In Love, Gilda a Comedy Legend Finally Gets Her Due

A decade or so ago, I spent a couple of years as an intern at Saturday Night Live. My tasks included guiding VIP guests to their seats in Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8H, and escorting extras to and from wardrobe—purposeful roaming through time-suspended hallways. Photographs of the show’s iconic sketches and former stars are framed equidistantly, like portholes on a ship, each step bringing a new one to eye level. To visitors, blurting their approval as wigs and sets streaked past, the studio’s arteries seemed like the most fun and exciting place in world. And they could be: I rounded corners to find Paul McCartney lolling near metal detectors, and Tina Fey serenading a room—empty except for takeout boxes—with Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Once, my heart seized when the elevator doors opened onto a gigantic taxidermied jungle cat, ready to pounce. (A prop, awaiting transport.) But I most often regarded those corridors as sacred: the former workplace of so many creative and comic legends, plenty of whom burned bright and fast and were gone far too soon. Some, like John Belushi, Chris Farley, and Phil Hartman, were violently grabbed from the world by drugs, or guns. But then there was Gilda Radner, who just got sick. For me, a young writer who loved comedy, Gilda loomed above them all.

Radner, the subject of a new documentary, Love, Gilda, in theaters on September 21, has been something of an goddess figure to anybody interested in humor, but perhaps especially women, since her career took flight in 1975 (when Lorne Michaels offered her the first job in the Saturday Night Live cast) and long after she died of ovarian cancer in 1989, at age 42. Spunky and adorable no matter what she wore or what she said, Gilda sparkled through the television. She was that elusive thing: beautiful, yet somehow also so relatable, a theatrical craftsman made even more mysterious by the seamless nature of her work: audiences couldn’t tell when she read off cue cards and when she ad-libbed.

“I never met her, but she must have been such a magical creature, because everybody loved her, loved her,” Lisa D’Apolito, the director and producer of Love, Gilda, told me during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “Eighty people would be like, ‘Gilda’s my best friend. She never forgot my birthday!’”

A former actress and theater director, D’Apolito first began directing documentary-style projects for corporate companies’ internal use, films that she said "never see the light of day.” She began putting her talents to some pro bono work, which led her to make some fundraising videos for Gilda’s Club, a series of privately-funded centers in major American cities that offer support to cancer patients as well as their family and friends, founded by Radner’s cancer therapist, Joanna Bull.

Love, Gilda began as a short piece exclusively for Gilda’s Club. D’Apolito spent six months convincing Gilda’s only sibling, Michael, to let her use some of the Radner family home movies, but when she first considered weaving the available fragments of Gilda's life together into something more substantial, she hit a wall. “There wasn’t any interest, and there was a lot of, ‘Well no one knows who Gilda Radner is anymore,’” D'Apolito said. She spent two years feeling “tired of making the film.” But in life, as in comedy, timing is everything: Michael Radner moved house, and told the director that he was putting Gilda’s belongings into storage. D’Apolito made her fourth trip from New York City to the Radners’ native Detroit, and their storage, where she was given access for the first time to treasures like a 20-minute movie Gilda made documenting her final round of chemotherapy, something the director knew existed from reading Radner's memoir, It’s Always Something, and 30 hours of audio tapes Gilda had recorded to help herself pen that book. One box was full of Gilda's diaries; "the last box that Michael let me have access to,” D’Apolito said. (Although he was once “really worried” how they would be used—“people were very protective about Gilda," the director said—Michael was among those to later donate funds toward the production, adding to the $57,422 D’Apolito raised with an early IndieGogo campaign.)

<cite class="credit">Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures</cite>
Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

And so D’Apolito “fell into this Gilda path of doing this documentary, and then nothing else mattered.” Her new mission: letting her subject narrate her own life story onscreen. But there was a problem: “some of [the tapes] had warping, some of them had double-sound,” D’Apolito said—the result of less than ideal storage conditions. Still, she proceeded to build an entire subtitled rough cut around the damaged goods. “My filmmaker friends were like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s fine,’ because it’s Gilda talking,” she explained. (Others complained: “’‘I don’t understand, it’s confusing.’”) The final version consists of “recordings of so many different elements” braided together, including the audiobook for It's Always Something, Gilda's broadcasted interviews, and audio other journalists had saved from their conversations with the star. Watching the film, it struck me how despite years of watching her onscreen, I had barely ever heard Gilda’s real voice—she entered America’s homes and hearts in character, whether with Roseanne Roseannadanna’s staticky bravado, Emily Litella’s creaky confusion, or Lisa Looper’s mucous-y drone.

