Tales From Development Hell (22 page)

Uhls continued to work with Silver as German-born director Roland Emmerich and his producing partner Dean Devlin came on board. “I had worked with Roland on
Moon 44,”
the producer says, referring to Emmerich’s first science fiction film, “and based on that movie, Mario Kassar brought Roland in to direct the picture. Roland came in, read the script, and wanted to do a major rewrite, and asked me if I’d rewrite it. So I said, ‘Sure.’” While Devlin worked on his draft, he and Emmerich were surprised to learn that Joel Silver had hired another screenwriter. “Roland and I read in the paper that Joel Silver had hired Steven de Souza to do a rewrite, and Roland said, ‘Well, you’re about to get a new draft in two weeks, why are you hiring someone else?’ And Joel said, ‘Oh, Steven did
Die Hard
with me, he’s the best writer in Hollywood — trust me.’ So they never read my draft, they waited for Steven’s draft, and when that came out, Roland said to Joel, ‘I don’t want to do that, but I’ll do Dean’s draft,’ and Joel said no, so Roland baled out of the project.”

At the time, Emmerich and Devlin were some years away from delivering their science fiction blockbusters,
Stargate
and
Independence Day,
and Silver evidently had no qualms picking de Souza, the writer of
Die Hard, 48HRS
and
The Running Man,
over two relative unknowns. Says Devlin, “I think the biggest change which Steven made in his draft, which we didn’t do, is that he gave it a kind of uplifting feeling at the end, a kind of
E.T.
thing. And also Steven came up with some amazing characters that weren’t in the original drafts. That’s really the direction he went — it just wasn’t what we were going for. We were going for something much more like
Alien.”

Certainly, Silver’s decision would have been endorsed by action star Sylvester Stallone, who had previously met with de Souza to discuss a potential rewrite of his 1993 science fiction film
Demolition Man,
and had been impressed with the writer’s ideas. “They wanted a total reinvention of the script,” de Souza says of
ISOBAR.
“The original script was one of these usual dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures, and the movie was a complete rip-off of
Aliens.
It was sort of like
Aliens
combined with
Alien,
with a squad of guys assigned to catch this monster and bring it in for study by ‘The Company’ — a shameless rip-off. But then they had to get the train to its final destination, which made no sense at all.” After all, de Souza reasoned, if The Company wants to keep the existence of the monster secret, and has reason to believe that it may be dangerous, it would be more prudent to land the creature closer to its final destination. “Plus, if they’re going to take it to some military facility where they’re going to study it, wouldn’t they have an airstrip there? So from page one it made no sense.”

De Souza was equally nonplussed by the script’s description of the monster itself, which he describes as “a guy-in-a-suit kind of creature. It lived off adrenaline,” he adds, “sucking adrenaline out of your body with these big nails, like a vampire. It reminded me way too much of a picture called
It! The Terror from Beyond Space,
which was itself a rip-off of ‘Black Destroyer’ and ‘Discord in Scarlet’, from A.E. van Vogt’s short story collection
The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
So with
ISOBAR,
you had a rip-off of a rip-off.” Overall, he says, “It was too much like
Alien,
the monster wasn’t fresh enough and there was no explanation of why the world was this way — it was one of these science fiction movies where it’s supposed to be the near-future, but it’s a completely implausible near-future without any kind of explanation. The script was just embarrassing.

“I told the producers, ‘The biggest problem you have here is Sly doesn’t want to be ‘sci-fi Rambo’, and even if he’s not sci-fi Rambo, you want to make him a scientist, which makes him culpable because he brought the thing onto a civilian train, and as soon as he let his superiors convince him that it’s a good idea to bring a dangerous creature onto a civilian train, he’s poisoned as a hero.’” De Souza felt that audiences wouldn’t respect a character who makes the wrong moral choices, unless the consequences are dealt with in the course of the film. “So I said, ‘If Sly’s trying to do something different, and if everybody keeps saying he wants to do something like
Die Hard,
let him be just an ordinary guy on the train,’” de Souza continues. “I mean, in
Die Hard,
Bruce Willis was a cop, but he was so over matched, he was like an ordinary guy. They didn’t make him a Green Beret or Special Forces; he was just a cop and he had nine cartridges in his pistol, and that was it. So I said, ‘Let’s do something like that with Sly.’ And they said, ‘Well, what about a security
guard?’ and I said, ‘No, let’s just have him be a guy on the train.’ I kept coming up against walls, because they said, ‘That’s not special enough.’”

