Rob Bowman, who had done one X Files movie, was interested in directing. With Rob, we had Christian Bale interested in the lead role. We all loved Christian, but Paramount didn’t think he was an “action hero.” Ironically, he went on to play Batman.
Then Rob Bowman dropped out. We were close to getting another director, Jay Roach, who had done Mystery, Alaska for us. Tom Cruise was potentially interested with Jay directing. Also, on a weekly basis Matthew McConaughey’s reps would be calling Karen to tell her how much he wanted to be Dirk Pitt.
Eventually, we ended up hiring Breck Eisner, Michael Eisner’s son, to direct.
Then we got a call from the agent for Penelope Cruz. She wanted to get together to talk about the role of the female lead, Dr. Eva Rojas. Karen and I met Penelope and loved her. She was living with Tom Cruise then, and when she took the script back to the house, she left it lying around and Tom read it. So then we got the call from Tom’s agent. He really wanted to play the role of Dirk Pitt. We met with Tom and told him to be sure to call Clive Cussler, because Clive was very opinionated on who should play the lead. Clive felt that Tom, who is short, didn’t have the right physical stature to be Dirk Pitt. So Karen had to get on the phone and do what only Karen could have done: convince him that to get the biggest movie star in the world is actually a good thing. She pulled it off, and Clive approved Tom.
We kept telling Tom to call Clive, and he assured us he would. Every fourth day Clive would phone and say Tom still hadn’t called. We told him Tom was filming a big movie, The Last Samurai, a great movie, and that he was travelling all over the world. Despite our promises that Tom would contact Clive, the days kept going by and he didn’t call.
Then Clive’s wife, Barbara, who had been terminally ill, died. Clive then became more difficult to deal with. Sadly and understandably, this period of time was extremely difficult for Clive, and that translated to his being more difficult when it came to the project.
Clive called us and said, “I’m not approving Tom.” And how do you tell the biggest movie star in the world that? But we didn’t have to. Things were dragging so much that Tom had kind of lost interest. Now we were back almost at square one. We still had Penelope but we’d been through Hugh Jackman and Tom Cruise and still didn’t have the male lead.
Matthew McConaughey’s team was still calling weekly. We knew that Matthew had flown out to meet with Clive on his own, before we had become involved with Clive. Clive was unsure about Matthew, as there had been some negative publicity around Matthew for playing the bongos in the nude in Texas. Also, Clive felt Dirk Pitt needed to have dark black hair. One day Karen and I were flying back to the east coast on a late flight that was totally empty in first class except for us, Matthew McConaughey and his friend and manager Gus Gustawes. I’ll never forget it — and looking back, I realize it was very similar to accidentally meeting Phil David Fine on that flight to the WHA meetings 40 years earlier. We had never met Matthew, so we introduced ourselves and we all got along for five hours on that plane. That flight led to Matthew getting the part of Dirk Pitt. Matthew was totally dedicated to the role, and we could not have made a better choice. His persistence and passion were admirable and have served him well — as is illustrated in the remarkable work he did in Dallas Buyers Club and other films subsequent to Sahara.
Sahara was our biggest movie to that point, with a huge budget of $150 million. We got a big chunk of money, about $25 million, from what they call the U.K. Sales Tax Lease-Back. To get it, we had to employ a British crew. We filmed that movie in a lot of places, starting at Shepperton, the big studio in Surrey. Then we moved way out into the Sahara desert in Morocco, but the deal still applied because we carried the UK crew with us. Then we went to Marrakesh, and then to Spain for two or three weeks on a river — there’s a great boat-chase scene in the movie — then back to Shepperton.
Clive’s books always start with a historical piece. This one opened up with an ironclad battleship from the Civil War era being fired upon as it goes up a river. We had to build the boat in the studio and then add huge shock absorbers to get the rocking effect and the whole river feel. When you were inside it, you really felt like you were in an ironclad.
