A man gaslights a female acquaintance into thinking she’s married to him, then appoints her to raise his four feral children (and two dogs). It doesn’t sound like a successful screwball comedy—but on December 18, 1987, audiences were drawn to Overboard, starring real-life couple Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Despite a questionable premise, the film won legions of fans, including Reese Witherspoon; when she presented the couple with their Hollywood Walk of Fame stars in May, the actress admitted that her first e-mail address was overboard@aol.com.
Screenwriter Leslie Dixon—granddaughter of Migrant Mother photographer Dorothea Lange and Southwestern-scape painter Maynard Dixon—had already hit earlier in the year with her first produced script: the Bette Midler-Shelley Long buddy-comedy Outrageous Fortune, which grossed a robust $52.86 million. Soon after she wrote Outrageous, Dixon was commissioned to write Overboard, based on a real incident in which a woman with amnesia washed ashore in Florida
I was daunted from the get-go by the idea that the amnesia was a central plot device,” Dixon says now. “I thought that was hokey. But I was in no position to complain—someone was paying me to write a screenplay.” Thankfully, casting the leading roles of Dean Proffitt and Joanna Stayton/Annie Proffitt was easy: “I’ve never before or since had any actor say yes so quickly,” Dixon says. “Kurt and Goldie were newly in love, and it shows on screen. They’re so cute together that the audience just loves the film.”
Hawn stars in Overboard as a querulous heiress who hires Dean (Russell) to install shelves in her yacht. She refers to him as not being “housebroken”; she refuses to pay him $600 for his craftsmanship; and to taunt him further, she prances around in a one-piece thong bathing suit—a costume written into the script. Joanna is married to a lout named Grant (future Gilmore Girls patriarch Edward Herrmann)—who doesn’t seem to care when she falls off the yacht one night, gets amnesia, and ends up in a mental ward.
But Dean spies her photo on TV and, seeking payback, convinces her he’s her husband. Over the years, critics have assailed the film for the abuse Annie receives after moving to his ramshackle house; Birth. Movies. Death. has called the film “the most heartwarming rom-com about gaslighting ever made.” But Dixon doesn’t understand the fuss.
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“The premise of this movie is utterly ridiculous,” she says. “I think because it’s Kurt and Goldie, no one gets mad at them. . . . People have never mentioned, at any point when the film came out or since, that they hate him for what he’s doing to her.”
At the same time, Dixon purposefully saved their “boom boom” scene for later in the film instead of at the beginning, in order to avoid any issues of nonconsensual sex. “There’s nothing wrong with Dean other than the fact he doesn’t know how to be a mother,” she says. “He knows how to be a father, but he’s too permissive, and the kids are running wild. Once a mother comes into the picture, they get whipped into shape. What Dean does to Joanna, the audience kind of roots him on. She deserves it.” Gradually, Joanna begins to reemerge within Annie: “she starts to use some of her imperiousness for good rather than evil, like standing up to the kid’s teacher when the teacher is unfair to them.”
Modern audiences may feel more comfortable with the gender-swapped remake of Overboard that’s coming to theaters next year, with Anna Faris playing the Russell part and Eugenio Derbez filling in for Hawn part. Or maybe not: “In this day and age, there’s something that feels peculiar at best and unsavory at worst about a woman bringing a man into her home when she has four daughters,” Dixon says of the remake, which she wasn’t involved in. (Enough of her original script was used for the W.G.A. to give her a writing credit on the film.) “A strange man? It’ll be interesting to see if the audience can get past that conceit. . . . I don’t want the film to fail—they’re very nice guys—but they have a bit of a challenge.”
After Overboard—which grossed a modest $26.7 million on a budget of $22 million—Dixon became an in-demand screenwriter, adapting Mrs. Doubtfire and Pay It Forward as well as penning remakes of Freaky Friday, Hairspray, and The Thomas Crown Affair, and more recently executive producing the likes of Gone Girl.
Years ago, Dixon also sought the rights to a novel called The Dark Fields—the story that would become the Bradley Cooper film Limitless—from Harvey Weinstein, who owned them at the time. “I tricked Harvey out of the rights to the book without him ever meeting me, seeing me, or knowing what I was doing,” she says. “It stands as one of my proudest accomplishments. “I didn’t want to work with him, because of his reputation. I wasn’t afraid of being harassed, because he really only went for girls in their twenties and I was older than that—but I didn’t want a telephone thrown at my head or to be screamed at.”
In 2010, she finally adapted and produced the movie for Relativity Media. While working on the film, she says a Relativity exec named Adam Fields sexually harassed her—sending her repeated texts and, at one point, putting his hand on her leg while they were shooting a scene in front of a sex-toy shop. “He put his hand on my upper thigh and said, ‘Well, Les, what can I buy you from in there?’ That was the last straw. I called my agent and lawyer and said get this guy away from me,” she says now. “He wasn’t above me in the pecking order so for him to bother me in the way that he did was like a death wish. I wasn’t scared of him, I was just disgusted.” (In November, The Hollywood Reporter published a story about Fields’s alleged harassment of Dixon and other women; he denied the allegations.)
As a screenwriter, Dixon didn’t experience this type of misconduct. “When you’re a writer, and a writer who people want to be in business in with, people are more focused on wanting the script to be good,” she says. “They don’t want to do anything to jeopardize their relationship with a writer who can deliver.” Given her 30 years in the business, clearly, Dixon can deliver.
Even after all this time, she says, she still likes watching Hawn and Russell fall in love on screen—and hates the Arturo and Katarina sea-legend story, a plot device Dixon did not write. (It “embarrasses me to this day,” she says.) Hawn remains a fan of the film as well; when she appeared on The Late Late Show in May, she said that she and Russell recently watched the film together.
“Overboard has endured because Kurt and Goldie are the two cutest individuals who have walked the planet,” she says. “I don’t mean it in a diminishing way, I just mean the chemistry that they had on screen is very rare. . . . I lay it all on Goldie and Kurt. They are the movie.”
