While West was rewriting, Lansing turned to who might play Lara. It was a challenging part to cast, needing an actress sexual enough to resemble the computer creation while accessibly human. The filmmakers agreed that only one person could pull it off: Angelina Jolie.
It was early 2000, and the twenty-four-year-old was not yet a major star. She had earned kudos for HBO’s Gia (1998), in which she played a real-life model who died of AIDS. She was soon to win an Oscar for Girl, Interrupted, which would lift her to another level of stardom, but was plagued by damaging reports about her personal life: she was rumored to have dabbled in drugs and had an odd relationship with her brother, along with an even odder one with her soon-to-be-husband, Billy Bob Thornton, a vial of whose blood she reportedly carried around her neck.
“She definitely had some baggage and something of a dark reputation,” said West. “Funnily enough, that was one of my selling points: this sort of troubled and dangerous aspect in her reputation actually helped the character.”
Lansing was concerned, especially when both Jon Voight (Jolie’s father) and Jane Fonda (a family friend) called to warn her that the actress was extremely fragile. “I didn’t know if that was true,” she said. “But we discussed it, and Larry Gordon got a call like that, too.”
With Lansing’s blessing, West flew to Mexico to meet Jolie on the set of Original Sin, a thriller in which she was starring opposite Antonio Banderas.
“She said, ‘Look, I want to do it, but I know what my reputation is, and I’ll do anything you want to prove that I’m worthy. I’ll be reliable and I’ll turn up and I’ll work hard,’ ” recalled West. “She said, ‘I don’t care if the studio wants to drug-test me every day. Whatever you need, I’ll do it.’ ”
Jolie also sat down with Gordon. “I knew Angelina had some issues, and I met with her and I told her what I knew,” he recalled. “I said, ‘This is going to be a difficult role, because the British press are so excited about this.’ There was a big reward for the first person to get a photo of Lara Croft in costume; there was a bounty. I said: ‘The press is going to be vicious. They’re going to be looking for you. They’re going to know all the things I know. And I just want to tell you: if you do this movie, you’re going to have to ride, rope, jump, shoot, learn to fight—you’re going to do everything. They have a schedule for you that’s just horrendous. You’re going to be working your ass off. It’s going to be really tough. If you agree to this, and you do these things, I will be your biggest fan and ally for your whole career, as long as you live. If you say you’re in and you don’t do it, I’ll be the biggest enemy you’ve ever had.’ She said, ‘I’m in.’ ”
Lansing met with Jolie before giving her approval. They connected at once.
“I thought she was wonderful,” Lansing noted. “She was beyond beautiful—that’s the first thing you noticed. She had a perfect face, with perfect lips and eyes. Then she was smart, she was strong, she was very articulate, very together. She talked about how she loved Lara Croft and how we had to protect Lara. She was involved in almost everything from that point on.”
Jolie, who signed on for $1 million, was equally taken with Lansing. “What I noticed immediately [was her] empathy,” she said. “It was how she achieved the great balance of being tough as nails and equally kind and compassionate. We all wanted Lara to be fun, like the game, but at the heart of it give young girls their Indiana Jones, someone adventurous and strong to look up to. Sherry made that possible.”
The actress was drug-tested, regardless.
“We were sufficiently worried that we obliged her to undergo random drug tests, and not just urine tests but also blood tests,” said Goldwyn. To everyone’s relief, Jolie passed each test.
Even so, the studio and producers were concerned enough to talk about keeping an eye on their star during the shoot.
“There was the notion that we would put a team around her, for two purposes,” said a member of the production team. “One really was practical: to get her into great shape for the movie, not only in terms of appearance, but to do what she had to do on-screen. Then there was this notion that we had to give her spiritual and psychological support.”
This was when the real problems began. West suggested hiring Bobby Klein, a former photographer and therapist who he believed had the right kind of experience.
“There were issues with the studio and producers being very nervous about Angelina,” said West. “There was a discussion with the group: ‘We’re looking for someone to oversee or keep an eye on her, because we’re all making the film.’ That guy Bobby Klein came up as somebody who had worked in that world of psychotherapy or drug management or whatever. He was brought in to supervise Angelina.”
Relationships that had been tense before became strained to the breaking point now, and Gordon, who had already battled the studio over money and the script and would have further battles while preparing the shoot, bristled at Klein’s presence.
“Simon West comes with this guy Bobby Klein,” he said. “Who’s Bobby Klein? He’s dressed all in black. He’s a weird-looking guy, a big guy with a white beard and white hair and blue eyes. He’s very esoteric and gives me a thing that if you wear it you can’t get cancer, or whatever the hell, some bullshit thing. [They said] ‘He’s going to be a big help and he’s going to do all these great things,’ and so on and so forth.”
As preproduction got under way in England, Klein asked to be placed in charge of Jolie’s physical preparation, even though a stunt coordinator was already working with her. When Klein insisted on employing a health expert who had been investigated by Scotland Yard, the production team balked.
“[The expert] wanted her to have milk baths, and started talking about yoga and meditation, and she wanted to be the point person in charge of Angelina’s training,” said Lloyd Levin, who produced the film with Gordon. “It was just this bullshit. It seemed like spiritual hokum.”
When Klein was then accused of sexually harassing West’s assistant, among a host of other issues, he left the production.
Gordon was ecstatic. “I said, ‘Angelina doesn’t want you around, and I never wanted you around, so your ass is gone. You can get your shit and go, or I can get security to throw you off the lot. You decide.’ He said, ‘I still get my expenses?’ I said, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ ”
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With Klein out of the way, Jolie was a dream.
“In the dailies, she was riveting,” said Lansing. “She took what might have been a cardboard character and added a layer of mystery and emotion and humanity.”
“She trained for months beforehand,” noted West. “She worked out physically. She did fight training. She learned how to do bungee ballet. She did everything to make it work. There were a couple of times she was in a rig, where she had to shoot from [several] feet in the air. The rig was hard fiberglass. It was digging into her hips, but she never complained. I did see her go off and have a little weep, to kind of cry out the pain, and then come back on set. She did all these amazing, huge stunts that she was fantastic at.”
Only at the end of the long and turbulent shoot did an accident occur, when she fell and damaged her foot.
“It’s to be expected,” said Jolie. “After all the big stunts, I ended up hurting myself on a smaller stunt. A big jump over a statue, and I landed badly on my ankle. A partial tear, and I came back to work with a cane. Not very Croft. I had physical therapy every morning before work. My goal was to be able to run again by the time we went to Cambodia [one of the picture’s locations]. Those dates couldn’t move, so I had to make it, no matter. Fortunately, I did.”
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Weeks after the wrap, Lansing saw the edited film.
“Oh my God, it was terrible,” she said. “I was in this screening room, and I was so disappointed. It was well shot and well acted, but it was completely disjointed. The story made no sense.”
“It was horrible,” said Levin. “I thought, ‘This can’t possibly represen
t the movie. We’ve just wasted $100 million.’ Sherry got up and faced us [after the screening] and said, ‘I’m not going to beat around the bush, but this is a disaster.’ ”
“It was a very awkward situation,” said West. “Sherry and Larry were in the theater, watching it. They weren’t really speaking. I had to get my notes separately from them. At that point, Larry said, ‘Well, I think it needs a lot more work. I want to bring in another editor.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ ”
Lansing authorized a week of reshoots for the ending, and several meetings took place among the filmmakers and the new editor as the finale was revised, the improved ending filmed, and the picture restructured until something coherent emerged.
“We had numerous screenings,” said Levin. “We all felt we were moving in the right direction. Sherry was very, very supportive in postproduction. During that process, she had a cool head and was very pragmatic.”
Despite the volleys lobbed by the critics, Lara Croft made $275 million around the world when it opened in June 2001, enough to warrant a sequel. Lansing had launched a new franchise at minimal cost to the studio and helped turn Jolie into a major star.
And yet the experience left her feeling empty. True, the film had done well, but deep down she knew it was a triumph of marketing over content, of hype over reality.
She had been bothered for some time by her growing awareness that the quality of pictures no longer seemed essential, that clever sales strategies could redeem all but the most abysmal of movies. But never did that sink in as much as in a private conversation with Robert Friedman, her vice chairman and a marketing expert, while they were working on the new edit. When Lansing revealed her fears, he dismissed them with a shrug.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean?” said Lansing. “I don’t have a clue what the movie’s about.”
“I can still sell it,” said Friedman. “We’re going to open to $40 million or $50 million, and then we’ll make two and a half to three times that in total. You can spend all this money to improve the picture, but it won’t make the tiniest difference to how much it brings in.”
His words proved dead-accurate but left Lansing feeling shaken.
“I can’t think like that,” she said. “If I did, what would be the point of my job?”
Three months after Lara Croft opened, Lansing was lying in bed when Friedkin urgently shook her awake. “Sherry,” he said, “America’s under attack.”
It was the morning of September 11, 2001. They switched on the television and were jolted by the sights and sounds of the two burning towers, and then horrified as they watched one of them collapse.
“We just sat there, frozen,” said Lansing. “Then we went downstairs and called our children to make sure they were OK. They were scared and didn’t understand. We started calling everyone we knew in New York, and couldn’t get through. We didn’t know who was alive and who wasn’t. We sat mesmerized and scared.”
Even after she had gone to the studio and her team had begun to regroup, anxiety permeated every waking moment, and it spread throughout the city.
“Everyone was in a state of shock at Universal along with the rest of the country,” said Universal’s Ron Meyer. “People weren’t sure if they should come to work or stay home. Our emergency personnel, security team and I spent the next three days meeting with large groups in a soundstage to let our employees know we were doing everything possible to ensure a safe environment at work.”
Ten days after the attacks, the MPAA’s Jack Valenti convened a meeting of the studio heads. In his courtly southern tone, Valenti told them that Attorney General John Ashcroft had warned him, based on terrorist chatter intercepted by the FBI, that the next full-scale attack could well be targeted at a Hollywood studio.
