Tales From Development Hell (32 page)

“When the Fox project exploded, they didn’t want to talk about it,” said Preston. “They were resolutely insisting that all was hunky-dory, and ten minutes later someone would be weeping [to me] about how the Fox project was like a shipwreck.” The fact that Scott was unable to set it up elsewhere — even at Paramount, which had originally bid for the story on Scott’s behalf — did not surprise Tom Topor. “I can understand why other studios didn’t pick it up,” he says. “It was a very expensive picture — $40 or $50 million — and
Outbreak
was already in the works. As [Paramount president] Sherry Lansing said to Ridley, ‘I like what you’ve got better, but it’s not
that
much different.’”

“There was a sense of outrage that the producers of
[Outbreak]
had violated a kind of unspoken code: that if you spend a lot of dough and get the rights to a project — in this case an article — then you have in effect protected yourself from being ripped off. It’s yours to do and no one else’s,” says Friedenberg. “The
Outbreak
people lost the battle for the rights to ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’, and instead of going away as everyone else does, they just went ahead, claiming their right to use material in the public domain, like newspaper reports, etc. There was talk of suing and so forth, but they just ploughed ahead and won.” Adds Hart, “I was so angry because I thought Fox had a copyright infringement suit against Warners. They claim they didn’t, but Richard [Preston] and I both know that there were things in that screenplay that did not exist in any article, that had not been previously published, but that came out of the research [for
The Hot Zone
script], and the producers [of
Outbreak]
freely admitted they read every draft we turned in. The scene of the aerosol in the monkey house going up in the vents and coming down in the next room, the scene in the movie theatre, [and] people coughing and having it backlit in the air from a movie projector — stuff that’s in my script that didn’t exist in any book. But Fox business affairs did not feel they had a successful case against Warners. Warners out-managed and out-produced Fox. It was a big learning curve for everybody.” Worst of all, says Friedenberg, was that “it looked like a ‘go’ movie. We had Redford, Ridley Scott and a script in progress. That’s a lot to have. But instead of making it better, that just made everyone push to do a Hollywood number instead of an intelligent, thoughtful and honest film. I’d just worked with Bob on
A River Runs Through
It, a totally uncompromised project, and I naïvely thought that this could be the same. What an idiot.”

Finally, in August 1994, Fox pulled the plug on
The Hot Zone.
Warner Bros took the opportunity to shut down
Outbreak,
which was having problems of its own. According to Robert Roy Pool, the script for
Outbreak
had become
a battleground, with both he and Laurence Dworet engaging in “extreme creative conflicts” with one of the Warner Bros executives, apparently over the writers’ desire to keep the story as realistic as possible. After working on the script for a year, they left by mutual agreement. Nevertheless, Pool maintained his link with the production, making frequent visits to the set, and remaining friendly with Petersen, producers Kopelson and Gail Katz, and the incoming screenwriter Neal Jimenez, “an old poker buddy” of Pool’s. Pool also claimed to have read “every draft by every writer”, and was therefore in a position to state that although as many as fifteen screenwriters had contributed dialogue to the final script, “ninety-five per cent of the dialogue changes were simple enhancements of ideas we had already introduced in our final screenplay of December 1993.”

According to Pool, the story, characters, structure and scenes in
Outbreak
were his and Dworet’s creations: “Ted Tally contributed exactly one scene in the movie, and it’s a very good one — Dustin Hoffman looks up at an air vent, the camera dollies through the vent, and Hoffman says, ‘It’s airborne.’” Pool noted that after Tally departed, Jeb Stuart was hired, but soon left through the door marked ‘creative differences’. Once Fox’s competing project fell apart, the
Outbreak
crew took a week’s hiatus, and Neal Jimenez was hired to rework the dialogue to Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction. Nevertheless, Pool suggested, “the phrase ‘Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction’ is an oxymoron. Neal began to realize that Dustin would never be happy — not in this lifetime, anyway — and once the picture started rolling again, Neal showed up on the set less and less often. He felt insulted and ignored when the actors refused to speak the lines he’d written and substituted their own phrases.” On the final day of shooting, Jimenez told his old poker buddy that he might not have signed on for the job if he’d known what lay ahead.

