by Marc Eliot
“Michael never let one leotard go by,” Attenborough wryly noted.
The only problem for Michael was that, for the first time in his life, he could feel the specter of middle age looming. Off the set, the young girls in the chorus all referred to him politely as “Mr. Douglas,” the way they would refer to a school principal or a friend’s father.
FILMING WAS SCHEDULED to begin in January 1985 in New York City at the Mark Hellinger Theater, on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-First Street. At night, rather than going home—and despite Diandra’s wanting him there every night—Michael preferred the peace and the sanctity of his office at the theater, where he could work alone and undisturbed into the night. Even as Chorus Line was in production, he worked on the preproduction schedule for The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Romancing the Stone.
Fox had made the deal for Nile in August 1985, before A Chorus Line started rehearsals and before Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, was breaking box office records for a sequel. Joel Douglas, one of the producers of Romancing the Stone, was brought back by Michael for The Jewel of the Nile (known jokingly to industry insiders as “Jews in Denial” and “Jews on the Nile”).
A Chorus Line’s shooting schedule had slowed, mostly due to Feuer and Attenborough’s difficulties in getting the subtleties of the young chorus hopefuls to make sense on-screen. Attenborough especially was at a loss and again and again turned to Michael, the only non-chorus character in the production, to somehow help him make the film. To do so, he tried everything, eventually flattery. Every chance he got, Attenborough overpraised Michael’s performance, to the point of comically gross exaggeration: “Michael’s determination to play the ‘mean and attractive’ Zach—without a huge salary or star billing—represents growth in the actor’s career, and the resulting performance is miraculous. He brings to the performance enormous stature and a mind. Zach doesn’t work unless you believe there’s a mind racing around there.… [I]n the deep close shots, he is, oh, so delicate, like a watercolor rather than an oil painting. But you feel behind it, as you do with all great stars, the explosion imminent. Cooper had it, and Spencer Tracy—that huge strength and power behind the gentleness.”
Michael wouldn’t take the bait. He resisted having any role in the production except playing the part of Zach; on the set, he was strictly a hired hand. The onus, Michael made sure, remained with Attenborough.
THE SNAIL-PACED production on A Chorus Line threatened to cut into the scheduled start date of The Jewel of the Nile, a much bigger and more important project for Michael. It didn’t make things any better that both films were slated to open at Christmas 1985. That gave Michael only a year to get Jewel into theaters.
Fox had insisted that it have essentially the same cast, characters, writers, and director as Romancing. Michael didn’t agree. He thought new blood was a better idea to keep the series fresh. Diane Thomas, who had some clout now, sided with Fox and insisted on writing the sequel and keeping Joan the main character. After the success of Romancing the Stone, offers for Thomas’s services had come in fast and furious, including one that really interested her, Steven Spielberg’s remake of Victor Fleming’s 1943 tearjerker A Guy Named Joe, about an ill-fated wartime romance between Spencer Tracy (and his ghost) and Irene Dunne. The film had just enough chaste romance, with a touch of romantic fantasy to attract Spielberg, and he wanted Diane to write it. He had been impressed with Romancing and was confident he could get her with a two-picture deal that included the second Indiana Jones sequel. He was right. She eagerly accepted his offer. The remake of Joe, renamed Always, starred Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter. Dreyfuss at the time was the favorite on-screen doppelganger of the director. The idea to do the remake originated with him and Spielberg while they were both struggling through what would eventually be the breakthrough for both, Jaws, released in 1975.
However, Diane never got to write any of these films, including Jewel. As a present to her after the success of Romancing the Stone, Michael gave the former waitress a brand-new Porsche, partly out of gratitude for her work and partly as a way to try to convince her to do the sequel. On October 21, while driving with a male friend along the Pacific Coast Highway, she let him take the wheel, even though he was drunk. He crashed, and she was killed instantly. Diane Thomas was thirty-nine years old.
