He convinced me - Fred Freeman - to go to Hollywood and we went to Hollywood to write sitcoms. Joey Bishop actually paid my way to Hollywood.

I started as a journalist actually. I graduated from Northwestern Medill School of Journalism and with my degree discovered, once out in the real world, I wasn't very good at it.

I was very proud of that, of taking women and making them vulnerable and so I continued doing that. Right after Beaches I did "Pretty Woman", then I did "Frankie and Johnnie" and then I did "Other Sister" and "Princess Diaries" so that helped me get into the vein there of understanding women and trying to make them very pretty and very interesting.

My mother worked all of her life, she was a dance teacher and I also noticed, to be honest, that most of the male directors wanted to blow things up so there was like an open area for somebody who wanted to direct women movies, chick flicks, whatever you... I don't call them chick flicks.

I work with a lot of women and yeah I see totally different... My two sisters were different, I have two daughters that are pretty different.

I really wasn't too interested in writing "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie And Harriet." I thought they were pleasant enough, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do.

I don't know about immortal, but I must say that to me to touch more women and to have them understand friendships is important. I've had girls come up to me who said, "Yeah, after I saw 'Beaches' I called up my friend Denise who I was really mad at. She got me so aggravated and I called her and we made up." So if I could do that with this new release, yes, that would be very pleasing to me because, hey, it's a tough world. You need friends out there.