Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 28, 1994 TAG: 9405300010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JANE SUMNER DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's her ninth ``phoner,'' with five more in the wings. Her voice sounds tired and weak, but she talks easily without a shard of ego about the live-action Stone Age comedy and how she brought Betty Rubble's legendary giggle to the big screen.
By now, she's recounted many times how she owes the role to the director's wife. After seeing O'Donnell perform, Alison Levant told husband Brian that she'd found Betty Rubble. Called to audition, Rosie played it for laughs, convinced she was too zaftig to be Barney's skinny wife.
A big fan of the original TV cartoon, she couldn't forget Betty's high-pitched laugh. ``So I did the giggle and they all started crack up, and I got the job,'' she says. She knew, too, that Betty always stood with her wrists turned backward.
``So on the set I did that, and the director goes, `What are you doing?' And I said, `Well, that's how she stood.' He said, `Well, don't do that.' I said, `Well, I have to because that's the only thing you can remember about Betty. Her wrists were backward and she giggled.''' If you see the film, you know who won.
If the brassy comic looks a bit constrained in ``The Flintstones,'' it could be her tight corset. ``I kind of don't have a waistline. I sort of go straight down. So they had this really tight corset to schmmoosh my waist. It made it uncomfortable for me to sit. I used to beg my wardrobe lady not to wear it for one shoot.''
Much as she hates to hear movie people whine about difficult shoots, she says making ``The Flintstones'' was hot stuff. It was shot in a rock quarry during summer. And O'Donnell did her hee-hee-heeing in a blue suede dress in 110-degree heat.
One cool thing about the three-month shoot was working with John Goodman. ``He loves to laugh,'' she says. ``He's not a guy who makes a lot of jokes himself, but when somebody makes a joke on the set, he has this huge big belly laugh. So I would always play to him and try to get him to crack up.''
After doing stand-up for years, Rosie finds stage work (she's playing Rizzo in ``Grease'' at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre) a whole different ballgame. ``You mess up a joke doing stand-up, you can tell the audience, `I totally messed up that joke. Can you believe it?' If you mess something up on stage, you don't have that luxury. You have all these other people you're responsible for or to.''
And she messes up often. ``I laugh a lot. That's a problem. I get the giggles, which I did during movies, but we just did take two. But when you do it on stage, it totally messes up everyone. So I've been working on that and on not interacting with the audience.''
by CNB