De Souza suggested a compromise, to make the train’s passengers (and, by extension, the audience)
assume
Stallone’s character was a hero type: “Let’s make them
think
he’s something special, so people on the train go to him and say, ‘Oh, you must be the hero because of your strange behaviour.’ But he says, ‘Well, actually, I’m...’ — not that this would be it — ‘researching a role for a movie,’ or something, so that the audience is misled, and it turns out Sly is just an ordinary guy.” It was Mario Kassar who finally proposed the solution, recalling a British Airways Concorde flight in which the passenger sitting next to him had made the cabin crew’s journey as difficult as possible. “Mario said that this guy kept ringing the stewardess for all kinds of stuff, like he doesn’t like his pillow... And then at the end of the flight, he called over the stewardess and said, ‘I work for British Airways. That’s why I was being difficult, and you were really great.’ I said, ‘That’s great, Mario, let’s make Sly that guy.’ So once the Sly character identifies himself to the stewardess or the purser, and tells her why he’s been such a pain in the ass, they sort of have to be in charge because they’re at least minor company officials.”

The next challenge was to explain why, in the far future, trains might be the preferred form of transport. De Souza’s solution was to suggest that ozone layer damage or global warming meant that jet-powered air travel was no longer viable. Continuing that theme, “people were wearing masks, cities were burrowing deeper, there were air alerts and large portions of the country had deadly pollution.” Now that de Souza had made the trains ubiquitous, he decided that the one on which the monster gets loose should be a special one. “Let’s make it the inaugural transatlantic train,” he suggested. “Let’s say they’ve built a bridge between Greenland and Iceland, and it’s actually the first train from New York to London; the first trans-continental trip of a magnetic levitation train, so there’s all kinds of hoopla.” Suddenly,
ISOBAR
began to look less like a traditional Sylvester Stallone vehicle and more like an ensemble piece. “Now it becomes like
Murder on the Orient Express
or
Grand Hotel,
with all these wonderful characters,” de Souza points out.

One by one, cast members began to board the project. Future Academy Award-winner Kim Basinger, who had recently appeared as Vicki Vale in
Batman,
was Stallone’s leading lady. Character actor Michael Jeter (a supporting player in Stallone’s
Tango & Cash)
signed on as a con artist who had tricked his way onto the train. A part was written specially for Italian screen legend Sophia Loren. James Belushi (Red
Heat, K-9)
was cast as a
boorish entrepreneur who had made his fortune selling eggs and sperm over the equivalent of the Internet. “I could see this coming,” says de Souza, of the inspiration behind Belushi’s character. “He had a thing called ‘Babies R Us’ and he did his own commercial like a car salesman. You saw his ad in the movie, and it was like, ‘Are your sperm slow swimmers? Have your eggs been out of the fridge too long? Call us now — only US, grade A choice farm girls provide our eggs.’ It was comical, but it could be real.” Naturally, de Souza says, the other first class passengers looked down on this
nouveau riche
figure. “He was like that character in
Dinner at Eight,
the rich guy who’d made his money in pork rinds. There was also a rich lady travelling with her granddaughter, who’s being taken to an arranged marriage, and a poor boy who’s like a nomad kid, a stowaway. So there was a teenage romance, an older romance between Sly and Kim Basinger, and a couple of great older characters, one of whom was like a Walter Matthau character, because we wanted to get Walter Matthau.”

Perhaps the most important character of all, however, was the creature. Here, de Souza was inspired by the 1957 film
20 Million Miles to Earth,
in which the Ymir, an alien creature brought back from Venus, grows to enormous size and threatens the Italian city of Rome. “It starts out very harmless, so you actually feel sorry for it. And then because people are mean to it and a dog attacks it, it ends up becoming violent, and as it gets bigger and bigger it’s a menace, and they kill it on the Colosseum. So we wanted to have some sympathy for this monster until it moults and changes a little bit.” De Souza also suggested making the creature a plant-based life form. “I said, ‘Since we’re stealing from the best, let’s do Howard Hawks’
The Thing From Another World.’
Because the whole ecology was screwed up, this company had tried to genetically engineer this hybrid plant that would clean up the air. They’d done all kinds of illegal gene-splicing, and they’d created this fast-growing hybrid plant that would manufacture oxygen at a tremendous rate. It was their industrial secret. But they were having problems with it — the previous ones had died, and they had to get this one to London because this time they’d figured out what was wrong. And the thing had this tremendous thirst for water, so once it broke out, it sucked all the water out of its victims, so they’d find somebody and they’d be like a mummy and they’d crumble to dust.”

