Slim and None

by Howard Baldwin

  In early December of 1997 we invited Russell to come to dinner with the Penguins because he had said, “I want to meet the players. I need to get the feel for it, mate.” Every year Karen and I would take the Penguins to the Palm when they came to L.A. to play the Kings. We had also done the same thing when we had the Whalers. So there we were in the back room of the Palm when Russell came in, and everybody was having a great time. At the end of dinner, though, I saw that he had gone. I saw that Barrasso had gone, and Jagr, and Ronnie Francis. I was thinking, “Uh-oh.” We took care of the bill and on the way out I saw that Russell was at the bar with the guys. I asked if everything was okay and he said sure, and invited us to join him. But we politely declined, because I didn’t want to spend another month recovering.

  The Penguins were on a West Coast swing and we had arranged for Russell to travel with the team to Anaheim and Phoenix. Three days later, I got a call from Ronnie Francis and he said, “It might be time for Russell to go home or we may not win another road game.”

  When we started filming Mystery in Canmore, Alberta, in February of 1998, Russell rented Glen Sather’s house right under the Three Sisters mountain peaks. The weather had been absolutely freezing, but when it came time to film the hockey scenes on the outdoor rink we had built, a chinook blew in and the ice melted. So we called up NHL ice-maker Dan Craig, and he arranged for paneled ice to be brought out from San Diego.

  We worked our butts off on the hockey authenticity of that movie. Jack Kelley was there as a hockey consultant, and he made damn sure the hockey looked great. Brad Turner, who played in Europe and had three games with the Islanders, was a great skating double for Russell. He even looked like him.

  Russell was great because he really wanted to learn how to skate and play hockey. As an Australian, he was totally unfamiliar with the sport. But what makes Russell a brilliant actor is that he has the ability to study all the nuances of what his character is meant to be. If you saw him in A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator or The Insider, you know that he becomes the character he’s portraying. Russell’s brilliance in Mystery was that he totally felt he was a hockey player and was able to portray it clearly. Then when we had the actual skating scenes, we used Brad Turner.

  Glen Sather’s son Justin was in the movie, and so was Marty Lacroix, the son of Colorado GM Pierre Lacroix. Pat Brisson was in the movie, long before he was Sidney Crosby’s agent. Phil Esposito made an appearance, and the extras had all played at a good level of hockey. Mike Myers had a cameo, playing the role of the colorfully iconic Canadian broadcaster, Don Cherry. Glen Sather, who was running the Edmonton Oilers, came to the set and spoke to the Mystery team as well.

  There was only one thing that infuriated me and I’m still mad at myself that we didn’t catch it. When Little Richard came out to sing the national anthem and the camera scanned the players’ feet, one of them had black laces in his skates — and we all know that doesn’t happen.

  We made a mistake in making Mystery an R-rated movie instead of PG-13. We should have cut some of the language out so it would be suitable for more people. Disney also made a change in administration and brought in a new marketing director who didn’t have a clue what the movie was about, and that hurt us. Mystery did $20 million at the box office, when it should have been $60-70 million, but it did great DVD sales.

  Mystery, Alaska has become a cult film. It’s a good movie, wonderfully acted, with a wonderful story and a wonderful set. It was ranked by the major website, bleacherreport.com as the fourth-best hockey movie ever made.

  I’m extremely proud of that movie.

  Crusader Entertainment

  On May 27, 1999, tragically and unexpectedly, our dear friend and partner Richard Cohen died. Our lives were really in a state of flux at this point. We were mourning the loss of our partner and fighting the battle in Pittsburgh.

  At the same time, we were introduced to a new member of the NHL, Philip Anschutz, who had recently acquired the Los Angeles Kings. Phil was a soccer enthusiast who owned several MLS teams and was interested in learning more about Mystery, Alaska, as he wanted to develop a film that promoted soccer. One thing led to another and we formed a company with Phil called Crusader Entertainment.

