CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 10ON DECEMBER 13, 1978, FOUR MONTHS BEFORE the opening of The China Syndrome, Diandra gave birth to a baby boy they named Cameron.
The birth had been a difficult one. She had delivered by cesarean, and it had considerably weakened her. At their Santa Barbara home, having returned from Los Angeles and his film commitments, Michael turned domestic and became the dutiful husband and father. He would often wake up early and brew strong coffee for himself and Diandra to drink together on their balcony. Around her, Michael knew, he had to be careful to keep his lingering bachelor ways outside the front door, to not “be a bad influence. She was so young [when we married], but she didn’t get sucked up into the Hollywood scene. She held back, picking and choosing her way.
“I guess what I found out before Diandra, was that I was basically very lonely. I’ve really only been happy with one person. And I learned that although I like to get it on—have a good time on a Friday or Saturday night—I can’t go out and get crazy all the time like I used to and recover as quickly.… I joke with some of my rock and roll friends who knew me in my wild, single days, like Joe Walsh [of the Eagles]. A lot of them are still out on the road after fifteen or eighteen years. I mean, if you’ve got kids who get up real early in the morning, your life is going to be different from the way it was.… I guess [Diandra] and I were soul mates—like we knew each other in a different life.”
But it was in this life that both of them were having a difficult time. Diandra was trying to work at drafting international charters to protect the environment while caring for Cameron. She regularly complained to Michael that since the baby was born she did not have enough time for herself or quality time together with him. Michael had no answer for that. No matter how much coffee he made or how early he woke up, he was by profession a producer and actor; it was a life that would never allow him to be home precisely at six, kiss the baby, read the paper, and sit down with his wife for dinner. Their different lifestyles had created a physical and emotional divide between them that would only get worse.
IN THE WINTER of 1979, with much fanfare, Michael, under the Bigstick banner, returned to filmmaking, signing a nonexclusive three-picture producing deal with Columbia Pictures, thanks in part to Sherry Lansing. Michael could not deny that he preferred making movies rather than changing diapers.
It was, at the time, a great deal for Michael, because it meant he would no longer have to hustle studios for distribution for every picture he wanted to make or spend all his time trying to raise funds. Columbia was willing to put up all the money. But not long after he made the deal Lansing left Columbia and landed up at Twentieth Century-Fox, the first female head of a major Hollywood studio. After Lansing’s departure, Michael felt orphaned, left without an enthusiastic supporter, and his producing career at Columbia stalled.
With nothing else on his plate and eager to work, he accepted a quickie acting role in a small film for Universal called Running. He made it simply because there was nothing else to do and he was not quite ready to return to full-time domesticity.
Hollywood always loves health fads, and none was more pervasive in the ’70s than running. It was inexpensive, and no equipment was needed beyond a pair of sneakers; it soon became a craze on the order of the 1950s Hula Hoop, something both fun and healthy. When it hit the film community celebrity circuit, everyone wanted to run. Dustin Hoffman had helped kick up the craze when he starred in John Schlesinger’s 1976 film adaptation of William Goldman’s novel Marathon Man. As writer Robert Vare put it in Cue magazine that fall, “Try to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, or even Tunnel Workers Gazette without finding a story on jogging, usually written by a former hapless endomorph—a man who used to look like a dyspeptic ulcer but who now has been transmogrified through running into a person often mistaken in singles bars for Sylvester Stallone.”
Hollywood cashed in on the running craze for a while, but by the time Steven Hilliard Stern’s Running was produced, only the die-hards were still enthusiastic about it. Still, Michael remained convinced it would make a good movie. “The script knocked me out,” he dutifully told one interviewer. “I wasn’t even into running at the time. But it was a beautifully written love story about a man who has never really pushed himself in life and now has to get his act together.” It may not have been all that beautiful a script, but the character seemed almost uncomfortably close to Michael and his current career dilemma.
The plot for Running, such as it is, concerns an Olympic runner who has never quite made it in professional sports, wants to try to qualify for that year’s Olympics, suffers a debilitating injury, but goes on to finish. There is lots of grunting and sweating in the film, and an unlikely Hollywood-style happy ending involving a gratifying reunion with the runner’s ex-wife at the finish line, all of it watched on TV by his ecstatic daughters. Michael’s co-star in the film was Susan Anspach, a good-looking blond actress who projected an interesting combination of sophistication and sensuality, and who also happened to be one of Jack Nicholson’s lovers.