Outbreak
opened in the US on 10 March 1995, grossing $13.4 million in its opening weekend, and a total of $187 million worldwide. “On opening day, [Fox chairman] Peter Chernin and I were talking on the cellphone,” Hart recalls, “and he said to me, ‘We shut down for the wrong movie!’, meaning we never should have folded our tent. They could have opened both of those movies on the same day and
The Hot Zone
would have been the one that people went back to see a second time.” Preston was among those who paid to see
Outbreak.
“I’m just sitting here laughing,” he told
Entertainment Weekly
afterwards. “It just wasn’t scary. You have scabs that look like Gummi Bears. The blood was put on with an eyedropper. In a real [Ebola attack], the men bleed out of their nipples. I would have liked to see Hoffman bleed out of his nipples.”
Robert Roy Pool, one of only two credited screenwriters on the finished film (Dworet was the other), had had enough. In a letter to
Entertainment Weekly
published in full on 21 April 1995, he strove finally to set the record straight about the origins of the movie, stating that he and Dworet had not “ripped off” Preston’s story — but that the author had gained a great deal of publicity from claiming otherwise. On the contrary, Pool went on, he and Dworet had written the entire screenplay for
Outbreak,
notwithstanding embellishments by three subsequent writers, the cast and Wolfgang Petersen.

According to Pool, Warner Bros had been trying to persuade him and Dworet — a qualified medical doctor — to write an action-suspense film for them for more than two years, but had not found the right project until November 1992, when a senior executive asked them if they would be interested in writing a screenplay based on ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. At the time, they declined, believing that the story had several fundamental problems. “First, nothing very dramatic happens — it just threatens to happen,” Pool explained. “Second, the climactic action of the story is the euthanization of hundreds of monkeys — an extraordinarily grim finale for a major studio feature.” The writers believed that a movie was unlikely to emerge from Preston’s story — and even if it did, would struggle to find an audience.

Instead, Pool and Dworet drew the studio’s attention to an idea they had been working on for more than a decade, following Dworet’s research into another haemorrhagic illness, Lassa Fever, at medical school in 1975, which seemed to presage the end of the world. The pair worked up a story idea in February 1982 which Pool described as follows: “an emergency room doctor leads a battle against a bizarre African virus spreading in a small Idaho town. This battle eventually assumes a military dimension when the National Guard has to be called in to enforce the quarantine and protect the world from a devastating plague.” Pool and Dworet were fascinated by the social and moral implications of the story. What would really happen if such a virus broke out? Tough decisions would almost certainly follow. Would they isolate — or even annihilate — an entire town in order to prevent the spread of a contagious and incurable disease? A decade later, in 1992, Pool and Dworet sold the pitch to Warner Bros, at which point Arnold Kopelson suggested optioning Preston’s magazine story. “We told him that we had no intention of using Preston’s story,” Pool said, “and that Preston didn’t own the underlying subject matter — no one could.” Although Kopelson’s lawyers agreed, the producer decided to bid for the story regardless, feeling that
Preston’s research might prove useful to the project. When he was outbid, he went back to working on the Pool-Dworet story while Fox fast-tracked its adaptation of ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. And so the race was on.

In spite of the chaos surrounding the picture, however, Pool felt that Wolfgang Petersen had ultimately managed to make one of the most exciting movies he had ever seen, and that while
Outbreak
stretches credibility, “it’s never boring.” As for Richard Preston, “[he] is very talented... but he has amazing arrogance to think that, by writing one story for
The New Yorker,
he somehow owns an entire scientific subject.” On the contrary, Pool said, many other writers have addressed the subject of deadly plagues, from Daniel Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year
in 1722 to John Fuller’s
Fever!,
published 250 years later, detailing Nigeria’s Lassa Fever mini-epidemic of 1969. “Laurence and I read scores of articles about haemorrhagic fevers in medical journals and found hundreds more we didn’t have time to retrieve. We won the competition fair and square,” he concluded. “Richard Preston should stop whining and start writing his next book.”

