by Marc Eliot
Diandra told friends, “I don’t know how much longer I can go on living like this. When he’s working, I’m never sure where he is, or when he’s coming home. He eats, drinks, and sleeps movies. He has a telephone growing out of his ear.”
But in reality, they were already living separate lives. Diandra had her work with the Red Cross and a growing commitment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Office of Film and Television, where she felt much happier and more productive than when she was stuck in Santa Barbara. “I grew up with writers and painters and archeologists,” she said later. “L.A. wasn’t a good place to raise children.”
Only weeks into 1986, Michael, still exhausted from having to do Chorus Line and Jewel back-to-back, began talking to dozens of prospective independent producing partners, and had closed in on Michael S. Phillips of the Mercury Entertainment Corporation. A decade earlier, Phillips been the hottest producer in Hollywood. He had won a Best Picture Oscar (with former wife and ex-partner Julia Phillips) for producing George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), followed by a golden string of commercial and prestige hits, including Martin Scorsese’s 1976 Taxi Driver, the film that made Robert De Niro a star, and a year later Steven Spielberg’s monster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Mercury then fell in disarray following the departure of Julia Phillips, whose book You’ll Never Have Lunch in This Town Again pulled back the curtains on the sex-and-drugs-and-dirty-deals underbelly of the business and by doing so ensured that she would never work in Hollywood again.
Michael believed he could help Michael Phillips save the company. Mercury had a development deal with Home Box Office Pictures to produce two films, and a third theatrical feature in production, The Tender, starring John Travolta. Michael dove into the proceedings, hoping to revive Mercury’s fortunes and, along with it, make some exciting, and highly profitable, new movies.
IN 1987, the agreed-upon three years were up, and Michael asked Diandra to come back with him to Santa Barbara, where he could spread out and relax and be closer to Hollywood; an hour-and-a-half drive was far easier than a coast-to-coast flight. He suggested they could even try to have another child there. And he promised her his work would not interfere with that goal. To everyone’s surprise, even Michael’s, she agreed, and informed all her associates in New York she was going away for a while. Shortly thereafter, they packed up the things they needed and, with Cameron in tow, moved back to Santa Barbara.
That February, less than two months later, Sherry Lansing called Michael. She wanted to make a new film with him, to be shot, ironically, in New York and Connecticut.1
“Stanley [Jaffe] and Sherry asked me to look at a short film called Diversion,” Michael said, “At the same they were working on a project called Fatal Attraction.” The film was about a philandering husband and what happens when he gets caught up in an extramarital affair. “I had had the same idea many years ago after reading a book called Virgin Kisses.” Michael still owned the rights to this book by Gloria Nagy, which was about, as Michael later recalled, “a young, bored, successful psychiatrist, who cheated his way through school, had seen a hundred attractive clients, when suddenly this frumpy woman comes into his office and gives him the biggest turn-on of his life and has him breaking every ethical code of his profession.” He had always liked the idea but could never figure out a way to make it. Lansing’s concept was close enough to get him interested.
He talked with Diandra about the idea of working with Lansing and Jaffe on their new film. When Diandra said she was excited about returning to New York City so quickly, Michael called Lansing back and said yes. The next day he returned to New York with Diandra and Cameron, bringing an abrupt end to their make-a-baby-in-California plan—which, apparently, neither was all that committed to.
SHERRY LANSING HAD since left Fox and formed an independent production partnership with Stanley Jaffe. They had a first-look development deal at Paramount and were eagerly looking for new projects. Jaffe and Lansing had so far made only one movie together, Firstborn (1984), directed by Michael Apted, distributed by Paramount, starring Teri Garr, Peter Weller, and Robert Downey Jr. It was a small-budget affair and grossed a little more than $6 million in its initial domestic release—not great, but enough to keep the Jaffe-Lansing partnership going.
“While in London,” Jaffe later explained, “I had called ahead and asked agents if there was anybody they wanted me to see.” One of the people was James Dearden, who had made three short films. “I loved all three, especially one about an obsessive lover.”
