When director Lawrence Kasdan made “Light & Magic,” his six-episode streaming series on the history of visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic, he struggled to convey the tone he wanted to his collaborators at Imagine Documentaries. “The spirit I wanted the series to have wasn’t one that was naturally there,” Kasdan told IndieWire. “It was much more ebullient and fun and unpredictable. In order to try to explain that, I said, ‘I want it to feel like what it’s like when you hang around with Marty Short.’”
At that point Kasdan had been friends with actor Martin Short for over 30 years, ever since they had collaborated on the 1987 comedy “Cross My Heart,” which Kasdan produced. “We immediately hit it off, became friends, and it never stopped after that,” Kasdan said. Now, Short is the subject of one of the best films of Kasdan’s career, “Marty, Life Is Short,” a Netflix documentary that, like most of Kasdan’s work, is clear and straightforward but abundant in profound insights and rich observations.
First and foremost a lively and informative overview of Short’s life and career, “Marty, Life Is Short” is also a moving study of friendship through both triumphs and tragedy, a philosophical inquiry into the question of how to live a meaningful life, and a snapshot of a golden age in Hollywood filmmaking told from the point of view of people who lived through it. One of the most entertaining aspects of the movie for cinephiles is the use of home movie footage that presents Short’s star-studded gatherings at his vacation home — getaways where the guest list included filmmaking luminaries like Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Kasdan himself, not to mention old SCTV colleagues like Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy.
“It seems like a fairy tale,” Kasdan said when looking back at those get-togethers at Short’s Sag Harbor house. “Everybody came to visit him, because it’s just fun being around Marty.” Kasdan had met Spielberg years before when they worked together on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” After years of struggle, Kasdan had sold his screenplays for “The Bodyguard” and “Continental Divide,” the latter of which impressed Spielberg and inspired him to hire Kasdan for “Raiders” — which in turn inspired “Raiders” producer George Lucas to hire Kasdan to finish the script for “The Empire Strikes Back” after original writer Leigh Brackett passed away.
“Marty was not related to those people when I met him,” Kasdan said. “It turns out they all became close friends, but my relationship with Marty was separate from that.” In spite of his closeness with Short and interest in him as a subject, Kasdan went back and forth on whether or not he wanted to make a documentary about his friend. “Eventually I became convinced that I was the right person to do it, but I had to know that Marty really wanted it. He had been approached many times, and he was wary. He’s a private person.”
Ultimately Short not only gave the project his blessing, but provided hundreds of hours of home movie and video footage going back to when he was seven years old. “Whether it was him, or his father, or his brothers, he had historical material you could never dream of having,” Kasdan said. “When Marty said, ‘I’ll let you use everything,’ that seemed like the greatest invitation in the world, and I couldn’t say no.”
While the home movie footage and other archival material in the documentary are fascinating and illuminating, the real value of “Marty, Life Is Short” comes from Kasdan’s skill as an interviewer, as he puts Short and many of his friends and collaborators at ease to reveal memories and stories that will provide new pleasures to even the most learned Short fan. “My technique is a slow unpeeling of people’s layers,” Kasdan said. “I’ve always believed that if you are really interested in people, they will open up. And not only will they open up, it will release the great pressure they’ve had their whole life to have someone listen to them.”
This interest in behavior and the breadth of the human condition links “Marty, Life Is Short” to Kasdan’s best fiction films, from his directorial debut “Body Heat” and its follow-up “The Big Chill” to “The Accidental Tourist” and the underrated “Mumford,” all of which are concerned with the ways we both hide and reveal our true selves. “What we look for in life is someone who sees us and hears us, and it’s relatively rare,” Kasdan said. “Some of it is that people are shy, another thing is that people protect their privacy, and another thing is that no one asks. That’s bothered me my whole life.”
From the time Kasdan was young, he had a reputation as an inquisitive person. “People would constantly say, ‘What are you, a reporter?’” Kasdan said. “They just didn’t understand why I always had follow-up questions to their life. But to me, that was really irresistible.” It’s what has made Kasdan’s recent forays into documentary filmmaking so pleasurable for the director after decades in fiction filmmaking. “Making ‘Light and Magic’ was so stimulating to me after years of following a script and having preconceived ideas. The stories people would tell were so exciting and unexpected, better than anything I had been writing for 40 years.”
This year marks the 45th anniversary of “Body Heat,” which is newly available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Criterion with terrific supplementary features, including a new interview with Kasdan. In the fall of 1981, Kasdan had three big movies in theaters at the same time: “Body Heat,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “Continental Divide,” which Michael Apted directed from Kasdan’s script. All three movies were part of the cultural conversation in a way that seems almost unthinkable today given the more fragmented media landscape, and Kasdan knows how good he had it looking back.
“It was insane,” Kasdan said of the moment when he had three major releases playing simultaneously. “My friends and I really feel we were born at the right time. Hollywood felt like a very small town. Now it doesn’t feel like a town at all — they’re making things all over the world. Some of them are fantastic, but there are a thousand new movies a week, it seems. During that period, if you could get a movie going, it was a big deal, and people were paying attention. It was a very rich, wonderful time, and we didn’t know how quickly it was going to go away.”
When Kasdan first worked with Short in 1987, he was at the top of his game, having come off of “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill,” and “Silverado” en route to “The Accidental Tourist.” “Cross My Heart” was a critical and commercial disappointment, but it bonded Kasdan and Short, who reunited with the more artistically (if not commercially) successful “Mumford” over 10 years later. “‘Cross My Heart’ was a difficult experience,” Kasdan said. “I had promoted it to Marty because because the script was really funny, and I believed in the director — maybe too much. I convinced Marty to do it and then when it started shooting it didn’t go very well, and I felt terrible.”
Kasdan knew, however, that Short was someone he wanted to keep in his life, and his affection for Short as an artist and a human permeates every frame of “Marty, Life Is Short.” “What’s kept us friends for so long is that I admire his spirit,” Kasdan said. “Despite many tragedies, when you get around him you feel good.” While the documentary delves into one of the central tragedies of Short’s life, the death of his beloved wife Nancy Dolman, two others — the unexpected death of Short’s friend Catherine O’Hara and the suicide of his daughter Katherine — are referenced only in the final dedication.
“We were cutting, and first there was the Reiner tragedy,” Kasdan said, referring to the murders of director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele. “Then Catherine O’Hara, who had been in my kids’ movies and my movies, who was a genius. No one in my group knew she was sick, and all of a sudden she was gone and everyone working on the movie was devastated. She was so central to the movie, and she’s such a lovely presence.” Then Short’s daughter died at the age of 42, and Kasdan had to talk with his friend about whether it was even the right time to release the movie.
“Katherine had been a huge resource for us because she had possession of an enormous amount of the archive,” Kasdan said. “She had been a better archivist of the photos than Marty had been, and she was lovely and couldn’t have been more cooperative. When this tragedy happened, I couldn’t believe it, and I said to Marty, ‘We don’t have to release this movie now. Do you want to think about this and just take some time?’” Short’s response was, for anyone who has seen Kasdan’s film, unsurprising.
“In the movie there are horrible things have happened to him, and they can knock him down but his instinct is toward life,” Kasdan said. “When I asked him, he said, ‘I think this movie’s about not retreating from it.’ And he was absolutely right.”
“Marty, Life Is Short” is now streaming on Netflix. “Body Heat” is newly available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Criterion.
