

'Teen Wolf' director's brutally honest commentary







'I hold no illusions'





We met a few days later.



High-concept, I said.






We sat in his living room. There was a card table, some furniture and a feeling of abandonment. Daniel and his wife moved in last spring, and then spent most of the summer at their vacation home outside Traverse City, Mich. The only acknowledgment of his filmmaking career was a Panavision lens with his name inscribed on the barrel and a 1981 Humanitas award, given to uplifting TV work, for an episode of "WKRP." He spread his arms wide across the back of his sofa and kept talking.

He said he grew up the son of a respected surgeon, "a big-deal doctor who plucked out my mom, this retiring little country girl, and then couldn't get out of the hospital. The man never wanted to come home. He was unavailable. God knows, I went to the graveyard many times and told that (expletive) off. Because that was something I had to work out. Anyway, it's right there in 'Like Father Like Son,' and in 'Teen Wolf' too.

"See, a whole lot of 'Teen Wolf' is who I wish I could have been, who I wanted my father to be more like."

For those unfamiliar with "Teen Wolf": It was an early fall hit in 1985. Michael J. Fox, then 24, plays a high school kid who learns he's a werewolf. He also learns his father (James Hampton) is a werewolf, and that being a freak of nature is an easy way to become popular in school. It's a sweet, light comedy that cost $1.4 million and earned about $80 million worldwide and solidified Fox's star status. (His other hit that year, "Back to the Future," came out a few months earlier, though it was shot after "Teen Wolf.")

Daniel came to it this way: He was directing commercials ("badly"), which led to directing "WKRP," which led to Mary Tyler Moore hiring him for her (short-lived) sitcom "Mary," which led to a restlessness with TV: "I could teach you to direct sitcoms in 30 minutes. It's outrageous how easy it is, like stealing money. What do you say to a (expletive) Bob Newhart — 'OK, be Bob Newhart'"?

He said he was hired for "Teen Wolf" because Fox asked a bunch of potential directors what the movie was about. They all said "A werewolf." Only Daniel said, "It's about a father and son."

Later I called Rod's Chicago-based son, Lucas Daniel, an associate partner at Gravitytank, a local innovation consulting firm. He said he had a great childhood, "probably because my father was able to work out his issues with his own father by making stuff like 'Teen Wolf,' and though I don't know how much he knew that he had this ability to channel those issues, I watch that movie and those ideas are all in there."

Albeit, invisibly.

By chance, I caught "Teen Wolf" recently on cable. It didn't seem to contain anything angsty. It was watchable, pleasant, and so lacking in the reflexive snark and irony of contemporary teen movies that it almost played like outsider art. Or as Lucas Daniel said, explaining its charms, "It's like a reminder of the simple idea realized simply."

Time to bow out

"You know how I said I wouldn't buy a ticket to one of my own movies?" Daniel asked me. "Truth is, I wouldn't buy a ticket to any movie now. Two reasons. I'm in the Academy (and vote for the Oscar awards), so I get screeners of everything now. And because, well, I saw 'The Dark Knight.' I didn't quite get it, and everyone else did. But it wasn't them. It was me. I'm watching it and I'm feeling like I'm just getting old."

But everyone feels like that sometimes, I offered.

"Yeah, but it was me," he said, resigned. "I've always been great with exits, and when I watched that I knew my uncoupling from directing was done. I didn't understand what it was saying. I couldn't hear it.

"See, I did a movie of week for ABC (in 2002), 'Home Alone 4.' We shot in South Africa. I delivered funny — and on time and under budget. The president of ABC sent me a note and said she loved it. I thought, 'Here comes the work.' But the work stopped. And I know why: If you work in the arts for a living, you are paid to know what's in the air, what the mood is, the whole societal thing. And I don't care how (expletive) hip you are, when it's over, it's over. I couldn't artistically reflect how the world changed. And that feels like you woke up one day and were thrown out the (expletive) window. Heard the phrase 'the dogs bark but the caravan moved on'? A generation has changed. Time has moved on. Now graciously bow the (expletive) out."

I asked, didn't the resurgence of "Teen Wolf" as an MTV series, albeit a grim one, make him feel connected to the zeitgeist? He said he hasn't seen it, can't watch it. "It's violent, right? I was in Vietnam, and when I came back I saw 'Bonnie and Clyde' and promptly threw up. I can't go there. It's just not in my bones."

These days, retired, Daniel shoots photographs, somewhat as a hobby. The hallway of his condo is lined with melancholy examples, depictions of decline, an abandoned hotel, a boat at low tide. Only two pieces on his walls, neither of them his, remind you of movies. One is a candid of Daniel perched on a crane, in his director's chair during the filming of "Teen Wolf." The other is a painting of the inside of a movie house.

"What do I think when I look at that, the theater? Well, it invites you in. I like things that invite you in. I want to be in that room."

It's a mostly empty movie house, a few moviegoers scattered in the seats, nothing on the screen. It's an image as sanguine as anything that Edward Hopper might have painted.

But not as memorable.

"An empty movie house, huh?" he said. "Interesting. You're seeing a picture of a movie house right before the movie starts — nobody turned out and all that. But I see a movie house an hour before the movie begins."

Twitter @borrelli

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