To prepare for the role, Michael moved back into his Hollywood office full-time, leaving Diandra at home with the baby, and began running every day through the twisty rises of Beverly Hills, doing, he later claimed, up to sixty miles a week—not exactly the physical regimen that De Niro went through for Scorsese’s Raging Bull, but still a lot of running. He then temporarily relocated to New York City to shoot some of the exteriors before moving again, this time to Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, where most of the remainder of the film was actually shot.
Despite Anspach’s sultry presence, the resulting film had no heat. It was yet another sexless turn for Michael in a film that literally went around in circles. It was released nationwide by Universal on November 16, 1979, and was gone from movie screens by Christmas.
BEFORE RUNNING was released, Michael announced the first project of his three-picture production deal with Columbia.1 It was to be called Romancing the Stone, with a script written by a complete unknown, a Malibu waitress who had given to it an agent while she continued to wait on tables. Her name was Diane Thomas. As Michael remembers, it was passed around the studios and received little enthusiasm before it landed on his desk. He took it home one Thursday night, read it after dinner, and couldn’t put it down. “I just loved it. [Later] I went to Alice’s Restaurant to meet Diane, and I found that she had the same kind of quality as [the leading female character in the film] Joan Wilder. She was an attractive blonde who had a shyness about her and a real need for adventure. She had written the script as her own fantasy.”
The following day Michael contacted Frank Price, the new chief executive of Columbia Pictures, and John Veitch, the senior vice president, and told them he had found his first project for them. “I was looking for something that would be fun and lighter than the other things I had produced. I thought it had the elements of romance and action and comedy, and I liked the idea of shooting something in the jungle, or down in Mexico.”
Price and Veitch each took the script home over the weekend, and on Monday they gave Michael the green light to make a preemptive bid prior to auction of $250,000 for the script, an astronomical amount for a first screenplay by a woman at a time when there weren’t that many established female screenwriters in Hollywood. Being on-screen was no problem for women; behind the scenes, though, with notable exceptions like Lansing, it was nearly impossible for them to break through the industry’s glass ceiling.
Michael, however, with his liberal sixties background, had no problem with Diane Thomas’s gender or her lack of experience. “It was a bidding situation and I was always accused of paying too much money for a first-time writer. My take was, if it’s a first-time writer or a tenth screenwriter, it’s priceless.”
Interestingly, no actors came knocking on Michael’s door looking to play Jack T. Colton, the Harrison Ford–type male lead. Part of the problem was that the role appeared to be actually modeled after Ford himself, and the film resembled a bit too closely a Spielberg-Lucas project called Raiders of the Lost Ark that had just gone into production as a joint venture between Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount. One of the reasons Thomas’s obviously commercial script had received no previous takers was that no other actor in Hollywood was willing to ruffle those golden Spielberg/Lucas/Paramount feathers.
Except Michael. He had decided to play the role himself.
The reasons that Michael had not made this kind of movie or played this type of role before had more to do with his personal feelings than the rigid dictates of Hollywood. “The role of Jack Colton is closer to my father. I guess I’ve shied away from the kind of roles he played, shied away from the comparison. Passion and anger. It limits you a little.… The Colton role is also closer to me than what I’ve played before. He’s a rascal.… [A]s Joan Wilder’s publisher says in the script, ‘Jack’s favorite author is the guy who wrote Pull tab to open.’ ”
So the dynamics of the emotional and professional competition of son versus father were still there for the both of them. Kirk’s reaction to this shift in Michael’s career direction and choice of roles? Cautious enthusiasm (heavy on the caution, light on the enthusiasm) with a critical assessment of Michael’s having not yet found himself as an actor. “Michael’s just scratched the surface as an actor. There are lots of things inside him that haven’t emerged on-screen yet, an inner strength, an inner anger. There’s a mystery inside him. A seething cauldron behind that face. It’s a wonderful quality. A good part for Michael would be a nice, sweet, lovable guy and then—bang—you’re suddenly looking into the eyes of a killer.… [B]efore Champion, I played weaklings, made pictures like A Letter to Three Wives. Then, suddenly, everyone thought of me as a tough guy.” Including Michael. In effect, Kirk was saying that Michael had not played up to his talents or his abilities, and until he did, he would never be as good an actor as his father.
