by David Hughes
Perhaps unsurprisingly, coming as it does from the co-writer of The Wild Bunch, the script is as bloodthirsty as it is scatological. At one point, Hagen is bound, sewn into the rotting carcass of a donkey and set upon by hungry hyenas. He narrowly escapes the fate of a eunuch — namely, having his genitalia cleanly severed, the wound cauterised and compressed with a mixture of tar and fresh cow dung. An enemy is killed by having a trident thrown through his face. In a climactic scene, Emmich is severed in two by Hagen’s sword, his legs and lower body remaining on his fleeing horse while his upper body falls to the ground. It’s hardly PG-rated stuff. Blood and guts, carnage and chaos are seldom far from the screen, a tendency which might have phased lesser filmmakers, but not the taboo-breaking, envelope-pushing director of such ultra-violent films as Robocop and Total Recall, who later courted a different kind of controversy with Basic Instinct and Showgirls.
“There are touches of lightness and romanticism and there are often funny scenes,” Verhoeven says of Crusade, “but it’s not a happy story. It’s cruel and it’s violent — my kind of ultra-violence that I’ve displayed in many movies — but there is also a lightness and tenderness, and I think with Arnold it would have worked for an audience. And the fact that it wasn’t made had nothing to do with the disbelief of the producer or anyone else that this movie, with Arnold as a Crusader and an honest political touch, would not reach its audience — we all felt that we would.”
The political viewpoint of Green’s script was certainly intriguing, if not groundbreaking. Although it does not contextualise the period in historical or epochal terms — it does not, for instance, open with a caption explaining what the Crusades were all about — there are political elements to both the story and the characters. The fictional Emmich and his cousin Waldemar are corrupt opportunists, using a Papally-sanctioned religious crusade as an excuse to rape and pillage — vividly illustrated by the attack on the Jewish wedding party, launched on the pretext of having them contribute to the war effort. Pope Urban II, for his part, seems more concerned with the geographic incursions made by the Muslim Empire than the souls lost to Islam as a result. Robert of Flanders, commander of the Papal guard, is nobler, decreeing that pillage or violence against any but the enemy will be punishable by death. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the knights leading the Crusade, is as noble as his counterpart Ibn Khaldun, who believes that Christians, Jews and Muslims are fundamentally the same, and hopes that peace may be forged between the disparate religions. Khaldun’s new ally, Djarvat, seeks no such accord; he wishes to drive the infidels from the Holy Land as surely as the Crusaders wish to wipe worshippers of Allah from the face of the Earth with the rallying cry of “Convert or die!”
“It was always supposed to be a movie for Arnold,” says Verhoeven, “so we were all very much aware what kind of movie we had to make. I knew it would have a certain grandeur, also perhaps a little bit of hyper-reality, but on the other hand we wanted to have the historical events be completely correct, and the political point of view — the evil side of the Crusades, which is undoubtedly there. We wanted to make clear that this was not a great endeavour; that it was all cheating by the Pope, who basically lured all these fighting nobles from France so they could die somewhere else, instead of having trouble with them! That’s what most historians think about Urban II. On the other hand, there was this idiotic thinking in Christian religion that Jerusalem should be in Christian hands, for some unclear reason. Even today people think the city should be part of Christianity — [a view] still subsidised by a lot of fundamentalists in the United States.” Before the Crusades, he adds, there was no persecution based on religion in Jerusalem: “Arabs, Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Jewry were all accepted. There was just this evil thought of the Church that because Jesus had lived there, or spent a couple of weeks there, and got killed, that this belonged to Christianity — an even more absurd claim than saying that God promised it to the Jewish population. But as Gore Vidal pointed out, ‘God is not a real estate dealer’.”
