SCULLIBUNDO
Banned
From stories about Russel Crowe to Spielberg and Shrek. Now the author apparently had been knocked back from quite a few sources, so who knows just how authentic the happenings they mention are. Its an interesting read nonetheless.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-rude-awakening-20100612-y3w7.html
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-rude-awakening-20100612-y3w7.html
A FEW weeks ago I woke up to discover that Russell Crowe hates me. The actor had taken to Twitter to call me a ''lying horse's ass'' in reference to anecdotes about him in my new book, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company Called DreamWorks. Crowe declined to talk to me for the book about the rise and fall of the movie studio formed by director Steven Spielberg, former Disney studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen, but more than 200 others did. Based on those conversations I was able to re-create the behind-the-scenes drama of Gladiator.
That film would go on to win a best picture Oscar in 2001, make a star out of Crowe and be one of DreamWorks' finest moments. The making of the $US100 million-plus film, however, was utter hell. During filming, actor Oliver Reed died of a heart attack, after slamming back 12 double-rums in a Maltese pub. The script's ending remained a mystery - as in, there wasn't one despite the fact that three screenwriters were on the job. And then there was Crowe, who was a prickly pain from beginning to end. While filming in Morocco, he walked off the set twice. For ''fun'', he challenged crew members to foot races only to lose and then complain for days that he couldn't ''run in the sand in sandals''. Years before the actor would become famous for the kind of short-tempered fuse that launched airborne telephones in the direction of hotel receptionists, his diva antics were already at a remarkably impressive level: upset that his assistants' pay wasn't high enough, he placed an angry call to Gladiator producer Branko Lustig at 3am. Lustig, in turn, called Spielberg in Los Angeles: ''Steven, I'm leaving. Russell wants to kill me.''
All of this was child's play, though, compared with when Crowe refused to say the most famous line in Gladiator: ''And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.'' Crowe didn't think it was the sort of thing that would come out of the mouth of a metal-plate-wearing killer, though after much coaxing from director Ridley Scott, he finally came around. After the take, however, he spat out: ''It was s---. But I'm the greatest actor in the world and I can make even s--- sound good.'' And with that, he stalked off.
It was this bit that, presumably, got Crowe worked up enough to fire off his equine haiku, even though it was not me who first reported the episode, which is recounted by screenwriter Bill Nicholson in the 2002 BBC documentary The Hollywood Machine: Shut It Down. Indeed, shortly after his tweet, while doing publicity for Robin Hood, Crowe was asked by the BBC's Mark Lawson - who had earlier angered him by asking about Robin Hood's accent - about the veracity of the claim. He responded by getting up and noisily leaving the room.
Russell Crowe was the least of my worries when I set out to write a book about DreamWorks, the much-ballyhooed movie studio that was the first to be created in Hollywood in more than 60 years. Formed in 1994, the company promised to be the next United Artists, the prototypical inmates-running-the-asylum studio founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith in 1919. But the plan was far more grandiose. DreamWorks sought to be a sprawling, multimedia empire, producing everything from films to television shows to records to video games. Despite the pedigree of its founders, and the nearly $US3 billion in start-up capital, DreamWorks was a big risk. Making movies always is - even though the news was met with excitement, there was also an anxiety, a question mark: can they really?
The coming together of Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen made headlines around the world. Each was a towering titan in his own right.
There was Geffen, the billionaire who had worked, schemed and bullied his way from the mail room at the William Morris Agency to the heights of the music industry, where he had nurtured acts such as Jackson Browne and the Eagles. When Katzenberg came calling, Geffen's days were spent flipping through his investment portfolios, dialling up then US president Bill Clinton and flying the world in his Gulfstream IV, perpetually changing directions as boredom set in.
Then there was Katzenberg, the workaholic studio executive who had slaved for a decade at Disney, only to be unceremoniously fired and cheated out of a multimillion-dollar bonus. Katzenberg brought his adrenalin-charged ways to DreamWorks, where executives often found themselves sitting in the gleaming, all-white kitchen of his ''business house'' in Beverly Hills at 7am on a Saturday or Sunday, to discuss film release strategies or a faulty storyline.
