For those who live to feather their nests, the title sequence of Father of the Bride Part II may be the most gripping three minutes of film to come out of Hollywood all year.
While a singer rasps Give Me the Simple Life, the camera pans a series of domestic still lifes so chock-full of collectibles that the lyrics (“A cottage small is all I’m after”) make an ironic counterpoint.
The San Marino, Calif., home of George and Nina Banks (Steve Martin and Diane Keaton) lacks for nothing.
Like a bed-and-breakfast on steroids, the Banks abode is packed to its faux dormers with yellow-ware bowls, jars of olive oil with floating olives, faded flowery fabrics by Bennison and dozens of family photos in wood and in silver frames. Clearly, the simple life requires a lot of dusting.
All she set out to do was “create a warm, cozy, safe environment,” says Nancy Meyers, who produced the film and wrote it. Her husband, Charles Shyer, directed.
Meyers and Shyer re-created the white clapboard house they used four years ago in Father of the Bride. George Banks is Everyman but the kind of Everyman who owns an athletic-shoe factory. “We take a lot from Norman Rockwell,” Shyer says.
“This is not about 1980s possessions,” Meyers adds. “Whether or not you own your own shoe company, the Bankses’ values are very easy to relate to. It is picture-perfect, I suppose. But my house has tables with cut flowers on them and pictures of my kids in silver frames. It’s as valid a way to live as any other, and there are plenty of ways to do it…”
American audiences seem mesmerized by the Banks residence. Since Father of the Bride was released in 1991, the Pasadena house that serves as its facade has become a tourist attraction.
“People come from all over to see it,” Shyer says. In previews for Father of the Bride Part II, test audiences frequently raved about the house in the comment cards they were asked to fill out.
“The house itself is great,” says Stephen Earle, style director at Martha Stewart Living magazine. “It’s a classic Georgian revival from the 1920s or 1930s that just says home.”
But while the director was striving to create a “Rockwellian atmosphere” in the house, Arlene Vella, proprietor of Century 21 by Vella, a Pasadena real estate agency that sells houses in San Marino, is skeptical. She says a typical Norman Rockwell would go for $250,000 to $300,000.
“The house in that movie is worth at least $750,000,” she says, noting that estimate is low because the market dropped 30 percent in this area in the last four years.
In the film, Diane Keaton plays the owner of a boutique called Nina’s Cook Nook. The filmmakers reasoned that the kitchen should therefore be gargantuan. While Nina never actually appears to do much cooking, the kitchen plays an important role in the development of the story.
This is where George Banks, panicked at the onset of grandfatherhood, seduces Nina on the floor by the dishwasher to prove his youthful vigor. That encounter leads to the movie’s principal joke: Nina becomes pregnant at the same time as her daughter, Annie (Kimberly Williams).
As the setting for such a pivotal plot point, Nina’s kitchen is a masterwork of professional kitchen design. It’s equipped with a wall of illuminated glass-fronted cupboards filled with collectibles as well as a large, butcher-block-topped island with a hanging pot rack holding burnished copper pots, and a professional Wolf range.
Since gardens may be to the 90s what kitchens were to the 80s, this is a film in which horticulture matters, even if only briefly. The Bankses have converted their mud room into a potting shed straight out of the Gardener’s Eden catalog, complete with dried hydrangeas, candles, ribbons, planting tools and antique pine tables.
The front-and backyard shots of 24 Maple Drive were filmed at two real houses in Pasadena and Altadena. The production designer, Linda DeScenna, directed a greens crew to pretty up the real-life lawns with a forest of lilac trees, honeysuckle, calla lilies, pansies, snapdragons, agapanthus, jasmine, roses and camellias.
The house and the picket fence were draped in climbing cabbage roses; the portico in back was smothered in wisteria. “And,” says DeScenna, “we added cherry trees on the border to block out the neighbors.”
After the garden baby shower in Father of the Bride Part II, Franck Egglehoffer proceeds to his next project – an addition to the house for their new baby. Franck unveils “babyland” to George Banks, handing him a bill in a sealed envelope. “Do me a favor?” Franck says. “Maybe you open it after I leave?”
Meyers filled the nursery with 50 Steiff stuffed animals and furnishings from Little Folk Art, the Santa Monica company that equipped her own daughter’s room.
Midway through the movie, in the midst of his midlife crisis, even George Banks seems to want out of his domestic wonderland. He decides that he would rather live at the beach and ride a Harley-Davidson.
He impulsively unloads 24 Maple Drive for an undisclosed amount. On moving day, in a futile attempt to console his despondent wife and children, a guilt-ridden Banks says: “What are we? The Schmaltz family? Look at this shack.”
Almost immediately, the house appears to gleam in the sunlight, capped by a rainbow. At a preview screening in New York, the audience ate it up.
“I’ll take that shack!” exclaimed one woman. “That’s a beautiful house,” said somebody else. For roughly $2 million, they can have it.
Ingrid Abramovitch is a senior editor at Martha Stewart Living.