The creature was designed by multiple Academy Award winner Rick Baker, whose credits ranged from
An American Werewolf in London
to
Gorillas in the Mist.
“I actually have a video tape of a monster test Rick Baker did,” de Souza
reveals. “He also made the first victim — a very real-looking guy, who had one arm that could move. And when the creature got bigger it had tentacles that wrapped round you and sucked all the water out. It really was amazing.” Despite its influences, he says, “We made a really fresh monster. I liked the monster a lot.”

One of the things de Souza wanted to do was to subvert the audience’s expectations by having the creature kill a character they didn’t expect — a trick as old as Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho.
“We wrote a part for a guy like Clint Eastwood,” he says, “a big star who would come into the movie and say ‘I’m the hero, I’m in charge,’ give everybody a big stirring speech — and then get killed. That happened [years later] in
Deep Blue Sea,”
he adds, “where Samuel L. Jackson comes in and then gets killed.” Up to this point, Stallone’s character had reluctantly assumed the role of hero: “He says, ‘Until we get to the next train station, when we can sort this out, we have to do things.’ They’ve barricaded the back cars, and they know there’s some kind of creature on the train that’s killing people and they need help. So they go to the next stop, and this guy gets on the train — and we immediately kill him! It was pretty cool.”

The tension is further ratcheted up by the failure of the communication system, meaning that no one on board the train is able to contact the outside world. “Of course, they don’t know that the reason for the failure of the communication system is that the people who brought the thing on the train have sabotaged it, because they don’t want the story getting out — they have to do damage control now,” de Souza explains. “Their plan is to get the creature back under control, get off the train at some point on the line, and kill anybody who knows the truth.” By now, however, the train is out of control, and everyone, good and bad, is forced to work together in order to save the day: “At this point they were probably all in the same cage — they need to keep the creature from coming into this car. So the bad guys and good guys are working together, but you know at a certain point their agendas will diverge.”

“I never read de Souza’s version,” Jim Uhls admits. “I heard that it changed everything to be more of a large-cast Irwin Allen-type of disaster movie.” Nevertheless, it was de Souza’s draft which seemed likely to get a green light from the studio. Production designer Dante Ferretti, a regular collaborator with Federico Fellini and, later, Martin Scorsese, began designing sets, while Academy Award winning costume designer Marilyn Vance
(48HRS, Predator, Die Hard)
created what de Souza describes as “some very prescient costume
designs describing a very retro future.” So advanced was the project that set construction was due to begin within a week, until Carolco collapsed under the strain of a string of flops — most notably
Cutthroat Island —
and filed for
Chapter 11
bankruptcy. Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna went their separate ways, with the latter going on to form Cinergi, where he would draft in de Souza to rewrite another Sylvester Stallone vehicle,
Judge Dredd.
“It was a shock to me when
ISOBAR
collapsed, because everything that I’d worked on always got made. It’s a good thing I didn’t buy that Rolls-Royce. I thought it was a great script that should have been made,” he adds, “but movies get made not because the script is great, but because somebody likes the script
at that point.”

Ironically, Carolco’s bankruptcy almost gave
ISOBAR
a second chance, several years after the film and the company jumped the rails. At the bankruptcy hearing for the company, Kassar and Vajna showed up to bid for several of the properties their dissolved company had owned, despite the fact that Carolco’s collapse had left millions of dollars’ worth of debts unpaid. Says de Souza, “You’d think the judge would say, ‘Wait a second, didn’t you guys run the previous company?’” By now, de Souza was among the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, with almost one billion dollars’ worth of box office receipts from films bearing either his name, or his imprint, and he attended the hearing hoping to buy back the
ISOBAR
script, which he felt was among his best work. “I think they showed maybe $5 or 7 million ‘negative’ cost,” he recalls, referring to the cumulative amount of money Carolco had spent on the script, set designs, Rick Baker’s creature tests and the director’s customary ‘pay or play’ deal, which would have to be paid out of any future profits. Although the bailiffs initially set a price of fifty cents on the dollar, meaning that the project could be bought for half of the costs accrued against it, it was too rich for de Souza’s blood. “There was no way I could go there,” he says.