Which Lie Did I Tell? (12 page)

I have been a professional writer for over forty years now. (I began my first novel,
The Temple of Gold,
on June 25, 1956.) And in all that time, I have come across but two great pieces of material. The first, dealing with Butch Cassidy and his adventures with the Sundance Kid, became a famous movie around the world. But it was unknown material before that.

The second is the tale of the man-eating lions of Tsavo, which was well known around the world, just not in the United States. In Africa, it is
the
most famous story of high adventure. A hunt for wild animals is called a “stalk,” and no less an aficionado than President
Theodore Roosevelt termed it “the greatest stalk of which we have any record.”

More recently, in his splendid book
Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years,
the Oxford historian
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has written over seven hundred pages on what’s been going on Down Here for the last ten centuries.

Well,
two
of those pages are about the lions of Tsavo.

Why were Butch and Sundance unknown for so long? I think because they ran away to South America when the Superposse came after them, instead of shooting it out, which is what western heroes always did, since westerns are based on confrontations.

I think the reason the Tsavo lions are unknown here is because, when Americans go to the movies, they want solutions to questions, not more questions. The Tsavo story, something that never happened before and has not happened since, is still, at its dark heart, a mystery.

And always will be …

I first heard about them in July of 1984, my initial trip to Africa, at one of my favorite spots on earth, the Masai Mara Plains (it is in Kenya,
and when the land becomes Tanzania, the name becomes the Serengeti). It was night, a bunch of people were sitting by a fire. And then, in that magical semidarkness, someone began telling the story of what happened at Tsavo back in 1898. I clearly remembered that I turned to Ilene, my good wife of twenty-some years, and said something I had never said before: “That’s a movie.”

My plan then was simple—to research the story back in America, to return to Africa at the proper time for further work, and then to write it as an original screenplay. Life, however, as most of us are continually shocked to discover, has plans of its own which tend to take precedence. I did a lot of research when I returned home, yes. But our marriage ended, the further trips to Africa never took place, and the lions found a small corner of my brain, growled, and went to sleep.

Dissolve: five years later. It’s 1989.

I got a call from my agent,
Robert Bookman at CAA. “You remember that lion story?” I said I sure did. “Well, there’s some interest in the project at Paramount. Do you have a problem flying to L.A. to try for the job?”

I said I had zero problem flying to L.A.

But there was indeed a problem.

I have a bad back and it tends to go into spasm when it chooses—crippling me, usually for a week or two. And it had gone out just before Bookman called. When that happens, the worst thing is having to sit in a car for a long time. Having to sit in an airplane for a long time also isn’t so terrific. But I made the trip the next day, met with the Paramount Guys. The usual bullshit grunts of hello. Then it was my turn to sell.

This is not something for which I am noted. I have only tried one “pitch” in my life, and that was for friends, and I was so awful I quit halfway through. Now I was sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers. More precisely,
they
were sitting in the room.

Me, I was lying on the floor.

Pretty much in spasm.

Looking up at them.

I said I had no idea how to write the movie. I said I had no idea yet what the story was. But I also said I knew what the story
should
be: a cross between
Jaws
and
Lawrence of Arabia.

I said they could doubt my talent to be able to successfully write that movie, but they could never doubt my passion for wanting to try. I mean, shit, I was flying six thousand miles more or less doubled over—that had to be indicative of
something.
(I was told that the meeting, because of my position, achieved a certain brief notoriety.)

At any rate, I was hired.

I delivered the first draft on April Fool’s Day, 1990. I always aim for that date—after all, we
are
talking about the movie business. Shortly afterwards, we met again, the Paramount Guys (PGs) and
moi.
Here is what they said: Yes, we like the script. Yes, we think it’s a movie. But it is also going to be a very very expensive movie. So we will make it only if we can get one of these three stars to play Patterson, the main character:

Well, those happen to be wonderful performers, and all three were good casting for the role. Serious about their careers and their choices of material. And huge stars.

The problem is, you just don’t get people like that for pictures like this (neither O’Toole nor Scheider nor Dreyfuss nor Shaw were huge stars) because stars know they inevitably are going to be dwarfed by the desert or munched by the monster. In the case of
The Ghost and the Darkness,
I knew that none of Paramount’s holy trinity would sit around while the lions stole the movie. So while I said “Terrific” to the studio about their casting choices, I’ve been at this a while and I have a certain sense for failure when it is coming down the track at me. I knew, old hand that I am, that none of the three would do it. The movie was dead in the water.

A week later, Kevin Costner said yes.

One of the points to keep in mind when talking about movie stars is this: not only do
we
change,
they
change. So today when people disparage the lovely Miss Roberts and wonder why she isn’t that smiling star of
Pretty Woman,
the answer is pretty easy: that child is gone.
Julia Roberts was twenty-two then, we knew nothing much about her, and we all fell in love. Well, she’s in her thirties now, we know
everything
about her, some of it a bit disquieting. Our ardor has cooled.

The Kevin Costner of today, we know about: the divorce, the
Waterworld
budget, the fact that no one breathing saw
The Postman,
all that good stuff. But we’re still in 1990, remember, and
Dances with Wolves
is about to explode across the world, catapulting Costner into an orbit few stars ever attain. Remember how we rooted for him, putting his career
on the line to do an, ugh, western? A three-hour, ugh, western at that. And not just to star but, for the first time, to direct?

Well, he gambled and won and we didn’t just love him, we carried him through our village shoulder-high. He had become, in front of our eyes, the new
Gary Cooper. We could not find sufficient superlatives.

