by Marc Eliot
AFTER THE LUKEWARM New York and Los Angeles openings, an exhausted Michael returned to Santa Barbara. All he wanted to do now, he told one reporter, was to go home and relax. “One of the things I learned from watching my father is that you get caught on a merry-go-round. This is an industry of gluttony and total saturation. I want to keep a balance.” His spontaneous words reflected the still uneasy relationship between father and son, and at every opportunity he reminded everyone how much money he had made for his father: “My father didn’t push or promote me into show business. After my success with Cuckoo’s Nest, my father had mixed feelings, since it was his property first and he couldn’t get it off the ground. But he kept a percentage and made more off that than any of his own.”
And then it happened—one of those accidents of timing that changes everything. Twelve days after the film opened, on March 28, 1979, in a rare case of life imitating art, a partial nuclear core meltdown in Unit Two of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, resulted in a large release of radioactive gas. The incident was rated a 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, very serious, very dangerous.
It scared the hell out of a lot of people, not just in America but all over the world and suddenly this little movie produced by and starring Michael Douglas became the most relevant film in the world. Everyone now wanted to see it. Many theaters had to put the film on a round-the-clock screening schedule to accommodate the crowds. As the box office take soared, Michael went back on the promotional trail, this time emphasizing just how realistic his film really was. The movie “was well-received [at first] but dismissed as ridiculous. Three [sic] weeks later, we had Three Mile Island. In the movie, when we explain what the China Syndrome actually is, one character says, ‘It will destroy an area the size of Pennsylvania.’ And then Three Mile Island happens … in Pennsylvania! At the end of the movie we show the beginning of the meltdown … it would scare you how similar they were.”
The China Syndrome went on to gross $52 million in its initial domestic release, and its title became part of the everyday vernacular to describe any similar type of disaster.
The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Best Actress (Jane Fonda), Best Art Direction–Set Decoration (George Jenkins, Arthur Jeph Parker), and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, but the voters of the Academy, perhaps having had enough of Hanoi Jane, failed to vote it a single Oscar.3
The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Jack Lemmon won Best Actor for his performance. The film’s script also won the 1980 Writers Guild of America award. As Michael, later reflecting on the success of the film, said, “The first thought [for me] about the movie was the end result.… I have no formal religious training, but that picture … was close to a religious experience for me. It affected me in terms of working with the United Nations [for nuclear disarmament]. That’s where all that came from.”
AND YET, DESPITE having two of the biggest films of the 1970s, Michael Douglas was still not considered automatically bankable by the studios either as a producer or an actor. The primary reason was that neither of his films had anything remotely resembling what Hollywood likes to call a “love story.” They were offbeat and hard to categorize. His two out-of-the-chute successes were considered flukes by the industry. One fluke was bad enough; having two in a row was worse. Three would be too much for any studio to risk.
Which is why, after making the two biggest Hollywood movies of the past five years, going into 1979 Michael couldn’t get a job.
1 Nicholson had an early unsuccessful marriage and was now committed to a philosophy that said no matter how great a relationship was, it had to be able to end quickly by simply walking out the door. His pal Warren Beatty had shared this philosophy, as did Michael until he met Diandra.
2 Silkwood was made in 1983, directed by Mike Nichols, starring Meryl Streep. Both were nominated for Oscars but neither won.
3 Jack Lemmon lost to Dustin Hoffman in Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer; Jane Fonda lost to Sally Field in Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae. Despite expectations that they would be strong contenders in their respective categories, The China Syndrome was not nominated for Best Picture, nor was Michael for Best Supporting Actor.
CHAPTER 10
My producing career evolved out of my inability to get parts as an actor.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
ON DECEMBER 13, 1978, FOUR MONTHS BEFORE the opening of The China Syndrome, Diandra gave birth to a baby boy they named Cameron.
The birth had been a difficult one. She had delivered by cesarean, and it had considerably weakened her. At their Santa Barbara home, having returned from Los Angeles and his film commitments, Michael turned domestic and became the dutiful husband and father. He would often wake up early and brew strong coffee for himself and Diandra to drink together on their balcony. Around her, Michael knew, he had to be careful to keep his lingering bachelor ways outside the front door, to not “be a bad influence. She was so young [when we married], but she didn’t get sucked up into the Hollywood scene. She held back, picking and choosing her way.
“I guess what I found out before Diandra, was that I was basically very lonely. I’ve really only been happy with one person. And I learned that although I like to get it on—have a good time on a Friday or Saturday night—I can’t go out and get crazy all the time like I used to and recover as quickly.… I joke with some of my rock and roll friends who knew me in my wild, single days, like Joe Walsh [of the Eagles]. A lot of them are still out on the road after fifteen or eighteen years. I mean, if you’ve got kids who get up real early in the morning, your life is going to be different from the way it was.… I guess [Diandra] and I were soul mates—like we knew each other in a different life.”
