CHAPTER 21 CHAPTER 21Giving back to the planet, that’s probably as close to immortality as you can get.… Maybe because I’m so consumed with my father’s legacy—the honors he’s receiving, the theaters that are named after him, all of the incredible amount of impressive things—that either I haven’t dealt with mine or I just don’t think of myself in the same category. I don’t know. It’s sort of the opposite side of growing up.… You grow up in the shadow of somebody and then at the end, in the twilight, you have the shadow of that somebody again.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
MICHAEL RETURNED TO ACTIVE FILMMAKING IN 2005, via his independent production company Further Films. The Sentinel, his first feature in three years, directed by Clark Johnson and shot on location in Georgetown, in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. He both starred in and produced this presidential assassination movie involving rogue Secret Service men, based on the novel by a former Secret Service agent, Gerald Petievich. Also in the cast were Eva Longoria, Kim Basinger, and Kiefer Sutherland. In the film, which is similar to Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire, a 1993 Clint Eastwood vehicle, Michael plays Pete Garrison, an aging Secret Service agent assigned to the president’s inner circle who becomes involved in an affair with the president’s wife (played by Kim Basinger), a scenario preposterous enough without the almost sixty-one-year-old Michael Douglas in that role. Being the boss has its benefits.
Still, Michael experienced more than the usual amount of trouble raising money for this project, and it made him realize how much the business of making movies had changed. “I’m in love,” he told one reporter, “and I’ve got a nice family, so part of [my not wanting to produce movies], you know, was saying, ‘Screw it.’ Now I’m trying to get my mojo back for our industry.”
To another he said, “Things have changed a lot with not just me getting older.… The industry has changed.… [T]he studios are … companies. They are scouring their libraries to find an economical way to make movies with the least amount of profit participation, which is why we’re seeing all these remakes and sequels and TV series as movies. It’s depressing and difficult. If you want a certain amount of independence as a filmmaker, you’re obliged to find outside financing.”
And to yet another, “Studios today are just a division of an entertainment media corporation. Look, it was always a business, but there was at least the sense of a struggle between art and commerce. It’s gone now … a tough economic climate. You’re either doing big-budget studio pictures or low-budget independent films. Middle-budget films—it’s Death Valley. Anyway, there are no roles at this point that I’m dying to play.… I can’t compete with the younger men. I’m 62 years old. I’m not looking to be taking off my shirt.”
Michael eventually raised the money for The Sentinel by partnering Further Films with another independent film company Regency Enterprises. Together they managed to get a distribution deal with Fox. With their financial backing secure, Michael felt encouraged to fill out a slate of several potential Further Films projects that included a second (unnamed) sequel to Romancing the Stone to star himself and Catherine.1 At the same time, Oliver Stone was putting out feelers to bring Michael back to major name-above-the-title star status by having him reprise his Oscar-winning role as Gordon Gekko in a sequel to Wall Street.
Early in 2006, Michael appeared in Anthony and Joe Russo’s You, Me and Dupree, a family comedy, playing the father of Kate Hudson, and surrounded by such contemporary stars as Owen Wilson, Matt Dillon, and Seth Rogen. The films is mindless, with Michael seemingly wandering through the script looking for a place to sit down. The film was made for $54 million.
THE SENTINEL WAS released on April 21, 2006, and received almost universally negative reviews. Made for $60 million, it grossed a disappointing $78 million worldwide, opened and closed in a flash, and instantly evaporated from the consciousness of the country’s moviegoers. Michael looked old and tired in it, and certainly not believable as the president’s wife’s lover.
After the July 2006 release of You, Me and Dupree, which received equally poor reviews but earned $130 million worldwide ($76 million domestic), Michael then took another break from movies and, together with Catherine, concentrated on building up their growing real-estate empire, which included homes in Barbados, Bermuda, Manhattan, Aspen, and Quebec. In 2007, Michael and Catherine decided to move full-time to Bermuda, as far from the paparazzi as possible. They built a guesthouse in Bermuda so that their parents could come and visit whenever they wanted.
Eventually, though, Michael, missing the Hollywood action, decided to take an acting job back in Hollywood in King of California. He read and liked the script, by first-time director-screenwriter Mike Cahill, a broken-home drama about a young girl (Evan Rachel Wood) trying to find her own identity while her father (Michael Douglas) languishes in a mental institution. Michael was sent the script directly by Cahill after it had been turned down by all the studios, and he decided to become involved simply because he thought it was a part he was well suited for. There were obvious if faint echoes of Cuckoo’s Nest (Stephen Holden, writing in the New York Times, actually called the film “a sequel of sorts” to Cuckoo’s Nest), but no one would ever mistake the two films for each other. King of California, shot in thirty-one days, made it to the Sundance Film Festival, an auspicious beginning, but found full theatrical distribution only in Canada; it had a very limited commercial release in the States and grossed a little over $1 million on a $10 million budget.
