Where does Three Men and a Baby take place?

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Thirty years ago this weekend, Three Men and a Baby opened on the day before Thanksgiving, and if there is any better indicator of the ways that the movie industry has changed between 1987 and 2017, I haven’t found it. For one thing, nobody makes contemporary comedies about adults anymore. And they certainly don’t make money! The Big Sick was a Sundance-approved indie that made $42 million domestic, and it’s been treated as a legitimate miracle, because it is. Meanwhile, Three Men and a Baby opened at #1 on Thanksgiving weekend (beating out fellow contemporary-comedy-about-adults Planes, Trains, and Automobiles), played for TWENTY-THREE WEEKS, and finished as the top box-office earner of all 1987. All to see Thomas Magnum get peed on by a baby!

The box-office fate of Three Men and a Baby is only the tip of the iceberg of what makes this movie still so fascinating. It’s an artifact of is time in so many ways, from cultural attitudes to real estate pricing to debunking of urban legends (oh, we’ll get to the ghost). No film is more worthy of a rewatch (you can rent it on Amazon Video and iTunes).

The following are the ten most enduring fascinations we still have with this movie that so captured the imagination of the waning days of Reagan’s America.

1

Okay, But Once More About Box Office

Box Office Mojo

There is truly no shortage of amazing things about Three Men and a Baby being the box office champ of 1987. The fact that it played in theaters for five months, then was brought back into theaters for Memorial Day weekend. The fact that the other top 10 movies it beat out included Fatal Attraction, Moonstruck, and The Secret of My Success. The fact that Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop II were the only action films in the top 10 that year. Truly, a simpler time.

data: Box Office Mojo

2

'Sacre Bleu! Un Bébé!"

photo: Everett Collection

The other big Did You Know item about this movie is that it is based on a 1985 French film, Three Men and a Cradle (Trois Hommes et un Couffin). Setting aside for a moment the fact that the French word for “cradle” looks a lot like “coffin,” and what that might mean for attitudes about parenthood, we should note that said French won the Cesar award (the French version of the Oscar, basically) for Best Film and was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.

3

About That Penthouse

The single most fascinating and incredulous thing about Three Men and a Baby has nothing to do with a baby getting dropped off to be raised by three single men in New York City. It has everything to do with the apartment that is shared by Peter (Tom Selleck), Michael (Steve Guttenberg), and Jack (Ted Danson). Now, granted, the vagaries of New York City real estate are never all that interesting to people who don’t live in New York City, but a penthouse apartment along Central Park West even in 1987 must’ve cost a fortune. Normally, three single roommates would rent a place, but in this case they’ve very clearly bought, because Peter keeps making improvements on the place, seemingly adding new rooms at will, meanwhile Michael is drawing a never-ending mural around the hallway to the elevator.

My first question in a situation like this is “where is the money coming from?” We know Peter is an architect (because during the opening montage we see Michael affix a plaque to the wall that tells us that Peter is an architect), and those fellas make money. But then why not just get a decent place on your own if you make that kind of money? Is Peter doing a favor for his less financially-well-established pals? Michael is a cartoonist of some renown, and Jack is a struggling actor (though one who gets cast in movies that have enough money to shoot in Turkey for weeks at a time, so how struggling can he really be?), so I suppose it’s logical that Peter owns the apartment and is subletting to his friends.

Considering the likelihood that all three men could probably afford decent places of their own, we’re left to conclude that they have decided to pool their resources to trade in three decent NYC apartments for one one totally baller penthouse. Perhaps as a statement of defiance against a world that wants to stamp out their bachelorhood. Three single men in their 30s have thrown in on a fuck palace on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, famous neighborhood of Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby, the Seinfeld gang (sans George), and Janosz from Ghostbusters II.

The aesthetic of the place is quasi-minimalist, though that’s contrasted with the frankly ridiculously ostentatious mural out in the hallway, a mural which depicts the central trio as New Yorker cartoons of top-hatted dandies about town. Are these three womanizers (again, that opening montage is a revolving door of women they bring back to their pad) evincing a bro aesthetic? Peter treats his party guests to tapes of old Knicks games and later sneers at the symphony. But the rest of the apartment reads less “man cave” and more “sophisticated flat with wine racks and lots of natural light.” I will spend the rest of my life trying to map out a floor plan to this apartment, one which appears to include a film room, a drawing room, some kind of garden patio (greenhouse???), and at least one ghost.

4

A Moment for Tom Selleck

photo: Everett Collection

Tom Selleck was famously the first choice to play Indiana Jones, but couldn’t get clear of Magnum P.I. to do it, and as a result, his film career has always seemed more like a “what might have been.” But Three Men and a Baby is unquestionably his biggest success and signature big-screen venture (sorry, Mr. Baseball). You can see why Hollywood would have wanted him in this medium. He doesn’t evince “TV star” vibes at all. He’s funny but commands attention at all times (it’s the mustache); he’s handsome without being pretty. He’s laid-back, perhaps to a degree that makes him ill-fitting for a comeback in today’s hyper-aggressive blockbuster climate (remember how odd a fit Robert Redford’s laissez-faire delivery was for the Marvel universe in Winter Soldier?). But Three Men and a Baby was the perfect-sized project for Selleck’s talent, even if TV has proved to be his most reliable home.

5

The Music Montages

You wouldn’t think a movie about three uptown bachelors raising a surprise infant would be so indebted to Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine, but here we are. The opening credits montage/parade of female conquests is scored to the group’s “Bad Boys” (get it?), and then Peter’s sprawling birthday party in the film’s opening sequence heavily features “Conga.”

But it’s not just Gloria who defined this movie musically. A later montage, after the drug-deal subplot is taken care of but before Sylvia returns, as the boys become pretty good at the dad thing and have steadily fallen deeper and deeper in love with baby Mary, is scored to “Daddy’s Girl” by Peter Cetera, and a more reliable voice for ’80s middlebrow movie music you will not find.

And then, over the closing credits (where we get another mini-montage, this time with Sylvia having joined the group), the song is “The Minute I Saw You,” sung by John Parr (another voice that could only exist in the ’80s, he of the St. Elmo’s Fire hit “Man in Motion”). “The Minute I Saw You” manages to have songwriting credits from Marvin Hamlisch, David Foster, and Carole Bayer Sager, who are basically the adult-contemporary movie-ballad version of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird playing together on the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team.

6

So ... The Ghost

photo: Touchstone

The fact that all anybody ever wants to talk about re: Three Men and a Baby is the “ghost” makes it one of the least interesting aspects of the movie in 2017, if only because it’s so thoroughly been debunked. The thing is, when the movie was released and in its early years on home video, this was a great urban legend, because it really did look creepy when Jack and his mother (Oscar winner Celeste Holm) walk out of Jack’s bedroom with Mary and you get a fleeting glimpse of a figure in the window. And because internet culture didn’t exist back then, the legend could get passed around and gain credence in a “Mikey from the Life cereal ads died from eating Pop Rocks” kind of way. But thirty years on, we’ve been repeatedly reminded that these scenes were filmed on a soundstage, not in an apartment where a young boy may have committed suicide; and we’ve repeatedly been reminded that there is a stand-up cut-out of Jack in his room, which we see more clearly in a later scene. Current higher-resolution transfers of the film don’t even look as much like a ghost on first-blush anymore. It’s obviously Ted Danson in a top hat in that window. Modernity ruins everything, but especially old urban legends.

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