  Karen and I really liked Phil and appreciated his immediate commitment to fund a film company properly, not only with development financing but with production financing as well. We had a challenging mission statement at Crusader, but one we believed in and that made economic sense. The mission was to make G and PG films that had some message which went beyond pure exploitation. The first two films we did with Phil were smaller pictures called Joshua, starring Tony Goldwyn, F. Murray Abraham and Giancarlo Giannini, and Children on Their Birthdays, a Truman Capote adaptation.

  Under the Baldwin/Cohen banner, we had developed a few projects that Crusader acquired but that we knew were not suitable under the mission statement. One of those films was A Sound of Thunder, based on Ray Bradbury’s famous short story. We made a deal with Franchise Pictures for them to take this project over. The movie starred Ed Burns, Sir Ben Kingsley and Catherine McCormack, was directed by Peter Hyams and was released by Warner Brothers.

  As a result of the development of this film, we established a wonderful relationship with Ray Bradbury, who was a magnificent mind. He gave Karen the honor of introducing him at an award ceremony for him at the University of Southern California.

  We then made two films for Crusader in Australia, Swimming Upstream, the story of swimmer Tony Fingleton, starring Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, and Danny Deckchair, which was a fun, uplifting comedy starring Rhys Ifans and Miranda Otto. Swimming Upstream was nominated for five Australian Film Institute Awards, and Danny Deckchair had the honor of being the closing picture at the Toronto Film Festival in 2003. We did a few other smaller films and actually fulfilled Phil’s hopes for a soccer movie, with The Game of Their Lives (a.k.a. The Miracle Match), about the 1950 U.S. World Cup team, and a project that reunited David Anspaugh and Angelo Pizzo, and starred Gerard Butler.

  The two big films we did with Phil under the Crusader banner were Ray and Sahara.

  Ray

  The original title of Ray was Unchain My Heart. We had started working on this project at Baldwin/Cohen with our good friend Stuart Benjamin, and then brought it into Crusader. We put up the money to get the first draft of the script written, but Stuart had already been working on it for nine years.

  Ray is a great example of how long it can take to get a movie made. By the time it was released in October of 2004, Karen and I had been involved for four years, but for Stuart the journey was more like 13 years.

  Stuart had become a friend of Ray Charles and had obtained the rights to Ray’s story. His relationship with Ray was very important to him and he had nurtured it for years.

  Everybody knew Ray Charles’s music. I had always liked it, and Phil was an avid fan. Ray was a hard movie to get made because it was a period piece and its subject was African-American, so there wasn’t much overseas sales potential, or at least we didn’t think there would be.

  We all knew that Taylor Hackford was the right choice to direct because he had a passion for Ray Charles as well. Stuart and Taylor had been friends at USC and had worked together in the film business for years. Taylor’s first big hit was An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, and he had also directed White Nights and produced La Bamba and When We Were Kings, among many other credits.

  Taylor’s agent Jim Wiatt, a great guy who was head of the famous William Morris Agency, told me Taylor was reluctant to do the film because he was concerned about telling this story in a soft PG-13 manner. After a lengthy negotiation that dealt not only with finance but also with creative issues, we came to a fair agreement.

  After Taylor agreed to direct, Jamie Foxx was quickly attached as the lead. Besides being a great actor, Jamie had a musical background. He sang in a band called Leather and Lace when he was young, an
d he went to United States International University on a classical music scholarship. Everyone was familiar with his TV work on In Living Color and The Jamie Foxx Show in the ’90s, and he had moved into movies with Ali and Any Given Sunday. He was obviously the right choice to play Ray Charles, and in the end his incredible efforts and outstanding performance were rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actor. When he also got the Best Supporting Actor nomination for Collateral, which he did with Tom Cruise, Jamie became just the second male actor (after Al Pacino) to receive two Academy Award nominations for two different films in the same year.

