Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  At USA Films, Greenstein and Schwartz were neither a major nor an independent, saying they aimed to make movies in the $10 to $25 million range. They were tied inexorably both to the media mogul who created them (Diller) and the conglomerate (Seagrams and then Vivendi) that had significant ownership. In February 2000 Variety wrote, “USA is hunting for smart thrillers, franchiseable stories, and the occasional superstar vehicle—provided the superstar in question takes a salary cut.” Nobody knew what that meant, and USA had so far failed to show much in the way of examples. But both Russell and Greenstein had the sensibilities of the independent movie world and were eager to put their new studio on the Hollywood map. Said Schwartz, “There was a sense of quiet desperation between Scott and myself. At that point in its young life, USA needed something big to get on the map. We didn’t have that many opportunities.”

  So when Laura Bickford met Scott Greenstein for a drink on New Year’s Day, 2000, at the Belage Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, she was meeting with someone who was more than a little motivated to green-light something edgy and interesting (why else would you be working on New Year’s Day?). Bickford was eager, too. She wanted to get this movie set up at a studio before the whole thing slipped through her fingers.

  GREENSTEIN WAS A LARGE, LOUD, AND NOT-VERY-WELL-LIKED executive in Hollywood. He’d been trained at the Harvey Weinstein School of Etiquette and tended to bellow when talking would do, and to call twenty times when a couple of phone calls might get the job done. One producer in Hollywood—one who likes him—said that Greenstein had been scarred by the Weinstein method, calling him “an abused-child executive.” He made a passionate pitch to be given a shot at making Traffic and said he would make it one of the centerpiece films of his new film studio.

  Bickford was thrilled to have found a movie executive who got the significance of the film and was willing to defend it. MGM was showing interest, too, and put an offer on the table. Miramax wanted to get involved, but neither Soderbergh nor Bickford wanted to be in the Harvey Weinstein business. Miramax had changed dramatically since the days of sex, lies, and videotape and now looked and acted more like a major studio than a scrappy art-house distributor. Weinstein was a genius at winning Oscars, and he loved to dominate cocktail parties and endless award dinners that drew Hollywood stars and players like homing pigeons to the swank restaurants of Los Angeles from January through March. Weinstein always had several possible Oscar movies in the pipeline. Come the fall, he would decide which ones would be backed with major marketing campaigns to win awards. Those that didn’t find immediate critical support were usually jettisoned fast. Weinstein liked to bet on winners. Remarked Bickford, “We didn’t want to be at Miramax and be one of eight movies at Oscar time.” A foreign partner was being brought in to help with financing. They were Fifty Cannon, the British company run by Cameron Jones that had made a pocketful of cash from the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. That helped, but Soderbergh and Bickford needed an American studio to get the film made. Both of them liked what Scott Greenstein had to say. They were leaning toward making the movie with him at USA Films.

  THEN OUT OF THE BLUE, HARRISON FORD CALLED.

  Bickford was in her house, brushing her teeth in early January 2000 when the phone rang. It was Pat McQueeney, Ford’s longtime agent/manager.

  “Why haven’t you offered Harrison this movie?” McQueeney demanded. The question itself was strange, to say the least. Ford, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, had always acted exclusively in big-budget, mainstream Hollywood action movies. He was Han Solo. He was Indiana Jones. He had made tens of millions of dollars as Jack Ryan, the lead character in the Tom Clancy series. Ford, everyone in Hollywood knew, liked to play heroes, and audiences loved that he did. He had the strong jawline, the tousled hair, the appeal of a regular guy thrown into life-threatening situations. His fee was $20 million, and he never took less than that. Actually, for many years Ford had essentially been playing the same character over and over, in The Fugitive, in Air Force One, in Clear and Present Danger. He didn’t seem to want to stretch himself as an actor, and there was no particular reason to think he’d want to do Traffic.

  But he did. Ford was looking to take on a young agent for the first time in a long while, and announced that he wanted to work with the young directors who were emerging in Hollywood. At least he said he did. Agents vying to represent Ford had been sending scripts, and one of them came from United Talent Agency, whose client was Steve Gaghan. UTA sent over Traffic, with a strong recommendation.