When he heard about it, Michael was grief-stricken, and felt a sizable amount of guilt for having given her that car. The deadline was looming, though, and he had to get Jewel moving. Michael hired the television writing team of Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner to somehow crank out a script. He assumed that Bob Zemeckis would direct, but Zemeckis, too, had moved on. He had signed to direct Back to the Future for Spielberg and his production company, Amblin, in association with Universal. Michael then chose Lewis Teague, whose direction of the 1983 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Cujo, about a woman and her child trapped in a car by a rabid dog, had impressed Michael.
With all these mostly downward changes, it was clear now to Michael that Jewel was not going to be another Stone. Even Kathleen Turner had hesitated about signing on. She had already contracted to do two other movies, John Huston’s 1985 Prizzi’s Honor, co-starring Jack Nicholson, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 Peggy Sue Got Married, co-starring a then up-and-coming Nicolas Cage. Although she felt she owed Michael, she agreed to do his film only if she thought the script was as good as the first, which put even more pressure on Michael, who in turn put it on Rosenthal and Konner. Their first script came in while Michael was finishing up on A Chorus Line. He read it that night in his office, felt it didn’t work, and took to rewriting it himself.
He tried to remain publicly upbeat about all the problems. “It’s always difficult to try to top a very successful picture like Romancing the Stone,” Michael said later. In an interview with the Sunday Times of London, he told them, “What we wanted to do was peep in on those two people who rode down West End Avenue in a sailboat … and pick up their relationship six months later.”
He elaborated on the plot for another reporter: “We’ll follow them through the south of France and they’ll get into another adventure which will take them to some fictionalized North African country. I think we have a real fun story. It may even be funnier than Romancing.”
To further sell the movie, he reminded audiences that Danny DeVito would be back, along with “some other new characters—like the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner the Eccentric.”3 The only principal character not returning from the original was the deliciously evil Ira (Zack Norman), despite (or because of) Norman’s having become one of Michael’s best friends and future business partner.
SOMEHOW, A Chorus Line managed to complete filming on time. As Michael later remembered, “We finished shooting January 31 [1985], and next morning I ran over to England for a production meeting [for Jewel] with the guys who had been scouting locations in five countries; we narrowed it down to principal shooting in Morocco.… [W]e set up offices in Nice, where filming was to wind up the following July.” To handle the difficult physical production he brought over fifty top technicians and administrators hired by his new production company created especially for the film, the Stone Group.
Even as Michael arrived in Morocco, new production problems arose. In April, during the first few days of actual shooting, he felt a definite lack of chemistry between Kathleen and himself (she had come aboard at the last minute). Although offscreen they were still sexually involved, he wasn’t wrong. At one point, unhappy with the way things were going, she threatened to pull out of the filming. With Fox backing him, Michael countered with a threat to sue for $25 million for breach of contract. Kathleen then had an abrupt change of heart and agreed to stay if the script could somehow be improved. In an attempt to cool her out, Michael did to Kathleen what Attenborough had done to him: he used flattery. He became publicly effusive about her ability to work under extremely difficult conditions. “I take my hat off to
Kathleen,” he said later. “There was many a time in which we would be doing a scene and all of a sudden someone would say, ‘Excuse me one second, the teamsters are about to strike,’ and I’d have to go. She was always wonderful about that. She could get back into it.”
The locals that filled out the crew operated on a different time clock than those Michael had imported from Hollywood. They did not have the commitment or the expertise that Michael demanded, resulting in a general slowdown of production. And then there was Ramadan, a month-long religious holiday during which Muslims do not eat, drink, smoke, and do as little work as possible during the daylight hours. That meant that work on the film could only take place at night. (Michael fired the two production managers who had not figured this into the schedule.)
The grand finale of Jewel had to be filmed precisely at twilight, and a solid week of action scenes had to be shot during the day, in the blistering desert city of Ouarzazate. Michael had to pull a Houdini to get all of it done.
