Tales From Development Hell (11 page)

According to Ron Miller
(Dune),
engaged as production illustrator by DEG during the period of Cronenberg’s involvement, it was more than just the story that might have been different: Miller recalls Martian creatures called ‘Ganzibulls’, originally created by Shusett, but retained in Cronenberg’s drafts. “They were creatures that lived in the sewers of the Mars city, called Venusville,” he told
Cinefantastique.
“In Cronenberg’s version, they were mutant camels. In Ron’s original script, the Martian colonists used camels as pack animals, and the camels wore oxygen masks... Cronenberg elaborated on the camels idea by having the monsters in the sewers be mutant camels.” Miller also remembers working with art director Pier Luigi Basile
(Conan the Destroyer)
at DEG’s studios in Rome, where “nothing much happened. We just drew all day for weeks on end. Cronenberg finally was hired, and he gave us more direction, more purpose. Bob Ringwood was going to do the costume design for the Cronenberg version, so he was there, on and off, for a couple of weeks and did a few sketches.”

Cronenberg recalls that, several years down the line, De Laurentiis offered him the project again, his way. He declined. “It’s dead for me now,” he told the producer. “I can’t get back into that now. I just can’t go back to working with Ron and fighting the same old battles and doing all that
stuff.” Cronenberg was mostly unimpressed by the finished film. “I thought it was a bad movie,” he told Serge Grünberg, “although there were one or two moments that were true Philip Dick moments in it — they were good. But they weren’t good because it was Schwarzenegger still: first of all as an actor for that kind of role, and secondly as that character. The whole point of that character was that he was a unique, shy, mild character. They tried to compensate by making him a construction worker, but they gave him this beautiful Sharon Stone wife.” This, of course, was a deliberate move on the part of director Paul Verhoeven (who would soon make Stone a star in
Basic Instinct),
who understood that Quaid’s low-grade employment was as far as possible from secret agent, while his beautiful wife was designed to keep him satisfied with his otherwise average lifestyle. As Verhoeven explains, “With Arnold Schwarzenegger in the main part, [an audience] would not want him to dream. So to a large degree by choosing Arnold, there was a preference in reality.” Nevertheless, Cronenberg had other reservations: “I thought it was very visually tacky and messy,” he said. “Verhoeven didn’t do a good job with all the effects and the mutants and all of that stuff. They went for the action stuff purely and that was it: it was an action gimmick. So I didn’t really like the movie and I didn’t think much of it. But by the time I saw it, I didn’t care. I was over it.”

Although Cronenberg was the first director involved with
Total Recall,
his would certainly not be the last name to be stencilled on the director’s chair before Paul Verhoeven’s was allowed to dry. “As I recall it was seven directors,” says Shusett, “most prominently Richard Rush, who’d directed
The Stunt Man.
He and Dino couldn’t agree, because Richard liked our third act of
Total Recall
— Mars gets air — and Dino didn’t. Richard Rush said, ‘It’s wonderful, Dino. It’ll work perfectly.’ And Dino said, ‘Rick, I can’t go with you as director. I don’t even want to go to Mars.’ And
I
said, ‘Well, you can’t take that out, it’s in my contract.’ Dino said, ‘It’ll never get made,’ and I said, ‘Fine, I’d rather never make it.’ I said, ‘Mars is in it, and Mars gets air, it’s the first ending that’s worked, Dino. Show it to another director.’ So one day I get a call from Dino, he says, ‘Ron, I love you so much I could kiss you on the mouth! You saved me! You’re so goddamned stubborn, you saved me! I showed this script to Bruce Beresford... [and] I say, ‘Take out Mars, take out air.’ He says, ‘Dino, you full of shit!’”

Beresford, a two-time Academy Award nominee best known for the acclaimed dramas
Breaker Morant
and
Tender Mercies,
soon found himself in his native Australia, with
Dirty Dancing
star Patrick Swayze in the lead of what
Shusett has described as a less gritty, more fun, ‘Spielbergian’ version of
Total Recall.
The next thing Shusett knew, however, “Beresford called us and said, ‘The movie’s off! Dino’s gone bankrupt! He’s fired eighty people and they’re tearing down the sets as I look out the window.’”