  Now McQueeney was on the phone, saying that Harrison Ford was interested. Bickford recovered quickly enough to say that she and Steven Soderbergh would love to offer Ford the role. “But,” she cautioned, “we’re shooting in March. It’s now January. We need to know right away whether he will commit.” There was more. “This is an independent film, and he’ll have to lower his price. I understand you won’t cut his price.”

  McQueeney, it turned out, had not yet read the script, and neither had Harrison Ford. McQueeney promised to read it immediately and get back to her. The next day she called with news. Harrison Ford definitely wanted to do Traffic, but he wanted to do an action movie first.

  Bickford met with McQueeney and John Lesher, the UTA agent who was now on Ford’s “team” (and also represented Gaghan; he’d sent the script) to talk about money. Still a novice in Hollywood, Bickford understood little about the realities of international financing. A star of Ford’s stature was worth millions in the foreign market, and immediately meant the budget would find more backers from abroad. Hoping to get Ford to cut his price radically, Bickford said, naïvely: “Pat, we only have two million dollars to pay Harrison. What are we going to do?” The budget had been calculated at indie prices, which was quickly becoming the norm when making risky movies with auteur directors, even in the studio system. All the main talent had been calculated to work for one-tenth of their regular fee, and Bickford imagined that Harrison Ford would, too. McQueeney smiled. She knew better. “You’ll figure it out,” she said.

  Bickford came to learn that a $20 million actor like Ford would buy her $50 million in financing. On a small project like this, Ford would work for $10 million, half his fee, not one-tenth, and take the other $10 million with 10 percent of the box office gross on the back end, if the movie was profitable. As a result, the entire budget had to be shifted and all the actors would have to be given raises, to half their usual “quote.”

  These intricacies with Ford meant things were moving ahead, and the movie star met with Soderbergh at Ford’s home in Los Angeles, then at his home in Manhattan, to develop the character. Ford came with some notes and as a result of his suggestions, Soderbergh added the scene in which the drug czar follows his daughter’s school friend (played by Topher Grace) to the drug dealer’s apartment in the inner city to find his daughter when she runs away. He also added a scene on an airplane in which Robert urges his staff to “think out of the box,” an indication of his shifting views on the drug problem. Meanwhile Soderbergh explained that this production would be very unlike the Hollywood movies in which Ford usually starred. In Traffic, the director, Soderbergh, was also going to be the cameraman and the director of photography; that was unheard of for studio productions. He warned Ford that they would be using a lot of natural light (hence less hair and makeup) and that Soderbergh would be shooting quickly, with two cameras. Instead of waiting in his trailer for hours on end while crew set up the scene, Ford would be spending most of his time acting.

  Ford agreed.

  Normally, this would have been cause for celebration. But Soderbergh and Bickford had just concluded a signed deal with USA Films. With Harrison Ford now cast as the lead, they were contractually bound to go back to Bill Mechanic at Fox and offer him the option of making the film. While on the verge of closing the deal with USA, negotiating with Ford, and refiguring the budget, Soderbergh had to give another studio the chance to jump into the mix, two and a half months before pr
oduction was supposed to begin.

  Said Bickford, “It was a real mess.”

  Not surprisingly, Fox said they wanted to make the movie with Ford. Greenstein went ballistic, calling Soderbergh and Bickford several times a day. “Let’s get Harrison and make the film at USA,” he urged. Bickford patiently explained to him—as if he were stupid—that she was contractually bound to let Fox make the movie with Ford if it wanted. It wasn’t a dark little drug movie anymore. Financially the movie made sense. With Ford cast in the lead, Fox could raise the entire budget of the film, now $50 million, from foreign backers. That meant the studio only had to put up funding for movie prints and advertising, which would be approximately $20 million. It seemed guaranteed to at least make its money back and Fox might have a movie they could be proud of at Oscar time. Tom Rothman thought it would be a good way to launch his protégé, Peter Rice, who was taking over Fox Searchlight. Rice was the son of a prominent advertising executive in London, one of Rupert Murdoch’s oldest allies, and one of the dynamic young studio executives who would nurture new talent at the major studios.

