Actors have been dabbling in directing for decades and will continue to do so, but Ron Howard is in rarefied air as a successful performer who saw their on-camera stardom as little more than a means to an end that would eventually let him get out of the acting game entirely.
First rising to prominence as a fixture of The Andy Griffith Show, Howard notched dozens of credits across film and television to become one of the most prolific youngsters of his era. He worked with John Wayne in The Shootist and played a prominent role in ‘Best Picture’ nominee American Graffiti, and the Happy Days juggernaut made it look like his acting career would be long and fruitful.
However, he didn’t want to be an actor, which was a problem. Howard was a known commodity with an extensive filmography dating back to his earliest years, so it was only reasonable that nobody in Hollywood took him too seriously when he started trying to excise himself from his performative predicament to chase what had been his real dream all along.
Fortunately, there just so happened to be a guy in the business who loved nothing more than taking a chance on an untested and unproven filmmaker, provided they could bring a picture in on time and preferably under budget. Roger Corman was instrumental in launching countless careers, and he was happy to give Howard a shot, but only if his terms and conditions were met.
The future two-time Academy Award winner had always dreamed of calling the shots on his own self-directed production, and when the time finally came for Howard to take the plunge, he quickly realised that Corman’s preferred style of making movies was a baptism of fire.
“The rule was you have to make 25 setups a day, which is a lot,” he told Charlie Rose. “By lunchtime, I had only made four or five setups. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I’ve been talking about this for ten years.’ It was the day after my 23rd birthday. I had been shooting my mouth off for ten years that I wanted to be a director, bugging directors, following directors, telling interviews. I’m going to get my ass fired on the first day.”
Howard was lagging so far behind the usual pace of a Corman production that he was in danger of blowing his first and potentially only shot at proving he had what it took to be a director. Corman had no issues replacing anyone who wasn’t up to scratch either, and if the first-timer had continued falling behind, then it stands to reason he would have been fired and forced to return to acting full-time with his tail between his legs, completely altering the trajectory of his next five decades in Hollywood.
