Tales From Development Hell (29 page)

“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.”

— The Hot Zone
screenwriter Richard Friedenberg

I
n 1992, journalist Richard Preston was researching article ideas for
The New Yorker
magazine when he stumbled across what was to become one of the biggest stories of the decade. His original intention had been to write about viruses, but while the AIDS epidemic seemed the logical choice, a lot had already been written on the subject; instead, he asked Professor Joshua Lederberg at New York’s Rockerfeller University if he knew of any other ‘interesting’ viruses. “He mentioned Ebola,” Preston recalled, referring to the lethal and incurable filovirus which kills nine out of ten of those infected — liquefying their internal organs and causing them to haemorrhage through every orifice. “He said there’d been a frightening outbreak of Ebola near Washington a few years earlier, which had been dealt with by the US Army — by soldiers wearing space suits, killing monkeys. He added, ‘Well, you probably know about it.’ I said, ‘God, no! How do I learn more?’” Lederberg suggested that Preston call the Army, which he did. “Eventually I got permission to interview the Army officers who’d led the Ebola mission. Among them were Colonels Jerry and Nancy Jaax, husband and wife.”

The result, published in October 1992, was an article entitled ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’, detailing the seemingly superhuman efforts of the two USAMRIID (US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases)
virologists to contain an outbreak of the virus, which had not only travelled from the African rainforest to the eastern seaboard of the United States, but also jumped species from monkeys to humans. If it was not contained, it threatened to become a worldwide pandemic, a so-called ‘slate wiper’ for the human race. Since the tiniest tear in the Jaax’s biohazard suits could have resulted in a swift and horrible demise, they lived and worked in a state of constant paranoia, and put their lives at risk throughout the entire endeavour. “In [my] very first interview with Nancy Jaax, she told me the story of how she’d gotten a leak in her space suit,” Preston said later, “and her glove had filled up with Ebola blood, while she’d had a cut on her hand. It was a gripping story.” The fact that the pair was married — and that Nancy had, at the time, outranked her husband — only made the story more thrilling. That it was also
true...
well, that was almost too good to be true. No sooner had the article been published in
The New Yorker
than Hollywood was on the phone.

In fact, it was on 18 January 1993 that Preston told the teenager babysitting his two children that he was going to work in his garage office and did not wish to be disturbed. Moments later, Hollywood heavyweight Arnold Kopelson — producer of such hits as
Platoon, The Fugitive
and, most recently,
Falling Down
— was on the line, prefacing the conversation with the to-the-point question: “Do you know who I am?” As Kopelson explained to
Entertainment Weekly, “
I want people to know I’m a serious film-maker; I’m an Academy Award-winner.” Preston recalled, “I don’t know if he had a cigar in his mouth, but I think he did. You could almost hear the faint sucking sound in the background. He said, ‘First of all, call me Arnold. How are you, anyway?’ and I said, ‘I’m fine,’ and he said, without missing a beat, ‘I’m terrific,’ and I thought, sitting there in my garage, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Hollywood.’” Kopelson went on to say that he wanted the rights to ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. He told Preston he wanted to make an important movie that would effect social change. He was passionate to make the movie. He wanted to spend money on it — indeed, he claimed never to make a film for less than $50 million. “By the way,” Kopelson added, somewhat ominously, “we have the lawyers’ opinion that we can make this movie without you.”

Unbeknown to Preston, Kopelson had already been working with screenwriters Laurence Dworet and Robert Roy Pool on a screen version of events similar to those detailed in Preston’s article. This was possible because facts are generally considered to be in the ‘public domain’, and since no one can own them, anyone can exploit them for dramatic effect, as long as the names of real life people are not involved, or if they are, their ‘life rights’ are purchased.
Dworet and Pool’s first stab at the screenplay was, Kopelson said later, “totally unsatisfactory”. Warner Bros, with which Kopelson had a production output deal, wanted a grittier thriller, and hired Academy Award-winner Ted Tally (The
Silence of the Lambs)
to tackle the next draft. Kopelson says that his initial plan had been to hire Preston as a consultant on a film that would be based only loosely on the article, but use it as the backdrop to a more dramatic, fictionalised account of an outbreak. “[The article] wasn’t a movie, it was merely background,” the producer explained. “It was about 100 monkeys, and all of them end up getting killed. First of all, I would have the animal rights activists all over me. Secondly, it did not have a beginning, a middle and an end.” According to Preston, however, the rights to the article were auctioned off, with producer Lynda Obst (The
Fisher King)
emerging the victor, paying $100,000, with a proviso that a further $350,000 be payable on the first day of production.

