Team Mates

Defying the adage "Never mix business with plea sure," filmmakers Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers have whipped the two to gether into a heady brew that's resulted in a string of big-screen successes, an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting (for Private Benjamin), and, most specially, two daughters. From a shared office behind their Sherman Oaks home, the couple turned out some of the eighties' most crackling comedies, including the workingwoman's fairy tale Baby Boom, and as a reward earned the kind of creative control (writing, producing, and directing) their peers dare not dream of.

This Christmas brings their latest production, a remake of Father of the Bride, starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton. Meyers produces the Disney release, Shyer directs, and in a neat Tinseltown twist, they share writing credit with another famous scribbling duo, the husband-and-wife team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, whose original screenplay for the 1950 Spencer Tracy-Joan Bennett-Elizabeth Taylor classic was nominated for an Oscar. A team in every sense of the word ("Ask one of us a question and the other answers," says Shyer), the partnership is remarkably free of the competitiveness which plagued the filmwriting couple in an earlier Shyer-Meyers project, Irreconcilable Differences. On the contrary, "we bolster each other up. It's kind of like having a third eye," claims Shyer. In a notoriously cutthroat industry, "it's hard to know who to trust," explains Meyers, "and we do trust one another."

S. L.