Tales From Development Hell (31 page)

For Obst, keeping each party from fatally losing faith in the face of such adversity was all part of her role as producer: “Like Atlas, I felt like I was balancing all the issues of the movie on my shoulders: the director’s fear
of the studio, the studio’s fear of the director, all of our fears of the potent movie stars — Robert Redford and Jodie Foster — who could make us or break us at any juncture. But all of these opposing forces could have been tamed with the proper amount of time. In the context of a race to production — everyone believed that there was a place for only one such movie in the marketplace, but no one was folding — time was a luxury we didn’t have. All of us — director, studio, stars, me — were deeply concerned about how the race would compromise the movie.” Meanwhile, the press was eating up the story, until the coverage of the race began affecting the basic process of putting the movie together, a situation she described as “a kind of media Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”

“I felt that Ridley was going to make a great film,” says Hart, “but I began to see how all the work you do in the beginning starts to get unravelled as other film-makers come on board and — rightfully so — bring their vision to it. It was fascinating to work with Ridley because my job became, ‘How do I take this idea Ridley has for a brilliant shot or a brilliant sequence and make it work in the movie?’” For instance, Scott had an idea about Tiny’s character getting on an aircraft, trying to get home to his mother, and being sick. “This actually comes from a scene out of Richard Preston’s book that really happened. Ridley wanted this guy coughing up his guts into a [air sickness] bag, and then when the military ground the plane and surround it and want him to come out, he goes into the men’s room and tries to flush the bag down the vacuum toilet, and it explodes and sends blood out under the door and up into the air conditioning system... This is all Ridley’s idea, and I’m going ‘Wow!’ So this was in the best draft, the last draft I wrote, this whole sequence where Karl Johnson and Nancy Jaax go into the plane to get Tiny out, and it is a scary sequence, when the blood bag explodes.

“That’s what Ridley brought to the table: his extraordinary visual facility, which is at his fingertips. It didn’t always fit into the narrative, and didn’t always take the narrative into consideration — there were several things in Topor’s shooting script that Ridley wanted to do that I still don’t get — but it was exciting. So I had been brought back to try to help here. They were under enormous pressure from Warner Bros, and I was also told that Jodie wasn’t happy with the shift away from her character and the move toward Redford’s character.”

It was at this point that Obst received a call from Redford’s agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), whom she described as “a close ally and friend”, informing her that the director and screenwriter of
Outbreak
were flying out
to meet with Redford, ready to offer him the lead in
their
film. “You just start laughing at what you’re up against,” says Hart. “They’re just feeding off of each other — ‘take my arm and his leg and this guy’s heart...’” Somehow,
Variety
reporter Mike Fleming got a whiff of the rumour. “Now I’m really screwed,” thought Obst. “If it’s reported, it could unravel Jodie. Two actors gone, no movie... Bosnian Muslims were under genocidal siege, Hutus were slaughtering Tutsis, the prospect of national health care was falling to pieces while O.J. ran, and I wish I could tell you that I was aware of any of it. But this kind of pseudodrama shrinks perspective, rendering us (or at least me) myopic to the rest of the world. All news becomes the trades’ industry news, and you are it.”

In the event, Redford declined the rival offer. Says Hart, “To his credit he said, ‘No I’m gonna do
The Hot Zone’
— one, because he’d committed to it first, and two, because it was a more true to life project, and if he was going to be involved, he wanted to be involved in the one that was trying to break new ground, as opposed to just an action-adventure movie.”

Next, Hart flew out for a meeting with Redford, whom he had known through the writers’ workshops at the Sundance Institute, where Hart had previously worked with fellow
Hot Zone
writer Richard Friedenberg. “I
begged
him to
please
play the character that I was writing,” says Hart. “I wrote a living legend in Karl Johnson — literally, a living legend. I gave Karl Johnson a role he never got to play in real life, and it was a great character: a romantic character who didn’t have to have a romance, [who] every female in the audience would gravitate to and every male in the audience would want to be like. It was like having a hero out of
King Solomon’s Mines
or Denys Finch Hatton,” he adds, referring to a real-life figure Redford’s character in
Out of Africa
had been based on. “A guy that was
of the world,
who brought enormous experience to the table and who was a renegade and a rogue and an outsider and who struck fear into bureaucracy!” Hart is not sure if Redford was confusing the size of the role with its stature, but “all I know is, I lost.”

