The Keys to the Kingdom (36 page)

It was a deft move. Instead of being defensive, Storaro found himself springing to Landau's defense. “Maybe Jon is right,” he said. “I can make it better.”

“Okay,” Beatty said. After he left, Marks turned to Landau and said, “That was his best performance yet.”

As the movie's release date approached, Katzenberg received a taunt from his old boss Don Simpson, whose ego could scarcely be contained on the Paramount lot. Simpson was immersed in making
Days of Thunder,
a hopelessly clichéd race-car movie with Tom Cruise and Tony Scott, the star and director who had helped make
Top Gun
such a smash. The production was troubled and wound up destroying Simpson's relationship with the studio he had called home for years. In fact, it would nearly wreck his career. But before the film was released, Simpson's braggadocio raged unabated and—with
Days of Thunder
set to open that summer just a couple of weeks before
Dick Tracy
—he sent a fax to Katzenberg saying, “You can't escape the Thunder!”

Katzenberg promptly faxed back: “You won't believe how big my Dick is!”

 

ACTUALLY, IT WAS
Beatty who was causing more problems than competition from
Days of Thunder
. A split developed between Helene Hahn, who oversaw the studio's business and legal affairs, and one of her top executives and protégés, Robin Russell. In Hahn's view, Beatty had
been end-running her by bonding with Russell and then exacting concessions that he could not get otherwise. Russell was at least as taken with Beatty as many other Disney executives, but in her view, she was being made into a scapegoat. She may have been a little infatuated with Beatty, but who at Disney wasn't? (Russell also put in a cameo as a prostitute in the film.) No one had the nerve to say no to Beatty, who was used to getting his way and who was, after all, an Oscar-winning director.

This strain between Hahn and Russell turned into an open rift when the studio allowed Beatty to give scriptwriter Bo Goldman a credit as a coproducer on the film. The Writers Guild has final say over which writers receive credit, and in this case, Jim Cash and Jack Epps got the nod. Goldman, who had reworked the script, was angry when Beatty failed to get him a writer's credit. Beatty gave him a producer's credit instead. The guild regarded this as a “consolation credit”—a sham intended to evade guild rules—and announced its intention to block screenings of any copy of the film that listed Goldman as a producer.

That bad news came just as Beatty and top Disney executives arrived in Orlando for the film's premiere—with a print that included the unscreenable credit. As they stood in the lobby of the Dolphin hotel, “Jeffrey and Robin Russell were just screaming at each other…and Warren was having a panic attack,” says one eyewitness. The premiere went forward after Disney agreed that it would pay a fine and destroy the offending copies of the film as well as printed materials that included the Goldman credit. But Hahn blamed Russell for having indulged Beatty by approving the offending credit. After that, the relationship between Hahn and Russell was irreparable.

The cost of making
Dick Tracy
had soared to $47 million. Meanwhile, Disney rolled up its hype machine to its highest pitch ever, spending a shocking $54.7 million on marketing. As a condition of making the movie, Katzenberg had gotten Beatty to commit to promoting it. It was something the press-shy star had refused to do even for his own sweetheart project,
Reds,
but now he publicized the picture so relentlessly that
New York Times
columnist Anna Quindlen found “something sort of pathetic” about the sight of Beatty “shilling up a storm.” He was interviewed on
David Letterman, 20/20, Arsenio Hall,
and
Larry King Live
. He talked to
Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone,
and
Premiere
.

It worked only after a fashion. Some critics warmed to the picture; Roger Ebert said the film was “original and visionary.” The
Washington Post
's
Desson Howe, on the other hand, said the film was a celebration of “everything that's wrong with [Hollywood]: the hype, the agent-negotiated star system, the…copy-cat mediocrity, etc.” It was an ironic broadside to level at Disney, which usually prided itself on shunning star-stuffed agent packages.

The picture opened better than the vaunted
Days of Thunder
($22.5 million versus $15.4 million), and it managed to gross over $100 million. But Disney had to drag it across the finish line. With all of its stunning visuals, its carefully chosen color scheme, and an all-star cast,
Dick Tracy
was too cerebral of an exercise. It never connected emotionally with the audience. Given all the time and money Disney had spent,
Dick Tracy
was destined to be perceived as a failure. The extensive lines of
Dick Tracy
merchandise didn't leap off the shelves. (An attempt to sell T-shirts that served as a ticket to the film was an outright disaster.)

