by David Hughes
Thus, Goldman had to reconfigure the story so that it could work both ways: as if it were really happening; and as if it were all in Quaid’s mind. “That’s the great thing about the movie,” says Schwarzenegger, “that from the beginning it always works on two levels and the audience has to guess what is reality and what is not.” Says Verhoeven, “As much as possible we kept these two realities alive, so that everything could be explained one way or another. And of course with Arnold being a superhero, people would always hope and think that it’s real, but there’s strong doubts about that if you look at the movie for a second time.” To illustrate this, Verhoeven points to the scene where Rekall salesman Bob McClane tells Quaid the nature of his chosen vacation: “You are a top operative under deep cover on your most important mission,” he tells his eager customer. “People are trying to kill you, left and right. You meet this beautiful, exotic woman... By the time the trip is over you get the girl, kill the bad guys and save the entire planet.” In other words, says Verhoeven, “McClane tells him everything that’s going to happen in the movie! It’s counter to every normal narrative — you would not tell anyone where it’s going. [But here] you get the whole story completely formulated for you. In the next scene,” he adds, “we are given several clues, [such as] the woman that he wants to be implanted in his dream — because he can make a choice; he can choose the woman. Of course the woman he describes is the woman he has a kind of fantasy image of that he dreams about, which is this girl, Melina. He describes her as well as he can, and he gets her!”
Having solved this problem with the kind of narrative acrobatics of which Philip K. Dick might have been proud, Goldman tackled another problem. “At the point that Quaid gets his memory back, I thought there was nothing interesting left in the movie — suddenly it just became this ordinary action picture. I wanted the whole movie to be as interesting as the beginning. So I invented the idea that Quaid wants to get back to being his authentic self, but he finds out that his authentic self [Hauser — the agent working for Cohaagen] is evil.” In other words, Quaid is not merely Hauser without some key memories, but a separate individual. “At the end of the movie, you find out that Hauser’s in on it,” says Shusett, “that he helped erase his own brain so that Quaid would not recognise his intent to assassinate [the rebel leader] Kuato. And then Hauser says, ‘Well, I hate to ask you, but it’s my body — I was there first, and I want it back. Maybe we’ll see each other in our dreams.’” Says Goldman, “This was a very fresh idea at the time. To my knowledge, it was without precedent.” In the new version, Quaid must decide if he wants to be technically authentic, but evil, or be true to his artificial self, and good. “He has to make a very interesting moral choice, and this takes him straight into Phil Dick territory,” Goldman explains. “Quaid is an artificial human, like the replicants in Blade Runner, except that it’s not his body that is artificial, but only his mental programming. The artificial person, Quaid, is more human than the authentic human, Hauser.
“It’s also psychologically accurate, I think, to say that no one (except in a Hollywood movie) would give up his/her identity, just to become authentic. Identity is life itself. It’s an interesting idea to be offered a choice to have a better life, but not to be oneself.” The hard part, says Goldman, was making this work; even Verhoeven was not convinced it could be done, until Goldman came up with the idea for the second video message from Hauser, which he receives after Quaid is captured by Cohaagen in Kuato’s lair. “That part of the narrative, that little twist, was something that Gary Goldman added to the story, because that was never there before,” Verhoeven admits. “Now Quaid will be forced to become the person he doesn’t want to be, because he has to make a moral choice. The last thing that he wants is to go back to being Hauser.”
“Paul Verhoeven had great instincts, great ideas, and intellectual courage,” says Goldman. “I am sure that all of my good ideas would have been rejected by any studio and almost any other director. In Hollywood, ideas are anathema, and the bigger the budget, the more forbidden they are. The authorities are not very educated, but they can smell an idea at a hundred paces — and, like a giant in a fairy tale, they will sniff out the idea and rip it out. Only a powerful director can protect an idea. And Carolco was the perfect place to work, because Mario and Andy gave their directors almost complete freedom.”