So as I flew out to the next meeting with the PGs, I knew that after half a dozen years, the gods were smiling.

“We know what we said last week,” the PGs began. “We know we said we would only do it with Costner or Gibson or Cruise. And we are thrilled that Kevin wants to do it so badly. That only proves what we felt about the value of the material. And since Costner agreed so quickly, we now know what we have to do.”

And then a pause.

Not just any pause. This baby hovering on the horizon was one of the longer lulls of my young life. I knew I was about to die, but I could not guess the method, poison or sword.

Then the PG spoke that most dreaded of all terms: “
special relationship.
”

There is something you must understand about studio executives (and these guys were absolutely standard: bright, decent, hardworking—and shortly to be fired for helping run the company off a cliff).
Studio executives love stars.
Because these are the executive’s two eternal verities:

Perfectly understandable behavior. I’d do it too. Where it gets dangerous is here: it is not enough that they love stars;
in their continually fevered brains, they want to believe that the stars also love them.
And so over the decades I have heard that “Sly and I have a special relationship” and “Dusty and I have a special relationship” and Arnold and I and Clint and I and Marlon and I and Paul and I and Steve and I and … backward reeleth the mind.

The truth is this: stars do not now and never have given even the remotest shit for studio executives. Stars only care,
legitimately and correctly,
about the material and the deal.

But studio executives, poor, put-upon, terrified, underappreciated like the rest of us, dream of being loved.

“We have a
special relationship
with Tom Cruise,” the head PG said
that day. “We are doing a picture with Tom now and we want this to be his next. He has a lot on his plate at the moment, yes, but we are prepared to wait for him. Because we know he’ll love this. And we know he loves working with us.”

“Because of your special relationship,” I said.

Heads nodded all around.

We waited six months for an answer. The movie he w
as starting was indeed a plateful. It was called
Days of Thunder
and it was not the easiest shoot ever undertaken, and not only that, he was also producing.

Cruise passed.

Costner had taken off five months and three weeks before, very pissed off, and with very good reason. We never went to Gibson. No point. There was now no movie. And honestly, I felt, there never would be.

The Tsavo lions curled up inside my brain again, growled again, and slept for five more years …

Which is not to say there was zero action. Michael Douglas, who has a remarkable record as a producer (he won an Oscar for his first try,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
), and his partner,
Steve Reuther, came aboard. And
Stephen Hopkins was selected to direct. Stirrings, sure. But lots of movies get producers, bring directors on, then disappear. We needed a male star. Optimist that I have always been, I knew we would never get one.

But as the sadly missed Mr. Williams once wrote for Miss DuBois, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.” Because our salvation was taking place across town, on the Warner Brothers lot, where the actor Michael Keaton had what I can only call the most helpful fit of madness of my screenwriting career. (No, I meant that sentence just as I wrote it.)

Understand this about stars:
they do not want to appear in
commercial films.
Oh, some will put up with them. Harrison Ford owes his entire fabulous career to three series:
Star Wars, Indiana Jones,
and
Tom Clancy. Stallone exists because of
Rocky
and
Rambo.
Mel Gibson also had two,
Mad Max
and the
Lethal Weapon
s. But these are not the norm.

Michael Keaton chose to ignore the ecology of Hollywood—you do one for me, I’ll do one for you. He had been in the first
Batman,
which
Jack Nicholson stole. He had done the second, this time bowing to Pfeiffer and DeVito. And that, apparently, was enough. He did not want to wear the dreaded Bat suit again. He felt the part of Batman wasn’t terrific. And you know what?

Dead right. Batman was and always has been a horrible part, a stiff the others got to be flashy by playing off of.

So Keaton walked.

And Val Kilmer replaced him.

Val Kilmer, who, it turned out,
loved
Africa.

Once more the phone rang from Hollywood. The lions answered it with me. We were alive again. Because the new Paramount people had always liked the Tsavo script. And suddenly there was this hot new star who wanted to play Patterson.
Batman Forever
had not opened yet. But the advance word was sensational.

Suddenly we were a “go.”

A dozen years passed between that first night on the Masai Mara and when we got released. We might have come out in ’91, in place of
Robin Hood,
riding the Costner love fest. And if we had, I think we would have owned the civilized world. We also might
never
have come out, because if Keaton had stuck with Batman, Val Kilmer wouldn’t have gotten his blink of sunshine, and no way any studio would have sent us into production without a star.

Anyway, that’s how movies get made.

The real ones are—right now, as they have been for over half a century—in Chicago. The Field Museum of Natural History. I went to see them with Ilene soon after we got back from the Africa trip.

There they crouch in their exhibit, probably not as big as in your imagination. Partly because they were maneless males. (Not uncommon in certain parts of Africa. If they live in an area rich with thorn trees, as these did, the thorns rip the manes off them over time.)

But here is what you must know about them, and I mean this—

—they are scary.

There is clearly a madness at work, some raging insanity; I have never seen anything like them. I felt when I first heard about them just exactly what I felt that day when I saw them and what I feel now: that
they were evil.

I called one The Ghost, the other The Darkness, for several reasons. I could differentiate the two in the screenplay, characterize them, if you will. More than that, the names were evocative, they would read well on the page; and more than that, if the movie ever happened, they would look good on the screen, these giant killing machines, with such easily identified manes.

Why were they so remarkable?

A few basic facts you should know about man-eating lions: