Tales From Development Hell (3 page)

While the feeding frenzy surrounding
Smoke and Mirrors
was not uncommon, what happened next was unusual to say the least: within three weeks, the script had achieved ‘go movie’ status. Immediately after the option deal was signed, Ricardo Mestres had secured the services of producer, director (and amateur magician) Frank Marshall, who had helmed the Disney hits
Arachnophobia
and
Alive,
and produced several Steven Spielberg films. Although Marshall had recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures, he retained the freedom to direct a picture elsewhere, and
Smoke and Mirrors
was immediately elevated to the top of his own personal script pile.

Meanwhile, Vajna managed to interest Sean Connery (who had just starred in Cinergi’s
Medicine Man)
in the lead role of Robert-Houdin, a development certain to attract other A-list stars to the film’s other principal roles: Colette, Robert-Houdin’s glamorous wife, and Darcy, the dashing American who accompanies the pair on their trip into the desert. But as the Batchlers were preparing to bathe in the glow of the film’s green light, the title
Smoke and Mirrors
proved to be prophetic. “We thought it was a wonderful script which just needed some work on the ending,” Vajna told Neil Rosser, producer of a BBC radio documentary adapted from the first edition of this book. “We enlisted Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall to produce and Marshall to direct; we had Sean Connery signed up as the star of the movie and we were looking at locations, but we were still working on the script, and somehow we could never get the end of the story right.”

Firstly, Sean Connery allegedly slowed the pre-production process by requesting rewrites, as is customary with A-list actors, to tailor the script to his own style. Lee and Janet Scott Batchler churned out several subsequent drafts, the last being a 132-page fourth draft dated January 1994. “We were very involved with the development of the project during its Sean Connery phase,” say the Batchlers. “Sean was attached within days of the script being sold, as were Frank Marshall and [producer] Kathy Kennedy. We met with Sean to get his notes, and spent months working with Frank and Kathy. [They] were great to work with in every respect and we think the world of them. We did three rewrites while working with Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy on the project. We were really focused at that point on getting the script ready for production,” they add. “We were very happy with the fourth draft of the script, which was the culmination of our rewrites. The original script is powerful for reasons of its clean, uncomplicated approach to the storytelling — it’s just a great ride, start to finish. [But] we personally feel the
fourth draft deepened the main characters and added several plot elements that actually improved on the original while retaining what was important.”

Sean Connery did not share their enthusiasm, however; although he remained attached to the project, he insisted upon further rewrites, by which time the Batchlers had been hired by Warner Bros’ Bruce Berman to write
Batman Forever,
the third installment of the studio’s most profitable franchise. In their place, the
Smoke and Mirrors
producers hired
Alive
and
Congo
screenwriter John Patrick Shanley to rework the story; the inevitable result being that Connery’s rewritten role diminished the supporting roles, Darcy and Colette, making them more difficult to cast. By the time Shanley turned in his draft, Frank Marshall had departed to direct
Congo
for Paramount, leaving
Smoke and Mirrors
without a director. Connery and Shanley parted company with the project soon afterwards, at which point John Fasano
(Another 48 Hrs.)
and Douglas Ray Stewart (An
Officer and a Gentleman)
took turns at the script. Since screen credit and remuneration tends to be apportioned depending on each screenwriter’s contribution, however, both Fasano and Stewart may have been inclined to change elements which might otherwise have fallen under the caveat of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Thus, the script began to move further and further away from the one which had excited Disney in the first place, and closer to ‘Development Hell’.

