What was Ron Howard’s first movie as a director?

Ron Howard is one of the most successful directors in Hollywood history who transitioned from working in front of the camera to working behind it. As a young actor, he shot to fame as Richie Cunningham in Happy Days and starred in George Lucas’ hit pre-Star Wars endeavour American Graffiti. However, from his teen years, Howard had always harboured the ambition to become a director, and over the years, he proved that was where his real talent lay. Howard made hits like Splash, Parenthood, Backdraft, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas – but what was his first movie as a director?

Back in the 1970s, the idea of an actor becoming a director wasn’t commonplace in Hollywood – and a TV actor being trusted with making a big-screen film was almost unheard of. At the time, Alan Alda directed a large number of M*A*S*H episodes but didn’t get the chance to helm a movie until 1981’s The Four Seasons. Similarly, Rob Reiner directed a couple of TV movies but wasn’t hired to make a theatrical motion picture until 1984’s This is Spinal Tap.

Howard actually paved the way for people like Alda and Reiner, though – and he did it at the tender age of 23. It all started when Howard took a meeting with Roger Corman, the legendary B-movie director. Corman wanted Howard to star in a film called Eat My Dust, but Howard had an ulterior motive for accepting the meeting. He knew Corman was famous for giving young directors their first shot in the industry and was instrumental in kickstarting the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich. So, Howard put in motion a cunning plan – or, as he put it, “I really had to blackmail my way into my first directing opportunity.”

When Howard sat down with Corman, he told him he would star in Eat My Dust on one condition: if Corman agreed to co-finance a low-budget character study that Howard had written and let him direct it. Corman eventually read the script and told Howard that it wasn’t the kind of picture he knew how to make. However, he made him a counter-offer: if Howard signed up for Eat My Dust, he would let him pitch other ideas for movies. If he liked one of them, he’d hire Howard to direct it, and if all else failed, he’d allow him to shoot second-unit footage on one of his other films.

So, what was Ron Howard’s first movie as a director?

After Eat My Dust became a hit at the box office, Howard began pitching ideas to Corman, but none of them stuck. Corman wanted to do something similar to Eat My Dust, a car crash comedy about people on the run, as it had proved successful. So, he told Howard that he’d hire him as a director if he could write a car crash comedy about young people on the run that he could title ‘Grand Theft Auto’, as that title was the second most popular when he was workshopping names for Eat My Dust. Howard once chuckled, “I had an outline for him about 15 minutes later, and I got to make that movie.”

Howard cobbled together the script for Grand Theft Auto in only a month, and the film was released in 1977, slightly more than a year after Eat My Dust. The budget was a paltry $600,000, and Howard admitted he was sure he would be fired on his first day – which happened to be the day after he turned 23. He told DGA Quarterly, “I was very anxious that first day. I read an article a few years ago in which Corman said I was one of the coolest, calmest first-day directors he’d ever seen. But I was really jumpy, and the first half of that first day didn’t go very well.”

Ultimately, though, Howard didn’t get fired, and Grand Theft Auto went on to make $15million at the box office. It mightn’t have received glowing reviews from critics, and few people mention it when discussing Howard’s filmography today. Still, it will always be the little picture that gave him the platform for a thriving directing career.

What is Ron Howard’s highest-grossing movie as a director?

Grand Theft Auto may have been Howard’s first movie as a director, but what is his highest-grossing effort? Well, that distinction belongs to The Da Vinci Code, his 2006 adaptation of the culturally ubiquitous novel by Dan Brown.

That movie, which starred Tom Hanks as a symbology professor trying to solve the murder of the curator of the Louvre, made a staggering $760million at the worldwide box office. It was the second-biggest film of that year and spawned two sequels, Angels & Demons and Inferno, both of which Howard also directed. They made $486m and $220m respectively.

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