Despite the expense, Disney didn't satisfy the audience's appetite for action and effects.
Dick Tracy
couldn't compete with the big bangs in the first
Die Hard
sequel or the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi fantasy
Total Recall,
both of which opened that year. And the live-action kids' movies that scored in 1990 were hipper than
Dick Tracy. Home Alone
and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
ran away with the box office.

Katzenberg says he remains proud of
Dick Tracy
and defends the process that went into getting it made. “It was not a movie that got out of control,” he says. “
Roger Rabbit,
I couldn't control.
Star Trek,
I couldn't control. This doesn't fall into those categories.” Even so, for Katzenberg, the whole experience had been draining and debilitating. He started to realize that aside from animation, he wasn't having fun anymore.

W
HILE TOUCHSTONE STRUGGLED
through
Dick Tracy,
Hollywood Pictures had been expected to have a quick start with its first film, which was released a month later. But
Arachnophobia,
the spider-invasion movie directed by Steven Spielberg protégé Frank Marshall, wasn't a huge performer, grossing $53 million. The studio never figured out whether to sell the movie as fun or horror. Katzenberg decided to call it a “thrillomedy,” but audiences were not moved. Between the middling box office and the profit participation that went to producer Spielberg, the picture didn't produce the windfall that had been anticipated.

The division fared even worse when Mestres picked up
Marrying Man,
a comedy that had been in development at Touchstone. The Kim Basinger–Alec Baldwin picture was based on a Neil Simon script about a millionaire playboy who falls in love with a gangster's moll and ends up marrying her four times. At the time Baldwin was on the rise—still awaiting the release of
The Hunt for Red October
but not yet as hot as the industry expected him to become. Basinger was a bigger name thanks to
9
1
?
2
Weeks
and
Batman,
but she was slumping. She also had a reputation for being tardy to work and hard to manage.

This was meant to be a typical Disney film, with a budget below $15 million and a tight shooting schedule. Katzenberg hoped that Jerry Rees, an animator making his directing debut, would be as brilliant a gamble as Joe Johnston, a special-effects man who scored a major hit when the studio gave him a chance to direct
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
.

Basinger started off by showing up late for rehearsal. Then she was five hours late for her first makeup test. When she arrived, she worked for a couple of hours and left. She demanded that the studio fire the director of photography, Ian Baker, because she didn't like the way she looked in the test. Disney gave in. So it went at first, until Basinger announced that she
had to fly to Brazil in the middle of the production to consult a psychic. Disney told her she would face charges of $85,000 a day to make up for time wasted. Basinger skipped the trip but her behavior didn't improve. She drove Simon, who had written the script, off the set. “This isn't funny,” she reportedly told him at one point. “Whoever wrote this doesn't understand comedy.” Simon walked off and was scarcely seen afterward. (Executives associated with the project say there were problems with the script, which lacked a workable ending, but Mestres could never get Simon to address them.)

A blossoming romance between Basinger and Baldwin seemed to inspire the stars to increasingly extravagant displays of temper. At one point Baldwin, apparently upset because the phones in his trailer didn't work, knocked over glasses and ashtrays, and then grabbed executive Jay Heit's cell phone and threw it to the ground. When he kicked over a case full of lenses, Disney had Panavision tally the costs and threatened to make Baldwin pay.

Eventually, Baldwin and Basinger—who later married in real life—essentially took over the film. They rushed through preparations, and some shots were out of focus and needed to be done over. That made Basinger “go crazy and start throwing stuff,” a member of the crew reported. The stars banned producer David Streit from the set. From time to time Katzenberg demanded something from them; for example, he insisted that they reshoot a scene in a wedding chapel. When Baldwin refused, Katzenberg threatened to shut down the production. He prevailed.

Though Basinger and Baldwin steamrolled novice director Rees (who wound up in the hospital by the end of the production, stressed and exhausted), he actually laid some of the blame on Disney. “A primary source of Kim's and Alec's frustration was the pressures that come from working with a studio that presses so hard for money savings,” he said. Despite those pressures, the savings didn't materialize. The movie wound up costing $23 million and it bombed at the box office when it was released in February 1991.

In fact, by 1990, Hollywood Pictures was looking at a string of films that would turn out to be losers.
Taking Care of Business
was an empty-headed James Belushi–Charles Grodin comedy that cost $15 million (not counting millions for prints and advertising) and only grossed about $20 million. Many more flops were in the works. Meanwhile, to his credit, Mestres tried to get the studio to make
In the Line of Fire,
a thriller starring Clint East
wood. Katzenberg thought it was too expensive; the project was a major hit for Sony Pictures in 1993.