  His start at the studio was unusual because he was British, but classic because it involved a personal connection. Murdoch owed Rice’s father a debt for having continued to advertise in Murdoch’s British newspapers during the 1980s, when the Australian mogul was brutally breaking the unions. After Rice finished college at the University of Nottingham, his father asked Murdoch to help his son find an internship at Twentieth Century Fox. The young Rice landed an internship in advertising under Tom Sherak. After the summer he begged Sherak to let him stay; the executive signed the immigration papers. Rice rose quickly within the studio, and by his thirties was entrusted with Fox Searchlight. He turned out to be someone whom creative folks in the movie industry could count on; one of the big gambles Rice took in subsequent years was in reviving a long-dead genre, the musical, updated for its time. It was called Moulin Rouge, directed by Australian Baz Luhrmann, and received numerous nominations at the 2002 Oscars.

  After having negotiated with Laura Ziskin and Tom Rothman on two occasions, Soderbergh and his team found themselves negotiating with Fox a third time, with a new set of people led by Peter Rice. The foreign financier this time was Graham King, not Cameron Jones. Soderbergh was less than enthusiastic; he wanted to work with Scott Greenstein at USA, who had made his enthusiasm for the film clear. He wasn’t sure that Fox would really support his movie. Would they know how to sell it to audiences? In the meanwhile, Greenstein too believed he had already secured the legal right to make the movie, so things stood in limbo.

  Preproduction on the film was moving ahead—finding locations in Ohio, Kentucky, Washington D.C., San Diego, and Mexico; preparing sets and costumes; and the million and one details involved in making a movie—with no green light and no budget. Soderbergh was paying for all of it out of his own pocket, working out of the Erin Brockovich production offices, eventually fronting $200,000 on the film.

  Then someone starting leaking information to the trade papers. Variety ran one front-page story after another about the film. January 27, 2000: “Traffic Jammed with Talent.” February 16, 2000: “Fox Traffic Jams: Ford, Zeta-Jones Onboard for Soderbergh Pic.” And then, on February 24, 2000: “Ford Exits Traffic as Talks Collapse.”

  NEAR THE END OF FEBRUARY, ON PRESIDENT’S DAY WEEKEND, Harrison Ford was in Japan. He called Soderbergh on the Sunday with some news. He’d been thinking about Traffic a lot, he said. He’d been discussing it with his people. The role just didn’t feel right for him. He was dropping out. “He didn’t have to give a reason,” said Soderbergh. “It’s like marriage. If you’re ambivalent, you probably shouldn’t go.”

  Ultimately it seemed that Ford was unwilling to relinquish his movie star image to play a drug czar with an addicted daughter in a down-and-dirty production. The previous week he’d been honored with the American Film Institute’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, and Ford had spent several hours watching clips of his old movies and listening to his peers adulate him for it. “We all thought he should do the movie,” said Lesher. “He decided not to. And he never looked back. He was very confident about it. He doesn’t think he made a mistake.” Ford went on to take the role of a university professor in What Lies Beneath, a boilerplate mystery-thriller costarring Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Hollywood stalwart Robert Zemeckis. It was more in Ford’s comfort zone, though he did end up playing a villain, a change for him. Ultimately the actor never pursued his professed desire to work with the edgy young directors emerging in Hollywood.

  Soderbergh was stunned, and Bickford devastated. It was the end of February, and they were prepping a complicated movie that was supposed to start shooting in March. They didn’t have a lead actor, and now the studio financing the movie would be called into question again. Would Fox want to make the film without Harrison Ford? Maybe they could take the movie back to USA, which was their preference anyway.

  It seemed like a good time to panic. “We were all hoping on Sunday that he’d change his mind,” recalled Bickford. Pat McQueeney told them to double-check on Monday. But Monday the news was the same.

