Exclusive: Producer Marvin Peart On Getting Robert De Niro To Star In His Film ‘The War With Grandpa’
Coming out this week (Oct. 9) in theaters is the family comedy ‘The War with Grandpa’ starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Uma Thurman, Laura Marano, Oakes Fegley, Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin and Jane Seymour.
Directed by Tim Hill and based on the award-winning book by Robert Kimmel Smith, the film was produced by Marvin Peart, CEO of Brookdale Studios/Chief Business Officer and Founding Partner of 101 Studios, and Rosa Peart, Co-Founder Marro Media Company.
Sixth-grader Peter (Oakes Fegley) is pretty much your average kid-he likes gaming, hanging with his friends and his beloved pair of Air Jordans. But when his recently widowed grandfather Ed (Robert De Niro) moves in with Peter's family, the boy is forced to give up his most prized possession of all, his bedroom. Unwilling to let such an injustice stand, Peter devises a series of increasingly elaborate pranks to drive out the interloper, but Grandpa Ed won't go without a fight. Soon, the friendly combatants are engaged in an all-out war with side-splitting consequences.
When it comes to Black producers on films with a predominantly white cast, there are a few. There’s Broderick Johnson, Datari Turner, Kimberly Steward and DeVon Franklin to name. Marvin Peart is now among this list. Coming in from the music industry, where he worked at Sony Music and then entering the film and TV world where he produced Who’s Your Caddy?, The Perfect Holiday, and reality TV shows like Mob Wives Chicago and Big Ang, Peart has been contributing to different mediums of entertainment for over 20 years. As a founding partner of 101 Studios, the company is having a huge success with Yellowstone, the Paramount modern-day western drama series starring Kevin Costner.
BlackFilmandTV.com caught up with Peart as he spoke about putting this film together, from hearing his son’s pitch, grabbing the book rights and then landing Robert De Niro.
How did this project come about?
Marvin Peart: My wife Rosa always had this rule in the house that she wanted for our kids. If you wanted to see the movie you need to read the book. So then our eight year old son, Tre (Marvin Peart III) read this book in school and thought that every book has a movie already. He came home trying to find this movie, and he couldn't find it and then went to my wife and said, “Hey, help me try to find this movie. I read this great, funny book.” They couldn't find it. And then he was like, “Well, maybe it should be a movie. Let's talk to dad about it.”
My wife taught him how to do a pitch. I remember the night I was leaving for LA the next morning and just bustling to my office just trying to get stuff sorted to leave and Rosa came in and says, “Hey, your son wants to talk to you about a movie project.” She hit me with that look like sit down, take five minutes here. He pitched this movie from this book and I was like, “Oh, it's interesting.” I got on the plane the next morning, read the book, and by the time I landed in LA. I called her and said, “Listen, let’s call the publisher and option this thing. See if the rights are available. This could be our next project.” That's how it came about.
Now, you got the rights and then there’s landing the great Robert De Niro. Can you talk about getting him as your lead?
Marvin Peart: Well, when you're producing and financing, it’s like going to a grocery store with a with a list of groceries. You could take your list, if you had the money, buy your groceries but the store may run out of this item or that item. So once we optioned the book, we spoke to the writers who wrote this great, funny family movie that we watched, called Parental Guidance with Billy Crystal and Bette Midler. We hired those writers to come in and do a pass on Grandpa. My son Trey said, “Hey, maybe we should get Robert De Niro to play grandpa. You guys talk about what a great actor Robert De Niro is and too bad I can't see any of these movies. Why can't I put him in my movie?” That was the the impetus of that. I went off and I called Bob's agent and and they probably said no seven times. But on the eighth time, they said yes.
Did you meet with him? Did his team convince him to do it. What was it about the eighth time that had him say yes?