Within two years of Mestres's ascension, speculation about whether Katzenberg would fire him was beginning to percolate through the community. But those who knew Katzenberg said he wouldn't turn his back on his longtime lieutenant. And others said Mestres didn't deserve to take the fall because much of what he'd done was to execute Katzenberg's plans. Indeed, Hollywood Pictures' loser movies bore the fingerprints of Katzenberg and even Eisner. It was their idea to let Rees direct
Marrying Man
. Eisner was responsible for putting Patrick Dempsey in the ill-fated drama
Run
. Katzenberg not only went to every preview of every film, but acknowledged that he made decisions on every script and every pitch. The joke around town held that Hollywood Pictures was “Jeffrey Katzenberg unrestrained.”

 

BACK AT TOUCHSTONE
, Katzenberg was working on another project that brought with it a great deal of strife and anxiety.
Pretty Woman
producer Laura Ziskin had started to develop
What About Bob?
at the beginning of her three-year deal at Disney. The film was based on a story that Alvin Sargent and Ziskin had written hoping to get Bill Murray as the star. Initially, Katzenberg balked at paying Murray's fee and the producers looked at Robin Williams, among others. Williams passed and finally the studio turned back to Murray.

Disney wanted Garry Marshall to direct, but Murray said he wasn't interested in working with Marshall. (Marshall and Ziskin teamed up on
Pretty Woman
while
What About Bob?
was still in development.) The studio searched for a director willing to work with Murray, whose unpleasant reputation preceded him. Finally they settled on Frank Oz, whose credits included
Little Shop of Horrors
. Meanwhile, Murray's agent, Michael Ovitz (who also represented Oz), exacted Murray's biggest payday ever—$8 million.

In return, Murray was a nightmare throughout the production. He and costar Richard Dreyfuss got into arguments that once involved throwing ashtrays at one another. And Oz was not one to step into a confrontation.

Ziskin tried to pamper Murray, and when the cast was filming on location in Virginia even got a Richmond high-school marching band to surprise him with a rendition of “Happy Birthday” when the star turned forty. But when Murray found out that the producers planned to work on
Columbus Day, he was incensed. When Ziskin came on the set, he asked loudly, “So, Laura, are we getting the day off?”

Ziskin knew this was a sore point, so she stopped short of answering. “Were you expecting the day off?” she asked.

Murray jumped up and screamed, “Was I expecting the day off?” He picked up a light, threw it against the wall, and pulled down a piece of the set before walking out. Ziskin felt she had to follow him. In the parking lot, he turned on her, ripped off her glasses, broke them, and threw them at her. “I'm going to throw you across the fucking parking lot!” he yelled. She stood her ground and he stalked off. The rumor immediately sped through the industry that he had belted her.

After this treatment, Ziskin told Katzenberg that he had to back her up and make the star work on Columbus Day. Katzenberg didn't have the stomach for the fight. “What is that Kenny Rogers song?” he says with a laugh. “‘Know when to fold 'em.' It's not as though I didn't have more than my fair share of battles.” With Ovitz's help, Murray got an expensive day off—along with the crew.

What About Bob?
was about a psychiatrist (Dreyfuss) driven mad by a particularly irksome patient who follows him on vacation. The original ending had Dreyfuss's character trying to kill Bob and going insane. Once it was shot, it was clear it didn't work. Ziskin came up with a new ending in which Bob ends up marrying the psychiatrist's sister. Oz wanted an ending where everyone came together on a boat.

Katzenberg backed the director. Ziskin pleaded to be allowed to shoot both and see how audiences responded. After protracted begging, Katzenberg finally agreed. The two versions were screened with recruited audiences, back-to-back. Ziskin heard that Disney production executives had a wager over which version would fare better.

Oz's ending unspooled and the audience sat, unmoved. Then Ziskin's ending played to a much more enthusiastic reception. The audience scored Ziskin's version twenty points higher than Oz's. As Ziskin stood in the theater enjoying the applause for her ending, Katzenberg walked up the aisle and gave her a hug. After rejecting her proposed ending, he was only too happy to eat crow. “I couldn't lose,” he said. “I bet on your ending.”