  Soderbergh was determined to move ahead with the movie anyway. “We were pushing so hard,” he recalled. “I really felt like our window was the end of the year 2000. It was an election year. If we missed this window, we might as well walk away. Despite the fact that this is the kind of movie you could make every five years, since the problem doesn’t seem to go away, we all felt like it had to be right now.”

  While preparing the movie, Soderbergh continued to send new, polished drafts of the script to all the actors. It so happened that Michael Douglas kept reading them over Catherine Zeta-Jones’s shoulder as she prepared for the part of the drug trafficker’s wife (who was now made pregnant, to suit Zeta-Jones’s condition). He liked the changes in the drug czar, which he’d turned down two months before. Just after Ford bowed out of the picture, Douglas was at a Hollywood function, where he ran into Barry Diller and Scott Greenstein, who asked the star, “Why don’t you reconsider playing the drug czar?”

  Not willing to give up without a fight, Peter Rice wanted to take the script to other leading men. Kevin Costner was circling, showing interest. But by now the word was out that Ford was getting a large portion of his usual fee plus a major back end deal, and Costner thought he deserved the same treatment: $10 million up front, plus 10 percent of the gross. Al Pacino and Tommy Lee Jones wanted their fees, too. Technically, with Ford out of the picture, Bill Mechanic and Peter Rice no longer had the right to make the movie. But still, Rice hung on.

  NOBODY KNEW IF USA WAS MAKING THE FILM. DILLER AND Greenstein hadn’t checked with Soderbergh and Bickford before asking Douglas to reconsider the part. Soderbergh thought, “Can USA offer the role to Douglas?”

  It didn’t really matter. Movie stars trump most things, including the fine print. By this point, Soderbergh really wanted to make the movie with Greenstein. Douglas had been brought back to the movie through his relationship with Diller and Greenstein. And Douglas was furious that Fox declined to make his deal the first time around, low-balling him with a $2 million offer, but willing to pay $10 million plus 10 gross points for Harrison Ford. It was movie star payback time. (Mechanic says he decided not to make the movie with Douglas. “Michael Douglas with a higher price tag was something other than I thought was reasonable,” he said. The other parties dispute this version.)

  Pat Dollard called Peter Rice with the bad news. Michael Douglas didn’t want to make the movie with Fox. Rice said he was going to call and double-check this with Jim Wiatt, Douglas’s agent, the head of William Morris. He warned Dollard, “Promise me you will not call Jim Wiatt and tell him what to say.”

  Dollard said, “I promise.”

  Dollard then hung up the phone and got someone else to call Jim Wiatt to tell him what to say.

  “Someone had to call Jim Wiatt and give him the right answer, that Michael wouldn’t do the movie
,” Dollard explained. “I needed a reason to not make the movie at Fox.” He couldn’t believe that after trying to make this passion project according to AA principles—honesty being one of those—he had to resort to surreptitious measures to get the thing finally made. (Wiatt does not recall that Douglas did not want to make the movie at Fox and said it was unlikely that Douglas would react in that way. Bickford and Dollard remember this differently.)

  Meanwhile, Kevin Costner wasn’t giving up without a fight, either. Douglas had already been cast to replace Ford, but Costner’s agent, Jim Berkus, kept calling Pat Dollard to lower the star’s fee. The call came: “He’ll do it for $5 million.” Then: “He’ll do it for two.” Then: “He’ll do it for one.” It was too late; the role was no longer available.

  On March 14, 2000, the night of the Los Angeles premiere of Erin Brockovich, Bickford got a phone call. It was Peter Rice and Pat Dollard, exhausted after a bruising conversation. Rice said: “Go with God. Make your movie.” Three weeks before the start of production, Rice had decided to accept defeat gracefully. Mechanic had already called Soderbergh personally to let the project go. Outside the Mann Village Theater in Westwood, hundreds of starstruck fans threatened to overwhelm security as Julia Roberts, one of the biggest stars in the world, tried to walk down the red carpet into the theater. Amid the throng, Bickford excitedly pulled Soderbergh aside. “We’re done. Traffic is a go. We’re ready to shoot.”