Tales From Development Hell (12 page)

Ironically, Goldman was not a fan of Dick’s work at the time, having had very little exposure to it. Nevertheless, he says, “I am generally faithful to all the writers who come before me, from source material to earlier screenwriters. I try not to get involved in rewriting projects unless I like what’s already there. And then my
modus operandi
is to bring out the existing values, and try to complete and perfect them. So, I was being faithful to the ideas in the first half of the screenplay, which were the same as the ideas in the first half of
the short story. Phil himself tended to combine and garble his many ideas, and he rarely worked out any idea in a complete and consistent way. He just kept flitting about to the next idea.” Shusett agrees: “His work is very tough to translate into a screenplay because it has such brilliant set-ups that it’s hard to match his level of brilliance in the pay-off. That’s why most of his best work is short stories, and even those stories don’t have a third act.”

Goldman admits that the second half of the movie, beginning as Quaid arrives on Mars, was largely a concession to Hollywood plotting, and therefore retained most of the structure of the version Bruce Beresford had planned to shoot. “I didn’t think I had the liberty to make big changes because I was under the impression that Arnold, the studio and Paul were all ready to make that story. So I mainly concentrated on fixing and improving what was there. I would have preferred a more consistently realistic view of the future and more believable science, in regard to gravity, physics, and atmosphere. But we were making an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and that guided the tone and many of the decisions. Even so, we tried to make the movie a bit less jokey and more rigorous than Arnold’s previous movies.”

Having completed his first rewrite, Goldman and Verhoeven met with Schwarzenegger, Shusett, Vajna and Kassar. “Arnold and Ron had discussed our draft, and they felt that our climax lacked emotion,” Goldman remembers. “This was a valid observation because Paul prefers a dry emotional tone, and he really didn’t take very seriously the subplot about Martian liberation. He saw the movie as an intellectual puzzle. But faced with opposition from the star, I saw the need for a compromise, and fortunately an idea came to me in the meeting, and I proposed the idea about Cohaagen shutting off the air. This gave us a nice cruel action to justify the suffering of the poor mutants. I made these changes, and we went into production.” Adds Shusett, “All of a sudden all the pieces came together, and instead of going to Australia we went to Mexico.”

“I think we were a very writer-friendly group,” says Verhoeven, “because they were part of everything. They could see the dailies and have as much input as they wanted.” Adds Goldman, “It was a rare privilege for a Hollywood screenwriter, who is usually unwelcome on the set. If a screenwriter is present, it is usually an emergency script doctor who is brought in to ‘fix’ a problem. But Paul has great respect for screenplays and screenwriters. He works tirelessly on his scripts, and then he shoots them word for word. He almost never improvises, and he prevents the actors from deviating from the text. If something wasn’t working on the set, he would call for me and ask me to write something new. Ron Shusett and I liked and respected each other, and we worked together on the rewrites while we were down there. We spent a lot of time making small revisions, but ultimately I would say that we changed less than one per cent.”

Both writers admit to a few issues with the finished film. “There’s too much foul language, too much noisy shooting, too much violence and death,” says Goldman. “It’s a bit too long, and you don’t really care about the mutants. And the bulging eyes at the end went on too long,” he adds, referring to Quaid and Melina gasping for air in the Martian atmosphere. “I think that hurt us a lot because it was like a runner stumbling at the finish line. A lot of these things could have been fixed if we had had one test screening, but, alas, we didn’t. There was no time.” Shusett agrees: “Paul and Gary and I always regretted not having time for a preview, because you can’t get any perspective on what you’re doing.” Additional pressure came from the impending release of Warren Beatty’s star-studded
Dick Tracy,
which the filmmakers, and the studio, saw as a threat. “We didn’t want to open the same week, so we paid editors ‘golden time’ so we could go out a week earlier than
Dick Tracy,”
says Shusett, “but that robbed us of any preview. If we had just had a week to calm down, look at what we’d just cut... I wouldn’t have shot anything differently, I just would have re-edited the third act a little tighter, and then I think it would have hit the jackpot instead of it being seventy-five or eighty per cent the movie I was hoping it would be. Having said that, we were lucky to get that close.”

