“They want us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice,” he said.
“Adrian went nuts when he heard that,” said Lansing. “He felt that changing the ending was kowtowing to the lowest common denominator, and I agreed. Here was this wonderful film about how all your actions have consequences, and now they wanted to change the whole point. I felt it was morally wrong, and if I agreed to do it, I’d be selling out.”
Only Jaffe was open to Tanen’s suggestion, but the others resisted him fiercely. Then the executive offered a compromise: he would give the filmmakers $1.5 million to shoot a new ending, no strings attached. “He said, ‘Look, shoot it, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it,’ ” Lansing recalled. “That was brilliant. How could you say no? I would later use that tactic constantly, whenever I was at an impasse with a filmmaker.”
She brought out Dearden once again to rework the ending, and picked him up at the airport. “He sighed and said, ‘It’s never going to end, is it?’ ” she remembered.
Everyone knew Close’s character had to be killed, but how? Who would do the killing, and under what circumstances? It seemed logical and morally fitting that Douglas should kill her; after all, he was the one responsible for this mess. But somehow that failed to satisfy, and it was only when the filmmakers began to consider his wife, Beth (Archer), that they felt they had their solution. She was the perfect spouse, smart and good-humored, but she had been reactive rather than active for most of the film. To have her, the sole innocent among the lead characters, take this action at the end was nothing if not appropriate.
“We thought of Diabolique,” said Lansing, referring to the 1955 French thriller in which two women seemingly drown a man in a tub. “Dan draws a bath for Beth, and then goes to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He doesn’t realize Alex has broken into the house. Just as Beth is about to have her bath, she looks in the mirror and sees Alex, but the whistle of the kettle drowns out her scream. It’s only at the last minute that Dan hears her, runs upstairs, and drowns Alex in the bathtub. When she pops out of the water, alive, Beth finally shoots her and kills her.”
Douglas was on board, but Archer was appalled at the thought of scrapping the scene she liked best, when her husband is carted away by the police. She had been pleased with her performance, a high point in the original shoot, as she reacted to his arrest. Now she was being told the scene would no longer be in the movie. “I burst into tears,” she said. “My whole life and career and heart were on my sleeve. I felt like a little kid. Sherry held me in her arms and just comforted me. God love her, she held me tight for as long as I needed.”
Close resisted the changes even more vocally than Archer. She felt sympathy for Alex, a woman battling mental illness, and fiercely resisted clichés about another female psycho. And so she categorically refused to do the reshoot.
“She came into Stanley’s office, and we couldn’t even get through the conversation with her,” said Lansing. “Adrian and I were already consumed with ‘We’re selling out, what have we done?’ She looked at us as if we were the most terrible people on earth, and Adrian just said, ‘I give up, you’re right.’ ”
Dearden and Douglas stepped in. “I had to pretend it was a great idea,” said Dearden. “I had to sit there and tell her what the new ending would be, and tears were running down her cheeks. Glenn said, ‘You can take me in a straitjacket, but you can’t make me do it.’ ”
“I had a big talk to her about the theater, and how you take a show out of town and play the show to out-of-town audiences, and then you adjust, based upon what works best for the audience,” said Douglas. “The argument was, ‘It may not be the best for your character, but it’s best for the movie.’ ”
Close rejected that out of hand, along with all the other arguments. “I remember screaming at Michael, ‘How would you feel? How would you feel if they did this to your character?’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘Babe, I’m a whore.’ ”
Ultimately, a friend tipped her into saying yes.
“I was desperate,” she remembered, “and I called William Hurt, and he said, ‘You’ve done your fight. You’ve made your point. Now it’s your responsibility to buck up and just do it.’ ” At last Close consented to film the new ending, and agreed to a three-week reshoot, although she never came around to liking the version she filmed.
“We went back to [the Gallaghers’ house], and other people had bought it, so we had to reconstruct it just the way it was,” said Lansing. “It cost a fortune. Glenn had the worst of it, by far. She was dunked in the bath more than fifty times, and her eyes and nose became infected. But she gave it her all. She was a total professional.”