It was at this point, around 1987, that Shusett’s co-screenwriter Gary Goldman first encountered the project. “I was asked to do a polish,” says Goldman, who read the script, and liked it, but turned down the job because he had just started working with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven — fresh from his first Hollywood success, the sci-fi satire
RoboCop
— on his own project, coincidentally an out-of-body action film that Goldman co-wrote and was producing, entitled
Warrior.
“This was set up at Warner Brothers, and I wanted to work with Paul, whose work I had long admired, and who had just come off
RoboCop,
which I loved.” Although the pair worked together for several months, they were unable to reach a point where Verhoeven was ready to direct
Warrior.
In the meantime, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been circling
Total Recall
since Swayze’s departure, learned that his
Conan
collaborator Dino De Laurentiis was in financial difficulties in Australia, and that the production had all but collapsed. Schwarzenegger called De Laurentiis and asked if his company would sell the rights to Dick’s story. When De Laurentiis agreed, Schwarzenegger called Carolco co-owners Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, for whom the actor had made
Red Heat,
and suggested that they buy it. The asking price: $3 million. Says Schwarzenegger, “Within a few hours, they owned the movie.” Next, Schwarzenegger claims to have cornered Dutch director Paul Verhoeven at lunch, and insisted he take a look at
Total Recall.

Incredibly, Verhoeven was the director Ron Shusett had originally had in mind when he was trying to set the film up at Disney: “In 1981, eight years before I got the movie financed, I wanted Paul to direct it,” he reveals. “I’d just seen
Soldier of Orange,
and I said, ‘That’s the guy I want.’ His agent said she gave him the script, but that he doesn’t like science fiction. Then, about seven years later, he fell in love with science fiction and made
RoboCop.”
When Verhoeven did eventually read the script, Shusett recalls, “he didn’t even have to finish reading it before he had committed to it. He said he’d got as far as the scene in the hotel where Edgemar says, ‘You’re not really here, you’re asleep in the chair at Rekall,’ closed the script, called his agent, called Schwarzenegger, and said, ‘I’m in!’” Adds Goldman, “I told Paul the ironic story that I had turned down the chance to re-write
Total Recall
in order to work with him. He asked my opinion of the screenplay. I told him. He said
that we saw it the same way, and that he would try to get me the job to rewrite it. And he did.”

By this time, there had been dozens of drafts — Verhoeven remembers “about thirty” — variously credited to Shusett and O’Bannon, Shusett and
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
screenwriter Jon Povill, and Shusett and Steven Pressfield
(Freejack).
Goldman says that Verhoeven read them all, and sent him the ones he wanted Goldman to read. “The story of the first half was almost exactly as it is in the movie,” he explains, “but there was general agreement that the second half of the movie wasn’t working — that is, everything after the Dr Edgemar scene. I had to adjust everything in order to make the second half work adequately. I also had to reconfigure the movie to fit Arnold, [because] in the short story and in all previous drafts, Quaid was a mild-mannered guy who suddenly discovered that he was a high-powered secret agent.”

According to Goldman, several fundamental decisions determined most of the changes. Firstly, Verhoeven wanted to make the movie as if Dr Edgemar might be telling the truth in the hotel room, so that from the point that Quaid undergoes the procedure at Rekall, everything you see is Quaid’s fantasy. “Everything we have seen before, in the last forty-five minutes, is all fantasy,” Verhoeven explains. “It’s a dream. Which is disturbing to the audience because they don’t want that, of course. They want an adventure story, they don’t want a fake adventure story. So they are on Arnold’s side trying to believe that it’s all true, while [Dr Edgemar] is trying to tell him that it’s not true.” As Edgemar asks rhetorically, “What’s bullshit? That you’re having a paranoid episode triggered by acute neurochemical trauma? Or that you’re really an invincible secret agent from Mars who’s the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he’s a lowly construction worker?” Quaid, of course, shoots Edgemar, thereby choosing to continue the fantasy — if, indeed, it
is
a fantasy.