PRODUCTION ON Romancing the Stone had originally been scheduled to begin in February 1980, but because it still had no director, the studio was insisting on a major rewrite, and the location was not set, its start was pushed back indefinitely. It was still a go, but as far as the studio was concerned, it was now only a partial green light.
In the meantime, Michael started looking for another film just to act in, a quick shoot, something to keep him busy that he might be able to squeeze in while he waited for Romancing the Stone to go into production.
He talked things over with Nicholson. Michael said he was worried about the long delay getting Romancing the Stone going, something he attributed at least in part to Columbia’s dragging its feet. Nicholson was less concerned about Michael’s producing problems and told him so in no uncertain terms. The reason he had not become a big movie star, Jack told him, was that he had been rendered sexless by the studios. He needed a script with some heat in it.
Michael chose something called It’s My Turn, in which he played a former baseball player, Ben Lewin, whose mother (Dianne Wiest) is marrying a female mathematician’s widowed father. Kate Gunzinger, the mathematician (Jill Clayburgh), is a professor at a Chicago university and lives with her boyfriend, Homer (Charles Grodin). When Kate travels to New York to attend the wedding she meets Ben. Although he is married, he and Kate have a brief but passionate affair. After the wedding, Kate returns to Chicago, unsure what the future holds.
When Clayburgh agreed to do It’s My Turn, the script had already been knocking around for six years. Back then, Claudia Weill, a television producer (and distant cousin to Kurt Weill), liked the novel it was based on and contacted screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein to ask if she would be interested in writing a screenplay-to-order called Girlfriends, similar to the novel in some ways but with some differences.
Bergstein said no, she was too busy working on her next novel.
Several years later, Weill was given significant public TV grant money to make a movie, and once again contacted Bergstein. This time she agreed, as long as she was guaranteed to have input every stage of the way. That screenplay eventually became It’s My Turn.
When she felt it was ready, Weill gave the script to Alan Ladd Jr. “Laddie,” at the time the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, loved it and wanted to make a hefty preemptive offer. However, when Weill told Bergstein, she rejected it, telling Weill she had changed her mind and wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, that she was only interested in writing for public TV.
It took some convincing, but when Jill Clayburgh expressed interest in playing Kate, Bergstein agreed and the deal looked set. Then suddenly Laddie and his entire team were gone, the victims of a studio coup. Either way, the new regime at Fox had no interest in It’s My Turn.
But not for long. Veteran producer Ray Stark, a longtime Columbia producer whose pictures carried the prestigious credit “A Ray Stark Film,” wanted to take over the entire production, and he reconceived it top to bottom, cutting out a key sex scene between Michael and Clayburgh. That scene was one of the reasons Michael had wanted to make the film.
By the time It’s My Turn started shooting, it was already supposed to have been in postproduction. This affected preproduction scheduling on Romancing the Stone. To save time, Michael and Clayburgh volunteered to rehearse evenings and weekends. It was also his first experience being directed by a woman, and Claudia Weill made it her business to get on Michael’s good side by appealing to his male vanity and his narcissism. As he recounted, “I have not had many directors come up to me and say, ‘You are such a dish.’ I was immediately spoiled, and comforted in an offhand sort of way. There is a moment in every actor’s life when he sees the director, normally male, go over to the leading lady, put his arm around her shoulder and whisper, ‘What’s wrong, darling? Let’s talk.’ Well, I’m sorry, but guys like to be complimented too. I just loved having the director come to me, put her arm around my shoulder and ask me if I’m okay.”