Back in Los Angeles, Lyne assembled a rough cut and then called Lansing into the editing room to show her what he had done. She took her seat at his side and watched the new ending unfold, as Archer enters the steaming bathroom, glances in the mirror and jumps at the sight of Close.
When Archer jumped, “I jumped, too,” said Lansing. “I leaped right out of my seat. I’d seen every single frame; I’d been there for every day of the shoot; I knew this inside out, but I was riveted by the whole thing.”
—
Fatal Attraction opened on September 18, 1987, and held the number one spot at the box office for eight consecutive weeks, remaining in the top ten for almost six months. The movie earned $156.6 million domestically.
Time put Douglas and Close on its cover and called Fatal “a nightmare parable of sex in the ’80s.” Still, feminists and many critics loathed it. “It’s about men seeing feminists as witches, and, the way the facts are presented here, the woman is a witch,” wrote the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “This shrewd film also touches on something deeper than men’s fear of feminism: their fear of women.”
It had never been Lansing’s intention to demonize women. “This was one woman, not all women,” she believed. “This was one career woman, not all of them.”
Critical attacks failed to quell the movie’s momentum, which peaked when it received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress (Close), Best Supporting Actress (Archer), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director and Best Editor. Douglas alone among the key participants was shut out.
Lansing attended the Oscars as a nominee for the first time. “I went with my friend David Goodman,” she recalled. “I felt like a princess. The telecast opened with a montage of the red carpet, and when the announcer said, ‘Here’s the beautiful Sherry Lansing,’ I couldn’t believe it. I turned to David and said, ‘I don’t care what happens. I can go home happy now.’ ”
Fatal lost the Best Picture race to The Last Emperor. Still, she said, “It was one of the greatest nights of my life. We’d bet on ourselves and won.”
Lansing’s next film would explore a woman’s point of view more thoroughly and sympathetically than any she had worked on before.
Reckless Endangerment—which later became The Accused—was the story of a rape, and the second project that Ovitz had counseled her and Jaffe to drop when they were struggling. It was inspired by a real-life event that occurred in March 1983 at a bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Cheryl Ann Araujo, a twenty-one-year-old mother of two, was attacked by a gang of men who dragged her across a pool table and sexually assaulted her as others, allegedly, stood by. The ensuing trial became one of the first high-profile cases to get massive television coverage on the nascent CNN, and most media outlets named the victim, which incensed Lansing and many other viewers. In all, six men were charged and four incarcerated.
“I was interested in two things,” said Lansing. “One was the guilt of the bystanders. You had a group of guys cheering on a gang rape. Were they as guilty as the rapists? And what would a jury think? I drew parallels to my mother’s childhood in Germany. And second, I was worried about the double victimization. When a woman was raped, it was always her fault: ‘She must have done something to deserve it.’ Effectively, it was as if she’d been victimized twice, fir
st by the rapists and then by whoever blamed her for the rape.”
Lansing had been disturbed by her own response to an assault she had witnessed while driving, when she glimpsed a couple arguing on the sidewalk, then saw the man slap the woman and pull her behind a tree. She swiftly turned around, but the couple had vanished. What would she have done had they still been there? Would she have gotten out? And then what? She played the incident over and over in her mind.
It was Paramount’s Dawn Steel who had first mentioned the Araujo story to Jaffe and Lansing, and with her blessing they hired former New York Post reporter Tom Topor (Nuts) to write the script, which focused on the fictional relationship between a district attorney and her blue-collar victim, and their decision to bring charges against the witnesses as well as the rapists.
When Jane Fonda said she wanted to make the film, Lansing was delighted. Now it would be easy to get the picture made. But Fonda insisted on replacing Topor with another writer, Nashville’s Joan Tewkesbury, and wanted the story to be told from the point of view of the DA, the character she would play.
“We had a script that nobody wanted to make, and Jane said she wanted a writer to help with her character,” said Lansing. “That seemed reasonable, so Tom was replaced without really being given the chance to prove himself. He was angry, really angry, which I understand.”
