by Marc Eliot
MICHAEL’S GLORIFIED home movie did not do nearly as well. Released five days after the birth of Carys, It Runs in the Family barely opened before it disappeared from the big screen. Budget figures were not available, but the film grossed only $7 million, marking it purely as a labor of love, something for the Douglases to pull out and show to each other every Christmas.
That same year Michael made two documentaries, Tell Them Who You Are (released in 2004), a biographical piece about Haskell Wexler in which Wexler’s friends and co-workers, including Michael, were interviewed about the revered cinematographer (Michael also narrated), and one by Scott Miller, Direct Order (released in 2003), about a secret army experiment during the Gulf War that had soldiers being involuntarily injected with anthrax (and dying from it) in the hopes that scientists would be able to develop a vaccine. Neither received much attention, from either critics or audiences, but Michael considered both projects highly worthwhile.
And then there were no new movies for three years, as Michael preferred to remain in the background, enjoying his new role as father and second-chance family life. Indeed, he became as close to a househusband as one could be, taking care of the chores and doting on his two young children. As he later wrote in an essay for Newsweek, “I adjust my schedule to my wife’s, since she is in the prime of her career. The school year tells us when we are to travel. The kids know what Mommy does for a living, but they have never seen Daddy’s movies (they’re too young), so Mommy makes movies and Daddy makes pancakes!… Don’t get me wrong. I still go to work, but now only on projects I really care about.… I love being home.”
Catherine, meanwhile, coming off her Oscar win and with Michael’s encouragement, cranked out five films in a row. She lent her voice to Tim Johnson’s animated Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas; made Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty (co-starring George Clooney), which grossed $120 million on a $60 million investment; and Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, a goofy, uninteresting film about a refugee stuck in an airport, where he lives for several months because he has no legal exit papers. The Terminal co-starred Tom Hanks and grossed almost $250 million off a $60 million budget. Catherine then reteamed with Steven Soderbergh for his Ocean’s Twelve, another film with George Clooney and his modern-day version of the Rat Pack—Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, Julia Roberts, and a dozen other familiar names and faces. That one outgrossed The Terminal, earning $362 million off a $110 million budget. Then there was Martin Campbell’s 2005 Legend of Zorro, the sequel to the film that had first introduced her to America.
Once again she easily stole the film. Made for $75 million, Legend grossed $142 million worldwide. Her successful five-film post-Chicago run grossed a total of just under $1 billion.
After that, feeling very much the conqueror, she too assumed a lower profile, to catch her breath, ease the risk of overexposure, and spend some quality time with her husband and children.
Their relative peace was disturbed in a fashion that holds more terror in Hollywood than perhaps anywhere else in the country because of the infamous and unforgettable Manson murders of 1969. In July 2004, an obsessed fan of Michael’s was arrested and charged with stalking Catherine Zeta-Jones (a scenario that eerily echoed the plot of Fatal Attraction). The woman, Dawnette Knight, was arrested, and at a pretrial hearing in Los Angeles it was established that she had threatened to cut up Catherine “like meat on a bone, and feed her to the dogs”—murdered, the prosecution contended, “in the same style as Sharon Tate.”
Michael testified that his wife was driven to the brink of a breakdown by the threats. “She was hysterical,” Michael said under oath. “She was fainting. She could not get any air. She showed all the signs of having a nervous breakdown.” Knight’s defense was that she didn’t mean any harm, and she wrote a letter of apology. She was sentenced to three years in prison. Michael then seriously upgraded the security for his family and decided it was best if they kept an even lower profile for a while, meaning no more movies for him or Catherine.
The only appearance they made together that year was one they had to go to, the big 2004 tribute to fifty-nine-year-old Michael at the Golden Globes (Hollywood’s Batman awards to Oscar’s Superman statuettes), when he was named the recipient of the 2004 Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award for both his acting and his producing. What made it especially meaningful to Michael was that Kirk had won the award in 1968 for the same double achievement. This time Dad would be sitting in the audience watching his son being honored.
Michael turned reflective about how far he had come. “How lucky I have been to meet my beautiful wife and start a new family,” he said when he first received word of the award. “You know, at this point in my life, I certainly never anticipated having a 3½-year-old and a 7-month-old. To be able to share this award with my family during what is a very beautiful time for us just shows how my priorities have changed very dramatically. Now my wife comes first, and my family, and only then my work, and that is something I am pretty sure I couldn’t have said 20 years ago.”
Later on, he reflected further: “Who knows, if I hadn’t met Catherine, I might be in the trenches in L.A., in my office, and focused on producing a lot more movies and television shows. But that’s not—I’ve been fortunate. You learn to respect something of value and nurture it and treat it well.”
ON JULY 6, 2004, Michael received word that his half brother Eric, forty-six years old and the youngest of Kirk’s four sons, had died of a drug overdose in his one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. His body was discovered by the housekeeper, who had come to clean. According to the coroner’s report, Eric died from acute intoxication from the combined effects of alcohol, tranquilizers, and painkillers. Although Eric had always been proud of his trim physique, which he believed was part of his actor’s instrument, he weighed three hundred pounds at the time of his death.
