Jack Nicholson Rated Terms of Endearment Director James L. Brooks to His Face

Terms of Endearment comes to 4K UHD for its 40th anniversary. The Blu-ray included also contains one of Paramount’s Filmmaker Focus features with director James L. Brooks reflecting on the film. That includes fun stories about Jack Nicholson giving Brooks playful grief over being a new director.

“He used to come up to me and say, ‘You want to know the worst direction you gave yesterday? You want to know the worst direction you gave yesterday?’” Brooks laughed. “It was like this school going on in my ear.”

Having Nicholson on board for a supporting role was a great asset to Brooks, for whom Terms was his first movie.

“If the star is with you nobody else has a choice but to be with you and he was with me,” Brooks said. “If he hadn’t been it wouldn’t have worked.”

And yet, Nicholson wasn’t the first choice for the role of astronaut Garrett Breedlove, who woos Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine). Brooks first asked Burt Reynolds.

“He was the number one box office star,” Brooks said. “I was trying to get this made. So if Burt had done it I’d get it made. And he was going to do it and then he took another movie instead because I think Dustin Hoffman dropped out of a movie and he inherited the part and wanted to.”

Still, there were no hard feelings with Reynolds.

“On the day that it happened, his publicist called me and said, ‘Burt’s pulling out but he wants you to know he loves you,’” Brooks said.

Debra Winger, who plays Aurora’s daughter Emma, got Nicholson to read the script. For a big softie like me, Terms is a classic tear jerker. Turns out Brooks was a big softie too.

“At that point I had only cried once in my life,” Brooks said. “That book, I cried when I read it so it was this biological truth I couldn’t deny.”

Still, Brooks saw it as a comedy.

“Tone is always important,” Brooks said. “Tone is always elusive. The important thing to me was that it live as a comedy especially because the ending was tragic. People’s memory of it is not what they laughed at. It lived as a drama in people’s minds. But in that dark room with strangers, people laughed.”

Terms of Endearment is my second Brooks 4K after As Good As It Gets in the Columbia Classics Vol. 3 set. While mostly a straightforward drama, the 4K retains the gauzy vaseline lens film look of the 1983 production. It does open in pitch black with only the night light illuminated in the bottom right corner so you definitely know you’re watching it in 4K.