mused about this, Brooks looked at me and asked, ‘Were my feet on the ground when I did I’ll Do Anything or off the ground?’

For me, Brooks was traveling – as he had in the past – a dangerous road, because the film touched too deeply into the truth of things. In the past he had skirted the line. In I’ll Do Anything, even accepting the fact that it was originally shot as a musical, he crossed the line. For my money, though, the three films can be looked at as a trilogy.

It suddenly struck me that this man who has lived a life of almost unmitigated success had known pain, and that he was at a time of crisis. He didn’t deny the fact.

‘I think I’m overloaded. I think I’m away from the things I’m supposed to be doingÉthe things that make me most happy. I’m not involved in one thing where I feel I would die if it didn’t workÉalthough I hope to be involved in that again.

‘There is some sense of a crossroad and some sense of crisis. One of the themes in I’ll Do Anything is salvation. Everyone there was in need of salvation, and I think that was very much where I was then. Now I don’t feel confusion, but I don’t know where I am.’

He smiled in a self-mocking way: ‘Now I feel that I have at least one foot on the ground.’

We both laughed, but the image of the Titan had stayed with him.

I asked if there was anything he was working on at the moment that mattered to him.

‘I was pilloried during the editing of I’ll Do Anything. There was a tremendous amount of press attention and I was torn to bits by it. I had the experience of being interviewed by these people who I knew were depressed, and in a desultory way, they went about the job of destroying me. I’m trying to frame that set of experiences within a romance and all that happened during that time.’

It was almost as though he had been riding high too long for some people.

I said that in mythology the hero has to be pulled down by the undifferentiated mob. He remembered that when Terms of Endearment was nominated he was told, ‘You’ll win everything, because nobody is rooting against you.’

As you become more successful, he said, you become objectified. ‘It’s not a comfortable thing to be treated in that way. Besides, whenever you’re doing a piece of work, you’re trying to create a cause that’s larger than yourself, and then you try to engage the audience. But right now I don’t have the ability to be free of all my responsibilities to have a truly creative life.’

I shared my view that many artists have been hurt in their childhood or humiliated in some way, and asked him what he was like when he was seven.

He grew very serious and replied: ‘A tortured child. I had a drinking father who was sporadically physically abusive. But he had a good sense of humor and he was a storyteller. My mother struggled very hard to provide the necessities for us. We were very low middle-class, and there were times when – without help – we wouldn’t have been able to provide the necessities for ourselves.

‘I was considered lazy, although I’ve worked all my life since I was eight or nine years old. We chipped in. I didn’t find out I was Jewish until I was 12 years old when my father was passing, so it was really a dysfunctional household. I was thrilled when my father left home because there wouldn’t be that awful screaming in the house. I was unhappy and I was alone.’

Brooks’ best work has a shadow to it. That shadow is tinged with pain, and within the confines of the 90-minute running length of the feature film, he takes us close to the truth of things. That’s why his work is worthwhile. That’s why it’s more than entertainment.

The man who made the world laugh with some of the most spectacularly successful tv shows in entertainment history has been touched by the tragic muse.

I left him hoping that he will invest that enormous talent and empathetic quality in another great film that has the courage to tell us the truth.