Redford brought in another of his favourite writers, Paul Attanasio, who would earn an Oscar nomination for his script for Redford’s next film as director,
Quiz Show.
“Attanasio is a fantastic writer,” says Hart, “but nobody had done the research, and nobody had been in the soup with these people, except me and Richard Preston. And the speed, the pressure, the race all began to take its toll on where the project had been a year earlier. Jodie Foster was plenty a movie star, Redford would have been brilliant in the [Karl Johnson] role, but I think that the romance that crept into the Attanasio script, that did it for Jodie. I think there was actually a kiss between Karl Johnson and Nancy Jaax in the ‘hot zone’ lab, and this movie was not about a romance — it was about heroic people in an extraordinary situation; people that you see driving a station wagon full of kids to school who are also saving the world. It wasn’t about a romance between people that were working in close quarters with each other. But, I will say this,
The Hot Zone
was a perfect situation for a male-female romance to emerge if that was where you were going with the movie. This movie did not have to hang on a romance or the attraction of two people to each other to make it interesting, yet it was the perfect set-up for that kind of relationship to evolve.”

Hart was among the first to hear that Foster had quit the project. “Someone had seen Jodie at a party in New York and she said that she was pulling out because the character I had written was no longer the character in the script. The focus had changed, and she was going. I remember calling Lynda Obst from New York — I woke her up — and I felt terrible because I thought Lynda knew. She was very upset and very angry.” Nevertheless, Foster “jumped species” onto another Obst production,
Contact,
which she had read more than a year earlier (when she was sent it as a sample of Hart’s writing), and in which, after several more years in Development Hell, she would play the lead role.

Even with Foster gone, Hart agreed to come back in for the third and last time. “I took Richard’s outline and folded his great ideas about ‘patient zero’ — the carrier — into the draft,” he says. “I met with Jerry and Nancy Jaax and explained to them that if I was going to make this work dramatically, I would have to take licence with their relationship, and that I was gonna make one of them sick, and I was gonna invade their family — and in the script it’s their daughter who gets sick. [The Jaaxes’ colleague] Peter Jarling told me their wives would always say ‘Don’t bring your work home from the office,’ because the worst thing that could happen is that you walk out of the lab and take something home in your system that’s gonna infect your family. And when they told me that, I just went, ‘Okay, the daughter’s gonna get infected.’”

Hart also attempted to address some of the romantic elements which Attanasio had brought into the script, apparently at Redford’s request, but which Hart felt threatened the reality of the relationship between Nancy and Jerry. His solution was simple: “I put Jerry in Desert Storm, in an outbreak where they were hunting for biological weapons, believe it or not. And he was gonna be brought home for Thanksgiving, but he was leading a biohazard team to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! So he is reintroduced into the story at a time when Nancy and Karl have been spending a lot of time together, so there is a natural tension in his return. But there is never
any doubt that Nancy is madly in love with her husband, and has a successful relationship and a successful family.

“The May ’94 draft brought together Richard Friedenberg’s work, Paul Attanasio’s work, the work Ridley had brought to the table, [and] Redford’s desires — yet still maintained the integrity of Nancy and Jerry Jaax. The end of that draft is still talked about,” Hart adds. “Karl Johnson is saying goodbye to Nancy after the monkey house is over and they’ve successfully spun off the serum and begun to deal with the outbreak, and Karl gets on the plane and you see from the point of view of the virus up in the air system, moving to the little nozzles, and suddenly it stops over Karl Johnson, and just as it rushes down towards him, he reaches up and turns off the nozzle, and the screen goes black. It is the way the movie should end, and I still get calls about it from people who read the script. That unproduced screenplay has gotten me more work than
Hook
and
Dracula
put together. It was my swansong,” he says. “I turned that draft in — it’s 154 pages long — and I said, ‘Here — I’m going.’”