Despite the script’s obvious strengths, Verhoeven was not entirely satisfied with the early drafts, and Total Recall co-writer Gary Goldman was called in to rework it. “They came up with a draft or two, and for some reason Paul wasn’t excited about it,” says Goldman. “I think he more or less decided there was something wrong with it, or it wasn’t good enough for him to be ready to make, so he kind of lost interest in it. He showed it to me at around that time and I remember thinking it was very good, and I told him so, and he thought I was an idiot for liking it.” Goldman describes Green’s draft as “a picaresque tale about a roguish serf who gets caught stealing, and the only we to get out of being hanged is to fake a miracle. He cynically endorses the Crusade, and shows the venality of all the European lords who were jockeying for power. It was a very good screenplay,” he adds. “He has a wonderful feeling for period. It was well written; filled with wonderful ideas. It was a great story, and very cynical — a serious historical epic tailored to Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Moreover, Goldman believes it was a subversive script, hiding an intelligent film in the guise of an action movie, allowing Verhoeven to have his cake and eat it — a trick they had already pulled off with Total Recall, in which the audience gets to enjoy an action-packed Arnie movie despite the fact that it takes place almost entirely inside the putative hero’s head. “We presented it in the way of Total Recall,” Verhoeven confirms, “so you can be looking at this movie completely in a non-involved way, just Arnold and adventure: he gets caged, he nearly gets castrated, he finds a girl — this beautiful Arab princess — and he has to kill the bad guys, and then he decides that the best part of life would be to be on his farm with his Arab wife. You could see it on that level. But there were also these other levels: the anti-Semitism, the anti-Arab thinking, prejudices left and right.
“You could say the movie was also pro-Arab, or certainly not anti-Arab — there are bad Christians and good Christians, bad Arabs and good Arabs, but most of the Arabs seem to be okay, so it doesn’t fit into this [attitude of] looking at Arabs as evil people. It wasn’t the Arabs that persecuted the Jews, it was the Christians, with a couple of thousand years of anti-Semitic thinking. In the year 1000 this was common thinking. Even the Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, are permeated by anti-Semitic thinking. So I think we wanted to express that without hitting it hard.” Goldman recalls that the script was an indictment of the Crusades specifically, but, more generally “it was an anti-war statement, basically saying that the Christians had no business going there. That’s not how Hollywood would do it,” he concludes, “but at Carolco we were free to do what we wanted.” Verhoeven, for his part, wanted to do for the Crusades what Oliver Stone, among others, had done for Vietnam, and revisionist Westerns had done for the ignoble conquest of the American West. “If you see other movies about the Crusades,” he explains, “Christianity is saving the world in Jerusalem, and there is this absolute claim of Christianity that that city should be their property. So for the last four hundred years they have desperately tried to get it, and [they believe] that if it’s not to be in Christian hands, at least it has to be fully in Jewish hands.”
Not being the kind of writer to throw out the baby with the bathwater – even though it may result in the Writers Guild of America awarding a larger share of the writing credit, and thus residual payments – Goldman’s final rewrite did not differ significantly from Green’s. “We tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until we finally got it to the point where Paul was very happy with it, and they were ready to go ahead and make it,” the writer explains. “Some of it was that after trying things and trying things, Paul started to realise how good the Walon draft really was, so he kept the changes that were improvements and got rid of the ones that weren’t, pieced together the best parts of each draft, and we ended up with a draft that he was ready to make. I was very excited about it. Walon Green was also very happy with it. He thought the best parts of all his drafts had been chosen
all along, which was Paul’s doing. Your horror as a writer, or your fear, is that someone’s going to ruin your work, but I’ve always been a very respectful rewriter, and Paul really is a creative rewriter-developer. He’s not into starting over.”
One of the more fundamental changes has Hagen and Emmich re-imagined as half-brothers, with the latter as the true heir of a Count, and Hagen as the illegitimate son of the same father (shades of Gloucester’s sons in King Lear). Not only does this add a suitably Biblical sibling rivalry to the relationship, but the Abbot who catches Hagen stealing also uses it to his own advantage: because he knows Hagen is legally entitled to half the estate of Emmich’s father, he agrees to sentence Hagen to death only if Emmich signs a quarter of his estate over to the Abbot. Goldman tones down the attack on the Jewish wedding party so that it is disrupted, not decimated, and Hagen saves the bride from being raped by Emmich and his men, rather than intervening too late.
