Copyright American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Nov/Dec 1999You're a director and a studio gives you $50 million for a picture. The movie you make becomes the rallying cry for national politicians criticizing Hollywood excesses, lands you and the studio in court for possibly inciting a brutal crime spree, and barely breaks even at the box office.
Naturally, executives are wary about your next project. It's about one of the most unpopular political leaders of the century. It tanks, bringing in less than half of what it cost to make.
Your next outing seems promising because it has an all-star cast. But it barely earns $7 million.
If you have this financial track record in the entertainment capital of Las Vegas you'll end up with your legs broken. But in Hollywood it earned director Oliver Stone the chance to try to redeem himself by making a picture about an all-American pastime: professional football.
No, the man who made JFK hasn't uncovered the identity of a new grassy knoll shooter in one of Tom Landry's old playbooks. He just knows box office when he sees it. So he's assembled Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Charlton Heston, Dennis Quaid, and LL Cool J for Any Given Sunday, a Christmas release from Warner Bros. Real-life football legends Johnny Unitas, Dick Butkus, and Jim Brown are also along for Stone's $55 million paean to the gridiron.
Pacino plays Miami Sharks coach Tony D'Amato. "I've given up everything I have to be on that sideline every Sunday," he says. Riveting scenes invoke the men who made the game, amidst montages of the sport in all its splendor. In
an early draft of the script, players are depicted as "heroic and shimmering."
The action projected on 150-ft. screens will no doubt be visceral and "in your face"-the Oliver Stone trademark. Class war, another Stone cliche, will also be a prominent theme. Diaz plays the team owner-vicious, and out for the bottom line. One black player complains that for every Barry Sanders-like hero "there are a hundred niggers you never heard of, and when they get too slow, the game tosses them back on the street.. and the game keeps on going." Get the idea?
Oliver Stone's core message is that "Football isn't about honor or sport; it's really about money." This may resonate in our era where there's often more hype about the Super Bowl commercials than the game itself. But debunking America's favorite sport isn't going to be easy. GQ just had Doug Flutie, Terrell Davis, and Bill Parcells on its cover under the headline "Why We Love Football." A film about the beloved Redskins replacement team of the '80s is in the works. And a Vince Lombardi biography by writer David Maraniss is one of the most eagerly anticipated books of the fall, with a splashy excerpt appearing in Vanity Fair.
Stone will surely do football as it has never been done before. Imagine North Dallas Forty with an added dose of painkillers, race conflicts, heartless businessmen, and the F word thrown in for good measure. That's just the kind of over-the-top embellishment that has always characterized Stone.
It's also what landed Stone and his Time Warner bosses in court recently. A vicious crime rampage carried out by a Louisiana couple after they repeatedly watched Stone's Natural Born Killers now has the director playing defense. The victims say Stone's picture caused the attack, and have filed a civil suit that the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop. Stone himself told the New York Times their complaint isn't so farfetched: "The most pacifistic people in the world said they came out of this movie and wanted to kill somebody," Stone's deposition is scheduled for this fall.
As this column was going to press, it seemed as though the director was spending more time in court than even his JFK hero Jim Garrison. Stone recently plea-bargained DUI and drug charges from last summer, and is now on probation and in a drug rehab program.
But for this Hollywood fixture, the latest troubles are all re-runs. Stone's drug arrest record, for instance, dates back to 1969, when he was stopped by authorities near San Diego after a little jaunt to Mexico. "I got busted at the border carrying two ounces of my own weed," he said.
Talk about an intentional foul.
| [Photograph] |
| Left to right: Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx and Al Pacino in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. |
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