 The
Horton/Pfeiffer
household in Santa Monica was a happy
place to be around.
Pfeiffer's
sojourn in Italy seemed long ago, something
in the past. Now they were looking toward
the future together. Horton has never
publicly spoken about the pressures of
what for the couple was always A
Star is Born situation.
Pfeiffer's
career was always soaring forward, while
Horton's
progressed prosperously but at a less
flamboyant pace. Pfeiffer's
father Dick
would say later that he regarded his son
in law as a 'very
domineering person'. He categorized
his daughter as the 'obedient'
one in the marriage. And in 1984 Pfeiffer
went to bat for her husband again although
it meant returning to make for television
genre. One
Too Many was an ABC
TV network film about teenaged
alcoholism and drunk driving. It was under
the category 'Afterschool Special', which
means exactly that it is screened in the
late afternoon. But Horton's
film was so admired by the TV network
that they decided to show it on primetime,
at 8 p.m., to give it the chance of a
wider audience.
 Pfeiffer
played a high school student whose boyfriend
is an alcoholic. Young actor Val
Kilmer co-starred as the boyfriend.
It was another example of Hollywood being
a small town. Kilmer,
on his way to establishing himself as
a leading man and mesmerizingly playing
rock legend Jim
Morrison in Oliver
Stone's thunderous movie The
Doors and marrying actress Joanne
Whalley, had a spell as Cher's
toy boy. And Cher
would tell a nationwide American television
audience in March 1993, 'The
only friend I trust not to distort or
misuse what I say is Michelle
Pfeiffer.'
 Like
some magical magnet, Pfeiffer
attracts some of Hollywood's most colourful
characters. She had done so at Fountain
Valley High School, and she drew on some
of her own high school experiences to
help her relate to the theme of One
Too Many. It paid off for reviewing
the TV film, which was screened on 21
May 1985, John O'Connor
wrote in the New
York Times that she was 'powerfully
affecting'.
And from there it was Into
the Night. That was the title of
the 1985 film that cast Pfeiffer
in the role that allowed her to get involved
in comedy as well as thrills and spills.
Most film critics agree that this was
Pfeiffer's
first fullblown 'grown
up' part, she was a leading woman;
there was more depth, and character to
her. It also put her in close touch with
what was one of the most notorious scandals
in Hollywood in the eighties.
 The
director of Into
the Night was John
Landis. He had found enormous success
with National Lampoon's Animal
House in 1978, The Blues
Brothers in 1980 and turned Eddie
Murphy into a number one box-office
star with 1983's Trading
Places. He also directed Michael
Jackson's rock video Thriller.
But in 1982 Landis
bad, along with Steven
Spielberg, co-directed and co-produced
the first of three episodes of The
Twilight Zone (the movie version
of Rod Serling's
classic black and white television series)
which filming finishes on tragedy, and
for five years from the date of the accident
on the set there were to be shocks.
It was in these circumstances that Pfeiffer
went to work for him. She was supportive
and helpful, and later Landis
would play a part in keeping her marriage
alive. For the moment she was concentrating
on what was until then the richest role
of her career. She got to play blonde
and beautiful and devious.
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