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Now Allen can have almost anything he wants. After the success of The Santa Clause, Hollywood insiders predict he will command upwards of $8 million for his next movie (on top of the $5 million he reportedly made this year from the TV series). But talking in his TV dressing room last week, in between bites of a tuna-salad sandwich, Allen said he'd be happy with a small token of his achievement. "It's so cheesy," he says, "but I just want a little plaque that says, no. 1 tv show, no. 1 book, no. 1 movie. Just something for me, because I worked so hard I almost died: 18-hour days getting in and out of a fat suit, typing ((my book)) on my laptop. I looked forward to this day, right before Christmas, when it would all be over."
Or maybe just starting. With The Santa Clause, Allen has joined the tiny fraternity of stars (John Travolta, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey) who have successfully made the leap from TV to movies. Many more -- including the two most dominant prime-time stars of recent years, Bill Cosby and Roseanne -- have conspicuously failed to transfer their popularity to the big screen. Perhaps they are too closely identified with TV roles in which they essentially play themselves. Perhaps their very living-room familiarity makes it impossible for them to be fully convincing on the larger-than-life movie screen. For whatever reason, the stars with whom viewers get cozy around the TV hearth are rarely the same ones they surrender to when the lights go down at the multiplex.
Yet with his white-bread affability and a face as wide open as the Great Plains, Allen seems at home everywhere. On Home Improvement he plays Tim Taylor, a father of three and host of a TV fix-it show. Tim is a guy's guy who gets excited about playing with power drills and rewiring the dishwasher; yet he's something of a klutz around the house. It's an old sitcom formula -- Dad as doofus -- but brightened by the sarcastic, surprisingly adult interplay between Tim and his wife (Patricia Richardson) on the subject of maleness and its drawbacks.
In The Santa Clause, Allen is another all-American befuddled Dad. He plays Scott Calvin, a divorced father who is having trouble communicating with his young son -- until, on Christmas Eve, Santa falls off his roof, and Scott is pressed into finishing the gift-delivery chores. It turns out he is expected to give up his former identity and become Santa for good; over the next few months, he grows fat and acquires white whiskers and white hair. (Is this a Christmas fantasy or a horror film?) Scott eventually reconciles to the idea of spending his declining years at the North Pole, winning his son's love in the process. "Pretty cool, eh?" he tells his ex-wife before catching the last sleigh north. "Your parents thought I'd never amount to anything."
Allen has amounted to quite a bit, considering the misfortunes that befell his typical middle-class suburban upbringing. He was born in Denver, one of six children (five boys and a girl) of Gerald and Martha Dick. His last name was the occasion for a thousand playground taunts, which taught him early on how to steel himself with humor. At age 11, however, Allen faced a far more serious trauma: on the way home from a college football game, his father was killed in a car accident. "My world changed overnight," Allen recalls in his book.