At the centre of DreamWorks was Spielberg, the sun god around whom the company revolved, and the living mascot for the artist-friendly studio. The director of blockbusters such as Jaws, ET and Indiana Jones, Spielberg had been a Hollywood wunderkind for most of his life. But by 1994, the year he won his first best picture Oscar for Schindler's List, he was ready for something new, something bigger. Not that he needed it - no one was more comfortably set up in Hollywood than Spielberg, whose $US4 million ''campus'' on the Universal lot, Amblin, felt more like a spa, equipped with all the latest gadgetry, a personal chef, jacuzzi and a masseuse named Julie.
As the celebrity of the troika, Spielberg provided DreamWorks with sizzle; his name was the carrot held out to lure film-makers, money men, executives and actors such as George Clooney, whom the director personally asked to star in the studio's first film, The Peacemaker. Even though, as one screenwriter said: Spielberg's ''name was trotted out a lot more than he was. The ideas of Steven were always present in the room, but Steven wasn't always present in the room.''
Keep Steven Happy was the unwritten rule at DreamWorks, and the reason Geffen and Katzenberg pursued ideas and ventures even when they felt they were ill-advised.
Spielberg had no interest, no patience, for business details, something he made clear from the start. Nor did he have any tolerance, or ability to handle reality when it was anything other than rosy. When DreamWorks' marketing head Terry Press told Spielberg that Amistad, a film made with noble intentions but few commercial prospects, was unlikely to garner any Oscar nominations, Spielberg was crushed; he just wanted to be told that everything would be fine. In the end, Press was right.
Over the years, sequestered at Amblin, Spielberg had simply grown accustomed to being the focus of his universe. Despite his laid-back, good-guy image, he could seem strangely wary of the world as most mortals experience it.
When Michael Kahn, Spielberg's longtime editor, viewed footage in the screening room, a black cloth was draped over the projection booth window to hide the screen. In Spielberg's office, hanging above his desk, a Plexiglass half-moon ensured that his phone conversations remained ultra-confidential. A never-used motorcycle remained perpetually parked at Amblin so that, in the event of the unthinkable, he had a getaway. (When these details were printed in the New York Post, just before my book was published, Spielberg's rep told the paper: ''This description is so far from the real world of Steven that it doesn't deserve a comment.'')
It is this protective veil that surrounds not just Spielberg, but his partners, which caused people to warn me off writing a book about DreamWorks.
Not only were they insular, controlling and image-obsessed, but they could be vengeful, none more so than Geffen, who is famous for his decades-long, and very ugly, feuds. Geffen did not play nice. He had already turned on another reporter, Tom King, who wrote Geffen's at-first authorised biography, The Operator. But halfway through Geffen decided he didn't like the direction the very candid book was going in, and tried to thwart its publication. King died of a brain haemorrhage, at the age of 39, just a few years after the book came out. When I called a friend of Geffen's and asked him if he'd speak to me, I was met with a heavy silence on the other end of the line. And then a deep-throated growl: ''The last person who wrote a book about David Geffen is dead! And he was young. And healthy. And now he's dead!'' Click.
Unsurprisingly, the DreamWorks partners made it clear from the beginning that they would not speak to me for my book, despite the fact that I had no intention of writing a hatchet job. I just wanted stories, details, moments of amazing triumph and painful disappointment. I wanted the stuff that made DreamWorks one of the most colourful, drama-ridden, and human places I had ever seen or read about, and I wanted to bring it all back to life. I expressed this to Katzenberg in an email once, to which he responded something along the lines of: ''Sounds fair enough but no thanks.'' No thanks, indeed. Katzenberg proceeded to call up dozens of potential sources and warn them not to talk to me. Meanwhile, everyone around me assured me that I would never eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner in Hollywood again. Why? Besides the reputations of SKG, the story of DreamWorks was ultimately one of failure. Despite some memorable films, the studio's ambition to be a huge multimedia venture came to nothing, in part because the economics of the company never made sense. In short, the dream was more of a nightmare.
