Tales From Development Hell (13 page)

Weinstein went on to say that he intended to contact the film’s original cast, but not its director Paul Verhoeven, whose most recent film was the costly flop
Showgirls.
“We’re going to our Miramax stable of directors,” he stated. “We have discussed story ideas, we have a concept, and we’re going forward with this film within the next year.” Weinstein dismissed suggestions that a sequel to the $80 million
Total Recall
would be expensive by definition, noting that significant profit participation on
Scream
made the $14 million-budget hit possible, and that the same financial structure — forgoing an upfront fee in return for a share of the back end profits — would make
Total Recall 2
viable. Nevertheless, purchasing the rights, particularly for such a colossal sum, was a curious move for Dimension, since under the terms of a deal with corporate parent Walt Disney Co., the average budget of its films must be $12.5 million. Thus, if one film’s budget exceeds this sum, another must fall under it by the same amount. As a result, Dimension would need to generate a screenplay as cheaply as possible, and executives were delighted when a writer already under contract to Miramax offered his services.

Matt Cirulnick had just turned twenty-two when he signed a three-picture deal with Miramax, the first of which was the urban drug drama
Paid in Full,
eventually released in October 2002. “Immediately after turning in that script, Miramax informed my agents that they wanted to activate the second picture in my deal,” the writer recalls. “My agent gave me an open writing assignment list, and — lo and behold — on the list I see
Total Recall 2.
So I flip out. I remember to this day the font, I remember the way it looked, because when I saw those words I was like, ‘I’m getting this job.’ I was born in ’76, so I was watching
Total Recall
on tape when it came out and it was one of my favourite films. But my agents laughed at me and said, ‘Young buck, you’re
just starting out, they’ve had some big guys on this job,’ blah blah blah, and that fired me up, because I thought, ‘I can’t control how old I am or my credits, all I can control is the quality of the words on the page. I can’t control whether or not a movie gets made.’ So I said, ‘Look, I’ll put my writing up against whoever’s writing, and let’s see what happens. I gotta take a shot.’”

At the time, Dimension executives were set to close a deal with Bob Gale, who co-wrote the
Back to the Future
films with Robert Zemeckis. “I can’t say for certain what the reasons were for my agents not going after the job aggressively,” says Cirulnick, “but the bottom line is that what I was getting for the entire script would have been the commission my agents would get on Bob Gale!” When Dimension failed to make a deal with Gale, Cirulnick did not wait to be asked. “Luckily for me, one of the executives on
Paid in Full,
Jesse Berdinka, was also one of the executives on
Total Recall 2,
so I had my agent hit Dimension, and I hit Dimension personally, and I locked myself in a room and came up with an idea for
Total Recall 2.
I pitched the junior executive, then I pitched the president [Cary Granat], then I met with Bob Weinstein, Andrew Rona, Cary Granat and Jesse Berdinka, and gave them my pitch — and Bob was like, ‘Okay, you got it. Go.’”

There was just one problem: unbeknownst to Dimension, Ron Shusett’s contract for
Total Recall
meant that they were obliged to hire him to write the first draft of any sequel. Shusett, in turn, was obliged to bring Goldman aboard, due to the agreement the pair had made during the ‘Minority Report’ affair. Having learned of these obligations, Dimension could simply have asked Shusett and Goldman to turn Cirulnick’s concept into a script; instead, they invited the pair to pitch their own ideas. “They didn’t even give us Matt’s idea,” says Shusett. “They said, ‘We have some ideas, but what idea do you have?’ So we told them our take.” Dimension executives had their own ideas about where they wanted to take the sequel, ideas which did not gel with Cirulnick’s approach. “We had, almost eerily, the same approach to doing the sequel — a different one than Matt had in mind. So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you to do it,’ and they did. They were very good to their word,” he adds. “They didn’t low-ball us.” Announcing the deal in May 1998,
Variety
further noted that Arnold Schwarzenegger had attended a four-hour development meeting with Weinstein and Granat, and was said to be “actively involved” in the development of the film.

