by Marc Eliot
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film four out of four stars: “The movie is powerful precisely because it doesn’t preach. It is so restrained that at one moment—the judge’s final speech—I wanted one more sentence, making a point, but the movie lets us supply that thought for ourselves.” Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times that “Traffic is an utterly gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Or rather it is several interwoven thrillers, each with its own tense rhythm and explosive payoff.” Andrew Sarris, long a fan of Soderbergh, writing in the New York Observer, noted that “Traffic marks Soderbergh definitively as an enormous talent, one who never lets us guess what he’s going to do next. The promise of [his debut film] Sex, Lies and Videotape has been fulfilled.”
Entertainment Weekly gave it an A rating and praised Benicio Del Toro’s performance, another member of the film’s brilliant ensemble cast. Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Haunting in his understated performance, [Benicio] becomes the film’s quietly awakening moral center.” Desson Howe, in his review for the Washington Post, wrote, “Soderbergh and screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who based this on a British television miniseries of the same name, have created an often exhilarating, soup-to-nuts exposé of the world’s most lucrative trade.” In his review for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers wrote, “The hand-held camerawork—Soderbergh himself did the holding—provides a documentary feel that rivets attention.” Richard Schickel, in Time, was one of the few mainstream critics who couldn’t “see” the film: “There is a possibly predictable downside to this multiplicity of story lines: they keep interrupting one another. Just as you get interested in one, Stephen Gaghan’s script, inspired by a British mini-series, jerks you away to another.”
The film won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Del Toro), Best Film Editing (Stephen Mirrione), and Best Adapted Screenplay. It was also nominated for Best Picture, alongside another Soderbergh film released the same year, Erin Brockovich, but both lost to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe.1
After Traffic, a reinvigorated Michael wanted to produce again. The film he chose was a simple, inexpensive-to-make barroom drama called One Night at McCool’s, based on a screenplay by Stan Seidel, who had spent much of his adult life as a bartender. The story focuses on the interrelated stories of the bartender and his regulars, played by Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser, John Goodman, Andrew Dice Clay (credited here as Andrew Silverstein), and, in a small part, Michael Douglas, completely out of place leching after a young knockout (Liv Tyler). As critic Sean Macaulay of the Times of London put it after the film opened, “Some habits die harder than others—Michael’s character is obsessed with a pouting nymphet.”
Michael produced the film under his newly formed, solely owned Further Films. Unfortunately, Seidel died before the film went into production, leaving the entire project with an unfinished feel. The director was Harald Zwart, and McCool’s was only his second film. Michael chose him because he had liked Zwart’s first effort, Hamilton, a Swedish action-adventure movie, but whatever Michael saw in Hamilton, it did not transfer to One Night at McCool’s. Nothing meshed as the film appeared to want to recapture some of the bartender-memoir feel that Tom Cruise did so successfully in Roger Donaldson’s 1988 Cocktail. Made for $18 million, the film opened on April 27, 2001, and took in a total of $13.4 million. It was one of the few producing failures of Michael’s career.
Almost immediately after, Michael accepted a straight acting role in Gary Fleder’s Don’t Say a Word. He played Dr. Nathan Conrad, a child psychiatrist whose daughter is kidnapped in order to pressure Nathan into getting a secret combination of numbers from a traumatized, catatonic young woman hospitalized and unable to speak. Unless Nathan can somehow get the girl to give up her secret, they will kill his daughter. Despite a terrific cast, including Famke Janssen as Michael’s clever and active wife, and the always entertaining Oliver Platt, the film stretched the realm of credibility, nowhere more than in its far-fetched climax. And Michael, at fifty-six, looked a bit too old to be both husband to Janssen and father to nine-year-old Skye McCole Bartusiak, who played his daughter.
WHILE MICHAEL WAS filming Don’t Say a Word, Catherine was starring in Joe Roth’s romantic comedy America’s Sweethearts (not very romantic and hardly a comedy), about a famous couple’s breakup and all the attendant clichés that come with it. Except for a cute bit where outtakes showing who the characters really are make it onto the screen, the film played off like a dud. Throughout the filming of both films, Catherine and Michael were in constant touch. Michael even took a day off to fly to California to visit Catherine.