Goldman says that he and Verhoeven were “generally interested in having as much fun with ‘mindfucks’ as we could. This included introducing as many big surprises as possible. For example, the idea that the whole plot was about using Quaid to lead them to Kuato, because Kuato was psychic and would detect any traitor. Plus we knew that, at that time in Hollywood, for reasons of political correctness, African-American characters had been typecast as good guys. So I decided to make Benny the bad guy, as it would catch audiences by surprise. Paul wasn’t afraid of being politically incorrect — in fact, you could say that his whole career is based on being politically incorrect. He does it with a vengeance. I would say that I have the same bent, but don’t take the same relish in it. But we’re both interested in seeing things clearly, and seeing through popular clichès and delusions and hypocrisies. It was this same disposition that made us really embrace Phil Dick’s challenge to consensual reality, and to push it as far as we did. And to leave the movie on a note of doubt, but with a sense of humour.”
Ironically, Goldman was not a fan of Dick’s work at the time, having had very little exposure to it. Nevertheless, he says, “I am generally faithful to all the writers who come before me, from source material to earlier screenwriters. I try not to get involved in rewriting projects unless I like what’s already there. And then my modus operandi is to bring out the existing values, and try to complete and perfect them. So, I was being faithful to the ideas in the first half of the screenplay, which were the same as the ideas in the first half of the short story. Phil himself tended to combine and garble his many ideas, and he rarely worked out any idea in a complete and consistent way. He just kept flitting about to the next idea.” Shusett agrees: “His work is very tough to translate into a screenplay because it has such brilliant set-ups that it’s hard to match his level of brilliance in the pay-off. That’s why most of his best work is short stories, and even those stories don’t have a third act.”
Goldman admits that the second half of the movie, beginning as Quaid arrives on Mars, was largely a concession to Hollywood plotting, and therefore retained most of the structure of the version Bruce Beresford had planned to shoot. “I didn’t think I had the liberty to make big changes because I was under the impression that Arnold, the studio and Paul were all ready to make that story. So I mainly concentrated on fixing and improving what was there. I would have preferred a more consistently realistic view of the future and more believable science, in regard to gravity, physics, and atmosphere. But we were making an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and that guided the tone and many of the decisions. Even so, we tried to make the movie a bit less jokey and more rigorous than Arnold’s previous movies.”
Having completed his first rewrite, Goldman and Verhoeven met with Schwarzenegger, Shusett, Vajna and Kassar. “Arnold and Ron had discussed our draft, and they felt that our climax lacked emotion,” Goldman remembers. “This was a valid observation because Paul prefers a dry emotional tone, and he really didn’t take very seriously the subplot about Martian liberation. He saw the movie as an intellectual puzzle. But faced with opposition from the star, I saw the need for a compromise, and fortunately an idea came to me in the meeting, and I proposed the idea about Cohaagen shutting off the air. This gave us a nice cruel action to justify the suffering of the poor mutants. I made these changes, and we went into production.” Adds Shusett, “All of a sudden all the pieces came together, and instead of going to Australia we went to Mexico.”
“I think we were a very writer-friendly group,” says Verhoeven, “because they were part of everything. They could see the dailies and have as much input as they wan
ted.” Adds Goldman, “It was a rare privilege for a Hollywood screenwriter, who is usually unwelcome on the set. If a screenwriter is present, it is usually an emergency script doctor who is brought in to ‘fix’ a problem. But Paul has great respect for screenplays and screenwriters. He works tirelessly on his scripts, and then he shoots them word for word. He almost never improvises, and he prevents the actors from deviating from the text. If something wasn’t working on the set, he would call for me and ask me to write something new. Ron Shusett and I liked and respected each other, and we worked together on the rewrites while we were down there. We spent a lot of time making small revisions, but ultimately I would say that we changed less than one per cent.”
