Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker

by Stephen Galloway

  Just when both were about to give up, Lansing had an epiphany. She remembered an executive she had known who, to all appearances, seemed as conventional as a human being could be, until she discovered he was living a double life: a good family man, he was also a cheater living another existence altogether with his mistress. When the latter became pregnant, the executive was too scared to tell his wife, and the woman bore him a baby without his wife ever knowing.

  “What if our woman got pregnant?” asked Lansing. “An affair can come and go, but a child is forever.”

  “That was the key to up the stakes and make it much more dynamic,” said Dearden.

  Locking himself in, over the course of a few hours Dearden created a new plot that pushed his story into deeper and darker terrain.

  “We wanted to escalate Dan’s problems and show that his actions had real consequences,” said Lansing, referring to the hero, Dan Gallagher. “First, the woman tries to kill herself. Then she won’t leave him alone. Then she tells him she’s pregnant and wants to have the baby. When he insists that’s her decision, she keeps calling his office. After he refuses to take her calls, she tracks him down at home and meets his wife. She even picks up his child from school.”

  As the story came into focus, so did the characters. The leading man would no longer be a writer, as he was in the short; instead, he became a lawyer who has a one-night stand with a book editor, initially named Sean Forrest, who places his family in jeopardy and forces him to take action.

  Later the name Sean was changed to Alex. “There was a rumor that I’d based the character on [actress] Sean Young, with whom I’d had an affair—which wasn’t true,” said Dearden. “I didn’t have an affair with her, and I didn’t base the character on her.”

  Dearden’s sympathies lay primarily with the husband, while Lansing’s lay with Alex, and in this duality lay some of the film’s power.

  Alex’s line “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan” resonated with her. “That was the essence of the movie for me,” she said. “She was standing up for her rights, saying, ‘You can’t just discard me because it’s convenient.’ I always thought Alex was a successful career woman who became involved with one married man too many. That’s what caused her to crack. I didn’t think she was crazy to start with, but each of us has something that could put us over the tipping point.”

  —

  On a flight with Jaffe, Lansing ran into Michael Douglas, who agreed to read the script.

  “It was the perfect what-if, the ultimate quickie nightmare,” he said. “It was great how [it showed that] a little mistake can just poison your family and everything around you, to the point of being life-threatening.”

  Douglas was no longer the B-list star he had been when Lansing first met him. Since The China Syndrome, he had co-starred in two significant hits, 1984’s Romancing the Stone and its sequel, 1985’s The Jewel of the Nile. But he still did not have the heft to get a film green-lit on his name alone, and Paramount passed on the project, as did every other studio Lansing and Jaffe approached. Some questioned how anyone could ever sympathize with the lead; others did not like Douglas.

  Paramount’s new head of production, Dawn Steel, was so outraged by the story that she hurled the script across the room.

  “She yelled, ‘How can you give me this? I’m a newlywed!’ ” recalled Lansing. “She said, ‘Why should we care about a guy who cheats on his wife, especially when he doesn’t have a reason?’ But in some ways the fact that there was no reason was the whole point. Things like that happen, and knowing it adds to the feeling of ‘This could happen to me.’ ”

  Lansing failed to persuade Steel, just as she failed to persuade numerous others to direct. “Everyone passed,” she said. “I remember begging directors to do it. I begged John Carpenter [Halloween]. And it wasn’t just him. I begged everyone.”

  The movie was in trouble. Studio readers were sick and tired of seeing the same old script recycled, making its way again and again through their story departments. And the agencies were bored with Lansing’s repeated requests to show it to clients, knowing they would all say no.

  Everything changed when Brian De Palma, the director of films such as 1976’s Carrie and the 1983 remake of Scarface, said he wanted to do it. De Palma was hot and at the top of Hollywood’s A-list, and Steel could not have been more excited. So what if she had thrown the screenplay across the room? Suddenly it became her favorite project.

  “Dawn was very keen on him,” said Lansing. “So we met, and it went great. He was intense, but this was exciting. We were going to make our movie.”