Leila is also given something of a makeover. Instead of agreeing to the arranged marriage with a Muslim noble (named Duqaq in Goldman’s versions — though in reality ‘Duqaq’ is a rank, not a name — and with Djarvat demoted to a relatively minor presence), she rejects his proposal, forcing Duqaq to resort to nefarious means to ensnare the woman he loves. Furthermore, in Goldman’s version, Ibn Khaldun promises his daughter that in marriage her will is to be her own, to which Djarvat retorts that no woman’s will is her own – and further twists the situation to his advantage by suggesting that their faith faces desecration because of a woman’s pride. Another key device in Goldman’s revisions is that it is Hagen who attempts to broker the peace accord between the Christians and the Muslims, only to have Djarvat’s soldiers attack — thus, it appears that Hagen led the Christians into a trap.
Goldman’s greatest addition to the script is the spectacular ‘Shadow Warrior’ sequence, perhaps the most memorable scene in the entire 132-page enterprise. As Goldman envisaged it, in the middle of the climactic battle between the Crusader army and Djarvat’s Muslim horde, the setting sun projects a gigantic image of Hagen on horseback onto a wall of smoke, throwing the Muslims into a panic and inspiring the Crusader army to victory. The effect is increased when Hagen throws a sword at a Saracen horseman, who keels over dead with the sword arcing straight up like a triumphant cross, surrounded by a mystical aureole of sunlight. From this point, the battle becomes a slaughter, with even Ibn Khaldun — who survives far longer in Goldman’s drafts — falling to Emmich, who drives his men to attack even as the Saracens lower their colours and attempt to surrender. As the surviving Muslims retreat to relative safety within the walls of Jerusalem, the Crusaders lay siege to the city, killing Jews and Muslims with equal vehemence. At the end, Hagen and Leila walk off into the sunset, leaving Ari to ponder which of the three religious faiths he will adopt this week, and the Crusaders to wonder where the true cross is hidden.
Appraising the draft dated 24 January 1993 for the Ain’t It Cool website, reviewer ‘Damien Thorn’ described it as “the greatest unproduced script of the decade... a brutal action epic laced with literate political dialogue and evil humour (what you’d expect for a slicing cavalier Paul Verhoeven flick), this is foremost a smashingly entertaining story that hurtles forward like all those severed limbs in Starship Troopers. Green is known for his ruthless sense of structure and here every scene is loaded with fascinating details that set up the following events with enormous payoff. The Arnold character, Hagen, is the ultimate part for him — iconic and shrouded in charismatic mystery that reveals a keen intelligence and the sort of presence you can believe would be at the center of an epic shite storm in the medieval Christian world.”
Thorn also pointed to a few problems — some “ordinary” action sequences, and a third act which was somewhat “perfunctory”. He felt that the script might benefit from more political scenes, à la Ben Hur or Spartacus, and a punchier ending, but concluded that with its play on church politics, mass schizophrenia and sense of entire civilizations out to exterminate each other, it was a worthy and timely event film, “Verhoeven’s answer to Alexander Nevsky, Lawrence of Arabia”. It might not make back its production cost, and would, he felt, certainly antagonise “every known special interest group on the planet,” but was nevertheless the film that Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven “were born to make.” Another Ain’t It Cool script reviewer thought the draft somewhat muddled. “Crusade doesn’t want to take a religious stand, although it does seem to indicate at one point that Hagen has had a Christian vision,” the anonymous poster opined. “The result is that we watch three religiously-motivated armies (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) fight over Jerusalem and its Holy Shrine, and we don’t really care about any of them. Truth be told, I found the character of Ari (Hagen’s little con man sidekick) far more interesting and complex. It’s all terribly violent, even for Verhoeven,” the unnamed critic concluded, “but at least there’s a creative escape from prison.”
