Up Close & Personal
Short description
Tally Atwater wants a career in television news, and she is willing to work her way up from the bottom to get it. Hired at a Miami station, she comes to the attention of Warren Justice, a veteran newsman whose own career has lost some of its momentum. He recognizes her talent and takes on the task of teaching her the trade, and a romance develops between them as her rise accelerates. Her success eventually outpaces his, and the demands of the job test both their relationship and his sense of himself.
Jon Avnet directed, following Fried Green Tomatoes and The War, and the screenplay is by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Robert Redford plays Warren and Michelle Pfeiffer plays Tally, with Stockard Channing, Joe Mantegna, Kate Nelligan and Glenn Plummer among the supporting cast. The production brought together 28 credited cast members and 182 credited crew.
Made for about 60 million dollars, the film took in roughly 101 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 5.2 from 37 reviews, while on TMDB it sits at 6.3 from 245 votes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The plot of the original screenplay was based on the biography of TV journalist Jessica Savitch (1947-1983), who died in a car accident.
- To film this movie, Michelle Pfeiffer turned down a role in Paul Verhoeven's adventure film 'Mistress of the Seas' about female pirates. The actress had just had a son and did not want to travel far from home for filming.
- The photo of Tally (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) that she shows to Warren Justice (played by Robert Redford) is an actual photo of Pfeiffer from the 1970s when she competed in beauty pageants.
- In a DVD interview, Michelle Pfeiffer mentions that she wore so many wigs (and had so many different hairstyles) for this film that a separate trailer had to be allocated just for the wigs.
- Robert Redford had long wanted to act alongside Michelle Pfeiffer. He had even considered casting her in the war melodrama 'Havanna' (Sydney Pollack, 1990), but the role of Bobby Duran in 'Havanna' went to Lena Olin; consequently, he later agreed to star in the melodrama 'Heartburn' (1996) primarily because Pfeiffer was cast in the lead role.
- One of the fictional television channels in the film is called IBS. Fictional channels in several other TV shows and movies (for example, 'Morning Glory', January 2006) shared the exact same name because it was completely impossible to confuse it with the name of any real existing channel. This is because the abbreviation IBS is well-known in the US as standing for 'irritable bowel syndrome'—a disorder accompanied by abdominal pain, discomfort, bloating, bowel dysfunction, and stool problems.
- As screenwriter John Gregory Dunne wrote in his book about the filming of this movie, he and his co-screenwriter Joan Didion wrote 26 versions of the script (many of them for free) and made over 300 changes to them.
- Initially, Michael Ballhaus was hired as the cinematographer, but he fell ill during pre-production and was forced to leave the project. Director and producer John Avnet replaced him with Karl Walter Lindenlaub, whose work in Alan Sharp's historical drama 'Rob Roy' (1995) had deeply impressed him.
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