“I had trouble reconciling my responsibilities with my fears,” said Lansing. “Every time I heard a loud noise, I jumped. I was telling my staff there was nothing to worry about, even as stanchions were being erected at the gates.”
Like Universal and all the major studios, Paramount tightened security, building barricades and adding metal detectors, while Lansing worried that nothing they did would prevent an aerial attack of the kind that had destroyed the World Trade Center.
Kroll, a security firm, was hired to create a new protective system at a cost of millions of dollars. “They analyzed the studio: ‘If the bomb hit here, this would happen. If it hit there, that would happen,’ ” Lansing recalled. “The whole world changed for us. Everyone’s car trunk was searched. Our security team used mirrors on long poles to look under each vehicle that entered the lot. We stopped having test screenings there.”
Like the tremors that followed large earthquakes, occasional aftershocks would shake even the most confident executives, and the sense of uncertainty continued for months.
“We had watchers on the roofs and across the road,” said Dolgen. “Even so, two months after 9/11, some jerk drives into the studio and he’s got a case of grenades in his trunk. They were dummies, for a film shoot.” Another time, “a guy walked into the parking structure across the street and went to the top floor and was taking pictures of the lot from that vantage point. We grabbed him and called the police, but they told us we had to let him go.” Sometime later, the man got into similar trouble in Canada, though there was never proof that he was planning terrorist action.
As a patriotic fervor swept the country, Lansing convened a meeting among the studio chiefs and Karl Rove, then senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, who addressed a gathering of film, television and union executives at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.
“The heads of all the companies were there,” said Lansing. “It wasn’t about Republicans and Democrats. It was about what we could do to help the country.”
During his presentation, Rove outlined the history of Al Qaeda and its current operations, then opened the floor to questions.
“We discussed what the studios could do,” said Lansing. “Content was off the table; there was no suggestion we would produce propaganda. But we did talk about sending DVDs to the troops and making patriotic public service announcements to play in theaters, and later we did all those things.”
She drew inspiration from World War II, when the studios had joined forces to make a series of documentaries called Why We Fight, as much a case of propaganda as information. “It was a short-lived burst of bipartisan patriotism,” she said.
This, of course, assumed there would still be an entertainment industry when the terror died down. Theater attendance had dropped, and none of Hollywood’s powers-that-be could predict when audiences would return. They worried that exhibitors would have to introduce extreme security measures that might scare people away for good.
Inevitably, these concerns affected one of Paramount’s highest-profile pictures, The Sum of All Fears, a movie green-lit before 9/11, which tackled terrorism head-on.
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The fourth in a series of films featuring the character of Jack Ryan created by novelist Tom Clancy, Sum followed the CIA analyst’s attempts to prevent a group of terrorists from detonating a nuclear device during a football game.
Its subject matter was almost eerily in sync with the times, just as The China Syndrome had been more than two decades earlier. Back then, however, Lansing had come away with the lesson that such timeliness did not necessarily help at the box office; now she feared audiences would shun the movie as an unwanted reminder of what had just taken place.
Bringing the picture to the screen had not been easy, especially given Clancy’s stubbornness.
“Tom was one of the more difficult people I’ve known, complicated and unpredictable and all of that,” said Lansing. “He hated Harrison Ford and didn’t talk to Mace Neufeld, the producer. I guess he had a problem with success. How could you not think Harrison was perfect for the part? How could you not think Mace and Bob Rehme were great producers?”
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p; Early in her run at Paramount, as was her wont, she arranged a meeting between Neufeld and the writer in an attempt to broker a truce.
“She had me fly with her to Maryland to go to a Baltimore Orioles game, because Clancy owned a piece of that team,” said Neufeld. “She tried to create a detente between us, and we did start talking again, but it didn’t accomplish much. He became very combative in the press. At one point, he said Harrison was too old to play Jack Ryan. We stopped talking after a while, because he just went ballistic over things.”
The more successful Clancy became, the more eccentric he seemed. During the making of Patriot Games, “we went to visit him at his Chesapeake Bay mansion—me, Mace, Harrison and my daughter, Lucia, who was eleven at the time,” recalled Phillip Noyce, the Sliver director who also handled the Clancy franchise. “We pulled up, and Clancy came out dressed in military fatigues, and my daughter said, ‘I think that’s some kind of statement, Dad.’ ”
The writer invited his guests to go shooting. “We went down to the basement of his house, where he had a safari range, and he was instructing Harrison on how to fire a nine-millimeter pistol,” Noyce continued. “I was jet-lagged, and I made the mistake of going to sleep. I slept through his instruction, and that seemed to turn him against me forever.”
With three successful Clancy films already released, making a fourth was a priority for Lansing. After several drafts and several writers, the screenplay (credited to Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne) was exactly what she wanted. By mid-2000, it was ready to go.
“The script was terrific,” she said. “At the end of the second act, a neo-Nazi plants a nuclear bomb in a stadium where the president and the CIA director are watching a football game. What’s shocking is that Ryan can’t stop the bomb from detonating. I thought that was very realistic. In every movie, the hero saves the day, but not here.”
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 34
