It was 1983, and a 26-year-old producer named Brian Grazer was sitting across from the most feared man in Hollywood.
Ray Stark had a rival mermaid movie loaded with Warren Beatty, Jessica Lange, Herbert Ross directing and Robert Towne writing the script. Grazer had a scrappy fairy tale at Disney — a studio whose most recent live-action release was Gus, a flop about a field goal-kicking mule — and a leading man whose cross-dressing sitcom had just been canceled.
Stark’s message was simple.
“He threatened to just crush me,” Grazer says. “That I ‘Have nothing. Nothing.’ They’d ‘kill’ me.”
Then came the offer: 5 percent of the first-dollar gross if Disney would kill Splash. Disney said no, however, and Splash opened March 9, 1984. It became a top-10 hit, made Tom Hanks a movie star overnight, invented the Touchstone label, cracked March open as a release window, birthed Imagine Entertainment and gave the English language a new girl’s name: Madison.
Sitting down with It Happened in Hollywood, Grazer and Ron Howard lay out how one of the great sleeper hits of the decade almost never existed — and how close it came, repeatedly, to disappearing.
The origin is pure Grazer: At 25, producing a TV movie on Zuma Beach, he spotted “the hottest girl at USC, literally,” who had never given him the time of day. Then someone whispered: That’s the producer. “Seconds later, she’s asking me out,” he recalls.
A parade of newly interested women followed. Grazer found it clarifying, if vexing. Were they into him for him — or for what he could do for them? He went home and wrote down, literally, the attributes of someone who might actually love him back.
“That became the mermaid,” he says.
The script bounced through United Artists, Warner Bros. and nearly every studio in town. Nobody wanted to touch it. Not with Beatty circling and the powerful Stark looming. Executives didn’t say no —they just vanished.
Eventually, the project landed at Disney — a move that, at the time, felt like a step down. This was pre-Renaissance Disney. Howard for one wasn’t convinced.
“That is really the minor leagues,” he recalls thinking.
But Disney was eager, on one condition: the mermaid needed a bikini top.
“That was a no-go,” Howard says. What followed was a surreal pitch to Disney’s seven-person board, where Grazer found himself explaining mermaid logic to chairman Card Walker. The compromise — long hair, body stocking, no visible nudity — got them over the line.
Then Stark called. When the bribe didn’t land, the pressure shifted to Disney chairman Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law and, as Grazer puts it, “a tough guy.”
His response, per Grazer: “We’re doing it anyway. Fuck you. “
Now they had a greenlight — and a race. Howard, coming off Night Shift, promised he’d beat Ross to theaters. “I’m 26 years old. He’s not going to beat me,” he remembers telling them.
Grazer remembers it more vividly: “You said you’d be like a military grunt climbing under barbed wire.”
Howard shrugs. “Yeah, I probably did.”
But Ross’s movie never materialized. Splash did.
The casting followed the same pattern: almost everyone said no. John Travolta passed. Richard Dreyfuss passed. Others declined without meetings. One agent reportedly sneered that his client would “never act in a movie with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.”
Tom Hanks, at that point, wasn’t Tom Hanks. He auditioned for the brother role — the John Candy part — after a tip from writer Lowell Ganz. “He was crackling with intelligence,” Howard says. After the audition, Howard and Grazer looked at each other. “Could he be the lead?” they both wondered. Grazer went in and sold it.
As for the mermaid, Daryl Hannah had already made an impression in Blade Runner. Then she walked in and said she’d spent her childhood practicing underwater breathing with a garden hose. “I’ve dreamed of being a mermaid all my life,” she told them, landing her the part.
She also got sealed into a custom tail that took hours to remove, swam without a mask and outperformed professional “mermaids” in test tanks. Bathroom breaks were not an option.
The shoot itself was controlled chaos. The East River jump required stunt performers to be inoculated against typhus. (“Then, you could get typhus,” Howard notes.) At the Statue of Liberty, they had to wrap before the first ferry arrived. Howard had a 102-degree fever. They pulled off 63 setups before 7:45 a.m.
Splash: Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in the 1984 feature.
Courtesy Everett Collection
And then there’s the lobster scene. Hannah, a strict vegetarian, was handed a fake lobster stuffed with string cheese and potatoes. It didn’t work. Howard demonstrated by biting into a real claw. Hannah tried once, screamed and dropped it. Then she did it again; that’s the take in the movie.
By the time exhibitors saw Splash, the reaction flipped instantly. (“They all wanted it,” Grazer says.) The film opened in March — a dead zone at the time — and became a top-10 hit. Disney created Touchstone to release it. March became viable. High-concept comedy got a new blueprint. And “Madison,” pulled from a Manhattan street sign, became one of the most popular baby names in America.
The closest Grazer came to quitting wasn’t Stark. It was the slow accumulation of rejection. “I was so embarrassed,” he says, recalling how people would actively avoid him at social events, worried he’d try to sell them on his “mermaid movie.”
What kept him going, improbably, was Steven Spielberg — who had E.T. put into turnaround, as star Henry Thomas detailed in another recent episode of It Happened in Hollywood, whose current season is taking a closer look at the magical films of 1980s.
“I thought, this guy made Jaws and Raiders. I can’t take this personally,” Grazer says.
Howard’s memory of the shoot is almost the opposite of the fight to get there.
“It was one of the least stressful movies I’ve ever made,” he says. “Once we were rolling, it was working.”
The full episode of It Happened in Hollywood with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts. Splash is streaming on Disney+.