Carolco put the film into pre-production in early 1993, with Schwarzenegger being joined by Robert Duvall as Adhémar of Le Puy, John Turturro (though some sources say his brother, Nicholas) as Ari, Christopher McDonald (Thelma and Louise) as the evil Emmich. Verhoeven recalls screen testing a number of actresses for the role of Leila, before finally deciding upon Jennifer Connelly, a future Academy Award winner for A Beautiful Mind. “I only knew Jennifer from this Disney movie where she flies [The Rocketeer], but since then I have asked her several times for other movies — Starship Troopers and Hollow Man — but she felt they were not good enough, or not her kind of movie.” With shooting scheduled to begin in the summer of 1994, however, Carolco began to feel the aftershocks of its production profligacy, with expensive misfires such as Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin presaging a general downturn in the company’s fortunes, despite the strong box office performance of such high-profile pictures as Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
“We couldn’t quite figure out where the money went,” says Goldman, “but by that time it had gone. Crusade was a giant movie, and the company didn’t trust the numbers that were being thrown around. They felt that the movie was going to end up costing a lot more than Paul and [producer] Alan Marshall said — which is odd because Paul and Alan are probably the two least political film-makers on that level. Paul is ideologically honest; he takes pride in defining himself as a person who will give you the brutal truth, and expect you to handle it. So he doesn’t really lie about budgeting, which is a mistake because there’s no way to get these movies made without lying. People won’t ever admit up front that they’re willing to make the movie for that amount — you have to get them slightly pregnant, or they’ll never have the guts to bite, because they’ll be held accountable on these decisions.”
Verhoeven, who holds a PhD in mathematics, agrees. “I was too honest. I was stupid. I should have said that we could do it for a hundred million. We started out with seventy-five or eighty or something, but we didn’t really get the budget lower than ninety-five or a hundred because it was too complex.” As a result, Carolco began to lose confidence that it could be brought in on budget, and despite the millions of dollars spent getting to this point — including a ‘pay or play’ deal with Schwarzenegger, which meant that he was owed his full salary whether the movie was made or not — the film was scrapped at the eleventh hour. “We were already building [sets] in Spain,” says Verhoeven. “We had to break it all off, and the whole pre-production cost of the not-made movie was about $10 million. Despite the hefty write-down, Carolco’s backers likely saw it as a saving of $90 million – possibly more.
“Carolco went through a terrible time,” Verhoeven recalls. “They had two big movies in development at the same time,” referring to Crusade and Cutthroat Island, the pirate epic which ultimately sank the company in a sea of red ink. “Ultimately they realised that, in the circumstances they were in financially, they could not do both. In my opinion, they made the wrong choice because they thought Michael Douglas
would be in Cutthroat Island, but he backed off, and instead of rotating around to Crusade, they continued along that track, and got Matthew Modine.” When Cutthroat Island flopped, Carolco went into bankruptcy, still owing Schwarzenegger his full salary for Crusade. “I think there was some anger over it,” says Goldman. “In any case, they couldn’t or didn’t pay him, but they’d had a long relationship, and to pay someone twelve or fifteen million dollars for a film they don’t make... well, it’s a lot of money.” Eventually, Schwarzenegger reached a settlement with the producers that was mutually agreeable: the actor would take over all rights to the screenplay of Crusade, without any of the negative costs accrued against it, in return for forfeiting his payday.
Free to shop the script around, Schwarzenegger was soon developing it through his company, Oak Productions, hoping that Verhoeven would remain on board as he tried to set it up at Sony-owned Columbia Pictures, where the actor had made Last Action Hero. Unfortunately, rather than being the biggest hit of 1993 as expected, Last Action Hero grossed just $50 million in the US, leading to Mark Canton’s exit from the studio and a cool reception to the actor’s Crusade project. Although True Lies (1994) recovered some of Schwarzenegger’s box office clout, it was followed by a string of under-performers, including Junior, Eraser (written by Walon Green), Batman & Robin and End of Days, temporarily arresting the rise of the Schwarzenegger machine. Meanwhile, Verhoeven was busy making another costly flop, Showgirls, followed by Starship Troopers, neither of which repeated the success of his earlier Hollywood films. As Goldman explains, “All of a sudden neither of them were that ‘hot’ — and it just isn’t possible to make a movie of that size with people who aren’t hot, because it wasn’t an obviously commercial idea anyway.”
