#RON HOWARD ANDY GRIFFITH MOVIE#

'We loved these characters, and he needed to love them that much, too.' 'Ron has a real sensitivity that we thought was important for this material,' Zanuck said. Howard was still Opie from The Andy Griffith Show to folks outside Hollywood.

Zanuck said 22 directors turned down the job before it was offered to Howard, whose first blockbuster, Splash, was just hitting theaters. Petersburg was a character in ours.'įinding a director was much more complicated. 'Locations can be another character in a movie, and St. 'We were also very stubborn that Florida isn't California the lights are different, the palm trees are different, everything. At that time, there were probably a lot of reasons to shoot in Miami because of the fact that there were more crews there. 'You could end up shooting it somewhere else. Petersburg, but in movies that doesn't mean anything,' Lili Zanuck said. Producers David Brown and Zanuck's husband, Richard, both Oscar nominees for Jaws and The Verdict, agreed to co-produce. The seniors continue to sneak in and swim, getting a miraculous new lease on life and an offer to join the aliens on their planet and live forever. These 'Antareans' are retrieving comrades stranded in pods on the Gulf of Mexico floor, then storing them in the pool, now energized with an alien life force. They're disappointed when the house is rented to tourists, and astonished that the visitors are actually aliens in human form. Little-known screenwriter Tom Benedek tweaked it into the quirky tale of eight retirement home residents, three of them frequent trespassers to a nearby vacant house with an indoor pool.

A producer named Lili Fini Zanuck saw something in the story and paid $2,500 for it, developing it into the $17 million project that would be her filmmaking debut. Petersburg Times collected memories of Cocoon in telephone interviews with people who made it happen.Ĭocoon sprang from an unpublished novel by an unknown writer named David Saperstein. This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of St.

It's a cinematic time capsule, an artifact of old landmarks and a few regrets. Twenty-five years ago, Cocoon was a retirement community's coup. Games played then by seniors evolved into multigenerational pastimes. Like the movie's cosmically rejuvenated heroes, St. Then something else unexpected happened. After its debut on June 21, 1985, Cocoon became Academy Award-winning confirmation of that image. Petersburg in the early 1980s was the city of green benches, lawn bowling and shuffleboard courts, where retirees spent final days in rickety recreation. Call it typecasting the city's reputation as 'God's waiting room' had been sealed years before with a Johnny Carson joke.

#RON HOWARD ANDY GRIFFITH MOVIE#

Petersburg, the extraordinary came from Hollywood, whenthe little movie with an emerging director arrived for 11 weeks of filming, and put the city in the spotlight. 'YOU MUST NEVER AT ANY POINT IN YOUR LIFE IGNORE THE POSSIBILITY OF SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY COMING ALONG.'ĭIRECTOR RON HOWARD, IN HIS DVD COMMENTARY FOR COCOONįor the fictional Florida retirees in Ron Howard's 1985 film Cocoon, the extraordinary came from outer space - when aliens turned a swimming pool into a fountain of youth.

Ron howard andy griffith