But it was in this life that both of them were having a difficult time. Diandra was trying to work at drafting international charters to protect the environment while caring for Cameron. She regularly complained to Michael that since the baby was born she did not have enough time for herself or quality time together with him. Michael had no answer for that. No matter how much coffee he made or how early he woke up, he was by profession a producer and actor; it was a life that would never allow him to be home precisely at six, kiss the baby, read the paper, and sit down with his wife for dinner. Their different lifestyles had created a physical and emotional divide between them that would only get worse.
IN THE WINTER of 1979, with much fanfare, Michael, under the Bigstick banner, returned to filmmaking, signing a nonexclusive three-picture producing deal with Columbia Pictures, thanks in part to Sherry Lansing. Michael could not deny that he preferred making movies rather than changing diapers.
It was, at the time, a great deal for Michael, because it meant he would no longer have to hustle studios for distribution for every picture he wanted to make or spend all his time trying to raise funds. Columbia was willing to put up all the money. But not long after he made the deal Lansing left Columbia and landed up at Twentieth Century-Fox, the first female head of a major Hollywood studio. After Lansing’s departure, Michael felt orphaned, left without an enthusiastic supporter, and his producing career at Columbia stalled.
With nothing else on his plate and eager to work, he accepted a quickie acting role in a small film for Universal called Running. He made it simply because there was nothing else to do and he was not quite ready to return to full-time domesticity.
Hollywood always loves health fads, and none was more pervasive in the ’70s than running. It was inexpensive, and no equipment was needed beyond a pair of sneakers; it soon became a craze on the order of the 1950s Hula Hoop, something both fun and healthy. When it hit the film community celebrity circuit, everyone wanted to run. Dustin Hoffman had helped kick up the craze when he starred in John Schlesinger’s 1976 film adaptation of William Goldman’s novel Marathon Man. As writer Robert Vare put it in Cue magazine that fall, “Try to
pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times, TV Guide, or even Tunnel Workers Gazette without finding a story on jogging, usually written by a former hapless endomorph—a man who used to look like a dyspeptic ulcer but who now has been transmogrified through running into a person often mistaken in singles bars for Sylvester Stallone.”
Hollywood cashed in on the running craze for a while, but by the time Steven Hilliard Stern’s Running was produced, only the die-hards were still enthusiastic about it. Still, Michael remained convinced it would make a good movie. “The script knocked me out,” he dutifully told one interviewer. “I wasn’t even into running at the time. But it was a beautifully written love story about a man who has never really pushed himself in life and now has to get his act together.” It may not have been all that beautiful a script, but the character seemed almost uncomfortably close to Michael and his current career dilemma.
The plot for Running, such as it is, concerns an Olympic runner who has never quite made it in professional sports, wants to try to qualify for that year’s Olympics, suffers a debilitating injury, but goes on to finish. There is lots of grunting and sweating in the film, and an unlikely Hollywood-style happy ending involving a gratifying reunion with the runner’s ex-wife at the finish line, all of it watched on TV by his ecstatic daughters. Michael’s co-star in the film was Susan Anspach, a good-looking blond actress who projected an interesting combination of sophistication and sensuality, and who also happened to be one of Jack Nicholson’s lovers.
To prepare for the role, Michael moved back into his Hollywood office full-time, leaving Diandra at home with the baby, and began running every day through the twisty rises of Beverly Hills, doing, he later claimed, up to sixty miles a week—not exactly the physical regimen that De Niro went through for Scorsese’s Raging Bull, but still a lot of running. He then temporarily relocated to New York City to shoot some of the exteriors before moving again, this time to Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, where most of the remainder of the film was actually shot.
Despite Anspach’s sultry presence, the resulting film had no heat. It was yet another sexless turn for Michael in a film that literally went around in circles. It was released nationwide by Universal on November 16, 1979, and was gone from movie screens by Christmas.
BEFORE RUNNING was released, Michael announced the first project of his three-picture production deal with Columbia.1 It was to be called Romancing the Stone, with a script written by a complete unknown, a Malibu waitress who had given to it an agent while she continued to wait on tables. Her name was Diane Thomas. As Michael remembers, it was passed around the studios and received little enthusiasm before it landed on his desk. He took it home one Thursday night, read it after dinner, and couldn’t put it down. “I just loved it. [Later] I went to Alice’s Restaurant to meet Diane, and I found that she had the same kind of quality as [the leading female character in the film] Joan Wilder. She was an attractive blonde who had a shyness about her and a real need for adventure. She had written the script as her own fantasy.”
The following day Michael contacted Frank Price, the new chief executive of Columbia Pictures, and John Veitch, the senior vice president, and told them he had found his first project for them. “I was looking for something that would be fun and lighter than the other things I had produced. I thought it had the elements of romance and action and comedy, and I liked the idea of shooting something in the jungle, or down in Mexico.”
Price and Veitch each took the script home over the weekend, and on Monday they gave Michael the green light to make a preemptive bid prior to auction of $250,000 for the script, an astronomical amount for a first screenplay by a woman at a time when there weren’t that many established female screenwriters in Hollywood. Being on-screen was no problem for women; behind the scenes, though, with notable exceptions like Lansing, it was nearly impossible for them to break through the industry’s glass ceiling.
