Clooney Tries Harder;
The Shoot–War Breaks Out
1998
Eager to change his image from television stud to serious actor, George Clooney was determined to land the lead Three Kings role of Major Archie Gates, a Special Forces officer with an eye on a retirement income in the form of gold bullion. Warner Brothers loved Clooney. The actor had helped make the Warners-produced ER a cash cow, and the studio had signed a huge development deal with the actor. Studio executives were eager to prove that spending millions on having a “relationship” with Clooney would pay off by getting him to star in their blockbuster films. But Russell hated Clooney’s style of acting, which he considered a lot of head-bobbing and mugging for the camera.
Casting Clooney was the start of many long, involved tugs-of-war between Russell and Warners, a big studio unused to dealing with an auteur like him. From the start Russell had wanted any number of other actors. He liked Clint Eastwood, who was too old for the role, but he passed. Mel Gibson was briefly a possibility. Principally Russell wanted Nicolas Cage, but the actor passed, opting instead to do Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. John Travolta read the script and said he didn’t get it. Russell was so desperate to get someone who was acceptable to Warner Brothers that he approached Dustin Hoffman, who was a star but not exactly box office A-list and not exactly the right age to play the army major. Hoffman got very excited about the idea and started interviewing experts about military policy, but Warner gave a thumbs-down on Hoffman as well, citing the recently failed, big budget dud Mad City. Hoffman was upset that Russell had to back out of the offer, and the director went to apologize. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get the movie made with you,” he told Hoffman.
Hoffman replied, “That’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
Hoffman said, “No, you’ve got to do it the Jewish way, you’ve got to bring me something.” Later Russell brought him the role of an existential detective in his film I Heart Huckabees.
Meanwhile Clooney pursued the director with unabashed zeal, sending him a handwritten note pitching his talents. In March 1998 he sent this:
I was on the set of Batman and Robin when I first saw a tape of Flirting with Disaster. I remember thinking how similar the two films were. When I heard you were developing a film at Warner Bro[ther]s, I called Lorenzo and said I wanted in. I hadn’t read the script. Now I have. So I know basically what’s going on. Tom Cruise! Makes sense to me. And if his dance card is full I don’t know who you have next on your list. I know I’m not on it. (And with films like Batman I don’t blame you.) But I couldn’t sleep at night if I let a project this good go away without making one attempt. I just finished a film with Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank [Out of Sight]. It kicks ass. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I kick ass. But I think I did alright [sic]. What I know is, that I could screen it for you. Even toss in some Goobers. You’ll get who you want for this. I just didn’t want an agent or a studio trying to sell you on me. I can screw this up all by myself.
He signed it “George Clooney, TV Actor.”
Russell was intrigued, but still didn’t really want Clooney. Clooney didn’t give up. He came to see Russell in New York twice. (Russell answered the door with his video camera, asking “Does this bother you?” Clooney answered, “Only if I don’t get the job.”) He agreed to cut his fee in half to get the movie made. Russell consulted with his mother-in-law, whose judgement he trusted. What did she think of George Clooney? “Clooney?” she asked. “Isn’t he that guy who’s always squinting on that TV show?” That confirmed his skepticism.
But finally Warner Brothers lowered the boom. They wanted a star, and Clooney was the only actor with whom they would green-light the movie. Left with little choice, Russell laid down some conditions. He would consider Clooney for the role only if the actor worked on what the director considered to be his acting tics. The two met, and Russell was typically unvarnished. “You have a lot of habits, you ought to break them,” he told Clooney. Clooney, diplomatic, eager to become a serious actor, agreed he could improve.
Russell said, “Let’s work together before we go into production, because I don’t think you’re going to want to have me changing these habits in front of a hundred people.”
Clooney agreed, but it was an inauspicious start to the working relationship. For one thing, Clooney turned out to have little time to work with Russell on what the director considered his tics. “I want you to be very still in this role,” Russell told him. In preproduction, Russell had an office on the Warner’s lot and Clooney would stop over during breaks on the ER shoot to “work” on his acting. Russell would have him sit quietly and do yoga breathing exercises, which the actor found weird. The process wore on Clooney’s patience. Later he’d write to Russell that he wasn’t used to working in this way. For his part, he was frustrated that in rehearsals Russell would change dialogue, making it harder for the actor to learn all his lines.