It had not been an easy life for Eric, or a successful one. Discussing his lifelong battles with drugs and alcohol, he once told New York’s Daily News that he found it difficult being part of such a well-known family. “The pressures of being the youngest son in a famous family sometimes got to me,” he said. “I used to feel I had to compare myself to them.” In 1999, his speech and gait were permanently affected by an eight-day drug-related coma, and in 2003, the year before he died, he was tossed out of a North Carolina hotel after the maid, whom he had locked out along with everybody else, finally gained entrance and discovered he was drunk in a room filled with trash. It was complaints about the odor that had prompted management to check out the situation. That night, he told police he was a stand-up comedian participating in a weight-reduction program.
Michael had no public comment about Eric’s death. The only statement from anyone in the Douglas family came from a joint spokesperson: “The family is very shocked and saddened by this event. We hope you will respect their privacy at this time.”
THAT SAME YEAR, in a gesture that combined gratitude, satisfaction, and accomplishment, Michael donated $1 million to UC Santa Barbara for the school’s new Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media.
The lobby of the center was named after Michael.
1 Despite its huge gross and profit, Chicago finished out of the ten highest-grossing films of 2002 worldwide. They included, in descending order, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black II, Lee Tamahori’s Die Another Day, M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha’s Ice Age, Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Chicago came in tenth domestically.
CHAPTER 21
Giving back to the planet, that’s probably as close to immortality as you can get.… Maybe because I’m so consumed with my father’s legacy—the honors he’s receiving, the theaters that are named after him, all of t
he incredible amount of impressive things—that either I haven’t dealt with mine or I just don’t think of myself in the same category. I don’t know. It’s sort of the opposite side of growing up.… You grow up in the shadow of somebody and then at the end, in the twilight, you have the shadow of that somebody again.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
MICHAEL RETURNED TO ACTIVE FILMMAKING IN 2005, via his independent production company Further Films. The Sentinel, his first feature in three years, directed by Clark Johnson and shot on location in Georgetown, in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. He both starred in and produced this presidential assassination movie involving rogue Secret Service men, based on the novel by a former Secret Service agent, Gerald Petievich. Also in the cast were Eva Longoria, Kim Basinger, and Kiefer Sutherland. In the film, which is similar to Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire, a 1993 Clint Eastwood vehicle, Michael plays Pete Garrison, an aging Secret Service agent assigned to the president’s inner circle who becomes involved in an affair with the president’s wife (played by Kim Basinger), a scenario preposterous enough without the almost sixty-one-year-old Michael Douglas in that role. Being the boss has its benefits.
Still, Michael experienced more than the usual amount of trouble raising money for this project, and it made him realize how much the business of making movies had changed. “I’m in love,” he told one reporter, “and I’ve got a nice family, so part of [my not wanting to produce movies], you know, was saying, ‘Screw it.’ Now I’m trying to get my mojo back for our industry.”
To another he said, “Things have changed a lot with not just me getting older.… The industry has changed.… [T]he studios are … companies. They are scouring their libraries to find an economical way to make movies with the least amount of profit participation, which is why we’re seeing all these remakes and sequels and TV series as movies. It’s depressing and difficult. If you want a certain amount of independence as a filmmaker, you’re obliged to find outside financing.”
And to yet another, “Studios today are just a division of an entertainment media corporation. Look, it was always a business, but there was at least the sense of a struggle between art and commerce. It’s gone now … a tough economic climate. You’re either doing big-budget studio pictures or low-budget independent films. Middle-budget films—it’s Death Valley. Anyway, there are no roles at this point that I’m dying to play.… I can’t compete with the younger men. I’m 62 years old. I’m not looking to be taking off my shirt.”
Michael eventually raised the money for The Sentinel by partnering Further Films with another independent film company Regency Enterprises. Together they managed to get a distribution deal with Fox. With their financial backing secure, Michael felt encouraged to fill out a slate of several potential Further Films projects that included a second (unnamed) sequel to Romancing the Stone to star himself and Catherine.1 At the same time, Oliver Stone was putting out feelers to bring Michael back to major name-above-the-title star status by having him reprise his Oscar-winning role as Gordon Gekko in a sequel to Wall Street.
Early in 2006, Michael appeared in Anthony and Joe Russo’s You, Me and Dupree, a family comedy, playing the father of Kate Hudson, and surrounded by such contemporary stars as Owen Wilson, Matt Dillon, and Seth Rogen. The films is mindless, with Michael seemingly wandering through the script looking for a place to sit down. The film was made for $54 million.
THE SENTINEL WAS released on April 21, 2006, and received almost universally negative reviews. Made for $60 million, it grossed a disappointing $78 million worldwide, opened and closed in a flash, and instantly evaporated from the consciousness of the country’s moviegoers. Michael looked old and tired in it, and certainly not believable as the president’s wife’s lover.
After the July 2006 release of You, Me and Dupree, which received equally poor reviews but earned $130 million worldwide ($76 million domestic), Michael then took another break from movies and, together with Catherine, concentrated on building up their growing real-estate empire, which included homes in Barbados, Bermuda, Manhattan, Aspen, and Quebec. In 2007, Michael and Catherine decided to move full-time to Bermuda, as far from the paparazzi as possible. They built a guesthouse in Bermuda so that their parents could come and visit whenever they wanted.
