Still Buddy Buddy

There is evidence, so far not much more conspicuous than a touch of silver in the hair, that the major studios have begun to realize what anyone could have told them years ago: There’s a huge movie audience waiting to be tapped.

These viewers are well north of that roughly 16-to-20-year-old, primarily male demographic that the industry has been seducing so relentlessly for decades and now seduces more expensively than ever because the same fare finds even more customers abroad than at home.

The largely unsolicited audience is composed of the over-40s and over-50s--the graying America that grew up with the movies, loves the movies and would still go to the movies if the offerings were more to its taste.

It’s not necessary to go back to “The Sound of Music” to discover titles that define the taste or the many flavors of it. “On Golden Pond” found mature audiences eager to see its aging icons once more (and the film found a crossover audience of the young as well). In “Driving Miss Daisy,” a senior audience embraced a senior woman of spirit and sensitivity, creating a nice commercial rebuke to the Hollywood studios that wanted no part of the script.

Then there is the significant popularity of the most durable screen team in the business: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, who have become not least the avant-garde of the major studios’ long-overdue overtures to the middle-aged audience (and of course to any in the younger crowd who enjoy watching a pair of matchless actors at work).

It is a partnership that began just over 30 years ago in Billy Wilder’s “The Fortune Cookie,” a dazzlingly cynical work whose misfortune was to be made in glorious black and white in a transitional period when only color seemed to sell.

Then, as usually later, they were a version of good cop, bad cop, with Lemmon the protesting innocent being led astray by Matthau in full bellow and sounding, as one writer observed, like a dyspeptic moose. Matthau won an Oscar for his portrayal of a shyster lawyer trying to extract a major medical settlement on behalf of Lemmon, a television cameraman who had been knocked over by a pro footballer running out of bounds but was not hurt a bit.

The teaming has worked, generally with great success, in “The Odd Couple” (1968), one of the funniest comedies of any decade; in Wilder’s remake of “The Front Page,” Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s classic newspaper comedy, in 1974; in Wilder’s “Buddy Buddy,” one of the less successful outings, in 1981; and two outings as “Grumpy Old Men” for Warner Bros. in 1993 and 1995.

In their latest togetherness, Fox’s “Out to Sea,” opening Wednesday, they are semi-grumpily at sea, Matthau (running from bookie debts) conning Lemmon into snagging a free cruise by pretending to be dance hosts. Actually, as an exercise in demographic appeal, “Out to Sea” is interesting not only because its male stars are both past 70 but also because their love interests are Dyan Cannon, who is 60 (although not looking within 20 years of it), and Gloria DeHaven, who is 71 and most alarmingly attractive.

However preposterous the goings-on, the appeal of “Grumpy Old Men” (there may be a third, set in Italy to make Sophia Loren feel at home), like the appeal of “Out to Sea,” is the insistence that life begins when you say it begins, that romance is not the sole province of the young, who often make a mess of it anyway, and that youth doesn’t have exclusive possession of silliness either. (Martha Coolidge directed “Out to Sea,” and Matthau says, “Every time she came over I gave her a big kiss, and she said, ‘Now I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Wonderful.’ ”)

If Lemmon and Matthau on screen have a particular warmth and charm, it is likely because the two men (and their wives, Felicia Farr and Carol Grace) have been close off-screen friends for something like 40 years.

The details of the beginning of their friendship have a sort of “Rashomon” quality, each claiming to remember the first meeting differently from the other.

Lemmon is sure he was introduced to Matthau for the first time at the bar in Sardi’s in New York, Matthau having a beer and shifting uncomfortably. He explained that he had sat on Gloria Vanderbilt’s glass cocktail table at a crowded party and broken it into a million pieces, lacerating himself severely. His nether parts were still hurting. At the time of the accident, as Lemmon tells it, blood was spurting, and Vanderbilt’s comment was “You broke my table!”

Matthau insists he has no recollection of the Sardi’s meeting but agrees that the incident of the cocktail table was true: “My girlfriend, Carol Grace [now his wife], and I were in a play together and she was a friend of Gloria’s. We were always going to her parties and I was always uncomfortable. The first time I was there she slugged me. I had to hold her wrists. She thought I was taking too much of her girlfriend’s time.

“That one party was so crowded the only place I could find to sit down was the cocktail table, and it shattered. They rushed me to a hospital on the North Shore to remove the pieces of glass and sew me up. The surgeon said the glass just missed an artery, which would have ended my career right there. I was on my belly for two weeks. Gloria in her inimitable way kept calling Carol and saying, ‘Is he really all right, darling, I mean really, I mean really?’ [This in a very Brahmin accent.]

“Maybe I should leave Jack’s story alone. It’s more dramatic.”