The movie did well in the theaters but not great. It opened as number one in the U.S. with $18 million at the box office in its first weekend. It did however have an amazing DVD life — it was the largest-grossing DVD for Paramount in 2005.
By the time Sahara opened, Karen and I had decided to leave Crusader and go it alone, forming Baldwin Entertainment Group. In addition to business considerations, we both had families back east and we wanted to go back and spend time with them.
We left on completely good terms with Phil Anschutz. Phil had two different companies — Crusader Entertainment and Walden Media, which was really into making only family G-rated movies — and he wanted to merge the two. I just felt we could never make it work. So Karen and I put our own banner together in 2004.
Three months before Sahara was released, Clive Cussler sued Phil because he felt we hadn’t given him the script approval that he wanted. Between when the suit was filed and when it went to court, Karen and I had gone off on our own, but we felt an intense loyalty to make sure Phil won the lawsuit. Clive was being totally out of line.
Karen had been the producer in charge of creative on the film, so she was on the witness stand for three weeks, and she was great. The story was on the front page of the L.A. Times, in one form or another, every day during those three weeks.
It took two years for the decision to come down, and Phil won. There were subsequent judgments and appeals, but ultimately Phil prevailed.
Mr. Hockey
Going out on our own with the Baldwin Entertainment Group was a tough but rewarding experience. The business had changed, and it was getting much harder to get the financing for independent films because of the way banks had stopped lending. More equity money was needed to get films made, and the bottom had fallen out of the foreign sales market. Despite that, we were able to do a film in 2007 with Hyde Park Entertainment, Death Sentence, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by James Wan, and then we were able to bring a project to completion that had long been close to our hearts: Mr. Hockey. We had always been determined to tell the story, in film, of Gordie Howe coming out of retirement to play with his sons Mark and Marty. Too many people, even hockey fans, don’t truly understand what an extraordinary story it is. If it were a work of fiction nobody would believe it.
It’s safe to say that it will never happen again. This was just not any hockey player, hanging on by his fingernails to spend a nostalgic year playing with his sons. There isn’t any question that Gordie is the Babe Ruth of hockey.
When Gordie retired from the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings in 1971, he assumed he would never play again but that he would have a meaningful position in the Red Wings’ front office. Gordie has more hockey knowledge in his little pinky than most hockey people, then and now, accrue in their whole lives. Gordie was given a corner office with few responsibilities other than to sign an autograph from time to time.
In 1973, during the second WHA draft, Bill Dineen, who was then the GM and coach of the Houston Aeros, made a very bold move and selected Mark and Marty Howe, then excelling in junior hockey for the Toronto Marlies. Nobody thought at the time that the Howes would actually sign, and certainly nobody thought that Gordie would come out retirement at the age of 45 to play for the Aeros with his sons. But, unbelievably, he did. The whole event was orchestrated with Dineen by Colleen Howe, Gordie’s wife, the mother of their boys and the family business manager.
The signings of the Howes rocked the hockey world. Of course, the NHL hierarchy made fun of it and treated it as a “carnival event.” Wouldn’t you know, that first year, Gordie finished third in scoring and was the MVP of the league, Mark was the rookie of the year, and also made the WHA Second All-Star team. And as icing on the cake, the Aeros wo
n the Avco World Trophy that year, too.
We wanted to tell the story of the Howes’ unlikely first year in the WHA through a theatrical release film, but when we were in a position to try with Baldwin Entertainment Group, it was difficult getting any project made — but financing for period-piece hockey films had become impossible to secure. The project sat for six or seven years, but we remained committed to getting it made.
Mike Ilitch Jr., from the family that currently owns the Red Wings but did not when Gordie played there, joined Karen and me as a producing partner, which was value-added but still not enough to get us set up. We then met a company called Brightlight Pictures out of Canada, and they were able to work with us and get a deal at the CBC to make the story for television. So in 2013, nearly 40 years after the Howes came to Houston, Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story was released. It stars Canadian actors Michael Shanks as Gordie and Kathleen Robertson as Colleen, and it was shown on the CBC in Canada and on the Hallmark Channel in the U.S.