The effect of the film is one of intimacy (those diaries!) combined with a sort of frenzied look at fame in the 1970s. Gilda had never been on television before SNL; within weeks, 30 million viewers were tuning in. “There’s something about being an underdog and a voyeur that makes comedy possible,” she says in the documentary. “How do you keep on looking at what’s going on if suddenly everyone’s looking at you, and make that funny?" It wasn't easy to do: one of the film's revelations is that in June of 1978, at the height of her fame (and of SNL’s demands on her mind and body), Gilda checked into Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital to be treated for eating disorders. “She kept a diary for the two weeks she was in the hospital, and then she kept it for a couple months after. And it’s heartbreaking,” said D’Apolito. At intake, she weighed 104 pounds and journaled that she “hated [her]self,” still shackled by the food issues that began at age 10, around when her weight-concerned mother found a doctor who would put the little girl on Dexedrine, a stimulant, to discourage her appetite. (Her young adulthood didn't get any easier: When she was 14, Radner’s father died of brain cancer, a psychic wound she worried in her diary would hinder her from ever finding true love: “Can this affect every relationship I have with men?”)

“She really, really struggled that summer. Every single day she kept a record of what she ate, days she didn’t throw up, how many times she threw up,” said D’Apolito. It is not clear whether Lorne Michaels—who is interviewed in the film, along with stars like Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy, Chevy Chase, and Bill Hader—was aware of or facilitated Gilda's treatment; He doesn’t talk about it to D’Apolito. But it is true that to fill time on SNL, Michaels sometimes sent Gilda onstage for an impromptu segment called “What Gilda Ate,” where she would riff on the countless items she'd consumed that day, to the delight of the crowd.

Notably absent from Love, Gilda is her beloved husband, Gene Wilder, who died in August 2016, at age 83, from complications from Alzheimer’s. D’Apolito met Wilder for bagels in his Connecticut garden in 2015, but did not interview him on camera. (“He was really super frail, but he was totally clear about so many parts of Gilda’s life,” she said. “And he was beautiful, he had these big blue eyes.” Due to the progression of his illness, and her concern for his privacy, D’Apolito did not feel like she could attempt a formal interview. “People were like, ‘Why didn’t you film him?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, he has some health issues, but I didn’t want to say.’”) Wilder, a veteran of Mel Brooks films The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles, plus Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, was one of the world’s top box-office draws. He and Gilda met while she was still married to her first husband (SNL Band guitarist G.E. Smith), and co-starred in Sidney Poitier’s 1982 film Hanky Panky. Radner suffered a miscarriage while they filmed Haunted Honeymoon together in London, right before her diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder on the set of Haunted Honeymoon
Gilda Radner and Gene Wilder on the set of Haunted Honeymoon
Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

It's not all tragedy, though we know how the story ends: Love, Gilda’s biggest laugh comes when Michael Radner and Gilda’s best friend, Judy Levy, flip through a scrapbook the comedian devoted to her former flames and encounter a loose photo of an unidentified man’s naked backside. D’Apolito, for the record, is certain the buttocks belonged to Wilder, but also describes him as a “conservative” person who perhaps never knew the extent of his wife’s previous romantic escapades. (In the film, Laraine Newman, her SNL colleague, recalls Radner describing one lover as a “clit-snipper,” a term she coined for the male equivalent of a ball-buster; Levy remembers “It was really hard for her to see Ghostbusters, because every single guy in the movie had been her boyfriend at one time or another: Harold [Ramis], Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, but not Rick Moranis.") “That was the one thing she didn’t talk about in [It's Always Something]—her relationships—and she didn’t talk about those in the audiotapes either,” D’Apolito said. “She was so happy with Gene.”

Love, Gilda was selected as the opening night entry at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival—beyond a dream come true for the director, she said. Festival co-founders Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal attended the screening along with Michaels, Chase, Newman, Billy Crystal, Ray Liotta, Keegan Michael-Key and Gilbert Gottfried. “Tina Fey gave this really emotional speech, and she was so nice, and yeah, it’s a fantasy,” said D’Apolito.

And as far as that fantasy goes, well: “Not to get corny, but Gilda is about love. She’s not about anything negative,” D'Apolito says of her film (something that, not for nothing, led fellow feel-good documentaries RBG and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? to specialty box office success and critical acclaim this summer): “So I’m hoping that people get that message.”

Magnolia Pictures will release Love, Gilda nationwide on September 21.


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