 

AS
1990
DREW
to a close, the country was in a recession, the Gulf War was about to begin, and the entertainment industry was suffering
through a terrible holiday season. Universal unwrapped an enormous bomb in the shape of
Havana,
an expensive Robert Redford film about the last days of Batista's Cuba. Warner had a staggering flop in
Bonfire of the Vanities,
with a star-loaded cast that included Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Melanie Griffith. Paramount suffered through
The Two Jakes,
Jack Nicholson's long-in-the-making sequel to
Chinatown,
and the doomed sequel
Another 48 Hrs
. It was a lean holiday all around. Disney wasn't doing much better with the disappointing
Three Men and a Little Lady,
a lackluster sequel, and
Green Card
(another comedy, matching Gerard Depardieu with Andie MacDowell). Even animation brought only
The Rescuers Down Under,
another wan sequel. After that, Katzenberg swore off animated movies that didn't have songs.

Compared with other studios, Disney was faring fairly well. The studio had
Pretty Woman
and
The Little Mermaid
—both major hits—to bolster its performance for the fiscal year (which ran from October 1, 1989, to September 30, 1990). But Disney was hardly performing like a well-oiled machine. In January, its stock had taken a thirty-point dip due to nervousness about bad movies in the pipeline and bad winter weather in Orlando. The price quickly rallied and by June it was trading over $136 a share—a stunning 750 percent increase since the advent of Eisner and Wells.

But even though profits were up, they weren't growing at the same astonishing level that Disney had taught the public to expect over previous years, when one record-breaking quarter had followed another. For the first time the Disney juggernaut seemed stoppable. “Disney is looking just a little fragilistic,”
Business Week
had said in June. “How long can Eisner keep up the frantic '80s growth?”

In the movie division, profits for fiscal 1990 were the lowest they'd been in three years. On the live-action side,
Pretty Woman
had been the only really bright spot. All sorts of Touchstone pictures had disappeared—
Betsy's Wedding, Spaced Invaders, Firebirds, Mr. Destiny
. And compared with
Batman
, the 1989 megahit that Warner had enjoyed,
Dick Tracy
was an expensive mistake, emotionally and financially. There was no comfort to be found at Hollywood Pictures.

Disney's friends at Silver Screen, who had raised more than a billion dollars in three offerings that funded its film slates from 1984 to 1991, were starting to opt out of certain films that appeared to be too expensive or too generous to talent. In fact, Silver Screen partners Roland Betts and Tom Bernstein passed on
Three Men and a Little Lady
—which required more
generous remuneration of the stars after the success of
Three Men and a Baby
. “We said
Three Men
could outperform the original and be a lousy investment,” says Bernstein. “We started to get religion and realized it was time to move on.”

“I said, ‘Jeffrey, give me the hypothetical. Tell me what the film is going to gross,'” Betts says. “Jeffrey said, ‘If I don't do this I won't get Selleck's next picture.'” But Betts and Bernstein weren't enraptured with Selleck and their concern proved to be justified. (They refused to back the 1991 films
Billy Bathgate
and
Scenes from a Mall
—both bombs—bringing an end to the Silver Screen relationship with Disney.)

Television was doing worse than film. The company had spent money to make deals with some television talent, and at first, the investment seemed to be working. The studio got six shows on network television for the season that began in September 1990. But within weeks, it was clear that most of the shows would fail, causing Disney to lose millions.

It wasn't just filmed entertainment that was hitting a rough patch. In the fourth quarter of 1990, the theme parks felt the effects of the recession. The company generated record revenue of $5.8 billion in 1990, but for the first time Disney fell short of Eisner's stated goal of achieving a 20 percent increase in earnings per share (by two percentage points).

Eisner dealt with darkening skies by going way over the top with his annual letter to shareholders—working in the family's Thanksgiving in Vermont, his eighty-eight-year-old father-in-law's illness, and his twelve-year-old son Eric's Pee Wee hockey tournament all in the first two paragraphs. Disney was a family-oriented business and Eisner had never been bashful about using his relatives to win over stockholders. Sometimes Eisner's flights of fancy were oddly revealing for a man who headed up one of the world's most influential entertainment companies. In the November 25, 1990, letter, he talked about visiting Russia and mentioned the company's efforts to open a Disney Store in Moscow. “How else would I answer my mother, who was with my wife Jane and me on that trip, as we looked at the four-hour line waiting to get into McDonald's on Gorky Street?” Eisner wrote. “Before she questioned me, in a motherly way, I said, ‘We'll do one, too, Mother, soon, I promise.' I think I have said that to my parents before—the ‘Soon, I promise' part.”