Eventually, though, Michael, missing the Hollywood action, decided to take an acting job back in Hollywood in King of California. He read and liked the script, by first-time director-screenwriter Mike Cahill, a broken-home drama about a young girl (Evan Rachel Wood) trying to find her own identity while her father (Michael Douglas) languishes in a mental institution. Michael was sent the script directly by Cahill after it had been turned down by all the studios, and he decided to become involved simply because he thought it was a part he was well suited for. There were obvious if faint echoes of Cuckoo’s Nest (Stephen Holden, writing in the New York Times, actually called the film “a sequel of sorts” to Cuckoo’s Nest), but no one would ever mistake the two films for each other. King of California, shot in thirty-one days, made it to the Sundance Film Festival, an auspicious beginning, but found full theatrical distribution only in Canada; it had a very limited commercial release in the States and grossed a little over $1 million on a $10 million budget.
AND THEN THE family ghosts once more appeared. In 2007 Cameron, twenty-eight, was arrested again, in New York City, this time for felony possession of a controlled substance after police officers stopped a car he was in and found a syringe with liquid cocaine. (It was rumored but never conclusively proven that Cameron also had been detained in California on similar charges.)
For the last fifteen years Michael had been unable to prevent Cameron, if such a thing were possible, from traveling down the dead end road of drugs and booze that had killed Michael’s half brother Eric. This time, when Cameron pled out to a misdemeanor and opted for rehab, Michael publicly pledged to stand by the boy, to help him by taking more of an admittedly long-overdue, direct fatherly role in his son’s life. “My priorities are my marriage and my children, whereas earlier, my career was my priority. The one thing I pride myself on [with Cameron] is he could count on me. But there were big absences.”
When talking about Cameron’s troubles, Michael immediately recalled his own uphill climb, part of the price that came with being the son of Kirk Douglas. It was as if he were somehow trying to blame the genes he had inherited from his dad and passed along to Cameron, in an effort to absolve himself of any real responsibility. He still sounded somewhat distant and dismissive about the boy, saying, “He’s really good, but acting is about creating your own identity. And the [Kirk Douglas] genes [always] come through and so it takes a little longer to establish yourself.”
But when it came to talking about his second set of children, with Catherine, Michael transformed into proud papa, bursting with pride about how talented his little tykes were. Whenever he was asked about Dylan and Carys, he became the pitch-perfect adoring daddy: “The joy of raising two children includes Dylan doing a mean impersonation of Elvis and Carys memorizing all of the lyrics from Mamma Mia!”
Michael had put Cameron in the darkness of his own past while keeping Dylan and Carys in the brightness of his present.
In 2007, Michael accepted the personal invitation of executive producer Bob Epstein to record a new intro for his friend Brian Williams, the anchor of the broadcast, to be heard every night across America. Not long after, Oliver Stone contacted Michael about the possibility of doing a sequel to Wall Street. Michael jumped at the chance to make a real movie again.
TO WARM UP for his reprise of the character of Gordon Gekko, his first major movie role in nearly a decade, Michael took a cameo in Mark Waters’s Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, made in 2008 as a modern remake of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Archer, Michael’s co-star from Fatal Attraction (they had no scenes together in Ghosts). It was only moderately successful, but it helped Michael get his acting timing back to tackle Gekko again.
Then the Wall Street sequel hit a series of snags, having mostly to do with Fox’s dissatisfaction with the script and its feeling that the subject was dated. That allowed Michael to make two more fast films in 2008 (for release the following year). One was Peter Hyams’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an awful, phone-it-in remake of the 1956 Fritz Lang film that starred Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine. The remake bombed big-time at the box office, taking in a total $4.3 million worldwide, not even a third of the $25 million it cost to make.2
Michael also made Solitary Man that year for two good friends, the director Brian Koppelman and producer Steven Soderbergh. It also gave him the chance to work again with Danny DeVito, who had a role in it. The film was critically well received everywhere it played, but few people went to see it. Michael described his role in it this way: “I’m a car dealer who thinks he might have a medical problem and decides to go for broke. Susan Sarandon plays my wife, and Mary-Louise Parker is my girlfriend, so you can see I still get to have a good time onscreen.” The film was made for $15 million and barely earned $5 million worldwide. That meant that Michael’s last several films had flopped, all of which added pressure to his upcoming performance in the Wall Street sequel.
In 2009, Michael and Catherine experienced dual creative resurrections at approximately the same time. In June Michael received one of the highest honors Hollywood gives, the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, which Kirk had received in 1991. The ceremony was taped and shown as a television special that July.
In the audience for the gala presentation, to pay homage to Michael’s career, were Kirk; Michael’s mother, Diana; and Catherine, all sitting together. Catherine also opened the show with a sizzling performance of “One” from A Chorus Line. As the words “one singular sensation” came out of Catherine’s mouth, she stared directly at Michael. Tears poured out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
