After Patricia Heaton wrapped production on The Engagement Ring, a TNT original movie, she and her co-stars had a fabulous dinner together. "And I said to everyone there, 'This has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I never want to do it again!' "
That's classic Patty Heaton for you: endearingly warm and bluntly honest at the same time. But allow us to fill you in as to what she was talking about: Making the movie was thoroughly rewarding and pure torture for the former Everybody Loves Raymond star because, in addition to acting in it, she was a hands-on executive producer. Every nuance of the film -- from script revisions to set design to negotiating music clearance -- has at least a few of her fingerprints on it.
"It's exhausting," Heaton says of pulling double duty. "You're watching every single thing. Ordinarily, if you're just acting, you can go to your trailer and relax between scenes. But if I tried to do that here, our wonderful director, Steven Schachter, would come by and toss a few pages of revised script into my trailer and say, 'Why don't you take a look at these?' I mean, it was nonstop, always something to tend to. But it is hugely satisfying when you're that invested in it."
Even more so now because the movie -- a romantic comedy co-starring Vincent Spano, Lainie Kazan and Tony Lo Bianco -- is an absolute gem. It's beautifully photographed and charmingly performed. "To me, it feels like a feature film and looks like a feature film," Heaton says with pride. "And as our director of photography said, 'It's so nice to do a TV movie that's not set in a hospital or a courtroom.'"
Indeed, there are enough woman-in-jeopardy crime thrillers and disease-of-the-week tearjerkers already. "My philosophy, as I get older, is if you're going to be working for 12 hours a day for five weeks on a film somewhere, you might as well be in a vineyard as opposed to a hospital," Heaton says. "And I just loved the humor in it. I loved that it's like this grand comic opera. It's food and wine and opera music and a real sense of romance. It's all of that wonderful stuff."
The Engagement Ring is the story of two Napa Valley winemaking families, the Di Cenzos and the Rosas. Forty years ago, Nick Di Cenzo mailed a wedding proposal and engagement ring to Alicia Rosa while serving overseas in the Army. Unfortunately, the letter was lost in the mail. As a result, Rosa is heartbroken, interpreting Nick's silence to mean he has found another love. Getting no reply from Alicia, who married someone else, Nick's ego is bruised. And they never talk again throughout a 40-year feud.
Flash forward to today. Alicia's winemaking daughter, Sara (played by Heaton), wants to buy the Di Cenzo vineyards. But Nick (Lo Bianco) won't sell, still holding a grudge against Alicia (Kazan). This is when the engagement ring is finally delivered, 40 years late. Complicating matters even more: Although Sara is engaged to another man, there are instant and unmistakable sparks between her and Nick's nephew (Spano).
Many viewers will find it refreshing that the romance storylines belong to adults -- as opposed to mere "children" in their 20s. "That was the main thing that attracted me to the script," Heaton recalls. "It wasn't my storyline, but my parents' storyline. I just thought it was so wonderful to see mature people still struggling with the issues of true love. Is it about emotions? Is it about chemistry? Or is it the commitment that you put into someone year after year and the history that you build? I think that everyone struggles with this. But it was great to look at it from my parents' perspective."
Heaton often comically says that her first year of marriage was "the worst year of my life." It was a such rocky time, she explains, because she and husband David Hunt simply didn't know how to live together at first. They figured it out, mind you. They've been together for more than 15 years and have four sons. Which makes it an ironic masterstroke of casting that Hunt co-stars in The Engagement Ring as Sara's Mr. Wrong. "He was perfect for the part," Heaton says with a laugh. "What can I say?"
Is it barely possible that, to create a chemistry-free relationship in the film, Heaton channeled memories of when she and her husband didn't work well as a couple? "Actually, that wasn't necessary, because the first day of shooting was also one of the worst days for me," Heaton says. "It was really hard to separate being married from being producers and being actors. And we really got on each other's nerves. But I like to say that it presented wonderful opportunities for growth in our marriage."
As she put it that evening while dining with her co-stars, the moviemaking experience was exhilarating. But Heaton, who has a series development deal with ABC, is in no rush to repeat it. "I love the end result of this movie, but the schedule makes me want to run screaming back to sitcoms. It felt too much like work. I'm not used to working. I'm used to doing a sitcom!" Once again, that's classic Patty Heaton.
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by David Martindale