“Fox and I had won the initial skirmish by convincing Preston of our sympathetic intentions,” Obst later wrote in her memoir,
Hello, He Lied.
“He had elected to interview all the interested producers and choose from among them.” As a former reporter, Obst was attracted to the true story; as a working mother, she was attracted to Nancy Jaax’s heroism. “We did not want to make an exploitative horror film. Credible argument. We won the auction. Credible victory. That was the last moment any of it made any sense.” Kopelson maintains that no such auction took place. “On my life, the lives of my children, my wife, and everything that is dear to me, there was no auction,” he insisted, stating that Preston merely rejected his offer — a suggestion which Preston dismissed as “baloney”.

The fact remained, however: Obst had beaten Kopelson to the rights. “To our astonishment,” said Obst, “the losing producer from Warner Bros decided to proceed regardless of the fact that he had lost the auction. His idea was to make his own knock-off version of the Preston article.” As Kopelson explained, “I’m from Brooklyn and I don’t like to lose.” Thus, while Obst set
The Hot Zone
up at 20th Century Fox, Kopelson continued to develop his rival version — originally titled
Pandora,
a reference to the Greek myth about a box containing all the evils of the world. So closely related were the two projects that when Obst and Preston travelled to Fort Detrick, Maryland, to meet Jerry and Nancy Jaax, they were astonished to discover that Kopelson and one of his screenwriters, Laurence Dworet, had just left. According to Preston, Nancy Jaax had greeted Kopelson with the following: “Number one, get your goddamn limo out of my parking space. And another thing, if there’s a female colonel who looks like me in [your] movie, there’s going to be a major lawsuit.”

While Kopelson continued working on his version, now retitled
Outbreak,
Obst was expected to hire screenwriting/producing partners Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (The
Hand That Rocks the Cradle),
who had originally brought the article to the attention of Fox senior vice president of production, Michael London. When they were not available, Obst called in screenwriter James V. Hart
(Hook, Bram Stoker’s Dracula)
— with whom she had been working for some time on an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s
Contact
— to write the first draft.

“I had just finished
Contact
for Lynda Obst at Warner Bros,” Hart recalls, “which had been a two-and-a-half-year process with Carl Sagan and his wife. I was fired immediately off the project when I turned the script in [because] the head of the studio hated it. So although there was no reason to bring it to me, having just been fired from
Contact
and my draft genuinely being hated by the head of the studio, Lynda to her credit came to me [with
The Hot Zone].
I think she knew that the science problems were not frightening to me, that I actually enjoy that challenge.” His mission, he says, was simple: “‘Go tell this story, but find great characters.’”

Hart began by meeting everyone he could who had been involved with the incidents detailed in Preston’s article. “I spent time with all of them,” he says. “And as soon as you meet Nancy, you just go straight to her. Even though in reality her husband was the leader of the team that led the investigation and also went into the monkey house in Reston, Virginia, Nancy emerges as the most interesting character: she’s a housewife, she raises all kinds of animals, they have a daughter who is a spectacular gymnast. Once you take her outside the spacesuit and put her in a car driving home, she’s a commuting housewife, yet every day she went in and dealt with the deadliest diseases known to man. We had not seen that before. You put a military guy in a spacesuit, that’s easy. The hard thing was making Nancy Jaax the centre of the story, and for me that was the most fun about this: finding a way to make this great female character work.”

