Midler gives director big headache
Winnipeg Free Press
Thursday, October 14, 1982
Film director Don Siegel is really glad he’s finished with his f i lm Jinxed and its star, Bette Midler. Getting the movie in the can, he says, was murder.
“I’d let my wife, children and animals starve before I’d subject myself to something like that again,” says the 70-year-old Academy Award-winning director. He says working with the somewhat demanding and off-color Divine Miss M was “the worst experience” in his life. “It was absolute torture! I had to shoot some scenes three d i f f e r e nt ways. It wasn’t so much that Bette wanted changes. It was that she didn’t know what she wanted! And to a feisty veteran like me, it’s most annoying for someone like her – after making only two pictures – t o think she knows everything about editing, directing and acting.”
He says Midler became an enormous headache for everyone on the set. But . .. “The brass there was so in awe of her they let her do anything she wanted. Every time there was an argument – and there must have been 479,000 of them – t h ey sided with Bette.”
Despite it all, Siegel says Midler does a good job in the f i lm and t h i n ks it could be a winner. “I t h i nk they’ll be surprised at how good she turns out in this. I know I am.”