Then, in late 1994, Cinergi development executive Brett Fain brought in a young writer named Ted Henning, whose script for an unproduced pirate adventure,
Caribbean Blue,
suggested that he might be suitable to mount a salvage operation. “He was a very smart guy and very [committed] to creating a version of the script that the company could actually make,” Henning observes of Fain. “Each had some interesting aspects, but none was shootable — none would make a great movie,” Henning says of the previous drafts, all of which Fain showed to him. “They all lacked a sense of fun that we felt was imperative for the movie to connect. [The producers] wanted Indiana Jones meets
Lawrence of Arabia.
Most of the scripts were the latter with none of the former — though one was so confusing I couldn’t figure out which line it fell on.” Henning dismissed Stewart’s draft as “unreadable”, but liked Fasano’s take on the material. “It was really detailed,” he says. “He’d done all this research; you could tell. He brought in the
hashashim,
a really violent cult in Algeria in Northern Africa, which gave us the word ‘assassin’.”
²
“He brought
some incredible detail to it,” adds Henning, “but I think he got bogged down in the detail. I went back to the Batchler draft and started from there, working very closely with Brett to create a tight, fun epic that would stay as true to the story as possible while connecting with the largest audience possible, to warrant the $100 million-plus the movie would cost to make.”

The nature of their producer-writer collaboration was unusual: instead of taking Fain’s notes and delivering a script a few months later, Henning would write ten or fifteen pages at a time, and then go over them with Fain to see if the script was going in the right direction. “It was a really close [working relationship] which a lot of screenwriters wouldn’t like,” he says. “But Brett was a really smart guy. He had been through all the permutations, and had a really good sense of it.” Both knew that the script’s biggest flaw was structure. “The movie is about Houdin going to Algeria, and then what happens over there, so you have to set him up in France, put him in some situation where he’s vulnerable, and then get him on the boat. [The Batchlers] didn’t get him on the boat until page fifty.”
³
Although Henning and Fain liked the Batchlers’ script, both felt that it lacked focus, that Robert-Houdin’s character arc was weak, and that it failed to realise the potential of the Robert-Houdin/Darcy/ Colette love triangle.

“Structurally, we got it down,” Henning says. “We also made really strong decisions about Houdin’s arc,” he adds, noting that, in all subsequent drafts, Robert-Houdin’s name was further simplified to ‘Houdin’ — presumably for the convenience of the same audience who could not be trusted to pronounce ‘Jean-Eugène’. “We started him off as this powerful magician who was on top of the world, and we just flushed him down the toilet. He was disillusioned; he had killed someone with a magic trick [when] something had gone terribly wrong. In real life, it actually happened — I think his son or daughter was killed — and he basically then switched over to science and became a big debunker, and tried to find the reality of his world, because up to then he’d been living the illusion of celebrity. So when we found him [in the story], he hadn’t been out of the lab in six months, and his girlfriend [rather than wife] Colette was at the end of her rope, so when he is asked to go to French-occupied Algeria, she says, ‘If you don’t go, I’m leaving you.’ He figures he’s going to debunk this guy as a fake, and then leave. Of course, as soon as he gets there, things start happening to draw him deeper and deeper
into it, until finally he reaches that place which you reach in all movies, where our hero gets to decide whether he’s gonna give up and go home, or carry on and kick some ass.

“The other main character in it is Darcy, an American in the French Foreign Legion, who has given up his life because his wife was killed, and is fearless basically because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies,” Henning continues. “So Houdin is in his fifties, and he’s got this beautiful French girlfriend, but all of a sudden there’s this strapping Mel Gibson-type [love rival] who is brave and silly. So when Houdin is finally faced with ‘shit or get off the pot’, the real reason he decides to shit is that Darcy’s going like, ‘Hey, you leave, I’m in bed with her five minutes later.’” After several drafts, Henning and Fain had a script which they felt was working. Commenting on the 116-page draft dated 30 April 1997, online script reviewer ‘Stax’ described the story as follows: “Houdin travels to Algeria (accompanied by Colette) for the purpose of demonstrating first-hand to the natives how Zoras’ sorcery is performed. Guiding and protecting Houdin and Colette on their dangerous journey is a detachment of French Foreign Legionnaires, led by the swashbuckling Captain Trey Darcy and his Spanish second-in-command, Corporal Augustino Bartolote.