  Ray was alive when we started filming, but sadly, he died of cancer in June of 2004, four months before the movie was released. The first time Phil and I met him, we had received very precise instructions to go up the studio’s back stairs, which were like a fire escape, and ring the bell. We could hear someone coming down the hall saying, “Hang on, here I come,” and it was Ray himself. It was pitch black in there, and I’m thinking, “We ought to turn some lights on,” and then I realized Ray didn’t need any lights. So Phil and I slowly followed Ray down the hall in the dark. It was the blind leading the blind.

  Near the end of filming, Ray came onto the set with a lot of his kids and everyone got confused because Jamie, being the actor that he is, had stayed in character. The kids were calling him Ray and Dad, and I was calling him Ray and Jamie . . . it was surreal.

  When Taylor showed us the first cut on a big screen, it ran two hours and 32 minutes, which is, by industry standards, too long by 30 or 40 minutes, but it was unbelievably good.

  We screened it for Phil in a theater on the Warner Brothers lot; that was like being in a big living room. We were all apprehensive about some of the scenes in the movie, but to Phil’s great credit, he was as excited about the quality of the film as we all were. There were changes that had to be made in order to satisfy the mission statement, but they were minimal and reasonable.

  Then we had to sell the movie. I won’t bore you with the mountain of details about how that’s done, but in general in those days, you could use foreign-sales projections to help capitalize your film. The projections we got, though, were for a total of only $11 million. All the studios passed except for Warner Brothers — which offered a “P and A” deal, which only pays for the marketing — and Universal Studios. So we did the deal with Universal which guaranteed the $11 million to Phil (he had already put $36 million into it) in return for the worldwide rights.

  Stacey Snider, whose ex-father-in-law is Ed Snider, was chairman of Universal’s film division and said that the movie was just too long. But we told her it “played great” at the two screenings we had in Kansas City — one for a predominantly African-American audience, the second for more of a mixed bag. Stacey said we should screen it again, so we recruited an audience for a Monday night at Marina del Rey. We had the usual security there going up and down the aisles wearing infrared goggles to check for recording piracy, and one woman sitting directly in front of me got thrown out.

  The Universal executives got there 30 minutes late, and when that happens it’s usually the kiss of death for a testing, because having to wait aggravates the audience. But instead, it was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. During the movie, people were standing up and applauding. When a screening ends, the studio executives, producers and directors always huddle in a corner to discuss it, and when we did, Stacey Snider looked at us and said, “Don’t change a thing. It’s great!”

  Ray has grossed almost $300 million, including about $60 million in foreign sales, which shows you just how smart the projections were.

  The early part of each year is award season. Everyone, not only in Los Angeles but around the world, anticipates who the nominees will be. The Golden Globes are first, then, a few weeks later, the Oscars.

  The Oscar and Globe nominations are announced at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, so in L.A. you have to get up at 6 a.m. to watch. The year Ray was in contention, we awoke that early! We were really nervous, because although people think you know beforehand, you actually have no idea if your film will be nominated. The Best Picture Award nominations are always last. Jamie was nominated for Best Actor and Taylor for Best Director, and we also got nominations for editing, sound, and costume design, before it was time for Best Picture.

  When they finally said the word — Ray — Karen and I were overjoyed and felt incredibly honored. At that point the Academy Awards had been going on for 76 years, and almost 600 movies had been nominated for Best Picture. And how many did they have to select from? Probably more than 10,000.

  If you want a measure of how much my 32 years in hockey still influence me, I wore my Whalers championship ring to the Academy Awards for good luck — and I never wear it anywhere. We were sitting with Adam Sandler and his wife, and as you heard in the introduction to this book, Adam, a huge hockey fan, became fascinated by the ring.