AMERICA’S SWEETHEARTS opened on July 20, 2001, and despite generally dismal ratings, had a respectable first weekend—second in box office to Joe Johnston’s monster Jurassic Park III—based on the combined star power of Catherine and co-stars Julia Roberts, Billy Crystal, John Cusack, Hank Azaria, Stanley Tucci, and Christopher Walken. From a $48 million budget it went on to gross $94 million domestically, $138 million worldwide.
Michael couldn’t have been happier with his wife’s success. When Don’t Say a Word opened that September, Catherine was cheerfully by his side at the premiere. The gala was held by Fox on September 24, 2001, and Don’t Say a Word officially opened on September 28, although up until two weeks before it was the biggest secret in Hollywood. Fox was reluctant to put any money behind the picture because of the bath the company had taken with One Night at McCool’s. Reportedly there were heated arguments behind the closed doors of Fox as to whether to throw good money after bad and promote what could be Michael’s second bomb in a row. It wasn’t until the film was tested and received great audience cards (advance ratings) that Fox hastily put together an ad campaign with full saturation—print, TV, movies.
Don’t Say a Word did $17 million its first weekend and took that week’s top position, ahead of the heavily favored winner, Ben Stiller’s overhyped Zoolander, which came in at $15.7 million. Don’t Say a Word managed to show a small profit—from its $50 million budget it grossed over $100 million worldwide. More important, it proved that at the age of fifty-six, despite the physical miscasting, Michael could still open a movie at number one.
But the real bottom line was that Michael had been able to reprioritize the things in his life that were now important to him. Don’t Say a Word’s relative success was no more important to him than if it had been a failure. His was a glorious, glamorous profession, to be sure, but what mattered now most to him about making movies was that it allowed him the comfort and security to raise his new family the way he wanted. Dylan made Michael feel like he was reborn. He doted on the boy in a way he hadn’t Cameron (and in the way Kirk hadn’t with him, and Herschel hadn’t Kirk). He wanted this boy, a product of his love for Catherine, to grow up happy and filled with a healthy capacity to love and be loved.
1 The film appeared on several critics’ Top Ten lists, including second on A. O. Scott’s New York Times list, third on Jami Bernard’s New York Daily News list, second on the list of Bruce Kirkland at the Toronto Sun, third for Stephen Holden at the New York Times, third on Owen Gleiberman’s list at Entertainment Weekly, third for Peter Travers at Rolling Stone, fourth for Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times, fourth on the list for Jack Mathews at the New York Daily News, and fourth for Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer. Several, including Sarris, also listed Erin Brockovich; Sarris had it at number eight.
CHAPTER 20
God bless her that she likes older guys. And some wonderful enhancements have happened in the last few years—Viagra and Cialis, that can make us all feel younger.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
THE YEAR 2002 FOUND BOTH MICHAEL AND CATHERINE busy on separate star-driven projects. In addition to a slew of fresh T-Mobile phone commercials she filmed that seemed to run every five minutes on network TV (and again in 2009), Catherine began shooting Chicago, produced by her old friend Marty Richards, who insisted that only she could play the part of Velma Kelly in hi
s movie version of the musical. The original stage production had opened on Broadway in 1975 starring Chita Rivera as Velma, a vaudeville performer who murders both her husband and her sister when she finds them in bed together, with Gwen Verdon as Roxie Hart, who murders her nightclub-owner boyfriend. Chicago was originally directed by Verdon’s real-life husband, Bob Fosse, with a score by Fred Ebb and John Kander, whose thing was to make all the world a stage and the stage the world. They had used this technique to create the musical Cabaret a decade earlier, a musical adaptation of John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, which was, in turn, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.
