Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Beaches

Joining Disney had allowed Bette Midler to successfully reinvent herself as a talented and, perhaps more importantly, bankable comedienne. While comedy had always been a major part of her stage show, Midler’s only pre-Touchstone attempt at movie comedy had been the colossal flop Jinxed! But as popular as movies like Down And Out In Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, Outrageous Fortune and Big Business had proven to be, there were still a couple of things Midler’s Touchstone era hadn’t allowed her to do. One of those was flex the dramatic chops that earned her an Oscar nomination for The Rose. The other, more glaring oversight was that none of her Touchstone pictures had given her an opportunity to sing (unless you want to count her brief, extremely silly performance in Big Business). So it’s little wonder that when Beaches came along, Midler took an active role in its development, earning her first producer credit in the process.

The movie was based on the 1985 novel by Iris Rainer Dart, who’d been a sketch writer for the Sonny and Cher variety show back in the ‘70s. The screenplay was by Mary Agnes Donoghue, whose first film had been the 1984 romantic comedy The Buddy System with Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon. To direct, the production hired Garry Marshall, the legendary TV writer/producer behind such hits as Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. Marshall made the move to features with 1982’s Young Doctors In Love and while none of his movies had become blockbusters, they’d all done reasonably well on modest budgets.