“After Jodie went, we went to Meryl Streep,” said Obst, relishing the opportunity to re-team the multiple Oscar-winner with Redford, her co-star in
Out of Africa.
“Her agents thought we had a great shot.” With
The Hot Zone
now a mere eighteen days from the date principal photography was due to begin, Tom Topor received a call from one of Scott’s associates, asking him if he was available for “an instantaneous production rewrite” which they could use to entice Streep aboard. “They sent me all of the scripts,” Topor recalls, “and then Ridley and I got on the phone, and I said, ‘Look, you email me a list of all of the big set-pieces that you absolutely want to keep, because I’m going to treat this as though I’m doing a musical on Broadway — you tell me the songs you want to keep, and I’ll write around your songs.’ I said, ‘I will give you all your set-pieces, but you’ve got to give me a lot of manoeuvring room for the rest of it.’”

Scott agreed, but requested that Topor talk with Redford, and with Streep, who was considering whether to replace Foster on
The Hot Zone
or join Clint Eastwood for
The Bridges of Madison County.
Says Topor, “I got on the telephone with Bob, and we had sort of a ‘meet and greet’ conversation, and then I talked to Meryl, and she gave me a lot of ideas about her character. But then she said, ‘When do you think it’ll be done?’” Topor was forced to admit that, despite the approaching start date, he was still taking notes from Scott and Redford, and had yet to begin work on his screenplay. “I could tell that the moment she heard I had nothing on paper, she was going to take the offer from Eastwood.
The River Wild
[an action-packed thriller toplining Streep] was about to be released, and everybody thought that was going to be a huge hit. So she bowed out.”

The next time Topor spoke with Redford, he suggested that Redford and Scott needed to have further discussions about the direction the script was taking: “I said, ‘The way Ridley sees this is essentially a duet, and the way you’re talking, it doesn’t sound like that. So I will do anything you want, but I have to have a consensus between you and the director.’ And not long after that, Bob disappeared, too.” Redford officially quit on 12 August. “It was like a train wreck in extended slow motion,” Preston told
Time
’s Richard Corliss. “It begins with a smell of smoke; then one wheel hops the track; then a freight car goes off; then it turns sideways and the whole train begins to telescope. That’s when it goes off the rails and into the canyon. By Hollywood standards, this project took a long time to come apart,” he added. “Usually they explode immediately.”

While
The Hot Zone
was haemorrhaging stars,
Outbreak
’s cast list was beginning to read like a ‘who’s who’ of Hollywood: two-time Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman and
In the Line of Fire’s
Rene Russo would headline as virologist Colonel Sam Daniels and his colleague and ex-wife Robby Keough; Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding Jr would play USAMRIID personnel; and Morgan Freeman would play a Brigadier-General. Then, when Joe Don Baker
(Edge of Darkness)
was dismissed several weeks into production, a bigger star, Donald Sutherland, took his place. Yet
Outbreak
was having script problems of its own: after Dworet and Pool’s initial drafts, a succession of screenwriters, including Jeb Stuart (The
Fugitive)
and Carrie Fisher
(Postcards From the Edge),
worked on the script, the latter at a reported cost of $100,000 per week. Petersen later brought in
The Waterdance
screenwriter Neal Jimenez to “improve the pacing and structure”, while Hoffman, unhappy with his lines in one scene, brought in prize-winning poet and novelist Maya Angelou to sharpen the dialogue. The script was still far from finished when, on 13 July 1994, Kopelson sent Petersen and his crew to shoot exteriors in Eureka, California, effectively announcing the commencement of principal photography, and throwing
The Hot Zone
into further crisis. “They shot second-unit monkey footage for weeks on end,” said Obst, “as they were raced into production without a script, too.”

The other difficulty for
The Hot Zone,
Topor explains, was trying to cast the film barely two weeks before production was due to begin. “There were very few [actors] available at such short notice,” he says, “and by this time there had been so much bad publicity in the papers, that even for people who might have wanted to work for him [Scott], it looked like they were coming into a troubled movie that was similar to a movie that was already in production.”