Fade in to the first image of a would-be movie blockbuster: “We are looking at someone’s crotch …” It is our first glimpse of the hero, and he is using “some kind of contraption” to transform his urine into water. He drinks the liquid, and we see that he is standing on “the deck of a large river barge.” Then the narrator’s voice, “old and wise,” intones the movie’s once-upon-a-time: “After ze Great War, they called ze planet Waterworld …”
Seven years, six writers, 30 script drafts, several executive ulcers and a record $150 million after Peter Rader wrote this scene, Waterworld has metamorphosed into that peculiarly masochistic form of Hollywood sensation, the runaway epic. Nobody’s seen the film, a futuristic adventure produced by Universal Pictures, starring Kevin Costner and due for summer release. Principal photography won’t be completed until this week, the climax of eight chaotic months in Hawaii and California. But that hasn’t kept industry tongues from wagging, and industry wags from tonguing, about the presumed recklessness of the venture.
Waterworld, directed by Costner’s friend Kevin Reynolds (he made the hit Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, as well as the expensive flop Rapa Nui), is a greenhouse nightmare set 500 years from now, when the polar ice caps have melted and the earth is flooded. The good guys, the Atollers, are led by the Mariner (Costner), who is genetically equipped with gills for breathing underwater. He agrees to do battle with the evil Smokers (led by Dennis Hopper) and save a woman (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and a little girl with a tattoo in the shape of a map. The map could lead survivors to a precious treasure: dry land.
The film started shooting last June without a star villain or a satisfactory script; ace rewriter Joss Whedon (Speed) was frantically paged to fix Act III and give the dialogue some pizazz. The budget, estimated at $100 million when production began, ballooned as accidents, hurricane and tsunami scares, and other acts of a seemingly vengeful God struck the company. Costner’s stunt double nearly died when an air bubble entered his bloodstream after a deep-sea dive. A single battle scene took four weeks to shoot. Last month one of the huge sets sank into 160 ft. of water while moored off Hawaii island. It was needed for another week.
All this, stoked by reports of backbiting on the set and bad behavior off it, made for irresistible copy. Not since 1962-when Cleopatra, abetted by Elizabeth Taylor’s delays and dalliances, made front-page headlines on its way to becoming, in real dollars, the most expensive picture ever-has a film attracted this much unfavorable attention while still in production. The press dubbed it Kevin’s Gate, after the 1980 bomb Heaven’s Gate. The Wall Street Journal called it Fishtar, for Warren Beatty’s 1987 flop Ishtar, and wrote that because “nobody had provided bathrooms on the boats used by the crew or on the set … the actors and crew had to flag down a boat to take them to a barge near shore that was equipped with portable toilets.”
The bad publicity rankles the people at Universal and MCA, its corporate parent. MCA boss Sidney J. Sheinberg, who is concerned by a tone in the press he calls “Hard Copy journalism,” claims that the Journal story is “unfair, irresponsible and in a great number of places inaccurate.” The film’s producer, Charles Gordon, who has spent months undersea and under siege, says the no-toilet story is “insane. We had bathrooms on boats out on the water, two feet away from the trimaran where the scenes were shot. When I read stuff like this, it drives me crazy.”
Gordon had plenty of other stuff to drive him crazy. “In this movie there is supposedly no more dry land,” he says. “That means we have to shoot every scene one way-out to sea-so you don’t see any land. Then we have to rotate the set to shoot the reverse angle. So now we’re shooting, and suddenly a boat sails by, and the take isn’t good. Then we had three hurricanes come especially close to our island, and a tsunami warning, where we had to abandon the set.”
Twenty years ago, another Universal movie with a watery setting went 100% over budget and stoked pessimistic press reports. How, folks wondered, could Jaws ever make money? The pain and payoff of Jaws surely prompted Sheinberg, who had supervised it, to meet with Waterworld’s producers long before the shooting began and ask, “My God, do you guys know what you’re getting into?” Gordon’s reply: “We think we have an idea of what we’re getting into. And we’re sure it’ll be worse than what we think.”
Last spring Universal chief Tom Pollock declared, “Waterworld will not cost any more than $65 million.” That number may have a sacred resonance at Universal, since it was the production cost for the studio’s top hit of the ’90s, Jurassic Park. And here Sheinberg and Pollock may slip into melancholia: virtually all Universal’s megamovies of the past 20 years-including Jaws and Hollywood’s all-time champ, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial-were directed or produced by Steven Spielberg, who last fall decided to form an independent multimedia company with fellow Poo-Bahs Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
Universal must now find other filmmakers who can bring in the big-grossing films-and at a price that won’t provoke grimaces from MCA’s Japanese owner, Matsushita, which Sheinberg has accused of trying to stunt his company’s growth. Asked if the Matsushita board had expressed vexation over the Waterworld embarrassments, he replies, “None. I can blame them for a lot of things, but I can’t blame them for that.”
Directors often risk blame for thinking they can film on water, as such catastrophes as the 1979 Hurricane and Raise the Titanic! prove. But can Universal be blamed for thinking big on Waterworld? Action films, after all, are typically safer investments than many smaller, well-intentioned films-Being Human, A Simple Twist of Fate, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Scout-that cost $20 million or much more and earn less than $5 million in the U.S., while having scant life overseas. Contrast these with a big-budget disappointment like Last Action Hero, which still attracted enough thrill-kill fans worldwide to come within shouting distance of breaking even. Waterworld may need to gross $450 million to be solidly profitable (after advertising costs and the exhibitors’ share are deducted), but it can earn that in all the world’s theaters and video stores, on pay and free TV.
And hit or flop, Waterworld won’t spell the end of an expensive genre. Last year’s big-budgeter was True Lies; it did healthy business around the world, and who cares that it cost about $120 million? “Let’s face it,” says a top film executive, “there will always be action movies, and they aren’t going to cost any less. They’ll probably cost more. What you’re looking at is the shape of things to come.”
Ultimately, it is the one segment of the industry that hasn’t been consulted-the public-that will decide whether this movie sinks or swims. And then, Waterworld II? “The sequel,” Sheinberg jokes, “is going to be three people trapped in a 12-by-12 bathysphere, and it will be shot in 14 days.” Sounds sensible. Why, these days a studio could make a picture like that for, oh, about $65 million.
–Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles
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