Both writers admit to a few issues with the finished film. “There’s too much foul language, too much noisy shooting, too much violence and death,” says Goldman. “It’s a bit too long, and you don’t really care about the mutants. And the bulging eyes at the end went on too long,” he adds, referring to Quaid and Melina gasping for air in the Martian atmosphere. “I think that hurt us a lot because it was like a runner stumbling at the finish line. A lot of these things could have been fixed if we had had one test screening, but, alas, we didn’t. There was no time.” Shusett agrees: “Paul and Gary and I always regretted not having time for a preview, because you can’t get any perspective on what you’re doing.” Additional pressure came from the impending release of Warren Beatty’s star-studded Dick Tracy, which the filmmakers, and the studio, saw as a threat. “We didn’t want to open the same week, so we paid editors ‘golden time’ so we could go out a week earlier than Dick Tracy,” says Shusett, “but that robbed us of any preview. If we had just had a week to calm down, look at what we’d just cut... I wouldn’t have shot anything differently, I just would have re-edited the third act a little tighter, and then I think it would have hit the jackpot instead of it being seventy-five or eighty per cent the movie I was hoping it would be. Having said that, we were lucky to get that close.”
“I think that we captured Phil’s serio-comic tone better than anyone else has.” Goldman says. “That’s really what sets his work apart, in my opinion — his irreverent, alienated, kitchen sink, neurotic view of the future. Also, Paul Verhoeven is a truly brilliant man with a Doctorate in mathematics. Although his movies can be crass, Paul is a truly independent and deep thinker. It’s important not to confuse style with substance. Paul likes to be crass and offensive, on top of being incisive and precise. Paul, like Phil defined himself, is a ‘crap artist’, making great art from shit. It’s a mistake to think that a good Phil Dick movie is necessarily dark, moody and elegant, like Blade Runner.” Above all, Goldman doubts that anyone but Verhoeven would have had the courage to make a movie which questions the supposed reality the audience has just experienced. “He made that decision, and I executed it,” he says. “I doubt that anyone but myself would have thought up the idea that Quaid doesn’t recover his memory and become authentic again; [that] he is not the same as Hauser — Hauser is bad — and Quaid must choose his artificial identity over his real one. I think these are powerful extensions of Phil’s setup and themes.” Overall, he adds, “I loved working with Paul, Ron, Mario and Andy, Arnold, and Sharon Stone. It was a perfect experience from beginning to end, and I don’t expect to be so lucky again.” Certainly, Goldman would not be so fortunate with his subsequent association with Total Recall 2.
Today, the box office performance of Total Recall would virtually guarantee a sequel. In 1990, however, Hollywood was a very different place, as Goldman explains: “When we finished Total Recall, none of the major players wanted to make a sequel. They all felt that the franchise wasn’t well suited to a sequel. They also held the previously accepted idea that sequels were commercial debasements that serious artists did not indulge in.” The success of James Cameron’s Aliens had been an exception, and the same director’s subsequent sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day would further change this way of thinking. At the time, however, Shusett’s and Goldman’s interest in a sequel to Total Recall fell on deaf ears.
Then, in the early 1990s, Goldman optioned another Philip K. Dick story, ‘Minority Report’, with a view to directing it himself as a low-budget feature. He approached Verhoeven to ask if he would attach himself as executive producer, thus throwing the weight of his name behind the project, even if he was not directly involved. “He read the short story, liked it, and agreed to help me out. Then he asked me if I had thought about how well the story worked as a Total Recall sequel. Although it had nothing to do with the themes of the movie, there was something about the tone and driving narrative that made it seem perfect for a sequel.” Better still, it did not repeat anything from the original film, allowing Goldman to take the franchise in a totally new direction, but one that would be thematically consistent with the original. “This is what appealed to Paul,” he says. “The possibility of doing a sequel that seemed original, not repetitive or derivative.”
In Dick’s story, certain human beings are born with telepathic powers, shunned by ordinary citizens but embraced by the government as the foundation for a new anti-crime organisation called the Pre-Crime division, which uses the telepaths (known as ‘pre-cogs’) to predict illegal activities before they occur, and arrest the would-be criminals before any crime is committed. The plot revolves around a particular Pre-Crime detective forced to go on the run when the pre-cogs spit out his name as a future murderer. As Verhoeven explains, “There was an introduction [in Total Recall] that the mutants were perhaps clairvoyant, and that was used in the idea for the second one where Quaid becomes the head of this company that can look into the future and protect citizens by eliminating criminals before they do the crime.” Thus, the mutants would become the ‘pre-cogs’ of Dick’s story, the film rights to which Goldman now owned.