Marvin Peart: I think time had passed. There was a movie that he had done called ‘Dirty Grandpa.’ I think the word grandpa being in the title of this movie kind of scared him a bit because that he had gotten killed critically for making that movie. He was wary about doing a movie with the word grandpa in it. Some time it passed. At this point, I had attached Tim Hill as the director and he had a lot of great success with Alvin and the Chipmunks and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Great family director. Then I got the call saying “Listen, Bob wants to hear you out. He shooting a movie in Florida and we'll meet you in Florida.” I got Tim and we flew down to Florida. We sat with Bob and he said, “Hey, you know what? I like your persistence. This is interesting. Why don't I give you a list of other writers and see what they come back with? And if I like that, then I'll commit.” I went and hired two brand new writers to do a different pass on the movie. He signed off and then he signed on.
Was ever a thought process of bringing on black writers or black talent?
Marvin Peart: Well, my background comes from the music business. And so when I was in the music business, if I didn't sign a black artists or look for black artists, or writers or producers, etc. I didn't have a job. I was head of A&R at Sony. Sony never hired black executives to do anything other than black music. Obviously, depending on who you are, and like myself, I love country. I love rock. I love popular music, but no one ever paid me the kind of money that they paid me at Sony to find those artists but I watched other white executives do whatever they wanted to do. You know these guys were in hip hop doing r&b. They're obviously in rock and country. It was a very narrow tunnel for black executives, but I understood, and without the black music department, I wouldn't have had a job. So when I got into the movie business, I made two films pretty quickly, Who's your caddy and The Perfect Holiday just to get in and make a couple movies that I thought I can make.
I never wanted to pitch scripts to studios. I always wanted to create my own business. So but in order to talk to people about investing, the first question that would be asked is what do you know about making movies? If you go to somebody to invest in your restaurant, they'll say, “Well, what do you know about running a restaurant?" Do you have a great chef, etc. So I had to check that box. So I deliberately went off and I made an all white film because I wanted to cross the bridge off. I figure any day of the week, people will think I can do Ride Along. I can do Pootie Tang or Who's your Caddy? or I can do The Perfect Holiday. People just look at me and assume I can do that. But they wouldn't look at me and assume I can make The War with Grandpa. So that was just very deliberate, which is why there's there isn't a black writer or a black director or black cast. It was very deliberate why I did that.
How did you want to make this film different from what others may have seen before?
Marvin Peart: The movie started with a different thread, because everyone always wants to know, how did a movie come about? When I think an eight year old black kid read a book that turned into a movie, I think you're beginning to separate yourself from the origin of a film. In this particular movie, when it comes to family, it's very hard to watch a movie as a family. When you watch family entertainment, there's always something that's a little bit suspect in what you're watching. I wonder if my kid caught that innuendo. I wonder if you saw something that you thought was inappropriate, but no matter how brief it was, it was still sort of inappropriate. So we wanted to make a family movie that you can watch for 88 minutes, and where a parent will look at their kid and not feel any any uncomfortableness whatsoever, because it was made for a four years old or a 400 years old.
What did you learn, after production was complete, that you can take on to your next project?
Marvin Peart: The movie has been spread out over years due to several things that happened out of my control. The movie had been set up at different times. So the marketing would be tough, because you've had all these different ideas over time. And as time goes by, you're not able to execute, because the movie, for different reasons just isn't coming out. But in the in the making of the movie, I would never choose to make a movie in two separate locations, meaning two provinces or two different states. I would look to pick a movie and if I can't pick this one locale and find everything I need in that one jurisdiction, then I should move on from it. Unless you're going to get into a hundred million dollar studio land, it doesn't matter where you are. The backdrop doesn't matter. That's was the one lesson that I learned. We started in Toronto, Canada and then moved to Georgia.
Where do you go from here? Do you have anything else lined up?
Marvin Peart: Yeah, there's a couple projects that I'm working on both sides. As a producer, financier and one of the founding partners of 101 studios, we obviously have Yellowstone with Kevin Costner. That’s the biggest show on television, probably the biggest show in the last 13 years and then on the Brookdale side, which is what I call the genre studio, I'm looking to develop another family comedy around Christmas time with De Niro again. So I'm going back to the well.