He’s back -- after one too many ‘Men in Black’

THE director is acting like Barry Sonnenfeld, is talking like Barry Sonnenfeld but ... well, he doesn’t exactly look like Barry Sonnenfeld.

There’s the trademark cowboy hat and boots, the customary tie and jeans; but there’s also a fully grown mustache that Sonnenfeld didn’t have even three hours ago.

It was chosen from dozens of bogus beards and mustaches Sonnenfeld’s got in a bag that he dips into from time to time -- an amusing and occasional diversion from his main task at hand, “Notes From the Underbelly,” a new comedy pilot he’s directing.

“I wear them for fun,” Sonnenfeld says, peeling off the mustache with a little discomfort.

It’s not just Sonnenfeld’s hit movies -- “Men in Black,” “Get Shorty,” “The Addams Family” -- that display an eccentric comic style. The director himself is a complex combination of insecurity and confidence, a tightly wound showman who wants to do well by Hollywood but is among its most refreshingly unguarded critics.

With 1991’s “The Addams Family,” the former cinematographer for Rob Reiner (he shot “When Harry Met Sally...” and “Misery”) and Joel and Ethan Coen (“Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona” and “Miller’s Crossing”) put down his camera and climbed into the director’s chair. Marrying fast-paced, character-driven stories with an arresting and exaggerated visual style, Sonnenfeld in the span of seven years established himself as one of the town’s most original and popular comic filmmakers.

As rapidly as his filmmaking star ascended, on the heels of “Men in Black II” it also fell, and the director found himself in the same position as so many middle-aged actresses: trying to prove he still had it. And that’s part of what makes his disguise on the set of the TV show “Notes From the Underbelly” seem strange on a different level.

If anything, Sonnenfeld doesn’t need a disguise at all -- he’s been missing from the movies for four years. With April 28’s “RV,” he returns, with a film that is intimate by Sonnenfeld’s standards and his most autobiographical.

It’s a story of professional setbacks, disappointment mixed with relief, new insights into parenting and marriage, and finding laughs amid tough times -- which can describe not only the new movie but the director’s filmmaking sabbatical. “RV” stars Robin Williams as a dad who believes by packing everybody into a motor home he can reconnect with his wife and two children. The question now is whether “RV” will allow Sonnenfeld to reconnect with moviegoers, and revive his big-screen career.

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His stresses on his sleeve

THERE are people in Hollywood who are openly gay. There are people in Hollywood who are openly vegan. Sonnenfeld is openly neurotic.

“I had this fear I was never going to direct a movie again,” Sonnenfeld says inside a Pacific Palisades home used in filming “Notes From the Underbelly,” a 30-minute ABC comedy pilot about pregnancy, parenting and relationships adapted from the novel by Risa Green. “So I thought I better find a TV show and hope it’s a home run and it’s my dowry.”

It’s not that Sonnenfeld isn’t optimistic about “RV,” although his praise, as with so many of his opinions about the film business, is honest and measured. “It’s not like I love ‘RV,’ ” he says. “But it’s one of my kids.”

It’s more that paranoia is part of Sonnenfeld’s nature; he says he has the same anxious career worries whenever he finishes a movie. That baseline apprehension reaches well beyond his job too: Sonnenfeld travels with enough cellphones and PDAs to fill a small Verizon store, just in case, he says, one of his four service providers is knocked out by some natural disaster or a terrorist attack or, he adds, “I get lost in the woods. I need to know that I’m gonna get to somebody.” (Sonnenfeld writes a technology column for Esquire magazine.)

Sonnenfeld also knows that despite directing one of the most popular and influential comedies of the 1990s, “Men in Black,” a number of his subsequent projects have sputtered or not even gotten off the ground.

While his last movie, 2002’s “Men in Black II,” grossed a strong $190.4 million in domestic theaters, it seems to have left pretty much everyone (Sonnenfeld, the studio, the producers, the audience) unhappy. The release of his previous film, “Big Trouble,” was postponed by the Sept. 11 attacks, thanks to a subplot in the Tim Allen film about a bomb on an airplane. And even though Sonnenfeld is proud of 1999’s “Wild Wild West,” the movie was a media whipping post and quickly forgotten.

Any number of proposed movies that Sonnenfeld was tied to either have failed to coalesce or landed in the hands of other directors. Probably wisely, Sonnenfeld dropped out of making Jim Carrey’s “Fun With Dick and Jane,” which encountered numerous script revisions and reshoots under director Dean Parisot. But Sonnenfeld was heartbroken he didn’t end up directing “Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events,” ultimately made by Brad Silberling.

Sonnenfeld also labored but failed to find an actress to star in a planned reworking of “The Heartbreak Kid,” had similar trouble casting an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise,” and hasn’t persuaded “Ali G’s” Sacha Baron Cohen to star in a biography of the man who launched the Chippendales dancers.

One of the town’s highest-paid directors in the mid-1990s, Sonnenfeld couldn’t find work.

The director eventually was approached by producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, who had commissioned screenwriter Geoff Rodkey (“Daddy Day Care”) to write a script about Wick and Fisher’s family motor home vacations. “RV” already had Williams attached, so it wasn’t going to take much to get the movie up and running. For Sonnenfeld, the film carried an even stronger draw: He saw it as a means to tell a story about family and being a good dad.