“I think that we captured Phil’s serio-comic tone better than anyone else has.” Goldman says. “That’s really what sets his work apart, in my opinion — his irreverent, alienated, kitchen sink, neurotic view of the future. Also, Paul Verhoeven is a truly brilliant man with a Doctorate in mathematics. Although his movies can be crass, Paul is a truly independent and deep thinker. It’s important not to confuse style with substance. Paul likes to be crass and offensive, on top of being incisive and precise. Paul, like Phil defined himself, is a ‘crap artist’, making great art from shit. It’s a mistake to think that a good Phil Dick movie is necessarily dark, moody and elegant, like
Blade Runner.”
Above all, Goldman doubts that anyone but Verhoeven would have had the courage to make a movie which questions the supposed reality the audience has just experienced. “He made that decision, and I executed it,” he says. “I doubt that anyone but myself would have thought up the idea that Quaid doesn’t recover his memory and become authentic again; [that] he is not the same as Hauser — Hauser is bad — and Quaid must choose his artificial
identity over his real one. I think these are powerful extensions of Phil’s setup and themes.” Overall, he adds, “I loved working with Paul, Ron, Mario and Andy, Arnold, and Sharon Stone. It was a perfect experience from beginning to end, and I don’t expect to be so lucky again.” Certainly, Goldman would not be so fortunate with his subsequent association with
Total Recall 2.

Today, the box office performance of
Total Recall
would virtually guarantee a sequel. In 1990, however, Hollywood was a very different place, as Goldman explains: “When we finished
Total Recall,
none of the major players wanted to make a sequel. They all felt that the franchise wasn’t well suited to a sequel. They also held the previously accepted idea that sequels were commercial debasements that serious artists did not indulge in.” The success of James Cameron’s
Aliens
had been an exception, and the same director’s subsequent sequel
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
would further change this way of thinking. At the time, however, Shusett’s and Goldman’s interest in a sequel to
Total Recall
fell on deaf ears.

Then, in the early 1990s, Goldman optioned another Philip K. Dick story, ‘Minority Report’, with a view to directing it himself as a low-budget feature. He approached Verhoeven to ask if he would attach himself as executive producer, thus throwing the weight of his name behind the project, even if he was not directly involved. “He read the short story, liked it, and agreed to help me out. Then he asked me if I had thought about how well the story worked as a
Total Recall
sequel. Although it had nothing to do with the themes of the movie, there was something about the tone and driving narrative that made it seem perfect for a sequel.” Better still, it did not repeat anything from the original film, allowing Goldman to take the franchise in a totally new direction, but one that would be thematically consistent with the original. “This is what appealed to Paul,” he says. “The possibility of doing a sequel that seemed original, not repetitive or derivative.”

In Dick’s story, certain human beings are born with telepathic powers, shunned by ordinary citizens but embraced by the government as the foundation for a new anti-crime organisation called the Pre-Crime division, which uses the telepaths (known as ‘pre-cogs’) to predict illegal activities before they occur, and arrest the would-be criminals before any crime is committed. The plot revolves around a particular Pre-Crime detective forced to go on the run when the pre-cogs spit out his name as a future murderer. As Verhoeven explains, “There was an introduction [in
Total Recall]
that the mutants were perhaps clairvoyant, and that was used in the idea for the second one where Quaid becomes the head of this company that can look
into the future and protect citizens by eliminating criminals before they do the crime.” Thus, the mutants would become the ‘pre-cogs’ of Dick’s story, the film rights to which Goldman now owned.

“I had to make a tough decision between continuing with my plan to direct a small movie from ‘Minority Report’, or to become the writer-producer of a
Total Recall
sequel based on ‘Minority Report’,” Goldman says. “At the time, I was still working closely with Paul and Carolco. We had worked together on
Basic Instinct,
which had turned out to be the biggest movie of the year worldwide, and I had done a rewrite on
Crusade
which had gotten the project out of Development Hell and into pre-production [see
chapter 6
]. It seemed like the
Total Recall
sequel was a sure thing to speed into production, and become another big hit. So I decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.” At this point, Goldman and Verhoeven discovered that Ron Shusett had a contractual right to write the first draft of any
Total Recall
sequel, and that they would therefore need his permission to proceed. Goldman proposed that they write the sequel together, based on the ‘Minority Report’ story, on the proviso that Goldman would then be attached to co-write all future
Total Recall
sequels. Says Shusett, “We worked on it together and immediately clicked, and it became a wonderful sequel. Arnold was going to star in it, and Paul Verhoeven was going to direct it. Then, right after we wrote it, Carolco went bankrupt.” Indeed, Carolco’s financial situation was so serious it reneged on its contractual payments to Shusett and Goldman. As a result, ownership of the underlying rights — to both the short story and the first draft — reverted to the writers, allowing them to move it to 20th Century Fox.

