Moviemaking in New Mexico
Director comes full circle with ‘The Spy Next Door’

Courtesy Photo

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — As a parent, one of Brian Levant’s greatest joys when his children were young was to take them to the movies and watch them enter that “portal of imagination” and have the best time of their lives.

Sharing that experience has carried over into his career as a veteran writer-producer of television sitcoms and director of some of Hollywood’s highly acclaimed family films, including “Beethoven,” “The Flintstones,” “Snow Dogs,” and “Are We There Yet?”

Levant, who graduated from the University of New Mexico, returned to Albuquerque in November where he has spent the last two months directing Jackie Chan’s newest action-comedy, “The Spy Next Door,” scheduled for release in 2009.

“It’s been a great homecoming,” he said recently.

It was at UNM that Levant developed “some very outside dreams,” and over the past 38 years has realized just about all of them. “I’m very fortunate and very proud of that. Coming back here has been sort of a full circle and allowed me to look back with some satisfaction on just what went into achieving those goals.

“At the same time, it kind of drives home the point that nobody’s career lasts forever, and this has been a great ride.

I’m so happy to be near the bottom of the hill here and working with a real quality team and a great international star.

“Jackie Chan is just a phenomenal human. You can’t believe what this guy did for earthquake relief in China. He is the most generous human I’ve ever met. He’s a savvy businessman, he’s a brilliant filmmaker, and he is the damn closest thing to one of the great silent comedians that’s walking around today. He has tremendous taste and his timing is impeccable.”

Chan plays a spy living undercover in a typical American suburban neighborhood. He falls in love with his neighbor (Amber Valletta), who has three kids who really don’t like him. In an effort to take their relationship to the next level, when she is called away to take care of her dad for a few days, Chan steps in to hopefully bond with her kids. Instead, his cover is blown, the bad guys come after him, and the kids are dragged along on the adventure, Levant said. The film also stars Madeline Carroll, Alina Foley, George Lopez, Billy Ray Cyrus, and Katherine Boecher.

Levant attended UNM his first two years of college, spent two years of summer school at the Art Institute of Chicago’s film program, did a semester at California Institute of the Arts and a semester at the University of Arizona. By the time he returned to New Mexico, UNM had hired a new department head, Ira Jaffey, for its fledgling media arts department.

“I can’t tell you how supportive he was of my goals and how much I learned from him. One example, we did a year-long seminar on Alfred Hitchcock and watched, I believe, 43 of his 53 films. In that year Ira slammed home again and again how with an artist like Hitchcock, each frame contributed to telling the story.

“These were lessons that I brought with me when I moved to Los Angeles after graduation, and within like five months I was working, selling stories to series like ‘The Jeffersons,’ ‘Chico and the Man,’ and the Danny Thomas series called ‘The Practice’.”

A family friend, who also was a comedy writer and very helpful at the beginning of Levant’s career, took him over to Garry Marshall’s house to meet the creator and executive producer of ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Laverne and Shirley.’ “Garry was looking for people with a lot of different skills. He wasn’t interested in your traditional comedy writer. He wanted people who were athletes, who were musicians, who had something else to bring to the table,” Levant said.

“I blocked a couple of his shots and at the end of the game he said to me, ‘So, what do you do?’ They gave me a story meeting on ‘Happy Days.’ I didn’t know the rules too well. I came in with a whole season’s worth of stories. They bought the first one that I pitched and I was there on and off for the next eight years, starting as an apprentice writer for $200 a week.” Within a few months he was the head writer of the show.

He left for several years to produce his own shows, including “The Bad News Bears” for CBS and “Mork & Mindy” for ABC before returning to ‘Happy Days.’

“That was an amazing environment. You look at the people from ‘Happy Days’ and you are looking at some of the most successful people up and down the line in the history of the industry,” he said. “It was a great group and a wonderful television family.”

Next, Levant revised his favorite childhood TV show, “Leave It To Beaver,” for Disney Channel. He spent five years writing and later directing the series, which netted him the cable ACE award in 1989 for Best Direction in a Comedy Series.

“At that time, doing something like that kind of got you a look in the feature film world,” he said. He ended up at Universal Studios where he directed the 1991 feature films “Problem Child 2” and “Beethoven.”

“Good dog! That’s what we say in my house,” Levant said.
In the fall of 1992 he had an opportunity to meet with Seven Spielberg. “That spring he gave me ‘The Flintstones’ to run with. It’s a film that has gross revenues of over $600 million now, and it only cost $50 million, which wasn’t even much at the time really.”

After “Flintstones,” Levant stumbled onto “Jingle All The Way,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It wasn’t the biggest success in the world, but it seems to have found quite an active after-life and just continues to thrive and grow,” he said.

Levant is thrilled that New Mexico has become a major film production center. “I think what’s really important here for the state is that the new governor continues to work with the film community to make this successful and let this grow. People are very comfortable here.”

The film industry has dropped $100 million this year on the state’s economy, he said. “They have George Clooney, they have Denzel Washington working here, and Jackie Chan. This is a real coup. They just can’t ever take this for granted.”