  Red flags might have been visible if Lansing had cared to look. For one thing, De Palma did not share her sympathy for Alex, the jilted woman; for another, he wanted to make changes that seemed awfully close to turning the story into a horror film, a genre he knew well, but one in which neither Lansing nor Dearden had any interest.

  “We even had a Halloween scene, with Alex running around in a Kabuki mask, terrorizing the household,” noted the writer.

  This was business as usual with a top director, who almost always had the power to rework a script however he saw fit, and what counted was that he had Steel’s support, along with an undeniable visual flair.

  “We were thrilled,” said Lansing. “We knew that, with him, Paramount would make the movie.”

  Gearing up for the shoot, she rented an apartment in New York, where the movie was going to be filmed; Dearden flew in to go over details with the director; and Jaffe set to work finding locations and staffing the picture. Then De Palma had second thoughts.

  “He came to our New York office and said, ‘I have a problem,’ ” Lansing explained. “We thought he was going to say ‘I need a new set,’ or something like that. We were just a few weeks away from the shoot, and he said, ‘I can’t make the movie with Michael Douglas.’ We said, ‘What?’ There was no warning. Then he carried on, saying, ‘Michael’s completely unsympathetic. No one will ever like him.’ ”

  As Lansing fumbled for a response, De Palma gave her and Jaffe an ultimatum: “It’s either him or me.”

  “It was one of those come-to-Jesus moments,” said Lansing. “De Palma was the reason the studio said yes. He was the element that got us a green light, and we knew the picture was over without him. But Michael had been on it for two years, all through the time when everybody else rejected us. We’d committed to him, and we couldn’t drop him now. So we said, ‘We’re sticking with Michael,’ and that was that.”

  With De Palma out, the film was dead. And it continued to be, even when Dustin Hoffman heard about the project and said he might like to do it—not an option, as far as Jaffe and Lansing were concerned, because that would mean abandoning Douglas. They had an actor nobody wanted and a script in which no one believed.

  Then ICM agent Diane Cairns read the screenplay and sent it to her client, Adrian Lyne. The British director of such films as 1980’s Foxes and 1983’s Flashdance was at home in the south of France when he received the package and sat down on the stone steps of his farmhouse to read it. He finished the whole thing without moving.

  “I went and woke my wife up,” he remembered. “I fell in the bed and said, ‘Listen, if I don’t fuck this up, I know this is a huge movie.’ ”

  Lyne arranged to meet with Jaffe on his next trip to New York. But the producer had just seen Lyne’s latest film, 9½ Weeks, an erotic drama about an art gallery employee and a Wall Street trader, and was appalled. He hated the subject, and loathed the look Lyne had given it, with staged smoke that wafted through each room.

  “This could be the shortest meeting in the history of this business,” Jaffe told him when they met. “Adrian said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Number one, I don’t want the smoke alarm to go off in the theater. Number two, we’re not doing a sneaker commercial.’ Then he looked at me and grinned, and we spent about two hours talking.”

  At the end of the meeting, Jaffe called Lansing, ecstatic.

&nb
sp; “He said, ‘I can’t wait for you to meet him,’ ” she recalled. “He said Adrian was everything we’d talked about. And our film came back to life.”

  —

  A key piece of the puzzle remained: casting Alex. “The role was critical, because she had to be sexy but vulnerable, a career woman who had her act together but could still completely collapse,” said Lansing.

  At the beginning, she had felt that Gallagher, the male lead, would be the hardest role to fill; after all, finding someone who would remain sympathetic after cheating on his wife was no mean feat. But now she realized that casting his mistress was equally challenging.

  Her first choice, Barbara Hershey, was unavailable. Another possibility, French actress Isabelle Adjani, did not speak enough English. Debra Winger, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange were all considered or turned the role down. One actress did so with a vengeance. “Judy Davis flew in from Australia to test, and then tried to talk Adrian out of doing the movie,” said Lansing. “Adrian called me to meet her, and she said, ‘This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever read.’ ” Melanie Griffith was also in contention, newly a sensation thanks to the 1986 comedy Something Wild. But the filmmakers feared that what she had in sexuality, she might lack in gravitas.