Just before the shoot began in October, Clooney sent another missive, with the cracks starting to show in their relationship:
David, Just wanted to send you a quick note. First to say how excited I am about this project. I know it’s years of work for you. It shows. I also want you to know I’ll do the best I can to work with your process. It’s not how I work. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just new to me. So I’ll give you all I got. You won’t win on all of them, because I’m also doing the show. And you’re going to have to understand. If there’s something I can’t do, you can bet it’s because I’m working [on ER]. Now there’s something you can do for me. Get me the script. I need time to work on it. To break it down. It’s the most important thing you can do to help my performance. The sooner I get it the better I’ll be. I know you’re getting worked from every angle but see what you can do. Thanks, George (hr TV’s Dr. Ross)
When they began shooting, Russell never hestitated to give acting directions to Clooney in front of other people. Clooney—understandably—bristled each time. Their relationship seemed doomed. The actor, who was a star in just about every other Hollywood circle, felt undermined by his director and labored under the burden of knowing that he was Russell’s last choice. This led to disastrous consequences.
Having swallowed Clooney, Russell did not want to budge on his other casting choices. Mark Wahlberg, who had shown his acting ability in Boogie Nights and would draw young men to the theater, was cast as Sfc. Troy Barlow. The role of Sgt Chief Elgin went to Ice Cube, the veteran rapper who brought diversity and rap fans to the audience. For the role of Pfc Conrad Vig, Russell wanted to cast his friend Spike Jonze, who had never acted before. Russell hadn’t originally intended to cast Jonze, but as he wrote the screenplay he found himself shaping the character after his young, quirky friend. He told Jonze, “I keep sort of stealing things from you, he’s loosely inspired by you.” Jonze said, “Cool.” About a year later Russell mentioned that the screenplay was done, and wouldn’t Jonze like to try and play the role? Warners wasn’t happy. It was one more unconventional choice they accepted.
While Russell was busy rehearsing with Clooney, Spike Jonze and Mark Wahlberg scooted around the Warner lot in a golf cart wearing military fatigues, with the East Coast Jonze drawling in a deep Southern accent.
CASTING MOVIE STARS IN AUTEUR MOVIES COULD BE A tricky business, as the rebel directors learned through experience in the 1990s. On the one hand, a movie star could succeed in winning a studio green light. A star was also a way to raise financing from sources overseas. On the other hand, movie stars were accustomed to a certain kind of treatment; they were used to getting their way and sometimes threw their weight around on the set. Texas preppie-geek Wes Anderson had made his second movie, Rushmore, based on his experience in prep school, with an utter unknown in the lead, Jason Schwartzman. Bill Murray, an iconic comic actor who was in a kind of career limbo, played the second lead. The movie became a cult hit, and when it came to casting his next film in 2000, The Royal Tenenbaums, A
nderson had his pick from many serious actors who wanted to work with him. Gene Hackman, however, wasn’t one of them. Anderson set his sights on getting the great character actor to play the title role of Royal Tenenbaum, the sartorially slick and blindly self-centered head of an odd Manhattan clan. After pursuing Hackman for more than a year by phone and by mail, the actor finally agreed to do the part. But the relationship remained imbalanced; apparently Hackman felt he had deigned to take the role, and he wasn’t going to deign to take direction. And perhaps the introverted Anderson had something to learn about communicating with a giant of Hackman’s stature. Either way, Anderson had to find roundabout ways to get his point across. Finally he resorted to reverse psychology. He would ask costar Anjelica Huston, “Could I have a word with you?” She’d go speak to him privately, and Hackman would get curious and follow along. This tactic annoyed Hackman, who was no dummy. After Anderson had pulled Huston aside, he then said to the director, “Hey, Wes, can I have a word with you?” He pulled Anderson into a closet on the set (it was the game closet in the Tenenbaum house) and started screaming at him: You don’t get to pull actors aside and give them direction! What do you think you’re doing? The laconic Anderson tried not to react. “Why are you doing this, Gene?” he asked.