FILMING WAS COMPLETED on It’s My Turn in seven weeks at Columbia’s studios in Burbank and one week of location pickups in New York City. It was scheduled for release in the fall of 1980, but prior to its opening, a firestorm developed at Columbia. After several disappointing previews, Michael, who was still upset about that scene between him and Clayburgh that had been cut, announced he would do no publicity appearances for the film. At the same time, Marilyn Beck, who wrote a Hollywood gossip column, claimed that she knew that Michael hated the film: it had taken far too long to make, he wished he’d never gotten involved, and he was going to refuse to promote it.2 When Ray Stark found out, he blew a gasket. He believed that he and Columbia had done Michael a huge favor by giving him a lot of money for a role that he could do in a sleepwalk, and the least he could do was help sell the film. But Michael had a different view. Besides losing the one scene he felt he needed to give him some heat as an actor, the film had also cost him his start date on Romancing the Stone. To him, it was like giving up an executive position at the office to take on the more pressing task of becoming the head of the typing pool.
Michael was summarily called into Ray Stark’s office for a tongue-lashing, during which Stark implied that Michael’s entire future at Columbia might be at stake. Michael tried to calm Stark down by telling him that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion, a story planted in the press by someone who didn’t like him. Whether or not Stark believed the story, Michael got off with a mild rebuke—mostly, insiders believed, because privately, Stark, like Michael, was not overly fond of either the film or Claudia Weill and knew that Columbia was much more heavily invested in the more important Romancing the Stone.
IT’S MY TURN opened on October 24, 1980, and proved a $7 million dud. Weill was especially hurt by the fact that just before the film’s premiere Stark wanted to do yet another cut. At that point, though, the studio heads, perhaps fearing an avalanche of lawsuits, gave her cut the final green light.
Weill chose never to work for a major Hollywood studio again.3
Michael resumed preproduction activities on Romancing the Stone. However, three years would pass before a single footage of film would be shot, largely because of a serious skiing accident that sidelined Michael. To keep busy, he kept looking for new projects he could produce from his wheelchair.
The first was something called Virgin Kisses, a novel by Gloria Nagy about a woman who has a one-night affair with a married man and can’t let him go when he wants to return to his wife. Columbia hated it, and it was shelved, but Michael kept renewing the rights to Virgin Kisses, believing that one day he would get it made.
Another project he liked was something called Starman, a sci-fi flick about a space traveler from another world who accidentally lands on earth and then can’t leave. It was vaguely reminiscent of an old DC Comics character that appeared in the 1950s, John Jones (J’onn J’onnzz), Manhunter from Mars. (The character eventually became a member of the Justice League of America.) Michael’s choice was a prescient one. Within two decades comic books would rule the world of animated and special-effects cinema. But in 1982, Columbia was leery about such a project; finally the studio gave it the green light, if for no other reason than to keep Michael at Columbia.
At the same time, the hottest director in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg, was making his own space adventure film, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. He had already made Jaws (1975) and the blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and was about to release the most sure-fire film of the year, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Every studio, including Columbia, wanted E.T., but Columbia had to pass because it already had Starman. Frank Price, the head of production, believed that between the two projects the studio had chosen the right one. A memo he sent around said that in his opinion, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was a children’s film, while Starman was an adult love story that happened to take place in space.
Despite Price’s memo, Columbia was gun-shy about taking on Spielberg one-on-one and put the brakes on Starman—not enough to kill it, but just enough to slow it down until E.T. was in theaters. But even as E.T. was released in 1982, a host of directors, including Adrian Lyne, John Badham, Michael Mann, and Tony Scott, came in and out of Starman, while Columbia never came up with a firm start date. “We had Tootsie in development for four years,” said Frank Price, in defense of the Starman delays. “If you’re trying to make exceptional pictures, which is what Michael and all of us are trying to do, it takes time.”
“What has happened to the movie business,” Michael told Esquire magazine, “is market research. You would think, and I did think, that here I am, I’ve produced two big movies, and I go to the studio with a new thing I want to do. I’ve got a track record, but it turns out that doesn’t matter.”
Instead, the studio turned its attention to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, an epic, widescreen biography of the Indian pacifist leader meant to be the next Lawrence of Arabia (1962), except that Attenborough, a British actor turned director, was no David Lean, and Ben Kingsley, as good an actor as he is, was no Peter O’Toole.
