Doc Hollywood movie storyline. Benjamin Stone is a young doctor driving to L.A where he was offered a new job as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. He gets off the highway to avoid a traffic jam, but gets lost and ends up crashing into a fence in the small town of Grady. He is sentenced to 32 hrs of community service at the local hospital. All he wants is to serve the sentence and get moving, but gradually the locals become attached to the new doctor, and he falls for the pretty ambulance driver, Lou. Will he leave?
Doc Hollywood is a 1991 American romantic comedy film directed by Michael Caton-Jones, and written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, based on Neil B. Shulman’s book, What? Dead…Again?. The film stars Michael J. Fox, Julie Warner, and Woody Harrelson, with Bridget Fonda, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, Roberts Blossom, and Barnard Hughes appearing in supporting roles. The film was shot on location in Micanopy, Florida.
Film Review for Doc Hollywood
In “Doc Hollywood,” Michael J. Fox plays a big-city doctor who wanders off the beaten track and right into a television sitcom, or at the very least a pilot for one. In a tiny town called Grady, famed as “the Squash Capital of the South,” Mr. Fox’s Ben Stone crashes cute (by driving his vintage red Porsche convertible into a judge’s white picket fence) and is sentenced to stay and perform community service.
Supposedly, he is torn between a promising opportunity to perform plastic surgery on a vain Los Angeles clientele and the simpler, more immediate charms of Grady. And supposedly he has a hard time deciding what to do. But despite the prodigious efforts of the director, Michael Caton-Jones (“Scandal,” “Memphis Belle”), to postpone it for as long as possible, the film’s outcome is never in doubt. Anyone who has failed to notice this summer’s epidemic of breast-beating among once-proud careerist yuppies has simply not been paying attention.
The town of Grady functions as an elaborate support system for Ben as he wrestles with his conscience. And Grady is a television comedy writer’s dream. Funny, colorful and eccentric, it is not unlike the Alaska town that is the setting for “Northern Exposure,” which really is a television series about a displaced big-city doctor living among a fine array of rustic oddballs. This time the setting is “heehaw hell,” as a harried Dr. Stone puts it, but the willfully offbeat feeling is much the same.
Among the residents of Grady — there is a temptation to call them “regulars,” but that will probably come later — are an older, curmudg eonly doctor (Barnard Hughes), who resents his citified colleague but eventually comes to respect him, and a pert elderly waitress (Frances Sternhagen) who wears pigtails, makes hip wisecracks and turns up as a record-scratching D.J. at Grady’s all-important Squash Festival, which Mr. Caton-Jones has done his best to transform into April in Paris. It is here, amid the fireworks and the slow-motion shots of carnival rides, that Ben becomes deeply smitten with Lou (Julie Warner), the woman who insults him constantly because she wants him to stay.
Most of the other characters are considerably less abrasive. (Ms. Warner, attractive but too much the caustic sophisticate for this country-girl role, has been given a preposterous explanation for what Lou is doing in this tiny town, and for why she happens to be the ambulance driver accompanying Dr. Stone on his rounds.) Among the others, a very breezy and personable group, are Woody Harrelson as the insurance salesman who is jealous of Lou’s affections, Bridget Fonda as the much-too-friendly daughter of the mayor (David Ogden Stiers), Mel Winkler as an especially ingratiating mechanic who can’t seem to get Ben’s Porsche fixed, and Eyde Byrde as a gruff, disapproving nurse. In addition to its other virtues, Grady happens to be a perfectly integrated Southern town.
Mr. Fox, blithe and funny as ever, amusingly shrugs off each new surprise the film has to offer, one of which is the pregnant woman who sees a doctor just to have him read her mail aloud. Another is George Hamilton, who turns up unexpectedly as the living embodiment of all that has been wrong with Ben’s previous ambitions. (“We can squeeze one more in before lunch, don’t you think?” Mr. Hamilton asks while performing plastic surgery in one of several pastel-colored operating rooms at his California clinic, each of which bears a large, flattering portrait of the doctor.) While retaining his boyish appeal, Mr. Fox also seems a shade more substantial this time, possibly because he is seen making life-or-death decisions when not fielding comic lines.
The screenplay, by Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman and Daniel Pyne, is occasionally sharp-tongued but more often pleasantly knee-deep in rustic corn. “So Doc, what do you think of our little town?” someone asks Ben soon after his arrival. “I don’t know, I haven’t seen all of it yet,” Ben replies. “Yes, you have!” the first speaker answers. It will surprise no one that after only a few days in such a setting, Ben Stone winds up the proud owner of a pet pig.
Doc Hollywood (1991)
Directed by: Michael Caton-Jones
Starring: Michael J. Fox, Julie Warner, Barnard Hughes, Bridget Fonda, Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, George Hamilton, Helen Martin
Screenplay by: Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, Daniel Pyne
Production Design by: Lawrence Miller
Cinematography by: Michael Chapman
Film Editing by: Priscilla Nedd-Friendly
Costume Design by: Richard Hornung
Set Decoration by: Cloudia Rebar
Art Direction by: Dale Allen Pelton, Eva Anna Andry
Music by: Carter Burwell
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: August 2, 1991
Hits: 135