Thus, Goldman had to reconfigure the story so that it could work both ways: as if it were really happening; and as if it were all in Quaid’s mind. “That’s the great thing about the movie,” says Schwarzenegger, “that from the beginning it always works on two levels and the audience has to guess what is reality and what is not.” Says Verhoeven, “As much as possible we kept these two realities alive, so that everything could be explained one way or another. And of course with Arnold being a superhero, people would always hope and think that it’s real, but there’s strong doubts about that if you look at the movie for a second time.” To illustrate this, Verhoeven points to the scene
where Rekall salesman Bob McClane tells Quaid the nature of his chosen vacation: “You are a top operative under deep cover on your most important mission,” he tells his eager customer. “People are trying to kill you, left and right. You meet this beautiful, exotic woman... By the time the trip is over you get the girl, kill the bad guys and save the entire planet.” In other words, says Verhoeven, “McClane tells him everything that’s going to happen in the movie! It’s counter to every normal narrative — you would not tell anyone where it’s going. [But here] you get the whole story completely formulated for you. In the next scene,” he adds, “we are given several clues, [such as] the woman that he wants to be implanted in his dream — because he can make a choice; he can choose the woman. Of course the woman he describes is the woman he has a kind of fantasy image of that he dreams about, which is this girl, Melina. He describes her as well as he can, and he gets her!”

Having solved this problem with the kind of narrative acrobatics of which Philip K. Dick might have been proud, Goldman tackled another problem. “At the point that Quaid gets his memory back, I thought there was nothing interesting left in the movie — suddenly it just became this ordinary action picture. I wanted the whole movie to be as interesting as the beginning. So I invented the idea that Quaid wants to get back to being his authentic self, but he finds out that his authentic self [Hauser — the agent working for Cohaagen] is evil.” In other words, Quaid is not merely Hauser without some key memories, but a separate individual. “At the end of the movie, you find out that Hauser’s in on it,” says Shusett, “that he helped erase his own brain so that Quaid would not recognise his intent to assassinate [the rebel leader] Kuato. And then Hauser says, ‘Well, I hate to ask you, but it’s my body — I was there first, and I want it back. Maybe we’ll see each other in our dreams.’” Says Goldman, “This was a very fresh idea at the time. To my knowledge, it was without precedent.” In the new version, Quaid must decide if he wants to be technically authentic, but evil, or be true to his artificial self, and good. “He has to make a very interesting moral choice, and this takes him straight into Phil Dick territory,” Goldman explains. “Quaid is an artificial human, like the replicants in
Blade Runner,
except that it’s not his body that is artificial, but only his mental programming. The artificial person, Quaid, is more human than the authentic human, Hauser.

“It’s also psychologically accurate, I think, to say that no one (except in a Hollywood movie) would give up his/her identity, just to become authentic. Identity is life itself. It’s an interesting idea to be offered a choice to have a better life, but not to be oneself.” The hard part, says Goldman, was
making this work; even Verhoeven was not convinced it could be done, until Goldman came up with the idea for the second video message from Hauser, which he receives after Quaid is captured by Cohaagen in Kuato’s lair. “That part of the narrative, that little twist, was something that Gary Goldman added to the story, because that was never there before,” Verhoeven admits. “Now Quaid will be forced to become the person he doesn’t want to be, because he has to make a moral choice. The last thing that he wants is to go back to being Hauser.”

“Paul Verhoeven had great instincts, great ideas, and intellectual courage,” says Goldman. “I am sure that all of my good ideas would have been rejected by any studio and almost any other director. In Hollywood, ideas are anathema, and the bigger the budget, the more forbidden they are. The authorities are not very educated, but they can smell an idea at a hundred paces — and, like a giant in a fairy tale, they will sniff out the idea and rip it out. Only a powerful director can protect an idea. And Carolco was the perfect place to work, because Mario and Andy gave their directors almost complete freedom.”

Goldman says that he and Verhoeven were “generally interested in having as much fun with ‘mindfucks’ as we could. This included introducing as many big surprises as possible. For example, the idea that the whole plot was about using Quaid to lead them to Kuato, because Kuato was psychic and would detect any traitor. Plus we knew that, at that time in Hollywood, for reasons of political correctness, African-American characters had been typecast as good guys. So I decided to make Benny the bad guy, as it would catch audiences by surprise. Paul wasn’t afraid of being politically incorrect — in fact, you could say that his whole career is based on being politically incorrect. He does it with a vengeance. I would say that I have the same bent, but don’t take the same relish in it. But we’re both interested in seeing things clearly, and seeing through popular clichès and delusions and hypocrisies. It was this same disposition that made us really embrace Phil Dick’s challenge to consensual reality, and to push it as far as we did. And to leave the movie on a note of doubt, but with a sense of humour.”