 Landis,
thinking back to his second film as a
director, the huge, unexpected success
Kentucky Fried
Movie in 1977, decided to be outrageous
once again. The sometimes off the wall
but always stylish director (with George
Folsey, Jr., as his co-executive
producer) launched into an ambitious film
project titled Amazon
Women on the Moon. The
Universal Studios film was billed
as starring'a lot of actors'. Among them
were Peter Horton
and Michelle Pfeiffer.
And there was an added bonus for Horton.
The Landis
movie involved thirty different stories,
each with its own individual director.
Landis who
had met Horton
while Pfeiffer
was filming Into
the Night had been shown One
Too Many and was impressed. He
hired Horton
to direct the 'TWO
IDs' story, which starred Rosanna
Arquette and Steven
Guttenberg on a fail safe blind
date.
 Pfeiffer
was by 1987 emerging as a major Hollywood
player. But her friend Landis
and her husband were involved. She had
taken a role in a story directed by Landis
titled 'Hospital'.
Horton was
then typecast as her husband. In the post
natal wing of the 'Hospital'
the couple are new parents puzzled by
the antics of a tap dancing doctor played
by Griffin Dunne.
The idea was that they were a severely
over prepared for birth Yuppie couple,
who could not have imagined how to prepare
for how people can sometimes be treated
in a hospital.
In all the stories there were 160 speaking
parts, involving players from the old
Hollywood, like Ralph
Bellamy and Steve
Forrest, and the new Hollywood
like Rosanna Arquette,
Pfeiffer
and Carrie Fisher.
Fisher, who
had suffered as a child of Hollywood and
was portrayed in the film version of her
reportage of Hollywood events by Meryl
Streep in Postcards
from the Edge in 1989, is a sharp
wit and positive thinker. Pfeiffer
learned to be the same and to learn from
adversity. She, her husband and her
marriage had also benefited from her loyalty
to Landis.
It was more proof to her that friends
do matter in Hollywood.
 For
in the summer of 1985 Marty
Bregman had appeared on her career
horizon again. It was Bregman
who had fought for Pfeiffer
to play Elvira
in Scarface,
and he was so pleased with the results
that he helped her land not one but two
roles in Sweet
Liberty.
After the concluding episode of M*A*S*H
in 1983, the most watched two and a half
hours of television in history, not matched
by the final episode of Cheers
a decade later in May 1993, Alan
'Hawkeye'
Alda set
about writing Sweet
Liberty. He would go on also to
direct and star in the film. He would
also lust after Pfeiffer
on screen. As would Michael
Caine, doing an enchanting Errol
Flynn-style role. And Bob
Hoskins would do a wonderfully
entertaining run as a toadying hack writer.
And as a bitchy actress who would bed
or betray anyone to improve her performance
Pfeiffer
stole the film. It was a felony that was
to become habit forming. What remains
remarkable is just how quickly she established
her astonishing 'form'.
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