AND THEN THE family ghosts once more appeared. In 2007 Cameron, twenty-eight, was arrested again, in New York City, this time for felony possession of a controlled substance after police officers stopped a car he was in and found a syringe with liquid cocaine. (It was rumored but never conclusively proven that Cameron also had been detained in California on similar charges.)
For the last fifteen years Michael had been unable to prevent Cameron, if such a thing were possible, from traveling down the dead end road of drugs and booze that had killed Michael’s half brother Eric. This time, when Cameron pled out to a misdemeanor and opted for rehab, Michael publicly pledged to stand by the boy, to help him by taking more of an admittedly long-overdue, direct fatherly role in his son’s life. “My priorities are my marriage and my children, whereas earlier, my career was my priority. The one thing I pride myself on [with Cameron] is he could count on me. But there were big absences.”
When talking about Cameron’s troubles, Michael immediately recalled his own uphill climb, part of the price that came with being the son of Kirk Douglas. It was as if he were somehow trying to blame the genes he had inherited from his dad and passed along to Cameron, in an effort to absolve himself of any real responsibility. He still sounded somewhat distant and dismissive about the boy, saying, “He’s really good, but acting is about creating your own identity. And the [Kirk Douglas] genes [always] come through and so it takes a little longer to establish yourself.”
But when it came to talking about his second set of children, with Catherine, Michael transformed into proud papa, bursting with pride about how talented his little tykes were. Whenever he was asked about Dylan and Carys, he became the pitch-perfect adoring daddy: “The joy of raising two children includes Dylan doing a mean impersonation of Elvis and Carys memorizing all of the lyrics from Mamma Mia!”
Michael had put Cameron in the darkness of his own past while keeping Dylan and Carys in the brightness of his present.
In 2007, Michael accepted the personal invitation of executive producer Bob Epstein to record a new intro for his friend Brian Williams, the anchor of the broadcast, to be heard every night across America. Not long after, Oliver Stone contacted Michael about the possibility of doing a sequel to Wall Street. Michael jumped at the chance to make a real movie again.
TO WARM UP for his reprise of the character of Gordon Gekko, his first major movie role in nearly a decade, Michael took a cameo in Mark Waters’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, made in 2008 as a modern remake of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Archer, Michael’s co-star from Fatal Attraction (they had no scenes together in Ghosts). It was only moderately successful, but it helped Michael get his acting timing back to tackle Gekko again.
Then the Wall Street sequel hit a series of snags, having mostly to do with Fox’s dissatisfaction with the script and its feeling that the subject was dated. That allowed Michael to make two more fast films in 2008 (for release the following year). One was Peter Hyams’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an awful, phone-it-in remake of the 1956 Fritz Lang film that starred Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine. The remake bombed big-time at the box office, taking in a total $4.3 million worldwide, not even a third of the $25 million it cost to make.2
Michael also made Solitary Man that year for two good friends, the director Brian Koppelman and producer Steven Soderbergh. It also gave him the chance to work again with Danny DeVito, who had a role in it. The film was critically well received everywhere it played, but few people went to see it. Michael described his role in it this way: “I’m a car dealer who thinks he might have a medical problem and decides to go for broke. Susan Sarandon plays my wife, and Mary-Louise Parker is my girlfriend, so you can see I still get to have a good time onscreen.” The film was made for $15 million and barely earned $5 million worldwide. That meant that Michael’s last several films had flopped, all of which added pressure to his upcoming performance in the Wall Street sequel.
In 2009, Michael and Catherine experienced dual creative resurrections at approximately the same time. In June Michael received one of the highest honors Hollywood gives, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, which Kirk had received in 1991. The ceremony was taped and shown as a television special that July.
In the audience for the gala presentation, to pay homage to Michael’s career, were Kirk; Michael’s mother, Diana; and Catherine, all sitting together. Catherine also opened the show with a sizzling performance of “One” from A Chorus Line. As the words “one singular sensation” came out of Catherine’s mouth, she stared directly at Michael. Tears poured out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
When it was Kirk’s turn to take the stage, he was his usual charming if heavy-handed self. “I’m a little bit confused. I’m too young to have a son getting a lifetime achievement award. I’m so proud of my son Michael. I don’t tell him that much often.”
Many of Michael’s former co-stars showed up to pay tribute—even Bob Dylan, who still carries around the Oscar he won for “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys and displays it onstage at every concert he gives. He was a “surprise” guest and played an acoustic solo version of “Things Have Changed.”