As Dearden, a former playwright, recalled, “When I created Diversion in 1979, I just wanted to make an inexpensive film.… I was sitting at home thinking, ‘What is a minimalist story that I can do?’ My wife was out of town for the weekend, and I thought what would happen if a man who has just dropped his wife at the railroad station rings this girl who he’s met at a party and says, ‘Would you like to have dinner?’ One thing of course leads to another and he has what appears to be an easy one-night-stand, but then it all gets ugly. The girl keeps calling, and finally the wife returns and the phone rings again and the wife picks it up and says hello. And that’s the end of the story, a little fable about the perils of adultery.”
Jaffe told Lansing about Dearden’s films, and they decided to invite him to Hollywood to discuss working together. Lansing recalled, “I kept on coming back to that short film, which really ends when what would later become the Glenn Close character calls the home and the wife reaches for the phone. That’s all there was, a hint of what we would later do. I became obsessed with that short, convinced there was a movie there.” They optioned it and extrapolated what would eventually become Fatal Attraction.
After meeting with Michael, they offered him the lead, and he said yes.2 However, despite his commitment, every studio passed.
According to Lansing, “It was a Paramount picture, it was developed at Paramount because our deal was with them, and Paramount passed on it. Even with Michael Douglas attached, the subject matter was considered highly uncommercial. We then gave it to twenty-six directors and they all passed. None of the majors thought a story about adultery would find a sympathetic audience for its male lead.”
It eventually came to Adrian Lyne, the British director whose previous credits included 1983’s Flashdance, the sleeper hit of that year, about a female welder who longs to become a serious classical dancer. The hook of the film is its sleazy sex club atmospherics combined with a romantic love story (and the scene everyone remembers, where Jennifer Beals, the welder/dancer, mesmerizes her boyfriend, and audiences, when she slips out of her bra without removing her sweatshirt). In 1986 Lyne made the misguided 9½ Weeks, a sleazy soft-core S&M film that tried to romanticize a subject that works best when it is not romanticized at all. It didn’t do much at the box office, grossing about $6.7 million on a $17 million budget, but created an enormous buzz, establishing Lyne as someone who could make a film that got noticed and talked about. He was the twenty-seventh director to be offered Fatal Attraction, and he jumped at it.3
STANLEY JAFFE: “I went to see 9½ Weeks the day after we signed Adrian, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, this isn’t the film we are going to be doing.’ ” Jaffe met with Lyne and warned him that this could be the shortest meeting in the history of the world. But Adrian remained cool and managed to convince Jaffe that he’d done the best he could with the script he had in 9½ Weeks and that it could have been a lot worse. Jaffe was convinced, and Lyne was officially aboard.
They spent six months rewriting, with both Michael and Dearden contributing, and eventually Lansing brought Nicholas Meyer in to help, primarily to smooth some of the dialogue and fix the ending. Meyer’s previous screenplays included The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, his biggest success to date (he is uncredited in Fatal Attraction). He was able to fix some of the script’s more glaring problems.
The next step, casting the role of the female lead, was crucial. Glenn Close was someone Sherry Lansing wanted, but Close w
as so nervous about getting the part she had to take Valium to calm herself down before the audition. “I had flown out from New York. I didn’t know what to wear and I went to a store—Neiman Marcus or something. My hair was long and crazy.… I was kind of intimidated.”
Later on, Close elaborated on her audition. “I walked in and the first thing I saw was a video camera, which is terrifying, and behind the video camera in the corner was Michael Douglas. I just said, ‘Well, let it all go wild …’ and it wasn’t until we started shooting that I started loving working with Michael. I remember doing one scene where we go dancing, and I remember Adrian telling me to flip down my dress off-camera and expose my breast to get a reaction—and I got it!” During shooting, makeup artists worked on Close’s lips, filling in the dip under her nose to make her mouth look sadder. It was subtle, but it worked.