But if Michael thought that Starman was going to be kick-started by Columbia after E.T.’s success at the Academy Awards, he was wrong.4 The studio continued to drag its feet on Starman, demanding rewrite after rewrite, to make sure there was no way it could be considered a “copy” of ET. It wasn’t until the summer of 1983 that Columbia announced production would begin that fall.
Now Michael set about finding a director. He chose John Badham, whose biggest film to date was 1977’s Saturday Night Fever. However, even before production began Starman was delayed yet again by the studio, and Badham left to make Blue Thunder followed by the sci-fi youth adventure WarGames.
At that point, Michael gave up on Starman, and Columbia. Starman was made a year later at Columbia, directed by John Carpenter, and released in 1984, starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, and while not a big moneymaker ($28 million domestic on a $24 million budget) it is considered today one of the better ’80s sci-fi films. Michael received a producer credit, but except for hiring Carpenter, he had little to do with the film and severed his ties with the studio before it was released. “My father taught me that a good business deal is one which is beneficial to both parties. In that sense, the Columbia deal was not a good business deal. I discovered that I work best in a funky little office somewhere, with just a reader and a secretary.”
Whatever story he wanted to tell about what had happened to Starman and his relationship with Columbia, five years had passed without Romancing the Stone or, for that matter, any new Michael Douglas film being made. He managed to retrieve the name Bigstick from the studio (it was of no value to them), left his spacious Columbia offices in Burbank, and went back to his small office in Hollywood to try to turn his career around. The one sure project he had was Romancing the Stone, the still-undeveloped script he had always liked but that had somehow gotten away from him. Instead he had taken dumb acting parts and followed the lead of the post-Lansing corporate heads at Columbia, the same geniuses who had turned down E.T. for Starman and then screwed that up.
He held the script up and took a deep breath. It had to be his ticket back.
HOWEVER, BEFORE he could resurrect Romancing the Stone, another acting assignment came his way, via Fox, something called The Star Chamber. He liked the script and decided to do it. He was cast as an idealistic judge who gets drawn into a secret vigilante law group—a plot with echoes of Clint Eastwood’s popular 1973 Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force.
The Star Chamber takes its title from the feared seventeenth-century English court. It was written by Roderick Taylor and directed by journeyman Peter Hyams. Also in the film was Hal Holbrook (who, coincidentally, had played a major role in Magnum Force). Despite an extensive television promotion campaign, the film, released on August 5, 1983, after the season’s big summer openings, flopped badly, pulling in just under $2 million on opening weekend and grossing a total of $5.5 million before it quickly disappeared.
If there was any rationale for his doing the film besides wanting to be at Fox where, not coincidentally, Sherry Lansing was now calling the shots, it was to make himself bankable as an actor again, a plan that decidedly hadn’t worked. The studio was hesitant about making Romancing the Stone with Michael playing the lead and preferred either Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood, both actors red-hot at the time, but getting Clint was impossible. He had solidly landed at Warner with his Malpaso production company, a total-control setup that Michael could only envy. Whatever Clint wanted to do, he did; unfortunately, he passed on Romancing the Stone. And Burt Reynolds said no too. At one point Columbia had gone after Sylvester Stallone to play the lead, but he didn’t work out either.
Sherry Lansing believed in Michael’s abilities and potential star-power and wanted to keep him at Fox. To do so, before he could make a deal anywhere else, she gave him the green light to both produce and star in Romancing the Stone at the studio.
1 The studio agreed to honor the deal after Lansing’s departure but reserved the right to approve all projects; it didn’t want Michael making anything but popular mainstream (i.e., nonpolitical) movies.
2 The scene, written by Bergstein, was cut by Weill at the urging of Stark, who didn’t like anything approaching explicit sex in his strictly PG films. The most erotic scene in the script, it had Michael and Clayburgh dancing together. Bergstein later used it as the basis for another screenplay that became a huge hit, Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing (1987).
3 It’s My Turn was Weill’s second feature film. Her first, Girlfriends, was independently made and sold to Warner. It was on the basis of that film that It’s My Turn was green-lighted. Afterward she returned to independent features, documentaries, and teaching.
4 That year Gandhi won eight Oscars; ET won four. Tootsie, another Columbia Pictures film, was nominated for ten Oscars but only won one, for Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Lange).