In the movie, Williams plays Bob Munro, an overstressed soft-drink executive facing two unrelated but equally troubling problems. His disagreeable boss is grooming a know-nothing kid as a trusted advisor, and Munro’s children (Joanna Levesque, Josh Hutcherson) and wife (Cheryl Hines) are growing increasingly isolated from him and one another. Never far from laptops, MP3 players and BlackBerries, the family is using technology to create its own private spheres -- so much so that family members need to send IMs when dinner is ready. It’s a scene straight from Sonnenfeld’s life.

“My dad was a salesman, and he would come home at 8 or 9, and he would work half a day on Saturdays sometimes,” Sonnenfeld says. “But I always felt connected to my dad and never resented the long hours of his work. What’s really interesting about our generation is that we are with our kids more than I was with my dad, yet because we are electronically connected [to our jobs], even when we are with them we don’t shut off. So what happens is that our kids feel that we are with them less, even though we are actually with them more.”

Munro needs to use the RV to get to an important merger meeting in time, but he also sees the trip as a way to teach his family, and himself, what it means to be a family again. The outing prompts a number of physical gags whose execution will be familiar to Sonnenfeld fans, including a sewer hookup gone terribly awry and Munro’s repeated failures to drive and park the motor home safely.

“In many ways, this is autobiography because I wanted to make a movie about my relationship with Chloe before she got too old,” Sonnenfeld says of his 12-year-old daughter, who is cast in the film as the child of another family the Munros meet at an RV park. “And Robin plays me. Every time that Robin has dry heaves because he’s seeing fecal matter, that’s me. Any time he’s the first one running out of the door of the RV because there’s a raccoon inside, that’s me. Robin plays the fearful jerk who, at the end of the movie -- and in spite of himself -- redeems himself. That’s me.”

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A career ‘Black’ mark

ALTHOUGH some filmmakers will pass on the question entirely, any director with a modicum of humility will admit to at least one movie that was a mistake. It takes Sonnenfeld a fraction of a second to identify his misfire, and it isn’t “Wild Wild West,” but the second “Men In Black” film, which came out in 2002.

“That was a very difficult movie for me,” the director says. “I didn’t think anyone was very pleased with it ... and I think that was a very unfortunate movie for me, more than any movie I ever directed. If I could take one movie back, that would be it.” The sequel grossed less than Sony had hoped, selling fewer tickets than the 1997 original but costing much more to make. Equally painful to Sony, the studio had to pay out a huge slice of its revenues for contingent compensation to stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and to Sonnenfeld.

“It was a huge payday for me, but not really,” Sonnenfeld says. “Because that [movie] made me not work for the next 3 1/2 years, in many ways. So if you take the money I was paid on ‘MIB II’ and divided it by four, it wasn’t all that brilliant of a move.”

The project that Sonnenfeld hoped would restore his standing to pre-”MIB II” glory was “Lemony Snicket.” Sonnenfeld was set to direct the story of three orphans and the adults, led by the devious Count Olaf, who prey upon them. He had even started casting.

But Paramount grew nervous about the film’s budget and went looking for a production partner. In making the “Men in Black” sequel, Sonnenfeld had a falling-out with its producers, Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who were also the production chiefs at DreamWorks. When Paramount selected that studio as its “Lemony Snicket” partner and Parkes and MacDonald as the film’s new producers, Sonnenfeld was gone.

“I so regret not being able to direct that movie,” Sonnenfeld says. “Because I totally knew what that movie was -- what the tone of the movie was. The movie never should have been about Count Olaf. It was about the kids.

“I totally love kids, and one of the reasons why I wanted to make ‘RV’ so much is because I wanted to make a movie about kids and [their] relationships with adults. All adults, whether they are trying to help kids or trying to hurt kids, are basically inept. And children are capable.”

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Shrinking bottom line

IN the 1990s, when Sonnenfeld’s movies could do little wrong, he often was lavished not only with rich salaries but also spare-no-expense production budgets. “RV” cost a little more than $50 million, about a third of the budgets for “Wild Wild West” and “Men in Black II.”

Among other things, the limited budget meant that “RV,” despite being a story of a family driving from Southern California to Colorado, would be shot in Vancouver and the hinterlands of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. It rained so much during filming that most of the scenes of the Munro family driving their rig were filmed on a stage, with the passing background added digitally.

“I had both a love affair with and a hatred of Vancouver and felt we never should have been there,” Sonnenfeld says. “I felt we were being punished. Sony decided when it was my turn to direct that they were going to be really fiscally responsible. I felt it was the wrong place to shoot the movie because it’s all about America and the outdoors.

“But I loved the crew, and I loved working on the movie. First of all, I loved that my wife and daughter were with me all the time. And because we did shoot in Canada and no one wanted to go up there, there was not a day that a studio executive visited the set. They left us alone, and we were not the movie in trouble.” Unlike Sony’s pricey gambles on “Spanglish,” “Bewitched” and “Fun With Dick and Jane,” Sonnenfeld adds, “We weren’t the ones that had to work.”

The beauty of the TV pilot, Sonnenfeld says, is that if ABC doesn’t pick up the show, the effort will vanish, having been neither seen nor judged by anybody outside of the network and the production company.

Still, when he’s done joking about its potential disappearance, his neuroses and his fake mustaches, Sonnenfeld very much wants “RV” and “Notes From the Underbelly” to succeed.

“I love my family,” says the 53-year-old director, who also has two older stepdaughters. “But I really like to work. I realized that over the last couple of years of not working how much I missed being in charge. Because when I’m home, I’m not in charge.”