Satisfied with the revised script, which owed more than a little to Clint Eastwood’s 1971 Play Misty for Me, and with Michael and Lyne (and the relatively unknown Close) attached, Jaffe and Lansing once more put it back on the market. Everyone again said no.4
JAFFE: “We were turned down by every studio twice. They said basically the same thing they had the first time, ‘How can you make a picture where the leading man cheats on his wife in the first ten minutes?’ But eventually Paramount, which had given us a lot of money to make movies, which we weren’t doing, conceded, and gave us the green light.”
Michael was thrilled; this was his chance to definitively prove he could play a heated sexual character in a serious, adult movie. “For me,” Michael remembers, “the appeal of Fatal Attraction is this very powerful, visceral instinct for obsessive lust amid seeming decency and normality. My character wants to go beyond the norm. I also think in a general way the film has hooked into a very deep hostility that now exists between the sexes. For some women, I know that they find themselves thinking about the guy who dumped on them and who they regret letting off too easy. For some men, let’s face it, they have a lot of repressed hostility toward women. They’re the ones at the end of the picture yelling ‘Kill her!’ ”
To another interviewer, he said, “I remember [the scene where] I jumped into [my own] bed to ruffle the sheets [to make it look slept in, after returning from the weekend with Glenn Close’s character], there was this laughter and I was shocked. I thought, ‘My God, they’ve already forgiven this guy.’ Whether it says something about me or the amount of adultery going on in the country, I’m not sure.”
To still another, Michael added, “And something else. People kept saying to me how could you do this to your wife, the beautiful Anne Archer, and I would say yeah, but wasn’t Glenn Close kind of kinky, she looked like she had something up her sleeve. Could that not happen to you?”
Nonetheless, the film’s ending is a (literal) bloodbath, the result of what begins as a one-night stand between an ostensibly happily married New York City lawyer, Dan Gallagher (Michael) and an editor, Alex (Glenn Close), who works for a major publishing company. They meet for drinks to discuss business, and it leads to a passionate one-night stand while Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer), and daughter, Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen), are away. Unfortunately for Dan, the affair continues through the entire weekend, at the end of which, as he is getting dressed and Alex is trying to get him to stay, he tells her in no uncertain terms that it’s over. She grabs his shirt and rips it open. When that doesn’t work, she slits her wrists. Dan, frightened by Alex’s extreme behavior, stays with her, comforts and cares for her until he’s sure she’s safe, but when he leaves he knows and the audience knows he never wants to see her again.
Alex, however, keeps phoning him at work, and when he doesn’t return her calls, she shows up at his office. After a few weeks he reluctantly (and uncomfortably) agrees to talk to her; he remains firm and tells her not to call him anymore, and she replies quite calmly (and shockingly, to both Dan and the audience) that she is pregnant. He wants her to have an abortion, but she refuses, telling him that she is going to be in his life forever now. She keeps making his life miserable (to say the least), even after he moves his family out of the city and into the suburbs.5 Her stalking continues, becoming more intense and to Dan (and the audience) more frightening. In one memorable scene, she sneaks into the house when no one is there, puts the family’s pet rabbit into a pot, and boils it alive. (In England after the film was released, the phrase “bunny boiler” came to mean any woman who was especially bitchy: “Oh, she’s a real bunny boiler, that one.”) In another scene, she utters one of the most famous lines in all of eighties cinema: “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!” It became a rallying cry for women who had felt they had been ignored by cheating men their whole lives.
At that point, realizing he has no choice, Dan confesses to his wife and moves out. While he’s gone, his daughter is kidnapped by Alex, and his wife has a serious car accident frantically searching for her. Alex takes the child to an amusement park and afterward returns her unharmed, but too late to prevent Beth from winding up in the hospital.
When restraining orders don’t work and Dan realizes the police don’t care about the case (a nice Hitchcock touch), Dan plans to kill Alex in her apartment, but he can’t go through with it. Eventually Alex returns once more to the Gallagher household to try to kill off a recovering and still-fragile Beth. In one of the most tension-filled climaxes ever filmed, Alex takes a kitchen knife to Beth in the upstairs bathroom; Dan comes to Beth’s rescue and drowns Alex, but even though Dan (and we) think she’s finally dead, she’s still alive. Beth then returns with a pistol and shoots Alex through the heart. After the police leave, Beth and Dan embrace, and the camera closes in on a family portrait taken during happier times, set on a piece of furniture in the hallway.