One night, a scene was scheduled to be shot in the town square, with hundreds of extras milling beneath parapets hung with black-and-gold banners emblazoned with a falcon, the dictator Omar’s symbol. It took hours to get the shot set up, and only then did someone notice there was no film in the cameras. The raw stock could not be found, and the shot was lost. “I can’t fucking believe it,” Michael shouted to no one, and sent everyone home. Joel quietly suggested lightening the tension by throwing a big party. Michael did not smile, and everyone close enough to hear what he told Joel about his idea turned their heads away, pretending not to have heard anything.
A while later Michael received a call saying the film stock had been found, but it was too late to reassemble everyone and shoot the scene. It had to be rescheduled.
It got worse. Two location scouts and a pilot were killed in a storm while scouting new places to shoot. Several crew members were fired when Michael felt they weren’t giving enough of themselves for the film. Props often didn’t work right, causing additional expensive re-shoots. The temperature in Michael’s on-set tent often reached above a hundred degrees. Several crew members couldn’t take the relentless heat and demanded hotel rooms. Michael’s response was to threaten to release anybody who didn’t like their accommodations. Several still protested, and they were all fired.
Michael summed up his experience on the film this way: “After our experiences shooting Romancing the Stone in Mexico, we said, ‘Okay, enough of the rain and mud. Let’s go somewhere where it’s sandy and sunny. What I didn’t realize was that in Romancing, you fill up the screen with a few banana trees and the rain coming down. Two people going through the jungle with a machete looks real big. You go out in the middle of the desert, though [in Jewel], and you look like an ass sitting there. There’s nothing there. You’re gonna need a lot of stuff to fill it up. Lotta toys … so we were constantly behind. The temperature was sometimes 140 degrees.”
IN THE SUMMER of 1985, nearly eight months after he had begun, an exhausted Michael called a finish to the shooting of Jewel on the Nile. “Everybody knew this was gonna be a backbreaker,” he said to Danny DeVito while in the back of the Mercedes stretch limo parked just outside London’s Twickenham Studio, where he was feverishly working on postproduction to make the December opening. “I just need a break, man. I can’t even … anything.”
DeVito said, “You can’t do it any quicker than that on a picture like this. I defy anybody to try. [You] haven’t had a moment of rest. If it wasn’t for the makeup they put on [you, you’d] look like a rat right now … makeup, man, I’m a sucker for makeup now.”
“Makeup, man, I’m a sucker for makeup.”
“Yeah, your wife says, ‘Gonna go to bed with your makeup on again?’ ”
“Serious cosmetic work. Then you look in the mirror, everything’s okay.”
What they were talking about was cosmetic face improvements. “He’s had more work done than anybody I know. Especially the eyes. He’s a leading man. He’s at it constantly, it’s part of the gig,” said a close acting friend who had appeared in Romancing the Stone but not The Jewel of the Nile and who does not wish to be identified.
BOTH THE JEWEL OF THE NILE and A Chorus Line were scheduled to open the same week. Jewel had the Wednesday, December 11, position, giving it a two-day jump on the rest of the still-unreleased big holiday films. A Chorus Line was set to open two days later, on Friday the thirteenth.
A Chorus Line had good word of mouth and was opening wide, in a thousand theaters, while Jewel had twelve hundred theaters guaranteed and another four hundred to be added on Christmas Day. Michael was going to be plastered over twenty-four hundred screens at one time. And because he had a lot more at stake with Jewel than with A Chorus Line, he naturally hoped that the latter didn’t turn into the kind of sleeper that might seriously hurt Jewel at the box office.
The reviews for The Jewel of the Nile were mixed. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin dismissed the film by writing, “There’s nothing in The Jewel of the Nile that wasn’t funnier or more fanciful in Romancing the Stone.” Roger Ebert agreed that “it is not quite the equal of Romancing the Stone,” but at least he liked the interplay between Douglas and Turner. “It seems clear,” he wrote, “that they like each other and are having fun during the parade of ludicrous situations in the movie, and their chemistry is sometimes more entertaining than the contrivances of the plot.”
