You can find some weird stuff trolling the Internet. Back when Breaking Bad was ending and I decided to Google around Vince Gilligan a bit more, I learned he was a writer for Hancock and Home Fries. (No joke.)
So here’s the new random story: the daughter in Regarding Henry, Kamian Allen, looked at my LinkedIn profile yesterday. Odd. I thought I had seen the name somewhere before, so I Googled it. I found her Twitter and she made a direct reference to being in Regarding Henry. I thought to myself: “Oh, I want to stream that. That wasn’t a half-bad movie…” and I start Googling for some info on it.
Lo and behold, the movie was written by J.J. Abrams — the same guy who’s associated with Lost and is now pulling the ultimate fanboy double-fist by having control over the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises concurrently.
He wrote Regarding Henry before he dominated the fanboy universe. Kind of a big leap, right?
(Should be noted he also wrote Gone Fishin’ with Danny Glover and Joe Pesci.)
Regarding Henry is about a big-shot lawyer (Harrison Ford) and his stereotypical wife (Annette Bening). He goes to get cigarettes (if I remember correctly), gets shot, and needs to rehabilitate. In the process, he finds himself again. It happened about 13 years after Star Wars and 10 years before American Beauty, if you want to track the respective careers of the stars.
And yes — that means the second movie J.J. Abrams ever wrote (the first was Charles Grodin’s Taking Care of Business) starred Harrison Ford and then, 20 or so years later, he’s directing/producing Ford in Star Wars. Crazy.
Point being: if you ever think your career isn’t quite on track, remember that J.J. Abrams took about 13 years to go from Regarding Henry to Lost, and another 7-10 to go from Lost to Star Wars/Star Trek.
Life’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Here’s a detailed review of the movie, and it did make about $43 million — it was the 30th-highest grossing movie of 1991.
(Apparently Abrams made a brief cameo in Regarding Henry, as well.)
