First Thoughts on "Author! Author!"

The funny thing about rip-off movies is that it takes so long to make a movie that by the time it comes out, you might have forgotten the thing it was ripping off. An even stranger thing happens with Arthur Hiller’s 1982 comedy Author! Author! - by the time it came out, it looked like a rip-off of something else.

1982 was, of course, the year that gave us Tootsie, which was one of guest Jen Cheney’s top five. It was, in fact, released on December 17th of that year; Author! Author! landed in theaters (briefly) the previous June. But watching it today, you’d swear Hiller was aping Sydney Pollack, from the New York show biz milieu to the “softer” turn by a notoriously intense ‘70s leading man to the score by Dave Grusin to the treacly opening song (which, yes, includes the lyric “Comin' home to you's like comin' home to milk n cookies…”). The two films can easily play on a double bill, though certainly not to Author’s benefit. 

But Hiller was no prognosticator; instead, he and screenwriter Israel Horovitz were crafting a riff on Hoffman’s previous picture, the commercially successful, Best Picture (and, not incidentally, Best Actor) winner Kramer vs. Kramer. You can almost hear the producers giving Pacino, who hadn’t had a critical or financial hit since 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon, the hard sell: One kid makes money and wins Hoffman the Oscar? How about five kids, Al??!?