Martin Sheen took the stage to remind the audience of the night’s honoree’s extensive humanitarian work.
Michael was the last to speak, concluding the evening by expressing his ongoing theory of movie star science by saying he was grateful for the “great genes” his parents had blessed him with. “I want to thank you both [Kirk and Diana] and I love you both.” He then made it official by announcing that he was going to star in the sequel to Wall Street, to be directed once again by Oliver Stone; the news surprised the audience and brought one final standing ovation.
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps had found renewed interest at Fox. Stone needed Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps to help restore him to the A-list of mainstream directors. After going through a number of writers and scenarios—one that for a time relocated the entire production to China, which neither Michael nor the Chinese government cared for—the script was restructured with the film beginning as Gekko is released from federal prison after serving an eight-year sentence. Its opening scene has him passing through the prison gates, looking older, downtrodden, and lost in the wilderness of his newly reclaimed freedom (a nice metaphor for where Stone had found himself after his career had floundered—picking up the story of Gekko is picking up his own story).
He soon discovers his daughter is engaged to Jake Moore (more money?), a young, money-hungry wanna-be reminiscent of Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) from the original Wall Street, played by that week’s current Hollywood hotshot Shia LaBeouf. The film’s overly convoluted plot (a Stone signature) has a repentant Gekko trying to make up for his former greed-driven crimes by steering LaBeouf on the road to honest moneymaking and at the same time trying to reconcile with his daughter.
Somewhere buried among all the quick-cuts of computers and trading floors is a love story between LaBeouf’s character and Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), who remains angry at her father for the suicide of her brother while Gordon was in prison. Part of the drama of the film is the conflict caused between LaBeouf’s emergent greed, his Gordon Gekko side, and his genuine love for Carey, who doesn’t like the resemblances she sees between her boyfriend and her father, whom she stopped talking to when he went to prison. The rest of it is essentially a replay of the original—the attractive but losing game of Wall Street greed, the inevitable saving grace of redemption.
Directed by Stone from a script by TV and independent film screenwriter Allan Loeb (also a licensed stockbroker), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps was produced during the summer and early fall of 2009 for $70 million and was promoted less as Oliver Stone’s than as Michael’s return to mainstream moviemaking, reprising a role that had won him his Best Actor Oscar and just might cap his comeback with another one for the same role.3
Catherine, meanwhile, had agreed to star in the 2009 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, a concert-style show loosely based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night. As Desirée, she would have the plum song of the score, “Send in the Clowns.”
Both the show and the movie were New York–based projects. Realizing they were both going to be committed to a long stay in New York, Michael and Catherine agreed to move back full-time to the Central Park West apartment and enroll the children in private schools in Manhattan. Michael began production on the film as Catherine began rehearsals for a December opening.
IN THE MIDST of all this, on July 28, 2009, Cameron, thirty years old, was arrested again, this time by the Drug Enforcement Agency, for possession of half a pound of methamphetamine and charged with the far more serious intent to distribute.
The bust was the result of a three-year sting operation. The authorities had known he was using since 2007, almost from the first time post-rehab. Using phone taps, they knew when Cameron was selling, even the code he used to disguise his transactions. He always referred to meth as “pastry” or “bath salts,” as in “Did you get a chance to, like, smell any of the salts?” Before the capture, one friend who had run into him just days before said, “He came up to hug me and I didn’t recognize him. He was pasty and heavy. The familiar spark was gone.… He had some big shoes to fill, and it haunted him. Cameron was desperately in need of love—as if it was an out-of-reach thing for him.”
The arrest gave Michael another dose of insecurity about his role in Cameron’s life, and a familiar combination of denial and self-pity. Was it his fault that Cameron had been arrested again for drugs? Could he have done more to prevent his son from falling back into such an existence? “I’ll assume whatever responsibilities I have to,” Michael said at the time. “Would it have been better to have been around more? Absolutely. There were absences. I was no angel.”
Cameron pled guilty, and Michael arranged bail for him for house arrest until the April 2010 sentencing. In January, Cameron was arrested again, this time for violating bail when his girlfriend was caught smuggling heroin to him inside an electric toothbrush.
COINCIDENTALLY, Michael’s role in the Wall Street sequel involved a man full of remorse who has lost a son to suicide and is having a difficult relationship with his rebellious daughter, who can’t forgive him for her brother’s untimely passing. Ironically, as an acting prop, Cameron’s tragedy and Eric’s as well were a big help to Michael while he was making the film. But as a mirror that reflected his own perceived failures in helping to save both of them, their fates were a total emotional disaster.
And yet all of it was a mere prelude to the annus horribilis that was about to come down on Michael and Catherine.