Matthau’s own recollection of their first meeting was that it was at a delicatessen in Brentwood:

“I remember distinctly he ordered some fried shrimp and a chocolate frappe for dessert. And I said, ‘Jack, you don’t order fried shrimp and a chocolate frappe in a Jewish delicatessen. It’s not their specialty.’ ”

When Lemmon and Matthau were filming “Buddy Buddy” with Wilder, a scene called for them both to slide down a laundry chute to escape the bad guys. Lemmon never got to do it. Matthau went first, before a mattress had been put in place at the foot of the chute. Matthau hit the cellar’s cement floor with a ghastly thud, breaking his shoulder and receiving a concussion.

“I was the first one to him,” Lemmon says. “I put my coat under his head and said, ‘Are you comfortable?’ He said, ‘I make a living.’ He was out three months and came back 30 pounds lighter. Billy threw a long raincoat on him and told him not to button it; let it drape like a pup tent. Nobody picked up on the difference in him.

“Walter,” Lemmon says, “thinks I’m the reason for everything that’s ever ailed him, because something does happen every damned picture we do. Heart attack, an ulcer, duodenal hernia, all kinds of stuff, and it’s always me. I swear I’m innocent.”

Says Matthau: “I was reading my wife’s book [Carol Matthau’s memoir, “Among the Porcupines”] and I said, ‘Hey, this is not accurate, you’re making this up.’ She said, ‘That’s what writers are supposed to do.’ ”

Lemmon’s sole outing as a feature director, 1971’s “Kotch,” won an Oscar nomination for Matthau for his performance as a crotchety grandfather.

“I tried to get Freddie March, but he was ill and uninsurable,” Lemmon says. “I thought Walter was too young for the part. One night I was talking about it with Carol and Felicia. Carol didn’t say anything but evidently went home and told Walter about it.

“Walter called me and said, ‘Ya got anybody for it yet?’ I said no. He said, ‘Well, if you think it’s right, I’d love to play it.’ I called my partner, Dick Carter, who said, ‘He’d be wonderful; we’ll age him.’ I called Walter back and he said, ‘Hell, now I’ll have to read the damned thing.’ He hadn’t read one word, he was just going on what Carol said, and she hadn’t read one word either.”

Lemmon and Matthau have begun production on “The Odd Couple 2” by Neil Simon.

“The script is marvelous, hysterical,” Lemmon says. “Out of my marriage, which ended in divorce, we have a daughter, and he has a son from his marriage, and the two of them are getting married, which throws us together again.” The film will be released by Paramount, probably sometime next year.

As actors, Lemmon and Matthau would almost certainly find that without contrasting parts to stretch them as actors, their work as a comedy team would be as unsatisfying a diet as eating desserts only. But they both continue to work individually to great good effect. Matthau’s performance in last year’s “I’m Not Rappaport,” while he was still the voluble con man, had a quite different, darker coloration; the character was a man creating a myth for his own life to make it more bearable.

Lemmon has recently completed a remake of Sidney Lumet’s classic drama “Twelve Angry Men,” directed by William Friedkin, with a remarkable cast.

“I would stake my life it’s going to be a ripper,” Lemmon says. “Like ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ it’s a fantastic ensemble. George C. Scott, Hume Cronyn--and Mykelti Williamson, who was Forrest Gump’s buddy on the shrimp boat; Billy made him the bigot this time. And I want to tell you that to hear lines coming out of this guy gives a whole new twist on the story. I got goose bumps at times just sitting at the table listening.”

The film will premiere on Showtime on Aug. 17.

Both Lemmon and Matthau have sons in the business. Jack’s son Chris Lemmon has written a script called “Publicity Stunt.” “It’s a great idea, awfully good,” Jack says. “If we can get the right cast, I’d like to direct it, and we’re working on it.”

Walter’s son Charlie, a graduate of the USC film school, directed Truman Capote’s “The Grass Harp,” the 1996 film in which both Lemmon and Matthau appeared.

“He’s looking for another picture,” his father says. “You know, when you’re a director starting out you get a picture every 10 years. There’s something called ‘Dennis the Menace II,’ which maybe Charlie could direct. That would be good because it takes him out of the small, prestigious, noncommercial film department. I think he’s as good a director as I ever worked with. Doesn’t get in the way of the actors. Whispers everything, doesn’t want to embarrass anybody.”

Several years ago Lemmon went back to Harvard for an arts festival. The university assigned him a limo. At the end of the stay, the limo driver said that driving was his day job; he was actually a comic, working the clubs in and around Boston and hoping to make it to the West Coast. “Someday,” the driver said, “I’m going to live next door to you.” His name was Jay Leno, and he lives three doors from Lemmon in Beverly Hills. “The other day,” Lemmon says, “the house next door to me came up for sale and Jay bought it, for his mother.” Lemmon will do the “Tonight” show later this summer, to talk about old times.

Meantime, Oscar and Felix have old times of their own to talk over, in Doc Simon’s splendid words, and it is a reasonable guess that audiences of several ages will want to watch and listen.