“Because you’re a cunt,” Hackman snarled.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Oh yes, I mean it, you’re a cunt.”
Anderson sighed. “You’re going to regret these things you’re saying, Gene. You don’t believe them.”
The next day Hackman showed up in a macho get-up—long leather coat, baseball cap, and cowboy boots—and skulked around the set. Then he apologized. Hackman’s agent, Fred Specktor, commented on the actor’s behalf that he might have been occasionally testy on the set. “Difficult as he might have been, they got through it. Gene has been known to lose his temper and he feels badly about it,” said Specter. “I don’t consider that to be anything negative. It’s part of the process. I believe he’d work with Wes again if he had another part that interested him.”
THROUGHOUT THE MAKING OF THREE KINGS, RUSSELL felt the weight of what he considered to be institutional indifference at Warner Brothers. Production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura was the reason Russell was even working at the studio, but he was a lone source of support. Often he or one of his producers would be dealing with a Warner executive and hear that they considered the project “weird. You people are all weird,” executives would tell line producer Greg Goodman. They weren’t part of the Warner Brothers club.
Mostly, they didn’t understand what Russell was trying to do; apart from Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre, they had not made an auteur film at Warner Brothers in many years, probably decades. “They were afraid of investing $40 million in a weird, complicated, nonlinear action picture with political undertones,” said Greg Goodman, the line producer hand-chosen by Russell. Choosing Goodman was one of many decisions that the studio resisted—because he came from the independent world—and they placed veteran studio producer Charles Roven above him. Before Three Kings, the biggest budget Goodman had handled had been the $20 million stink-bomb Barb Wire, with Pamela Anderson Lee. But Russell knew and trusted Goodman from way back in the 1980s, when he was still a struggling nobody in New York. Goodman also met with institutional indifference; as he scrambled to learn the system at the sprawling Burbank backlot, he found little help from the more experienced people on the movie with him. “No one gave me a manual, ‘Line-producing for the big leagues 101,’” he recalled.
Another controversial decision was Russell’s insistence on shooting nearly half the film in Ektachrome, usually found in In-stamatic cameras. Russell liked that the film made an image look oddly bright, like from another world. It conveyed what military advisers had told Russell about the conflict, that “something wasn’t right,” said Russell. “They said, ‘We were celebrating, but we were sitting on our hands while innocent people were getting killed by the guy we just defeated.’” But it made the studio nervous, as Russell kept moving them out of their comfort zone. “Every step of the way there were forces in the studio who wanted me to keep sanding down the edges,” said the director.
As Russell geared up for production, the studio grew more skittish by the day. They wanted the budget to be lower: $35 million. Russell’s team got the budget down as far as $42 million and said they couldn’t cut it anymore. Russell had to make a personal promise to the studio not to go a penny over the budget (it eventually climbed to $47 million, over but not terribly by Hollywood standards). Then the studio chiefs began to worry more seriously about the political nature of the movie at a time when the Middle East was beginning to heat up again. In August 1998, with Three Kings in preproduction, alarm bells went off inside the studio when a Planet Hollywood restaurant in Cape Town was suddenly bombed. A group called Muslims Against Global Oppression had claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed a woman. The bombing came within weeks after President Clinton ordered American cruise missiles to attack terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Russell thought the studio was losing its spine. “They live in a culture of fear,” he concluded.
Russell wasn’t wrong. And as soon as Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the one executive entirely committed to the film, turned his back, the studio tried to bury it. At the end of August 1998 di Bonaventura went on vacation for a week. Terry Semel’s chief aide, Jim Miller, the president of worldwide theatrical business operations, called a meeting with George Clooney and tried to convince him to drop out of the film.
“If you make this movie, it will be a nightmare,” Miller told him. “Muslims will threaten your life. American reactionaries will come after you. You will never be safe again. This movie is a bad idea.” They suggested taking the movie to another studio. Or rewriting the script. Or just waiting six months—tantamount to canceling the whole business.