  Cheers star Kirstie Alley read for the role, and while she was not cast, she contributed a unique element to the finished film. “Her husband [actor Parker Stevenson] had been stalked by a woman who camped outside their house and made their lives hell,” said Lansing. “Kirstie had saved a tape of the woman’s calls and gave it to Adrian. You could hear the woman crying, and you could hear people talking downstairs as she begged to be part of this man’s life. Adrian ended up using it verbatim in the scene where Dan listens to Alex’s tape.”

  The options were fast running out when agent Fred Specktor urged the filmmakers to meet one of his clients, Glenn Close.

  The actress was in her mid-thirties and therefore the right age for the part, but she was not known for her sex appeal, and Hollywood still thought of her as Robin Williams’s earth mother in her debut feature, 1982’s The World According to Garp.

  “There was a debate about her sexiness,” said Douglas. “They gave me the most beautiful wife you could imagine [Anne Archer], and the whole thing was, how could you leave this gorgeous woman for Glenn Close?”

  Lansing dreaded the idea of bringing in anyone to whom she would have to say no, and for some time resisted all of Specktor’s entreaties to meet with his client.

  “I overcompensated for how poorly I’d been treated as an actress,” she said. “I often felt so bad during auditions that I’d pop my head into the waiting room and tell anyone who was waiting, ‘We’re almost ready.’ I didn’t want an Academy Award nominee to read for us if we were going to say no. Fred pursued us doggedly. He begged us to let her come in for a meeting, and we kept begging him to leave us alone. But finally we gave in.”

  Three months before the start of principal photography, Lansing, Jaffe, Douglas and Close gathered in the small office that Jaffe kept at Paramount, under a turn-of-the-century poster of San Francisco’s Sutro Baths, with Lyne videotaping the audition as Close performed her scenes with Douglas. She had changed her look for the meeting: her hair was wild and so were her clothes.

  “My hair was long and I didn’t know what to do with it,” Close explained. “I didn’t know whether to put it up or tie it back in a ponytail. I finally said, ‘Fuck this,’ and I let it go all crazy.”

  “She just knocked it out of the park,” said Douglas. “She already had the Medusa hair. It was a Glenn you’d never seen before.”

  “She was dangerous, vulnerable, sensual and erotic,” said Lansing. “We were all blown away. By the end of the meeting, we knew she had to have the part.”

  —

  In fall 1986, shooting got under way in New York. At first, everything went well on the $11.6 million film: the production hit its marks, and Lyne avoided his tendency to make things look too smoky, with the occasional nudge from Jaffe.

  “Stanley’s got a good shit detector,” said Douglas. “Did he always have to be as tough as he came off? No. But he was concerned about making something the best—both he and Sherry were, and their passion for the project was immense.”

  The producers, like their director, wanted the film to be as believable as possible, and at times their efforts to ensure realism bordered on the comic, not least in the scene where Archer finds a dead rabbit boiling on her stove. It was a real rabbit—already dead, procured from a butcher.

  “We tried to take its innards out to make it real,” said Lyne. “But then it didn’t have any heft. It was just like a little bit of skin. So we had to boil it with all of its innards, and the stench was beyond belief. It was ghastly, and that probably helped Anne, because the smell was so bad.”

  Lyne urged Douglas to make his character believably flawed. “I was trying to get myself in shape,” said Douglas. “Adrian said, ‘No, no, don’t worry about it. I like the way you are.’ But then I got a little on the chubby side, and one day in the middle of shooting, he came and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Mike! You look like bloody Orson Welles!’ ”

  In the sequence where Douglas and Close make love for the first time, getting hot and heavy in Close’s kitchen, Lyne loved Douglas’s suggestion that he should carry Close draped around him, and get tangled up in his trousers as they fall to his ankles.

