Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is the most dysfunctional of men, an acid-tongued romance novelist who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. As part of Melvin's unwavering daily schedule, he consumes breakfast at a local cafe. The only waitress willing to stand up to his sarcastic tirades is Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt), a single mother struggling to raise her chronically asthmatic son. Simon Nye (Greg Kinnear) has the distinct misfortune of living across the hall from Melvin in their West Village apartment building in downtown Manhattan.

These three New Yorkers discover their fates intertwined because of the fourth complicated character in the piece, a tiny dog named Verdell.

  A Dog's Story...

The catalyst for much of the film's dramatic developments is Simon's beloved pet, a dog named Verdell. "I toyed with calling the movie 'A Dog's Story,'" says Director James L. Brooks. "It sort of solves everything, to see it from the perspective of the dog.

Verdell is really the fourth lead in the picture." The script specifies Verdell's breed as a Brussels Griffon, a rare European breed that can perhaps best be described as resembling a 'Gizmo' from the film "Gremlins." Animal coordinator Gary Gero and trainers Roger Schumacher and Ray Beal searched throughout the States and in Europe to cast the role of Verdell - eventually finding six dogs they hoped could be trained to fulfill the demands of the script.

Schumacher explains, "We needed to find adult dogs, and that was hard to do. We had a couple come from England, and as we were getting the dogs, we had to feel out which ones might be capable of playing the lead." "No one had ever worked with the breed before," Brooks explains. "But because it was called for, our trainers began to work with the breed for the first time. They really took to it - it's an extraordinary breed of dog, very intelligent and very trainable."

"I started with Timer at the end of April 1996. Within two weeks of that we had the six dogs: Timer, Sprout, Debbie, Billy, Parfait and Jill. Jill, who came from Texas, was the last dog," Schumacher continues. "When she came in, she just stood out - she had a 'look.' I didn't want to show her to Jim right away, because I didn't know how she would do." Brooks enthuses, "Breed apart, Jill is the star. She's more beautiful, quicker and smarter than most of her breed."

Under Gero's supervision and with Brooks' input, Schumacher and Beal began a rigorous 15-week training program with the dog, working six days a week. "Jim wanted to make the dog a character, and we were going to have to make the dog seem like it had been trained for two years. We were really reaching for the top."

The results, jokes Greg Kinnear, were at the expense of the human actors. "None of us are going to survive this film without having been horribly upstaged by Jill. Jack, Helen and I have all talked about this."

"They'll bring Timer in for hours of having to do the same thing, and right when they're going to go in for the close-up, they'll pull Timer out and Jill will be brought in a big fluffy pillow," says Kinnear. "She is such a scene stealer. She's got these lashes and big eyes, and when she walks onto the set everybody just says, 'ooh.' Then they'll roll the camera for that important shot."