Yet, like the virus it described, it appears that
The Hot Zone
cannot easily be subdued, and may yet return in mutated form. “Because I lost the race on
Hot Zone
doesn’t mean it won’t be made,” Obst wrote in 1996, by which time Preston’s book had been on the bestseller list for almost two years. “Maybe I just lost the race to mediocrity; so every time I meet a new director who could be right or read a new writer who could save the script,
Hot Zone
moves to the front burner, ready to start cooking.” Sure enough, on 2 July 2002,
Variety
reported that Fox was reviving the film, with Scott McGehee and David Siegel
(Suture, The Deep End)
set to direct a new draft by Emmy-winning writer Erik Jendreson
(Band of Brothers, The 300 Spartans).
“It’s a great script,” said McGehee, “very similar to the original story.” Hart remembers being contacted by Lynda Obst when Jendreson was first brought in, around the same time that a small outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred as thousands of refugees were streaming across the border to escape the genocide in Somalia. “Lynda called me — I think it was after
Contact,
so it must have been 1998 or 1999 — and said they were bringing in [Jendreson,] who had just won an Emmy for
E.R..
She wanted to know if I would be willing to work as an executive producer on the project, and work with this writer in a supervisory capacity. I was flattered,” he says, “but I also was not stupid — I had been through this a number of times before.

“We spitballed what the take would be, how we evolved what we did in
The Hot Zone
to now, and it was gonna be a global outbreak like SARS, as
opposed to just being contained in Reston,” Hart continues. “That was almost going to be a main title sequence, and we were gonna do a global outbreak using the airline scenario. The problem was that if I was gonna get involved as an executive producer, it was going to have to be
very
clear what the credit situation was going to be.” After suffering through a tumultuous credit arbitration process — “a horrible situation which pitches writers against each other” — on
Contact,
he had worked on two films where the writers had agreed among themselves what the credits should be: an all too rare process, which the Writers Guild of America encourages in its governing agreements.

“I said to Lynda, ‘I can’t do this unless we agree up front on how credits are gonna be shared. I’m happy to take second position or third position, but I should be in there for screen story credit because I had pioneered the first draft,’” Hart recalls, “and she was not willing to let me have that conversation with Eric.” She did, however, subsequently let Hart know that the draft had not worked, and that the project had been abandoned once again. “I later ran across this script,” Hart says, “and again it just misses the characters of Nancy and Jerry Jaax and Karl Johnson and all the people that I was lucky enough to meet. I don’t care how many writers they put on it, if they could get something they were happy with and just do it, if it was closer to Richard Preston’s book, or even what I did with Richard Preston at the beginning with Lynda Obst... Karl Johnson has now written his own non-fiction novel about his experiences with outbreaks, and asked me if I’d be interested in adapting the screenplay — and I can’t wait to read it. He is a guy who has been at the epicentre longer than anybody else in virology, and I hope his story, which he’s going to try and get published, is as exciting and terrifying as anything that happened in
The Hot Zone.”

Richard Preston, who has since published further bestsellers, the movie rights to which were sold for millions of dollars, has described his first encounter with Hollywood as akin to “watching people break and enter cars in broad daylight — it just happens and everyone shrugs,” yet insists he hasn’t come out empty-handed. “I’ve had so much fun telling the ‘Call-me-Arnold’ story,” he said, of his memorable first phone call with Kopelson, “it’s almost worth it.” He also hopes that
The Hot Zone
may yet be revived by Hollywood: “I don’t know that the story is completely dead. In Hollywood, it always depends on if you believe in reincarnation.”

Indeed, despite the problems which have plagued the film for almost two decades,
The Hot Zone
remains in ‘active development’ at 20th Century Fox. “I think they want to go back to Richard Preston’s book and try to make it
work,” says Hart. “The most recent rumour was that they were going back to my script, but I hear that’s been put on the back burner.” Richard Friedenberg is among the casualties of
The Hot Zone
who remains optimistic that the film will eventually be made, declaring, “It’s a worthy project and a terrific book.” Nevertheless, Friedenberg does not expect to see his name on the credits of any eventual adaptation. “My paltry input has been swept away long ago, and will not be reflected in any way in some future film,” he says. Nor is the crisis that was
The Hot Zone
an experience on which he wishes to reflect: “It was a very bad time for me. For some reason it was more disillusioning than most of my experiences, and I took it hard.” Ridley Scott also found the film’s eleventh hour collapse frustrating. “I would have loved to work with Jodie [Foster],” the director told biographer Paul M. Sammon, shortly before the actress bowed out of another Scott-directed project,
Hannibal.
“I also thought [The
Hot Zone]
was one of those rare projects, like
Thelma & Louise,
that was actually about something.”