Two days later, A Chorus Line opened. The New York Times’s Vincent Canby observed, “Though it was generally agreed that ‘Hair’ would not work as a film, Miloš Forman transformed it into one of the most original pieces of musical cinema of the last 20 years. Then they said that ‘A Chorus Line’ couldn’t be done—and this time they were right.… Mr. Attenborough has elected to make a more or less straightforward film version that is fatally halfhearted.”
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, more of a film buff than a stage fan, sharply disagreed: “The result may not please purists who want a film record of what they saw on stage, but this is one of the most intelligent and compelling movie musicals in a long time—and the most grown up, since it isn’t limited, as so many contemporary musicals are, to the celebration of the survival qualities of geriatric actresses.”
Variety said, “Chorus often seems static and confined, rarely venturing beyond the immediate. Attenborough merely films the stage show as best he could. Nonetheless, the director and lenser Ronnie Taylor have done an excellent job working within the limitations, using every trick they could think of to keep the picture moving. More importantly, they have a fine cast, good music, and a great, popular show to work with. So if all they did was get it on film, that’s not so bad.”
Time Out London said, “The grit and drive of the original have been dissipated into studiously unkempt glitz as empty as plasticised pop.… It’s too corny and unbelievable for words.”
The Jewel of the Nile was the clear winner of the two, critic-proof, and grossed a whopping $96 million on a $25 million budget, giving Michael his fourth blockbuster in ten years, while A Chorus Line did less than $15 million on a $27 million budget. Nonetheless, A Chorus Line didn’t hurt Michael at all; it was Attenborough who received the industrial-strength thrashing on both sides of the pond.
On the strength of the success of The Jewel of the Nile, Michael found himself once more at the top of his game, but he had paid a price for it. He was burned out and exhausted, facing a grueling five-month worldwide promotional tour for Jewel on the Nile. When that was finally over, he never wanted to see another foot of film, go to a movie theater, or even watch a TV show again. Nor did he want to have anything to do with a second sequel to Romancing the Stone, although the studio already had a draft finished, called The Crimson Eagle, written by Warren Skaaren, who had done the screenplay for Tony Scott’s 1987 Beverly Hills Cop II (the first of two sequels). But without Michael’s enthusiasm and encouragement, it proved impossible to get off the ground.
Michael knew he had made the
right decision, and his days as an action star mercifully came to an end.
1 In its first run. It was eventually passed by Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Les Misérables.
2 Twenty percent of the film’s profits had to go to the show’s original producers and cast. The show was conceived as an ensemble piece, and the original cast members added much to it; in return, Bennett gave them all a piece of the show and wanted to be sure they had a piece of the movie as well. Bennett died in 1987.
3 Avner the Eccentric was appearing on Broadway while Michael was shooting A Chorus Line. He caught Avner’s show one night and immediately signed him up for Jewel, instructing his writers to create a character for him.
With Glenn Close in 1987’s water-cooler movie of the year, Fatal Attraction.
REBEL ROAD ARCHIVES
CHAPTER 13
I haven’t had a break in two and a half years. I’m not saying I won’t produce again, but it’ll be a hell of a long time and then perhaps a simple bedroom comedy. I belong right now to my wife and son.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
DIANDRA, THE WIFE HE “BELONGED TO,” WAS LESS than pleased with an interview Kathleen Turner gave GQ while in Morocco filming The Jewel of the Nile in which she said: “He takes my breath away, like in a scene where he turns to me and says, ‘God, I love you, lady.’ He turns on that switch. Michael is really a man who likes women.”
Or with Michael, who enjoyed being effusive about Kathleen, when he complimented her on how great she was during the making of the two difficult films: “I could never have done it with anybody else.”
