Betty Thomas made the studio comedy that gets the job done: a property the audience already knows, a cast of comics allowed to improvise, a running time that does not outstay the joke. Reliable rather than remarkable, and on Doctor Dolittle not quite reliable enough.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in Doctor Dolittle (1998) is Eddie Murphy not being funny. The pigeons, rats and strays of San Francisco do the talking, and Murphy stands among them with the patience of a man waiting for a bus, which is the right choice and, we said at the time, close to the only one the film makes. That is Betty Thomas in miniature: hire comics, let them loose, keep the star still enough that the noise around him registers. When it works, it works for a line at a time. Then the plot about selling the surgery comes back, and we were bored every time it did, and a little resentful that a film with talking rats kept asking us to care about a health company.
Thomas came to directing from the other side of the camera. She was Sergeant Lucy Bates on Hill Street Blues through most of the 1980s, and before that a performer at The Second City in Chicago, and the improvisation habit never left her. She moved into television directing at the end of that decade, made her feature debut with Only You (1992), and then spent the 1990s and 2000s on studio comedy: The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Private Parts (1997), Doctor Dolittle, I Spy (2002), John Tucker Must Die (2006), Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009). 28 Days (2000), a rehab story with Sandra Bullock, is the one drama in the run, and even there she researched the subject and then let the cast improvise around it.
The method does not vary much. Thomas has said "There is no such thing as too funny. I just plowed ahead", and the films bear it out: she casts people with comedy backgrounds, encourages them to invent on set, and treats the script as a starting point rather than a contract. Peter Teschner cut five of her films and is the person who had to make sense of all that invention afterwards, which may be why her comedies move briskly even when they are going nowhere in particular. Anthony B. Richmond shot two of them. The material is nearly always something already familiar, a sitcom, a radio host, a children's book, and the pleasure on offer is recognition with a twist.
The limits are the virtues seen from the other side. Critics have generally credited The Brady Bunch Movie with mocking its source while plainly liking it, and Private Parts with a warmth nobody expected from a film about Howard Stern. The complaint, which we share on the evidence of Doctor Dolittle, is that the comedies after that are light to the point of weightlessness, and that 28 Days never settled whether it wanted to be funny or serious. If you want to see what she does well, watch Doctor Dolittle for the stretches when the animals are talking and Murphy is not, and go and put the kettle on when the doctors start discussing the sale.
Biography
Betty Thomas (born Betty Lucille Nienhauser) is an American actress and director. She trained at Ohio University and began her career in Chicago, performing with the Second City comedy troupe after working as a teacher and waitress.
She gained prominence playing Sergeant Lucy Bates on the television series Hill Street Blues (1981–87), receiving seven Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and winning in 1985. She later directed episodes of series including Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989) and Dream On, winning a second Emmy for directing the latter.
Thomas made her feature directorial debut with Only You (1992). Her subsequent films include The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Private Parts (1997), Doctor Dolittle (1998), 28 Days (2000), I Spy (2002), John Tucker Must Die (2006) and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009).