It was personally moving for us to finally bring the story to the screen, but the greatest satisfaction we had from the project was how positively the family felt about the end result. Karen and I have always felt very strongly about Gordie and his family, and in particular the late Colleen Howe. We were very pleased that their family story could be memorialized for the public.
Star Power
Because I’ve spent much of my working life in both worlds, people often ask me to compare the hockey and movie businesses.
There are many similarities, which is why athletes and actors often gravitate toward each other. They live in a fishbowl, their life work is very public and they trigger outsized emotions, both positive and negative, in their fans.
Like hockey, the movie business sells its employees’ accomplishments to the masses. Both businesses soar and dip with public perception. They both market products which derive from universal pursuits: storytelling and playing games.
There are significant differences, though. From an ownership or management standpoint, one of the biggest is that when you own a hockey team and it doesn’t open the season well, you still have 40 home games left to try to fix it. But if you release a movie and it doesn’t open well, you don’t have any more time. You’re done.
The salary structure is also different in movies than it is in sports. Sometimes when they’re justifying their clients’ huge salaries, hockey agents will make the comparison to the top movie stars of the day. But there is a direct correlation between the movie star and the success of the movie he or she is in. There really is not the same provable connection in hockey.
As we know, most fans cheer primarily for the sweater of their favorite team. The player they like best is usually with that team for more than one season. But if you sign up to do a movie — unless you’re signing up for a series, and there aren’t a great number of those — it’s that movie, and that’s it.
If you’re one of the top two or three players in a movie, and it’s a good movie, you will make big bucks. For the rest of the people in the movie the wages are good, but not great. Yes, actors can make $15 to $20 million from one movie if they’re great, but you can count those actors on one hand.
There aren’t many hockey players who can put fans in the seats in the same quantifiable way that a top movie star can. Mario could do it, Gretzky and Messier too. Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin can do it today. But there aren’t many others.
That is why I want, and have always wanted, more star power in hockey. As with film, in sport, the more marquee value you can give your audience, the better. In my opinion it is important to differentiate between the local sports eye — whether it be in person or over the air — and the national sports eye. The national sports eye will, by and large, root for the sweater, no matter who is in it. This particularly holds true in hockey. Hockey has intensely loyal and dedicated local markets.
PART SIX
OUR FINAL CHAPTER
IN HARTFORD, AND BEYOND
The Connecticut Whale
Although we hadn’t been involved in the city since 1988, when the Whalers were sold, Karen and I always continued to pay close attention to Hartford and its hockey fortunes.
Ever since the Hartford Whalers moved to North Carolina and became the Hurricanes in 1997, we had felt a desire to go back to Connecticut and do what should be done for that market and its fans.
In 2009 we decided to take a break from the film business, return to the East Coast and spend time with our families. We also felt that it was an opportune time to try to do something good to reinvigorate the Hartford hockey market. We put together a select group of very strong and committed partners and formed a company to operate the New York Rangers’ American Hockey League franchise in Hartford. The deal was that we would operate the team but not buy it. The easiest way to describe the arrangement was that we essentially leased the team, paying the Rangers an affiliation fee, and if there were profits they were ours, and if there were losses they were ours too.
Twelve years earlier, the New York Rangers had moved the franchise from Binghamton, New York, to play in the Civic Center as the Hartford Wolf Pack, but the team wasn’t doing well at the gate or in sponsorships.
Some people might wonder why I would want to get involved in a market that lost its NHL team and was not responding to the AHL team (in 2009–10, the season before we took over, the Wolf Pack averaged 4,188 fans per game, 18th in the league).
There were a number of reasons why we wanted to return, but first and foremost was that the Whalers were the team that I started. I felt a loyalty to the city.