The film would touch a lot of nerves and cause extensive polarization between men and women who went to see it. Male audience members would see Dan as the victim of a woman who is obviously psychotic—out of control, desperate, and demented. Female audiences would see it differently: Alex was an innocent single and aging woman exploited and abused by a married man who sleeps with her and unceremoniously dumps her to return to his wife and child.
Several complex issues contributed to the film’s eventual water-cooler appeal. Although the familiar theme of “sex is dangerous” has been around since the first foot of celluloid ever passed through a camera lens, the film was released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and it angered those who felt that Dan’s display of careless, unprotected sex sent the wrong message. (Dan does catch a psychological dose of something deadly in the form of Alex’s pregnancy, something he can’t get rid of that progressively destroys his marriage and in the end almost gets him killed.)
The key scene is their first sexual encounter—more violent than sexual. They rip each other’s clothes off in her kitchen, and it appears they are beating each other up as much as having sex, because the scene isn’t really about sex at all. It is about entrapment, control, and shared rage. Alex is enraged because she has no man who loves her, and she uses sex as her only viable weapon of allure; Dan is frustrated because the heat has gone out of his marriage. Both are needy and culpable, and so is Beth, for not recognizing her husband’s sexual needs or his growing if unrecognized rage fueled by his unfulfilled desires.
Some saw the film as a parable for the Vietnam War, which had ended only a decade earlier. In a way, Dan’s everyman is America, and his “conquest” of Alex echoes America’s invasion of Vietnam, the assumption that he (we) can get in and out quickly and neatly, with no responsibility, and that he (we) can return home unscathed after a brief, uncommitted one-night stand, resonated with adult audiences that had spent a decade or more of their lives living through an endless, devastating, and ultimately meaningless tar-baby war.
It was also a time that saw both the rise of feminism and the first real backlash against it. The question of who was guilty in the film and who was (relatively) innocent from that point of view also polarized viewers. Some fe
minists saw Alex as a victim, exploited by the wealthy, married, smug Dan. Others saw Dan as the victim of a career woman with an agenda who was psychotically obsessed with the family that another woman, Dan’s wife, had rightfully earned. All of it made the film the morning-after topic of the year.
MICHAEL: “The movie touched a nerve of undeclared war between the sexes.”
STANLEY JAFFE: “It was not anything we could have guessed would have happened. The picture made money.… We set out to make a thriller with social implications, but it turned into a social phenomenon.”
But cultural issues fade and the movies that raise them remain. As a pure thriller bordering on a modern monster movie, with no sociopolitical overtones, the film is a touchstone of eighties cinema and made Glenn Close, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, a top-of-the-line star.
Michael was nominated for a BAFTA Best Actor Award for this film (the British equivalent of an Oscar), which was, without question, the most nuanced performance of his career. His natural like-ability meshed perfectly with Close’s hostile/pathetic/needy/victim/crazy-bitch performance, and each highlighted the other because of the contrast between the two.
The original ending had Glenn Close committing a Madame Butterfly–type suicide and Michael being arrested for murdering her, a too-neat, overly simplistic, and moralistic conclusion to a very complex story. It didn’t test well, and after several tries, the ending was changed to a more confrontational resolution, based on a combination of Alfred Hitchcock’s shower scene in his 1960 Psycho and the unforgettable bathtub climax of Clouzot’s 1955 French classic, Diabolique.6
During filming, everyone had tried to figure out the proper ending. Close preferred the original, where Alex kills herself and frames Dan for her murder, while Michael wanted Alex killed off for good. According to Close, “She was a deeply disturbed woman, but not a psychopath. Once you put a knife in somebody’s hand, I thought it was a betrayal of the character.”