Hart recalls only three mandates from the studio. The first was that the good guys must win in the end. “Of course,” says Hart, “every virologist you talk to will say, ‘You don’t win — you just manage to put the genie back in the bottle until the next one pops out.’” The second was to “scare the shit out of people,” he says. “Tom Jacobson, who was running Fox at the time, said, ‘Make the virus as scary as the shark in
Jaws.’
So we were able to do that, because [these people] had enormous reverence for the viruses, and when they talk about them it’s like they’re talking about a great work of art; what incredible, soulless, beautiful creations they are, and how powerful the
microbe is against all society, against all our technology, everything we can create as Mankind — this one microbe doesn’t give a shit.” The third mandate would be the toughest of all: “Tom Jacobson said, ‘You’ve got to deliver a script
fast
because we’re in a race, there’s another project called
Outbreak.’
At that point I thought there was some protection — I still think they did — because they had bought a copyrighted article and paid a lot of money for it, and Richard had done all this work. So I had ten weeks to do the research, do the outline, and write the script.
Ten weeks.
Tom Jacobson said, ‘That’s all I can give you, and you’ve got to hit it out of the park on the first draft. We’ve got to know there’s a movie there — we don’t have time to guess.’”

Hart began his research in April 1993. In June, he sent his wife and two young children away for the summer, moved into a converted barn in upstate New York, and set to work on the script, conferring with Lynda Obst and her associates Lynn Harris and Dean Georgaris (with whom, years later, Hart would share credit on the script for
Lara Croft Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life).
At the time, Preston had yet to turn his article into the ‘non-fiction novel’,
The Hot Zone,
which would become one of the hottest bestsellers of 1994. “There was no book at that time,” says Hart, “all there was was the article in
The New Yorker,
which was a fantastic article. Richard Preston was writing the book as I was writing the screenplay, so I was on the phone every day to Richard, and to Nancy Jaax and her husband. It was amazing — it was like having your own lab at your fingertips. They were all encouraging me to fictionalise the story to make the point. The problem was, [the story] had no third act, and the big climax was killing monkeys, and there were no bad guys. Who are the bad guys in that scenario? You don’t make the monkey handlers the bad guys. They were doing their job — they didn’t intentionally bring Ebola into this country, like a terrorist act. The CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] and USAMRIID are not the bad guys — they have bureaucracy, but they’re out there trying to save the world, not destroy it.” The solution was simple yet brilliant: “It was the virus. The bad guy was the virus itself.”

An equally tough challenge was finding the drama in the story of an outbreak of a deadly virus in which not a single person died. “The lethal Ebola virus that came to this country did not kill one human being,” Hart states. “In my research, I went to USAMRIID, I spent a very intense week with Nancy Jaax and her husband, and everybody who worked at USAMRIID, and
to a person,
the biggest problem — and I want to make sure this is said right — the biggest problem they had with the Ebola outbreak at the monkey house was the fact that no human being died. If
one
human being had died, it would have moved their cause for prevention and preparation for these kinds of outbreaks forward in the government’s mind — that it was a real threat and needed to be addressed. Because it was only monkeys, nobody in the government took it seriously enough to increase funding, to advance listening posts, check-points for fruits coming in to this country. They spend more time quarantining an animal coming into the United States, and you can go to Dallas airport or Kennedy, and people just walk right through, right off the plane, as we’ve seen with SARS. They all said you can infect half this planet in about seventy-two hours by international air traffic.

“So what they wished had happened — and it’s a horrible thing to say — was that a person had died of Ebola brought over here by monkeys, so it would give them the strength and the ‘go juice’ to go get government funding to begin work on a vaccine, on anti-serums, on controls about people coming in to this country with infectious diseases. That was the hope of people co-operating with the project,” Hart explains. “All they wanted to do was scare the shit out of the public, so they’d have some more juice to go back to Congress and get more funding for virology research, for virology protocols, for infectious diseases — how they’re diagnosed — for immigration controls, checks at airports, all of which came into focus during the SARS outbreak. And every one of those virologists I worked with said, ‘We are not ready, we are not doing anything to get ready,’ and, ‘It’s not a case of
if,
it’s a case of
when.’”
It was for this reason, Hart says, the real-life protagonists gave him dramatic licence to fictionalise the third act, “to dramatically show what would have happened had this outbreak been virulent to humans, and how quickly it could spread and how unprepared we were.”