“We stuck fairly closely to their set-up that launches the story, but from there we were free to go where we wanted,” Goldman explains. “They knew what they liked in the original movie: they wanted to keep it as a popcorn
movie with lots of cool stuff, but they also liked the ‘is it real or is it Memorex?’ theme — the ‘mindfucks’.” Dimension’s hope, he says, was to keep the ambiguity alive as long as possible by alternating between the theories. “It was a high wire act,” he explains, “where we would confirm that it was real on Mars, then use a narrative device to make it seem like he was on Earth or still in the Rekall chair, and then use an even more clever device to put him back on Mars. Even though this was our favourite theme too, Ron and I actually had to restrain them from overdoing it. They were real students of the movie, and we were flattered, but they didn’t quite understand the simplicity and subtlety of how we achieved our effects in the first movie. We took direction from them, but resisted decisions that we felt were mistakes. Eventually, they came to trust us when we said you can easily overdo the complications — and we arrived at a workable balance.”

The Shusett-Goldman draft opens amid celebrations for Mars’ independence, with Quaid and Melina honoured by President Gloria Palomares for their part in the struggle. Just as Quaid is about to give a speech, however, a double stabs him and takes his place... He wakes to find himself next to Melina. Only three weeks have passed since the events of
Total Recall,
and he is still among the Martian rebels — independence for Mars is still a dream. They tell him of ‘Project Whisper’, a form of mind control being planned by President Saarinen’s government, and suggest delving into his mind to see if Hauser knows anything about it. Reluctantly agreeing to submit to the operation, he falls unconscious... only to wake up at Rekall Incorporated, his wife Lori and Bob, the Rekall salesman, at his bedside, and Dr Edgemar very much alive. They convince him that he has not left Rekall since he began his vacation, yet events on Mars appear to have transpired largely as they occurred in Quaid’s Rekall trip — Mars has air, Cohaagen is dead — a suspicious development which Dr Edgemar attributes to real-world news programmes filtering into Quaid’s virtual adventure. “So, Mr Quaid,” Edgemar tells him, “like all vacations, this one too comes to an end. And as usual, we feel a little sad returning to the daily grind.” Quaid returns home with Lori, only to be told that during the six months he was comatose at Rekall, she began a new relationship with her personal trainer. (“Harvey Weinstein had a [professional] relationship with Sharon Stone, and they wanted to try to get her back into the franchise,” Goldman explains.) Dejected and financially dependent on Rekall, Quaid finds a job on the construction site of a Seattle-based ‘space elevator’ — one of Arthur C. Clarke’s proposed constructs tethering an orbital space station to the Earth,
allowing payloads to be transported cheaply to and from space.

Meanwhile, an imminent presidential election draws Quaid’s attention to an electoral campaign by Gloria Palomares, the President from his dream, denounced by her opponents as a “mutant lover” for promising to hold a referendum on Mars’ independence if she is elected. Torn between his feelings for Melina (whom he now believes to be a construct of Rekall) and Renee, one of Mrs Palomares’ campaign volunteers, Quaid becomes involved with her political campaign, but is betrayed and framed for an explosion which wrecks the space elevator. Imprisoned for six months in a space prison known as the Pasternak Institute for the Criminally Insane, he manages to escape, and rejoins what remains of the rebels, who tell him of Melina’s death.

Posing as Hauser, Quaid heads to Vladivostock, where he is shocked to meet up with his own mother, whom he thought long dead. Mrs Hauser, evidently a Saarinen sympathiser, sees through Quaid’s deception, but although she threatens him, she knows that if she kills Quaid, her beloved Hauser will die too. Through his mother, Quaid discovers that Project Whisper is a planet-wide programme designed to keep the electorate voting a certain way, thus keeping the next government — Saarinen’s — in power forever. After a gunfight with a dozen Lori clones and his own mother, Quaid succeeds in destroying Project Whisper, an act which creates a vacuum (allowing a popular scene from
Total Recall
to be reprised) and ultimately leads to the election of Mrs Palomares and independence for Mars. He is about to make a speech when he sees Dr Edgemar sitting in a front seat — but the next instant, he is gone. Did his eyes deceive him? Or is he still back at Rekall, dreaming of Martian independence?