“The group’s journey through Algeria is fraught with peril, as Zoras makes several sudden appearances (using actual magic?) to try and scare them off. During the course of this adventure, the one-handed Darcy (yes, that’s right, he fences with a wooden prosthetic!) and Colette discover a growing romantic attraction to one another despite their respective obligations to Houdin. This rivalry for Colette’s affection, and his confrontations with Zoras, reinvigorates Houdin’s long-dormant vitality and his faith in himself and in the magic arts. Exposing Zoras’ trickery to his fellow tribesmen, Houdin succeeds in becoming a marked man. Houdin and the expedition must then flee the wrathful Zoras and his army of rebels. This draft culminates with an Alamo-like siege at a legendary desert fortress between Zoras’ forces and the cornered Legionnaires.”
⁴
Overall, Stax saw
Smoke & Mirrors
(in Henning’s drafts, an ampersand replaced the ‘and’) as “a fact-based adventure chock full of romance, wizardry, David Lean-style vistas, and Golden Age of Hollywood production values.”

Despite the Batchlers’ assertion that Zoras’ men are Berbers, not Arabs, Stax had concerns about the fact that the heroes are essentially Colonialist
occupiers, fighting Algerian natives — who, in reality, took 180 years to rid themselves of the oppressive French and win back their homeland. Henning’s answer to this moral quandary was to make Zoras so bloodthirsty and mad as to distance him from the other Arabic figures in the story, and ennoble the Colonial heroes. As a by-product of this, Stax observed, “Zoras is pretty one-note heavy in this story. He’s mainly a vessel for special effects, just as most of the other Arab characters are mere window dressing.” Stax felt that the romantic rivalry between Houdin, Colette and Darcy was handled well, however. “Darcy is a man of honour who finds himself drawn to the lover of the man he’s charged to protect, and who he finds lacking in how to treat a woman right. Darcy then becomes torn between his feelings and his obligation to duty. Subsequently, Houdin realizes what he stands to lose if Colette forsakes him for Darcy. This realisation helps Houdin snap out of being such a Grumpy Old Magician. (There are a few good jabs where people mistake Houdin for Colette’s father.) If Darcy is a man of action then Houdin is a man of thought who instead relies on his wits and experience. Both men turn out to be more alike than they figured, and they eventually form an alliance to battle Zoras.”

Despite her status as the object of affection of both male leads, Stax noted, “Colette is thankfully no mere damsel in distress. Her attraction to Darcy and her reasons for staying with Houdin are well drawn. But the very nature of being a magician’s assistant means Colette is relegated to being a supporting player... Overall,” he concluded, “the dialogue here was sharp and playful but became far too tongue-in-cheek by Act Three. By then, characters were speaking in comic book-like dialogue balloons. It was one quip after another, and the puns deteriorated in quality as they grew in quantity.” Despite such reservations, Henning recalls that the reaction to the script was largely favourable. “Brett was happy,” he says. “Andy Vajna liked it but wasn’t excited about it, probably because he had not gotten any feedback from the stars... and then Cinergi fell apart. Andy went off on his own and Brett left, and that was pretty much all I heard from it.”

By this time,
Smoke & Mirrors
had accrued several million dollars’ worth of negative costs against it, meaning that if anyone took it over — another studio, for instance, or a producer — some of those costs would have to be repaid, either up front or, more commonly, from future profits. As Vajna explains, “We spent a lot of money because we had just about started to make the movie when everybody bailed out. I think it was close to nine or ten million dollars, part of which Disney wrote off, part of it I wrote it, part
of it another studio wrote off. And of course if you wanted to make it today you couldn’t start with those kind of costs, so all you can do is hope that one day if the film becomes a huge success that you might be able to get part of that money back.”

Nevertheless, in 1999, a buyer emerged: Joel Douglas, son of screen legend Kirk and older brother of Oscar-winning actor-producer Michael Douglas, for whom he had co-produced
Romancing the Stone
and
The Jewel of the Nile.
Joel had formed a partnership with actor/director-turned-producer Kevin Brodie (fiancé of Joel’s sister, Joann Savitt), funded by Initial Entertainment Group, one of the principals of which was David Jones, brother of Michael’s fiancée Catherine Zeta-Jones. The plan was to tailor
Smoke & Mirrors
as a vehicle for Michael and Catherine; in addition, it was widely reported that Kirk Douglas, recovering from a stroke he suffered in 1995, might take a small role as a sultan named Bou-Allem, whose son, Rachid, accompanies Houdin during the latter part of the story.