Over the course of a year, Tewkesbury went through multiple drafts, and everything seemed to be moving forward when Fonda called Lansing to say she was dropping out. She had decided to do another picture, 1986’s The Morning After, instead.
“I was furious,” said Lansing. “I was angry and hurt and frustrated. I knew that if Jane pulled out, our whole movie was going to fall apart. So I lashed out. I tried to make her feel bad by telling her she was the one who’d wanted to change the writer. I said, ‘You’re supposed to have integrity. That’s what you’re all about.’ ”
Fonda listened politely but did not relent. “She said, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, but I just don’t think the movie is ready,’ ” recalled Lansing. “She offered to read the next draft, but I told her we were moving on.”
Only many years later did she recognize that Fonda was right. “We weren’t a ‘go’ movie,” she said. “The script wasn’t right yet, and when something else came along with a director she’d approved, Sidney Lumet, it was understandable if she wanted to do it. That was part of my induction into the business. It was part of growing up.”
With Fonda out, Reckless languished, and the script was rejected by almost every director Lansing approached. In desperation, she and Jaffe mentioned a B-list name to Paramount’s Tanen, and he looked at them askance. “Have you actually seen his film?” he asked. Sheepishly, they retracted the suggestion.
The movie went into deep freeze until Jonathan Kaplan approached Lansing out of the blue. The young filmmaker had drawn warm reviews for 1983’s Heart like a Wheel, and asked to direct.
Lansing was skeptical. Kaplan had only one low-budget credit to his name, and would be jumping from that to a major studio release. But Jaffe supported him. “Stanley said, ‘Look, there comes a time when you’re either going to make the movie or not,’ ” she said. “He thought we should just go ahead and meet.”
When they got together, she liked the big, bluff and emotional Kaplan at once, despite his blunt assessment of the script.
“I read these drafts and said, ‘You guys drove this into the ground,’ ” he recalled. “Jane basically took control of the draft, did what she wanted to do. I know Joan. I’ve known her for years. She’s a lovely woman and a great writer, but she had to take dictation from Jane, and Jane got exactly what she wanted.”
The Tewkesbury-Fonda script had eliminated the best things about the original idea, he argued. “The rape victim became less central, and it was all about the lawyer. It was such a microcosm of what’s wrong with the studio development system: they needed a star, and the star had her own point of view, and they ended up boring themselves to death by over-rewriting it. Sherry said, ‘I know.’ ”
Lansing showed him the previous drafts and allowed him to judge what he liked without trying to steer him one way or another.
“Sherry didn’t indicate her point of view to me at all, even in the music in her voice,” said Kaplan. “She was very fair. She just said, ‘Here are the drafts. I’m not going to give you three years’ worth of reading to do, just the most significant.’ She gave me five scripts to read. I really loved Tom’s second draft. I said, ‘Why isn’t he rewriting?’ She said, ‘Well, it was really hard to fire him, and he’s furious at us and he’s furious at everybody.’ ”
Kaplan urged her to bring Topor back, and Lansing agreed, which meant placing herself in the exquisitely uncomfortable position of returning to the disgruntled writer, cap in hand.
“That was the first time I got to see her in action,” said Kaplan. “I was listening to her talk to him on the phone. She just charmed him right back in. First she left a message for him—‘I know you’re furious at us, and you have every right to be, but we’ve got Jonathan Kaplan, and he loved, loved, loved your draft. And I gave him your second draft and he loved that even more.’ Then he called back, and she was just brilliant. She let him vent—and it was easy, because basically she agreed with everything he said.”
Lansing had a somewhat different recollection: “I remember trudging up the stairs to Tom’s apartment, a long flight of stairs. And I said, ‘I beg you to come back!’ And he was suspicious, and he was tough. But he agreed.”
Steel was willing to green-light the picture with Kaplan onboard, given that it would only cost around $8 million. But the executive found herself in the minority among a phalanx of Paramount men.
“Dawn didn’t have quite enough power to just green-light it,” said Kaplan. “And the others [at the studio] would never have made this movie on their own.”