  “Adrian thought audiences were uncomfortable watching others have sex, and if you didn’t give them something to laugh at, they’d laugh at the scene instead,” said Lansing. “He was always looking for something to break the tension, so when Michael came up with the idea of carrying Glenn with his pants around his feet, he used it. I thought it was a bad idea. But I was wrong.”

  The director had flights of imagination that breathed life into what might otherwise have been a genre piece, but he could also be demanding and obstinate. Halfway through filming, he had a heated altercation with Douglas.

  “There’s a scene where they’re arguing as they go down into the subway, and she says, ‘I’m pregnant,’ ” Lyne remembered. “It’s this ghastly moment, and he’s struck dumb. It’s one of very few scenes where I thought of using a Steadicam, and I’m not crazy about the Steadicam. [When that did not work], I got a circular track and laid it around them, and halfway through I realized that was a mistake, too.”

  Douglas was furious about the delays. He and Lyne started going at each other.

  “I said, ‘Let’s talk about it,’ and we go to the trailer,” Lyne recalled. “I start yelling, and he comes right back at me. I thought he was going to murder me. He let me have it more than I was giving him. It was absolutely this cathartic shouting match. He was somebody not to mess with. I remember thinking, ‘Fuck, that’s his dad in there.’ ”

  “Adrian got nuanced performances from every actor, and had a unique visual style,” said Lansing. “He made everything so real. He’d rub his hands together, going, ‘How can I make it better? How can I make it better?’ But that need for perfection could drive a producer crazy. Stanley would threaten him, ‘Shoot the damn scene or we’re moving on,’ and then Adrian would yell at him. The three of us had operatic screaming fights.”

  At one point when she and Jaffe arrived on set for a simple sequence with Douglas in a hotel room, talking on the phone, they found that the director had added a maid in the background to make the scene more real, and was in the process of elaborately lighting her. It was deep into the night, the crew had been working the whole day, and everyone was exhausted.

  “We were on hour thirteen [of that day’s work],” said Jaffe, “and he’s shooting this woman scrubbing the floor in the bathroom. I said, ‘What the fuck? Are you crazy?’ ”

  —

  Months after production wrapped, a test audience saw the movie for the first time. Its title had changed from Diversion to Affairs of the Heart to Fatal Attraction.

  “Word around th
e studio was terrific: ‘The two failures have a success,’ ” said Lansing. “Then we started to test it.”

  To her astonishment, the movie received a score of 74 out of a maximum 100, nowhere near the brilliant result she had anticipated. “Must have been a peculiar audience. Maybe it was raining that day,” Lansing and her colleagues reassured themselves.

  The studio arranged for the film to be screened again, and it performed almost identically. Nor did its score improve during any of the test screenings conducted in different cities by the industry’s premier research firm, NRG.

  “We did about six screenings,” said Lansing. “And at every single screening, when Anne Archer says ‘If you come near my family again, I’ll kill you,’ the audience burst into applause. And Frank Mancuso [the studio chief] comes up to me at the popcorn counter and says, ‘I think they want Anne Archer to kill Glenn Close.’ And I looked at him, speechless, because I thought he was crazy.”

  From the beginning, the filmmakers had sensed the ending was not quite right. In Dearden’s early drafts, Alex frames Dan for her murder, and the police arrest him for killing her. When Jaffe showed those drafts to a screenwriter friend, Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), he argued the ending was too harsh.

  “I thought, in the words of The Mikado, ‘Let the punishment fit the crime,’ ” said Meyer.

  Steel had been keen for him to take over from Dearden, who was clearly burned out. When Meyer resisted, the executive had pleaded with him, upping the ante each time. Finally he’d agreed to work on the movie—but only if she would buy the rights to a novel he wanted to adapt. “We’ll buy your stupid fucking book,” she told him.

  It was Meyer’s ending that had been filmed, with a redeeming finale in which Gallagher’s wife finds a taped message Alex has left, which exonerates her husband. But audiences hated that ending, and after a final screening at the Directors Guild of America, Steel’s boss, Ned Tanen, was blunt about Close.