Harry and the Hendersons (1987)

Douglas Hosdale (0:07)

Hello, this is Douglas Hosdale, producer with Keen All Over, and today I'm here with producer, writer, and director, William Dear, discussing the making of Harry and the Hendersons. William, thank you so much for joining us today.

William Dear (0:19)

It's wonderful to be here, thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this after so many years.

I've never done a commentary that came this late in the film. I have a whole new perspective on what we're doing, here.

Douglas Hosdale (0:30)

Excellent. Well, so tell me where did this idea come from?

William Dear (0:34)

Well, back in the early 80s, late 70s, my reason for moving to California was I had done a movie called Northville Cemetery Massacre and Michael Nesmith did the score for it. And I saw and he saw a real opportunity in us working together. And he had an idea for music videos before there even was music videos and the show like MTV before there was MTV. And one of his associates, one of his friends, a real raconteur of comedy writing and speech was a guy named Bill Martin. And Bill Martin had this idea called Harry and the Hendersons. And along with Ezra D. Rappaport, Bill Martin and Ezra had written a half-hour screenplay, or sorry, half-hour teleplay.

And they imagined like Fred Gwynn as the Bigfoot with some hair stuck on his face and everything. And I saw in the idea a much bigger project. I saw a movie in the idea. And again, that's because I had always been kind of enamored with Bigfoot and the kind of lore because it's one of those great, like UFOs. I want to believe in UFOs. I want to believe in Bigfoot.

And so basically, I made a deal with Bill to acquire the rights to this half-hour sitcom. And they had the option that they would get to write the first screenplay, and that was fine because they had originated the idea. They wrote the first screenplay, and I realized that in all positive respect, they couldn't get the sitcom out of the story. And I wanted the story to be a little bit more about John's character as a human, embracing a character that was a non-human. And he's very much not that kind of person in the beginning, but he learns through Harry to become a better person. That wasn't something that was evident in the sitcom, and it didn't come through in the screenplay. So later, doing commercials, I had the opportunity to work with Alan Davio, and wonderful cameraman, real gentleman, really understood. He would use terms about light that we'd all just go, okay, he must know what he's talking about, because I've never heard that word before. And when light loses its tenatic value, and we had never heard tenatic value.

Anyway, he said, Amazing Stories was coming up at Amblin, and he said, you should meet Steven Spielberg, because we had worked together, Alan and I, on several projects, and he said, you're kind of inventive on the set, and this whole new series is looking for inventive directors to take a story and run with it. And I thought, well, this is nice. It sounds like a dream come true if it ever was to happen. And ultimately, through my agent, I got a meeting on an amazing story, through Alan's recommendation, with Steven. And this was quite a big deal. I mean, I was going to sit in a room and pitch my take on a story by Steven Spielberg in one of the amazing stories, sequences. At that time, it was called Mummy Dearest, which I thought was odd because the movie was just out a few years earlier, Mummy Dearest. And I thought when I added to the story, when I added, I thought Mummy Daddy was a better title, you know, because he was a mummy and he was also a daddy on that day.

Anyway, so I have this wonderful meeting at Amblen, and I pitch my take on the story where I added the second mummy. This was the Ra-Aman Ka.

And the whole myth about that mummy coming to life, because I figured if it was a real mummy, then it's all the worst for the movie mummy, you know, trying to get to the hospital where his wife's going to deliver. And so I pitched the whole story, and at the end of it, Steven Spielberg looks at me and he goes, I didn't like the second mummy. And I was like, it was my entire pitch was the second mummy. And he said, until you got to the end, you said, when do we shoot? I was like, did I just hear those words? And then I think the shooting date was a month and a half from that day. I thought, it'll never happen. Just too good to be true, it'll never happen. And it did happen. And that's how I came to sort of be in front of, say, have the opportunity to present Harry and the Hendersons to Steven Spielberg. One night during the edit of, I realized we're not talking about this movie right now, but-