“[Dimension] liked the screenplay,” Goldman says. “We did one fairly minor polish, and then they were ready to make the movie. They told Arnold that they were ready to make the movie. They let him know that they would pay him his price. Ron, Arnold, and I were all at the William Morris Agency. Five or six agents there read our script and loved it. I would say that there was a consensus that this should be Arnold’s next movie.” Schwarzenegger, however, didn’t agree. “He said it was too complicated. In general, Arnold never seemed to appreciate the complications in the original, or to grasp that the essence of the franchise was the complicated mindfucks.” Adds Shusett, “He had seen the outline, and gave [Dimension] the okay to pay us, but sometimes when you see things in script form, some things feel different than on a ten-page outline. He said, ‘No, I don’t like this, I don’t want to do
it.’ Bob Weinstein said, ‘He just turned down the best script that’s ever been offered to him,’ which coming from Bob, who can be very tough, is a real compliment. He said, ‘I always considered the first
Total Recall
[to be] one of the five best science fiction movies ever, and now you’ve topped it with this one, he won’t do it.’ Dimension was very disappointed, and we were too. At that point,” he concludes, “it just went into limbo.”

In the meantime, rumours had been circulating that
Star Trek: The Next Generation
actor Jonathan Frakes, who had directed the $150 million-grossing hit
Star Trek: First Contact
and had already been hired to helm the next installment of that franchise, had been in talks about directing
Total Recall 2.
In March 1998, Frakes confirmed that, of the various projects being developed by his Geopp Circle production company,
Total Recall 2
was the closest to realisation. “I’m very jazzed about that,” he told Ian Spelling. “If it all works out and Mr Schwarzenegger is available, we’ll get going with pre-production of it at the end of
[Star Trek: Insurrection].
They wouldn’t have gone this far if Schwarzenegger weren’t interested,” he added. “[Dimension] bought it because he wants to play the character again. Wouldn’t it be cool if it all happens?” Speaking to the
Calgary Sun
later in the year, Frakes added: “Arnold is serious because I’ve already received a draft of a screenplay.” Although Frakes expressed concern that the budget of the script might prove too rich for the terms of Dimension’s deal with Disney, he added, “Apparently, Sharon Stone wants to return as well — and it’s possible because there is a lot of time travel in this draft of
Total Recall 2.”

Goldman, however, recalls a different version of the story. “Jonathan Frakes was involved in the early stages,” he says. “Dimension had been in talks with him before we got involved. We had one meeting with Frakes, but we never heard any more about him. The reason was that Bob Weinstein started working with Arnold, and Arnold’s vision of the picture was different than Bob’s. To get Arnold, it was clear that the sequel couldn’t be medium budget, as envisioned by Bob... and that Arnold would not consent to work with anyone but an A-list director or rising star. So Frakes was tabled.” In August 1999, Frakes was quoted as saying that
Total Recall 2
was still on Dimension’s list of movies, and that they were “waiting for Mr Schwarzenegger’s hands to free up. We’ve got a script from the writer of the original, and we’re giving some notes on it,” he added. “It’s a very big, wonderful, expensive script.” By February 2000, however, Frakes confirmed to
Starburst
that the project was dead — at least for the time being — blaming Schwarzenegger’s over-loaded schedule. “
Total Recall
is an old movie now and it looks like one,” he added.
“I shouldn’t say this, obviously, because I’d love to do that film, but they blew smoke up my ass four years ago, and nothing’s happened since. I’m not holding my breath.”

Instead, Schwarzenegger chose to make
The 6th Day,
in which he played a commercial pilot who discovers that he has been cloned. “It was a
Total Recall
sequel in everything but name,” says Goldman. “The ‘A’ plot line of one of our sequel ideas was good and bad Arnold — Quaid versus Hauser,” says Shusett, “so that was passe because now he’d done a movie where there were two Arnolds. So we came up with a new concept; they came up with part of the idea, we came up with the rest of it, and they gave it to Arnold and he
still
said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it.’” At this point, exasperated Dimension executives went back to Matt Cirulnick, giving him a copy of the Shusett-Goldman draft — which he dismisses as “an assault on the English language” — and one piece of guidance from Andrew Rona. “He said, ‘What we’d really like is for the story to end on the same note of ambiguity that the first one did,’” Cirulnick remembers. “And that’s why I really fell in love with getting this assignment, because how do you sequel-ise something that ended on an ambiguous note, without ever resolving what that was? So that was the challenge... I was going to answer it and then not, answer it and then not, and basically leave you at the same point. What was also great was that this was my own original story — I didn’t use anything from the previous scripts, except the cloned Sharon Stones.”