Luckily some people did talk, particularly filmmakers who felt a prideful obligation, or so I saw it, to speak up for their films. Sam Mendes was one, and we talked about everything from US President Barack Obama, who had just been nominated, to a film Mendes was working on with Kate Winslet (pre-divorce), to American Beauty, the movie that would become DreamWorks' trademark film. It was Mendes's first non-theatre production, and he told me how the first days of shooting were so disastrous that Spielberg summoned him to his home for a ''half-hour tutorial''. Spielberg greeted Mendes by saying: ''I love watching first-time directors. It's like watching someone lose their virginity.'' Then he popped in a video of Dr Strangelove and began lecturing Mendes on Stanley Kubrick's use of lighting.
Spielberg was actually one of the only people at DreamWorks who believed in American Beauty, which was made on a shoestring budget of $US15 million. Everyone else thought it was too quirky and dark to ever make any money - Katzenberg dismissed it as ''Spielberg's hobby''. After the first viewing, however, minds were changed. When it went on, not only to be quite profitable (it grossed $US356 million worldwide), but win DreamWorks its first Oscar, Spielberg gave Mendes a cheque for $US1 million and said: ''Thank you.'' (Mendes's original fee was $US150,000; after taxes and commissions, he got $US38,500.)
Spielberg was especially grateful seeing as the year before his own film, Saving Private Ryan, had all but been assured a best picture Oscar. When DreamWorks lost out to Miramax's Shakespeare in Love, following one of the dirtiest Oscar battles in the history of the Academy Awards, Spielberg was crushed. In a photo taken at the Oscars after-party, which ran the next morning in the Los Angeles Times, Spielberg, Katzenberg and Harrison Ford are sitting joylessly around a table ''looking like they had just learnt that the family dog had died'', said Miramax's former head of Los Angeles operations, Mark Gill.
The company might have flourished more lastingly had there been more American Beauty films - creatively ambitious and made on the cheap. But too quickly, DreamWorks turned to made-to-market formulas, with films such as The Haunting, an extravagant horror tale; Paulie, about a talking parrot; and Small Soldiers, in which a toy militia comes to life.
At the animation studio, which Katzenberg was overseeing, things were worse. In lieu of Lion Kings there were The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, films one is forgiven for not remembering. Animation was supposed to be the company's cash cow, but as the hits failed to materialise, the company's financials took a pummelling. And then, just as things reached the brink, there was Shrek.
The Shrek films have so far made more than $US2 billion worldwide, but no one saw it coming. To animators who had been hopelessly toiling on the project for years, Shrek was ''the Gulag''. It was where artists were sentenced to work after they'd been fired from another film. Why? The movie, which was based on William Steig's children's book, had no ostensible plot. According to one animator: ''Shrek was essentially the story of the ugliest guy in the world who meets the ugliest woman in the world; they get together and have the ugliest children.'' Katzenberg wanted Shrek to be low budget and ''experimental'', but no one knew what that meant.
In the mid-90s a group of recent college graduates, known as the Propellerheads, one of whom was a fledgling screenwriter named J. J. Abrams, spent a year - and millions of dollars - trying to make Shrek into a motion capture film starring the comedian Chris Farley. Disaster. On top of which, Farley died of a drug overdose. Suddenly, there was no Shrek.
Only years later did the film begin to find its footing, under the direction of a visual-effects supervisor named Andrew Adamson, who had never directed a film before but had strong opinions and was willing to battle it out with the micro-managerial Katzenberg.
Thanks to Adamson, the scene in which Lord Farquaad is sitting in bed and, upon catching a glimpse of Princess Fiona, his blanket rises ever so slightly, was not left on the cutting room floor. The heart and soul of Shrek, though, was all Katzenberg, in that it was one big ''f--- you'' to Disney, the kingdom Katzenberg set out to defeat after he was so humiliatingly kicked out. No film bore Katzenberg's anti-Disney machinations more baldly than Shrek, which trotted out the entire Disney fairytale stable, only to subvert the characters in ironic, very funny ways.
But the successes weren't enough. After teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, DreamWorks was sold to Paramount, in a much-diminished state, in 2005. Last year, the studio launched anew with Indian financing, in what's referred to as DreamWorks 2.0.
Now that my book has been published, the DreamTeam has been remarkably quiet. There have been no lawsuits. No death threats. The statement everyone at the company is hewing to, and which I tend to believe Katzenberg crafted, is: ''We're not reading it.'' Sadly, I wasn't invited to the premiere for the latest Shrek film. But I'm sure there'll be another.
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