The Paramount brass wanted a brand name attached to star, and so Lansing sent the script to Kelly McGillis, who had risen to fame with 1985’s Witness and solidified her stardom with 1986’s Top Gun. “Choose any role,” she told her. McGillis chose the attorney.
“She said, ‘Whoever plays Sarah, the rape victim, is going to win an Academy Award,’ ” Lansing remembered, “but she wanted to be the lawyer.”
As with Diversion, the filmmakers preferred a different title. All liked J’Accuse, a term drawn from French novelist Emile Zola’s open letter in defense of the jailed army officer Alfred Dreyfus, and so the movie became The Accused.
Now they needed an actress to play the rape victim. Some candidates did not seem right; others were unavailable or simply said no. Weeks before filming, the picture’s casting director suggested Jodie Foster. Neither Paramount nor the producers were convinced.
“They thought I was still this child, and sort of a pudgy teenager,” said Foster. “They’d forgotten that years had gone by [since then]. They pretty specifically said, ‘No, we’re not interested.’ And I just kept bugging everybody.” She agreed to do a screen test. “They made a deal. It’s called a ‘test deal.’ Basically, you agree that you’re going to test, and then if you get the movie, you’re only going to be paid [whatever has been arranged]. But I had to beg to make that happen.”
Cloistered with Kaplan, McGillis and the producers, Foster delivered a powerful audition. And yet doubts remained. Jaffe and Lansing were concerned about the hard edge she had given her character, and asked her to come back a second time, adding insult to injury. “Jonathan told her to be sweet and vulnerable,” said Lansing, “and Jodie agreed to try, though she told us it was hopelessly wrong.”
That second audition won them over, but not the studio.
“Our biggest problem was the boys’ club at Paramount,” said Kaplan. “There were lists [of actresses’ names] they submitted, lists that we submitted, and so on. Here’s what came from the boys at Paramount: ‘We really don’t think she’s rape-able enough.’ ”
That conf
irmed all the stereotypes The Accused was trying to fight. But Steel was adamant the picture be made, and bulldozed her fellow executives into consenting. “She said, ‘I’m making this fucking movie, no matter what,’ ” said Kaplan.
When McGillis threatened to quit if Foster were not cast, Paramount backed down, and just before filming was due to start in April 1987, Foster got the part.
—
A roadside bar in Vancouver was chosen as the location for the rape sequence, and Kaplan kept his shooting schedule flexible so that Foster could decide when she was ready to film it. Only twenty-four years old, she was petrified by the scene.
“I was scared to prepare, so all I did was hang out with my friends, read the script once, and went dancing,” she said. “[I was] going out way too late at night, and just painting the town red to escape what I had to do. Which was perfectly in character. I was a kid, and it was hard.”
At one point, her mother had to intercede. “Sherry and Stanley called her and [said], ‘You really should come up here, because she’s a little weird,’ ” Foster recalled. “I was in the bar, drinking, having a fantastic time with all the actors from 21 Jump Street, who were filming at the same time. My mom got on a plane and came to rescue me. Even though I had worked my whole life, I hadn’t really been away from home without my mom for that long. It took a lot of getting used to. I was doing something that was emotionally difficult, and there I was all by myself. It’s still hard for me [to shoot away from home], and I’ve come up with all sorts of interesting rules and structures to figure out how to do that and not be a casualty, how to not be depressed and act out and do weird things.”
Early in the shoot, she walked on the set in a slinky T-shirt and short skirt, and said: “Let’s rape.”
Lansing and Jaffe cleared away extraneous crew members, and Kaplan shot the scene using two cameras, with McGillis present for moral support. The sequence had been planned with great precision, “but it was still brutal on Jodie,” said Lansing. “Her arms and legs were black and blue with bruises. She lost her voice from crying out for help.” The male cast members took it just as hard. “They were sensitive guys, and they were doing something on film that they couldn’t ever fathom doing in real life. They were having nightmares. They couldn’t handle the intensity.”
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 18