Whatever Russell’s problems with Clooney as an actor, he had to give him credit for loyalty. Clooney’s contract would have required him to be paid even if the movie wasn’t made. Still the star wouldn’t rise to the bait. “If you want to pull the plug on this movie, go ahead,” he said. “But don’t pin it on me. I’m not dropping out of this movie.” Then he told the director what had happened.
On a press tour in Europe for Out of Sight in September 1998, Clooney wrote his friend Terry Semel a note from Hamburg’s Kempinski Hotel urging him to wait, rather than weaken the script:
Dear Terry, I know we’re all put in an awkward position on this one. If the decision only involved my safety then I would say let’s do it. However I’m not the head of the company, nor do I have a responsibility to hundreds of employees. On top of the film being controversial it is also not an easy money-maker. The only thing it really could be is an exceptionally fine movie. Oscar caliber. But if we soften the story points, then we’ll end up with a watered-down version of this script. Giving us still a controversial film, with even less chance of making money. In other words, if we have to do this film, we’d have to do it all the way. For monetary reasons and for artistic reasons. You’re right when you say that this is fiction. But the Gulf War was not. The torture of the Shiites was real. The cruelties on both sides did happen and are documented. This is not a terrorist film. It’s a war film. If it’s too soon to make then let’s wait. Rather than homogenizing this script, I’d love to give it a shot as is. I’d like to do it here at Warner Brothers because this is my home. If that means waiting I will. And if that’s not a viable solution then give David back the script and let him make it somewhere else. I understand your situation and I don’t disagree with the dangers. And I will defer to whatever decision you make. The only thing I request is that you don’t ask me to do a screenplay that has been edited to keep from angering a group of people that may be dangerous. But it’s your call, and I’ll back your decision.
When di Bonaventura returned from vacation and discovered that Miller had tried to quash the film, he was livid. He told Russell he would quit if
the movie didn’t go forward, telling him, “If I can’t make movies like this, I don’t want this job.” But Clooney’s letter helped defuse the standoff. Semel allowed di Bonaventura to pick up the threads of preproduction and continue as planned. Russell always referred to this incident as “a coup attempt.” He never shook Jim Miller’s hand again.
Russell also suspected that Warner had used this moment to place a wedge between him and his star. He dated Clooney’s hostility back to this point. “There was a distinct turn,” Russell recalled. “He started getting colder to me, even in preproduction. I never talked to him about it. But I think when Warner Brothers tried to pull the plug on the movie, they called him in and said, ‘You should bail on this movie because your life will be in danger,’ God knows what else they said to him. In other words, my own corporation undermined me. I bet what they said to him was, you know, ‘You know David went to Will Smith and he went to all these other people before you.’ And I have a funny feeling he didn’t know how many people we’d gone to before him. I think he knew about Mel Gibson and that was all he knew.”
THE OCTOBER 1998 SHOOT OF THREE KINGS WAS SCHEDULED for sixty-eight days in the Arizona desert, and it wasn’t much fun for anyone involved. For Russell it was one of the most tense, pressure-filled experiences of his life. Too many people were juggling too many things, and too many people had too much riding on one movie.
Russell felt the responsibility of making his first big-budget studio movie. He’d personally promised di Bonaventura to bring the film in on budget and on schedule. At the same time he and his wife, Janet Grillo, had just learned that their four-year-old son, Matthew, was autistic. Whenever possible he was jetting home to Los Angeles in midshoot for twenty-four hours to help her cope. Clooney was shooting ER three days a week, then jumping on a plane to work on Three Kings for four days, a seven-day-a-week schedule he maintained for weeks on end. Fridays were pickup day at ER—when unfinished scenes were completed—and he’d often finish in the early morning hours; he’d then fly to the set. At one point he came down with bronchitis and had to use an oxygen mask on the set for several weeks. “I once finished at 4:30 in the morning at ER after a seventeen-hour day, took a jet to the set near Casa Grande, was late for my 6:30 A.M. call, and worked for another twelve hours. There were times that that got a little much,” Clooney recalled. Spike Jonze, another principal in the cast, was acting in Russell’s movie and flying home on the weekends to edit Being John Malkovich.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 27
