From the Sun vaults, July 18-24, 1974

I just learned a long time ago to accept a little less from life, that's all. --Bruce Dern, as a beauty pageant patron in the 1975 film Smile

Michael Ritchie wasn't accepting anything less from life 35 years ago this week--at least not yet anyway.

In July of 1974, the Mill Valley resident was still Marin's best-known filmmaker--an indie-scene darling who'd wooed critics with pseudo-documentary styled satires of professional sports (Downhill Racer, 1969) and political campaigns (The Candidate, 1972). Though his friend and occasional dining companion George Lucas had a smash hit the previous year with American Graffiti (and had begun work on "another sci-fi movie," according to a recent Sun story), it was Ritchie who'd established his filmmaking street cred along the linoleum-lined corridors north of the Golden Gate.

But, unlike his Academy Award-nominated pal from Modesto, Ritchie was still loading his cameras well beyond what remained of the Hollywood studio system--and had to fight for every penny to make films whose profit margins weren't a whole lot higher.

"In the office that Michael Ritchie rents from George Lucas, the windows let in a light Marin County breeze that just barely moves the trees," began Ira Kamin's 1974 story on the director. "Ritchie and his secretary move with deliberate long motions, as if they were afraid of spilling something on the floor. Of course, there's nothing to spill. Mr. Ritchie has a pen; his secretary has a telephone. There's really nothing to spill."

Ritchie had just returned from the last of several fundraising trips to L.A., where he'd finally secured enough dough to begin shooting his next film, Smile, a movie about a teen beauty pageant that takes place in Santa Rosa. Kamin imagined what a studio exec would see when Michael Ritchie came through the door asking for a million bucks:

"A man with a smile. Late 30s maybe. Graduated from Harvard. A man who could dunk a basketball with no trouble. A man with lots of film experience--directed Prime Cut with Lee Marvin, who is a goddamn drunk and doesn't show up for days at a time, directed Robert Redford in two films, wrote the original screenplay for The Parallax View."

But Ritchie's films don't make millions, wrote Kamin. So there were lots of negotiations.

The director had been given 30 days to shoot Smile and $1 million to do it with. "That's what good ideas are worth these days," noted Kamin.

"And there's no perspiration on [Ritchie's head. Ritchie's approach is warm and informal. Casual. But there's something inside that's cool and extravagant. Careful. Manipulating. There's a certain calculated edge to his speaking voice."

Kamin closed the story by referencing a scene in Downhill Racer, when Robert Redford is on top of a mountain, ready to try for a gold medal. "It's the most solitary time in the world," wrote Kamin. "It's someone getting ready to test himself; it's a held breath, and a rush down an impossible course.

"Ritchie's course will be 30 days long."

Following Smile--which didn't make millions, in fact it bombed despite good reviews--Ritchie directed his breakthrough film, The Bad News Bears, a genre-defining lovable-losers classic that planted the director at the precipice of filmmaking fame. But from there Ritchie's career careened from annoyances like The Survivors (1983) and Fletch (1985) to such unwatchable comedies as Wildcats (1985), The Golden Child (1986), The Couth Trip (1987), Cops and Robbersons and The Scout (both 1994). To critics, the only thing more jaw-dropping than the fact that someone made these movies in the first place was that that someone was Michael Ritchie.

In the mid-1990s a writer asked Ritchie about the Quixotic nature of his career, which initially positioned him alongside Lucas and Coppola as a member of American cinema's next wave of great directors--before devolving into one of the longest strings of lousy movies in Hollywood history. "You take what you can get," Ritchie explained. "Besides, I truly want to make movies that are not films in the art-house sense of the word, but films to be enjoyed."

Ritchie died of prostate cancer in 2001. He was 61.

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