“I had to make a tough decision between continuing with my plan to direct a small movie from ‘Minority Report’, or to become the writer-producer of a Total Recall sequel based on ‘Minority Report’,” Goldman says. “At the time, I was still working closely with Paul and Carolco. We had worked together on Basic Instinct, which had turned out to be the biggest movie of the year worldwide, and I had done a rewrite on Crusade which had gotten the project out of Development Hell and into pre-production [see chapter 6]. It seemed like the Total Recall sequel was a sure thing to speed into production, and become another big hit. So I decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.” At this point, Goldman and Verhoeven discovered that Ron Shusett had a contractual right to write the first draft of any Total Recall sequel, and that they would therefore need his permission to proceed. Goldman proposed that they write the sequel together, based on the ‘Minority Report’ story, on the proviso that Goldman would then be attached to co-write all future Total Recall sequels. Says Shusett, “We worked on it together and immediately clicked, and it became a wonderful sequel. Arnold was going to star in it, and Paul Verhoeven was going to direct it. Then, right after we wrote it, Carolco went bankrupt.” Indeed, Carolco’s financial situation was so serious it reneged on its contractual payments to Shusett and Goldman. As a result, ownership of the underlying rights — to both the short story and the first draft — reverted to the writers, allowing them to move it to 20th Century Fox.
By this time, Verhoeven was busy shooting Showgirls, and Goldman says he lost interest in the sequel. Not so, says Verhoeven: “Somebody whose name I won’t name, without warning, took it away — somebody who had me on their pay list, like a Judas. So in some subversive ways, I think, it left Carolco and it came into the hands of Jan De Bont.” At this stage, Verhoeven’s fellow Dutchman was a celebrated cinematographer, yet to direct the runaway hit Speed. Says Goldman, “Jan and the studio discussed acquiring the Total Recall franchise from Carolco, and continuing to develop ‘Minority Report’ as a Total Recall sequel. Ultimately, they decided not to continue with it as a sequel, so we removed all the Total Recall elements and used the first draft as the foundation for fu
rther work.” From that point on, ‘Minority Report’ was developed as a free-standing movie, based only on the Dick short story. Says Shusett, “We were really devastated, because we had proved tangibly to everybody, including Paul and Arnold, that it would make a great sequel. But my spirits rose when Fox bought it as a non-sequel, a free-standing movie.”
Even after its estrangement from Total Recall 2 and development as a separate entity, Minority Report suffered a further five years in Development Hell, with Jan De Bont eventually jumping ship, as Shusett recalls: “He was very hot from Speed and he’d followed up with Twister, but then Speed 2 and The Haunting bombed out, and gradually Fox lost faith in him. We wrote a new draft for him in ’95, but they couldn’t find an actor that liked his draft that Fox was in favour of too. It was years later — ’98 or ’99 — that Spielberg came in and read a draft he didn’t like. But when we personally got our draft to him, and persuaded him to read it, he did like it. And then he used an amalgamation of some of their draft and some of our draft and his own ideas, and because he’s Steven Spielberg, his version was better in many ways, and he made the best film of all.” Shusett — who, like Goldman, earned an executive producer credit on Spielberg’s film (Jan De Bont gets an associate producer credit) — admits to being surprised that the director’s take on the material was so dark, “even darker than our last draft. It was so dark that I think summer audiences weren’t ready for it. We should have released it in the winter, and then I think they might have expected it, and been able to handle it. It was too dark a movie for people expecting summer fun with a Total Recall/Phil Dick name on it, and our names connected to it — they thought it would be like Total Recall. And instead it was more like Blade Runner and they weren’t ready for that.” Indeed, although Minority Report (2002) grossed $350 million worldwide, it fell far short of expectations generated by the first teaming of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, especially on a sci-fi project. “It got wonderful reviews, and everybody thought it would do $500 or $600 million worldwide,” Shusett points out, “but it only made $350 million — and only $130 million in America, when there are movies making $200, $300 million domestically.”