Chicago ran a little more than two years in its first run, respectable but not great. Then, when the O. J. Simpson acquittal in 1994 for a murder whose circumstances somewhat resembled the Hart murders ignited a similar firestorm of journalistic coverage that quickly turned print and TV journalists into an electronic lynch mob, a weird electronic criminal cabaret, Chicago was revived on Broadway in 1996 and became a smash hit. Many picked up on the similarities of both cases, and some critics felt the show was a commentary on murder and the sensational trials that turn defendants into celebrities. It was (and is) still running (five thousand-plus performances and counting) when Miramax Films, then headed by the Weinstein brothers, and Marty Richards turned it into a tent-pole film production.
Although she wasn’t yet well known in America as a musical performer, Richards knew how musically talented Catherine really was, and that her performance of the song “All That Jazz” alone would surely earn her an Oscar nomination, and very likely an Academy Award.
The film version, directed by Rob Marshall, is frenetic, febrile, and a bit too faux. What worked on the stage as an extended metaphor—crime is a cabaret, old chum—came off on the screen as a messed-up musical, with too many fast cuts and breakaways that kinetically intruded on the integrity of the performances of the musical numbers.
Chicago opened in limited release in New York on December 27, 2002, one day after a massive snowstorm had shut down the city, to qualify for that year’s Oscars, and nationwide on January 24. It proved a smash at the box office, eventually returning $306 million from its initial $45 million investment.1 Its success made Catherine an international cinematic superstar. Oscar talk began opening day. She eventually got a nomination and was heavily favored to win.
MICHAEL, MEANWHILE, was busy putting together his own long-overdue dream project, It Runs in the Family, a film directed by Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation, 1993) and executive-produced by Michael and his brother Joel. What was unique about It Runs in the Family is that it starred three generations of Douglases—Kirk, Michael, Cameron, and Michael’s mother, Kirk’s first wife, playing Kirk’s wife in the movie. “We were always finding reasons not to do it,” Michael said about the long-delayed project, which over the years had had many false starts. “There was a certain fear factor of working together.”
For Michael, this was a life-culminating project, a wish-fulfilling screen reunion of his family, all of them playing versions of their real selves (with different names): the Nelson family (Michael’s generation) meets the Kardashians (Cameron’s generation). It was not a complete family get-together. Eric and Peter, Michael’s two half brothers, were not asked to appear in the film. Nor was Catherine. Having just finished shooting Chicago and pregnant again, she didn’t seem to mind not being included in the family’s screen saga.
After extensive rehabilitation, Kirk had made great recuperative progress and was now able to talk relatively clearly out of one side of his mouth. And although he hadn’t made a film in a while (his last effort, the first film he made after his stroke, had been John Mallory Asher’s 1999 Diamonds, which was never commercially released), he had taken up writing as physical therapy and religion as its spiritual counterpart. In the years since he was stricken, he has written several memoirs, embraced Judaism, and finally been bar mitzvahed. For the first time, he was willing to make the project that his son had wanted him to do for so long.
Michael’s film wife was played by Bernadette Peters, whom Michael preferred over Schepisi’s choice, Sigourney Weaver. Clearly, Michael was the star and the producer and was going to call all the creative shots.
Everyone appeared to have a good time except Cameron, who was not used to the intensity of high-caliber professional filmmaking and felt out of place and confused on-set. While he and Michael were doing a scene together, Cameron recalled, his father “grabbed my shoulder really hard. I thought he was being supportive. Actually, he was trying to move me out of his shot.”
It wasn’t hard to understand. Cameron had long ago turned away from the family business in favor of contemporary music and DJing, and with little real experience in film and the daunting challenge of having to double-jump two legends to make a name for himself, he had been reluctant to be part of the film of the family he didn’t feel he belonged to all that much. Drugs and music were the roadblocks he had laid down between himself and the rest of the Douglases, and they were not easy to put aside to act as someone he was not.
WITH HIS SENTIMENTAL family album of a film in the can, set for an April 2003 release, Michael turned his attention to the Academy Awards. As expected, Catherine had been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Velma in Chicago, and he was determined to do everything he could to see her win.