By this time, Verhoeven was busy shooting
Showgirls,
and Goldman says he lost interest in the sequel. Not so, says Verhoeven: “Somebody whose name I won’t name, without warning, took it away — somebody who had me on their pay list, like a Judas. So in some subversive ways, I think, it left Carolco and it came into the hands of Jan De Bont.” At this stage, Verhoeven’s fellow Dutchman was a celebrated cinematographer, yet to direct the runaway hit
Speed.
Says Goldman, “Jan and the studio discussed acquiring the
Total Recall
franchise from Carolco, and continuing to develop ‘Minority Report’ as a
Total Recall
sequel. Ultimately, they decided not to continue with it as a sequel, so we removed all the
Total Recall
elements and used the first draft as the foundation for further work.” From that point on, ‘Minority Report’ was developed as a free-standing movie, based only on the Dick short story. Says Shusett, “We were really devastated, because we had proved tangibly to everybody, including Paul and Arnold, that it would make a great sequel. But
my spirits rose when Fox bought it as a non-sequel, a free-standing movie.”

Even after its estrangement from
Total Recall 2
and development as a separate entity,
Minority Report
suffered a further five years in Development Hell, with Jan De Bont eventually jumping ship, as Shusett recalls: “He was very hot from
Speed
and he’d followed up with
Twister,
but then
Speed 2
and
The Haunting
bombed out, and gradually Fox lost faith in him. We wrote a new draft for him in ’95, but they couldn’t find an actor that liked his draft that Fox was in favour of too. It was years later — ’98 or ’99 — that Spielberg came in and read a draft he didn’t like. But when we personally got our draft to him, and persuaded him to read it, he did like it. And then he used an amalgamation of some of their draft and some of our draft and his own ideas, and because he’s Steven Spielberg, his version was better in many ways, and he made the best film of all.” Shusett — who, like Goldman, earned an executive producer credit on Spielberg’s film (Jan De Bont gets an associate producer credit) — admits to being surprised that the director’s take on the material was so dark, “even darker than our last draft. It was so dark that I think summer audiences weren’t ready for it. We should have released it in the winter, and then I think they might have expected it, and been able to handle it. It was too dark a movie for people expecting summer fun with a
Total Recall
/Phil Dick name on it, and our names connected to it — they thought it would be like
Total Recall.
And instead it was more like
Blade Runner
and they weren’t ready for that.” Indeed, although
Minority Report
(2002) grossed $350 million worldwide, it fell far short of expectations generated by the first teaming of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, especially on a sci-fi project. “It got wonderful reviews, and everybody thought it would do $500 or $600 million worldwide,” Shusett points out, “but it only made $350 million — and only $130 million in America, when there are movies making $200, $300 million domestically.”

In the meantime, Carolco had sold the
Total Recall
TV rights to DFL Entertainment for $1.2 million, resulting in the short-lived Showtime series
Total Recall 2070.
The sale led Shusett and Goldman to believe that the possibility of a
Total Recall
sequel was dead forever, since studios rarely buy into a script or film, much less a franchise, unless all rights are available in all media. Nevertheless, at a subsequent bankruptcy hearing for now-defunct Carolco on 14 January 1997, Dimension Films, the recently-formed genre division of Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, paid $3.15 million for the theatrical sequel, prequel and remake rights to
Total Recall.
“I heard later that they were surprised that the TV rights had already been sold off,” says
Goldman. “They thought that was part of the package of rights that they acquired.” (Indeed, pressure from Dimension may have been behind DFL’s decision to ditch its original concept for the TV series — a direct continuation of the movie, featuring Quaid on Mars — for an Earth-based format using new characters, which ironically owed more to
Blade Runner
than
Total Recall.)
In what Carolco bankruptcy counsel Howard Weg described as “lively bidding”, Dimension had outbid DFL Entertainment, 20th Century Fox (which retired from the bidding when it reached $500,000) and Live Entertainment, whose final bid of $3.14 million was narrowly exceeded by Dimension, which had recently produced its first
bona fide
hit,
Scream.
“This is the perfect franchise opportunity for Dimension,” said co-founder Bob Weinstein, “[and] franchises are what Dimension is all about.”