There are very few people who have given birth to a franchise and then carried it through the way I did with the Whalers. Ed Snider has done that in Philadelphia, the Wirtz family has done it in Chicago, the Knoxes have done it in Buffalo, and there has been perhaps a small handful of others. It was natural that I would want the success to continue after I left, but it hadn’t. The Whalers had moved, unjustly in my opinion, because the governor and Peter Karmanos, the team owner, just locked horns.
It was a good marketplace with loyal fans, and to this day I think it still is.
Hartford was where I met Karen and where I raised my children. I had very strong feelings for the former Whaler players, and for the significant moments in the history of the franchise. That team meant a lot to a lot of people, and it still does. It’s a team that doesn’t even exist, yet it has a huge cult following.
We started negotiating with the Rangers in September of 2009 and got to the five-yard line, but couldn’t go any further until we arranged an arena lease in Hartford. AEG had the arena management rights from the state until the end of the 2012–13 season, but they were having some issues with their partners, Northland Investment, a local real estate company. This caused significant delays in our lease approval. It is important to emphasize that AEG was on the front lines of any and all negotiations, but the City and the State were calling the shots. To clarify, when we refer to AEG, we refer to it as the representative of the City of Hartford and the State of Connecticut. AEG didn’t cause us any problems; it had its own problems with the City and the State.
It was July of 2010 before AEG told me they had worked things out with Northland and were ready to deal with the lease. I pointed out that it was now so late that I didn’t know if we could make much of a difference in the team’s situation for the season which would soon be opening. But they insisted that they had been counting on us. So, my heart being bigger than my brain, I went ahead and did a lease deal with AEG that I knew was the worst in the American Hockey League. We signed a three-season deal for $25,000 per game. It was a complete gouging. Dave Andrews, the excellent commissioner of the AHL, was very helpful to me through the process, but he thought I was crazy for agreeing to the deal. The next-highest rent in the AHL was about $15,000 per game, but the average would have been more like $9,000 per game. And we didn’t g
et a dime from concessions. Nothing.
Why did I do it? Because I felt that once we got in there and proved our point that this was a good market, everybody would adjust. I could not have been more wrong.
Then the Rangers had their turn to gouge. For their affiliation fee — essentially the price for them to take care of the hockey aspects of the business — they got $1.35 million per year from us, one of the highest fees in the league.
That’s where I was stupid, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I should have just walked away. But I cared about the market and I cared about doing the right thing. And I kept believing that people would step up and help, as everyone had done in Hartford in the 1970s and ’80s. Plus, as you know by now, I hate to give up.
We started this venture with absolutely everything going against us. The Northlands delay, along with the Rangers delay, created a situation whereby we did not take control of the team until September 20th. The season began on October 6th.
Since AEG had anticipated consummating this deal with us early in the spring, it had essentially stopped operating the team.
So, our organization had less than three weeks to sell season tickets and sponsorships prior to opening night. That has to be a record in pro sports. To top it off, we received zero financial consideration from either MSG or AEG in respect to the delay that they caused. To add insult to injury, the schedule we inherited was heavily loaded with weeknight games in October, a graveyard time for AHL attendance. In the key month of February — hockey’s bestselling time — we only had two home games at the XL Center, and one of them fell on Super Bowl Sunday.
The crowning blow was that this delay caused by MSG/AEG forced us to begin the season as the Hartford Wolf Pack. For legal reasons, we couldn’t use the name Whalers, so we ended up renaming the team the Connecticut Whale to re-establish the connection with the WHA and NHL eras. In those days most people referred to the team as “the Whale” anyway. And we changed the uniform color scheme from Rangers red, white and blue to the green and blue of the Whaler days. But we couldn’t rebrand to the Connecticut Whale until November 20th. Of course as soon as we did rebrand, we had over 13,000 fans attend.
Slim and None Page 23