It was not going to be a shoo-in. She was up against some stiff competition, and many of the other actresses who had been nominated had far deeper Hollywood résumés than she did. Chicago was only Catherine’s seventh Hollywood film (she had appeared in eight previously in England). What worked in Catherine’s favor was that the others, with the exception of Queen Latifah, one of Catherine’s co-stars, had all appeared in less-than-spectacular productions, and none of their films did anything close to Chicago at the box office. The nominees, besides Catherine, included Kathy Bates, for her performance in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt; Julianne Moore, for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours; Queen Latifah; and Meryl Streep, for Spike Jonze’s Adaptation.
The ceremonies were held on March 25, 2003, at Oscar’s newest home, the Kodak Theater, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. Although 2002 was Oscar’s seventy-fifth anniversary and great celebratory events had been planned, nearly all were canceled, as was almost the show itself, because of the American invasion of Iraq, which had taken place five days earlier. The presentation went on with no red carpet but still managed to create some fireworks all its own when filmmaker Michael Moore took the opportunity of winning for Best Documentary (Bowling for Columbine) to attack President Bush and his policies. His criticism set off a firestorm of boos, prompting host Steve Martin to come up a few minutes later with the face-saving showstopper of the evening, a joke that turned the audiences jeer’s for Moore into cheers for Martin: “The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.” In a different, nonpolitical way, however, Moore was outdone by Adrien Brody’s Best Actor win (Roman Polanski’s The Pianist): upon hearing his name announced, Brody ran up to the stage, grabbed his presenter, Halle Berry, and gave her what became known in Hollywood as “the kiss.”
Chicago had been nominated for thirteen Oscars and began collecting them early in the evening, indicating a sweep. When it came time for the award for Best Supporting Actress, the room hushed as Sean Connery, dressed in what appeared to be a modified pirate outfit, read off the names of the nominees, then opened the envelope. “And the Oscar goes to …” He let his voice drop to bedroom level as he said simply, “Catherine.”
The audience erupted. Catherine and Michael both stood up and kissed each other on both cheeks, and then the very pregnant winner made her way to the stage. Once there, she took her statuette from Connery and shouted, “Thank you so much. My Scotsman giving the Welsh! I can’t believe it! Oh my gosh! This is too … I mean, my hormones are too out of control to be dealing with this!” After reading the traditional laundry list of
thank-yous, she said, “And to my son, Dylan, watching at home, and to my husband who I love, I share this award with you … along with this one too,” referring to her swollen belly. A look of joy flashed across his face. Now Catherine, too, was a member of the Oscar club. In its own way, it brought them even closer together.
It fell to Michael and Kirk to present the Best Picture Award together. Sensing Catherine might win, the Academy looked to enhance the expected drama of the evening. Standing together at the podium, Kirk, his speech still impaired, put his arm around his son and said, “This is my son, Michael. He has two awards … but I’m still young!” The audience laughed and applauded good-naturedly as Kirk gently prodded the Academy for having never given him an Oscar: “The seventy-fifth anniversary—oh, to be seventy-five again!” After another joke or two, Kirk finally let Michael talk, but not before admonishing him to “speak distinctly.” Yet another burst of appreciation applause from the crowd. When the audience hushed, Michael responded with, “My father, who art in movies.” The audience roared with appreciation.
Kirk then read the names of the Best Picture nominees: Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, Lord of the Rings—The Two Towers, The Pianist. As Kirk fumbled with the envelope, Michael said to him, “You’re supposed to say ‘And the Oscar goes to …,’ ” to which Kirk responded, “And the winner is …” More laughter and applause. When Kirk finally managed to open the envelope, he looked at the name of the winner, then tore the card it was written on in two, gave one half to Michael, and said into the microphone excitedly, “Chicago!” The film would go on to win a total of six Oscars that night, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress.
It was a huge night in Catherine’s and Michael’s lives, but hardly the biggest, not by a long shot. One month later, on April 20, 2003, Catherine gave birth to their second child, a daughter they named Carys Zeta Douglas.