Michael, however, with his liberal sixties background, had no problem with Diane Thomas’s gender or her lack of experience. “It was a bidding situation and I was always accused of paying too much money for a first-time writer. My take was, if it’s a first-time writer or a tenth screenwriter, it’s priceless.”
Interestingly, no actors came knocking on Michael’s door looking to play Jack T. Colton, the Harrison Ford–type male lead. Part of the problem was that the role appeared to be actually modeled after Ford himself, and the film resembled a bit too closely a Spielberg-Lucas project called Raiders of the Lost Ark that had just gone into production as a joint venture between Lucasfilm Ltd. and Paramount. One of the reasons Thomas’s obviously commercial script had received no previous takers was that no other actor in Hollywood was willing to ruffle those golden Spielberg/Lucas/Paramount feathers.
Except Michael. He had decided to play the role himself.
The reasons that Michael had not made this kind of movie or played this type of role before had more to do with his personal feelings than the rigid dictates of Hollywood. “The role of Jack Colton is closer to my father. I guess I’ve shied away from the kind of roles he played, shied away from the comparison. Passion and anger. It limits you a little.… The Colton role is also closer to me than what I’ve played before. He’s a rascal.… [A]s Joan Wilder’s publisher says in the script, ‘Jack’s favorite author is the guy who wrote Pull tab to open.’ ”
So the dynamics of the emotional and professional competition of son versus father were still there for the both of them. Kirk’s reaction to this shift in Michael’s career direction and choice of roles? Cautious enthusiasm (heavy on the caution, light on the enthusiasm) with a critical assessment of Michael’s having not yet found himself as an actor. “Michael’s just scratched the surface as an actor. There are lots of things inside him that haven’t emerged on-screen yet, an inner strength, an inner anger. There’s a mystery inside him. A seething cauldron behind that face. It’s a wonderful quality. A good part for Michael would be a nice, sweet, lovable guy and then—bang—you’re suddenly looking into the eyes of a killer.… [B]efore Champion, I played weaklings, made pictures like A Letter to Three Wives. Then, suddenly, everyone thought of me as a tough guy.” Including Michael. In effect, Kirk was saying that Michael had not played up to his talents or his abilities, and until he did, he would never be as good an actor as his father.
PRODUCTION ON Romancing the Stone had originally been scheduled to begin in February 1980, but because it still had no director, the studio was insisting on a major rewrite, and the location was not set, its start was pushed back indefinitely. It was still a go, but as far as the studio was concerned, it was now only a partial green light.
In the meantime, Michael started looking for another film just to act in, a quick shoot, something to keep him busy that he might be able to squeeze in while he waited for Romancing the Stone to go into production.
He talked things over with Nicholson. Michael said he was worried about the long delay getting Romancing the Stone going, something he attributed at least in part to Columbia’s dragging its feet. Nicholson was less concerned about Michael’s producing problems and told him so in no uncertain terms. The reason he had not become a big movie star, Jack told him, was that he had been rendered sexless by the studios. He needed a script with some heat in it.
Michael chose something called It’s My Turn, in which he played a former baseball player, Ben Lewin, whose mother (Dianne Wiest) is marrying a female mathematician’s widowed father. Kate Gunzinger, the mathematician (Jill Clayburgh), is a professor at a Chicago university and lives with her boyfriend, Homer (Charles Grodin). When Kate travels to New York to attend the wedding she meets Ben. Although he is married, he and Kate have a brief but passionate affair. After the wedding, Kate returns to Chicago, unsure what the future holds.
When Clayburgh agreed to do It’s My Turn, the script had already been knocking around for six years. Back then, Claudia Weill, a television producer (and distant cousin to Kurt Weill), liked the novel it was based on and c
ontacted screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein to ask if she would be interested in writing a screenplay-to-order called Girlfriends, similar to the novel in some ways but with some differences.
Bergstein said no, she was too busy working on her next novel.
Several years later, Weill was given significant public TV grant money to make a movie, and once again contacted Bergstein. This time she agreed, as long as she was guaranteed to have input every stage of the way. That screenplay eventually became It’s My Turn.
When she felt it was ready, Weill gave the script to Alan Ladd Jr. “Laddie,” at the time the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, loved it and wanted to make a hefty preemptive offer. However, when Weill told Bergstein, she rejected it, telling Weill she had changed her mind and wanted nothing to do with Hollywood, that she was only interested in writing for public TV.
It took some convincing, but when Jill Clayburgh expressed interest in playing Kate, Bergstein agreed and the deal looked set. Then suddenly Laddie and his entire team were gone, the victims of a studio coup. Either way, the new regime at Fox had no interest in It’s My Turn.
But not for long. Veteran producer Ray Stark, a longtime Columbia producer whose pictures carried the prestigious credit “A Ray Stark Film,” wanted to take over the entire production, and he reconceived it top to bottom, cutting out a key sex scene between Michael and Clayburgh. That scene was one of the reasons Michael had wanted to make the film.