  Sitting six seats down from us on the aisle was Martin Scorsese, whose The Aviator was up against Ray, Finding Neverland, Sideways and Million Dollar Baby for Best Picture. Scorsese’s film started out the night by winning three of the first four awards, and then I noticed that he pulled out this little piece of paper: his speech. Being a sports guy, with all our superstitions and habits, I immediately figured, “That’s killed it, he isn’t going to win. You just don’t do that, it’s bad karma.” Scorsese’s film didn’t win and neither did Ray. Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby did.

  We would have loved to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture — but it is not cliché to say it was a huge honor to be nominated.

  Much has been written about who did what on Ray, but here are the facts: Stuart Benjamin had this project under his wing for 13 years and had the passion and commitment to not let it die. Karen and I are immensely proud that we were able to play a part in Ray by bringing it into Crusader, working with Taylor and Stuart to develop the script, and backing the project. Phil Anschutz deserves huge credit for the guts to write out a $40 million check to finance the film. Of course, creatively, Taylor, Jamie and the other members of the cast and crew deserve credit and accolades for their performances and fine work. Ron Meyer, Stacey Snider, Mark Shmuger and the team at Universal should also be applauded for taking the chance they did on the film when other studios were reluctant to do so. Most importantly we have to thank Ray Charles for his participation in the film and the extraordinary life he led.

  In 2006 the American Film Institute put Ray in their “100 Years . . . 100 Cheers” list of the top 100 inspiring American films — “films whose ‘cheers’ continue to echo across a century of American cinema.”

  Sahara

  Back when Karen and I first decided to move out to Hollywood, a good friend of mine, Senator Lowell Weicker, told me we were crazy because “those people are thieves.” I assured him that I was still going to give it a try, and he said, “Okay, then you ought to buy the Cussler books.”

  If you’re not familiar with Clive Cussler, he’s the famous author of many wildly popular action/adventure books, one series of which features the hero Dirk Pitt. Cussler writes one Dirk Pitt novel about every two years — it’s his brand like Ian Fleming’s brand is James Bond.

  Everyone in Hollywood looks for a book series, a good one, because there is the potential to do a number of movies off it.

  Lowell and Clive share a love of the ocean. Clive’s books all have to do with adventure on the ocean, and he and Lowell actually went on a couple of dives together. The two of them were also on a submarine for three days, and how they didn’t end up killing each other, I’ll never know.

  Clive Cussler can be an incredibly difficult man, but I had always wanted to get the rights to his books.

  So around 1995 Karen and I started meeting with Clive in Arizona, where he lived, and with his agent, Peter Lampack, in New York City. We were trying to reassure Clive that we respected his work, and slowly but surely he
became comfortable with us. Clive drove a tough deal and we spent a fortune on the option, but we knew that if the movies did well, we owned the franchise. We had the rights to do a movie on what’s called a revolving option. If you make one movie, you get two-and-a-half years to do another.

  The book we chose was Sahara. We all agreed it was the best one because it would be manageable in terms of budget: there was not as much action on the water as in some of his other books. Scenes on water cost a lot more money because you either have to do them in reality, on the water itself, or you have to do them by CGI, computer-generated imagery, which is not easy.

  After we got the deal done, we were into the difficult details of “approvals.” As the author, Clive had a lot of approvals: over the script, over the director and over the two leads. Once those were all in place, our position in the deal was that we then had control of the film. Karen had the responsibility of dealing with Clive, and she deserved combat pay for this role. She was put into an impossible position.

  After we got the script done and approved, there were several iterations of director and leading actor before we came to the Breck Eisner–Matthew McConaughey combination. The first actor we interviewed to play Dirk Pitt was Gerard Butler, but he was not a big enough name at the time, though he sure is now. Then we interviewed Hugh Jackman, who was an emerging star. When his agent gave his quote of $5 million, we agreed. It was pricey, but we were building a franchise and it was within our budget. We were delayed for a while because Hugh was travelling, and then he took the lead in X-Men, playing Wolverine, which put him out of the picture for us. We didn’t want to have to hold up production for the lead actor, and Wolverine became his franchise, so he would be doing more than one.