by David Hughes
Hart was among the first to hear that Foster had quit the project. “Someone had seen Jodie at a party in New York and she said that she was pulling out because the character I had written was no longer the character in the script. The focus had changed, and she was going. I remember calling Lynda Obst from New York — I woke her up — and I felt terrible because I thought Lynda knew. She was very upset and very angry.” Nevertheless, Foster “jumped species” onto another Obst production, Contact, which she had read more than a year earlier (when she was sent it as a sample of Hart’s writing), and in which, after several more years in Development Hell, she would play the lead role.
Even with Foster gone, Hart agreed to come back in for the third and last time. “I took Richard’s outline and folded his great ideas about ‘patient zero’ — the carrier — into the draft,” he says. “I met with Jerry and Nancy Jaax and explained to them that if I was going to make this work dramatically, I would have to take licence with their relationship, and that I was gonna make one of them sick, and I was gonna invade their family — and in the script it’s their daughter who gets sick. [The Jaaxes’ colleague] Peter Jarling told me their wives would always say ‘Don’t bring your work home from the office,’ because the worst thing that could happen is that you walk out of the lab and take something home in your system that’s gonna infect your family. And when they told me that, I just went, ‘Okay, the daughter’s gonna get infected.’”
Hart also attempted to address some of the romantic elements which Attanasio had brought into the script, apparently at Redford’s request, but which Hart felt threatened the reality of the relationship between Nancy and Jerry. His solution was simple: “I put Jerry in Desert Storm, in an outbreak where they were hunting for biological weapons, believe it or not. And he was gonna be brought home for Thanksgiving, but he was leading a biohazard team to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! So he is reintroduced into the story at a time when Nancy and Karl have been spending a lot of time together, so there is a natural tension in his return. But there is never any doubt that Nancy is madly in love with her husband, and has a successful relationship and a successful family.
“The May ’94 draft brought together Richard Friedenberg’s work, Paul Attanasio’s work, the work Ridley had brought to the table, [and] Redford’s desires — yet still maintained the integrity of Nancy and Jerry Jaax. The end of that draft is still talked about,” Hart adds. “Karl Johnson is saying goodbye to Nancy after the monkey house is over and they’ve successfully spun off the serum and begun to deal with the outbreak, and Karl gets on the plane and you see from the point of view of the virus up in the air system, moving to the little nozzles, and suddenly it stops over Karl Johnson, and just as it rushes down towards him, he reaches up and turns off the nozzle, and the screen goes black. It is the way the movie should end, and I still get calls about it from people who read the script. That unproduced screenplay has gotten me more work than Hook and Dracula put together. It was my swansong,” he says. “I turned that draft in — it’s 154 pages long — and I said, ‘Here — I’m going.’”
“After Jodie went, we went to Meryl Streep,” said Obst, relishing the opportunity to re-team the multiple Oscar-winner with Redford, her co-star in Out of Africa. “Her agents thought we had a great shot.” With The Hot Zone now a mere eighteen days from the date principal photography was due to begin, Tom Topor received a call from one of Scott’s associates, asking him if he was available for “an instantaneous production rewrite” which they could use to entice Streep aboard. “They sent me all of the scripts,” Topor recalls, “and then Ridley and I got on the phone, and I said, ‘Look, you email me a list of all of the big set-pieces that you absolutely want to keep, because I’m going to treat this as though I’m doing a musical on Broadway — you tell me the songs you want to keep, and I’ll write around your songs.’ I said, ‘I will give you all your set-pieces, but you’ve got to give me a lot of manoeuvring room for the rest of it.’”
Scott agreed, but requested that Topor talk with Redford, and with Streep, who was considering whether to replace Foster on The Hot Zone or join Clint Eastwood for The Bridges of Madison County. Says Topor, “I got on the telephone with Bob, and we had sort of a ‘meet and greet’ conversation, and then I talked to Meryl, and she gave me a lot of ideas about her character. But then she said, ‘When do you think it’ll be done?’” Topor was forced to admit that, despite the approaching start date, he was still taking notes from Scott and Redford, and had yet to begin work on his screenplay. “I could tell that the moment she heard I had nothing on paper, she was going to take the offer from Eastwood. The River Wild [an action-packed thriller toplining Streep] was about to be released, and everybody thought that was going to be a huge hit. So she bowed out.”
The next time Topor spoke with Redford, he suggested that Redford and Scott needed to have further discussions about the direction the script was taking: “I said, ‘The way Ridley sees this is essentially a duet, and the way you’re talking, it doesn’t sound like that. So I will do anything you want, but I have to have a consensus between you and the director.’ And not long after that, Bob disappeared, too.” Redford officially quit on 12 August. “It was like a train wreck in extended slow motion,” Preston told Time’s Richard Corliss. “It begins with a smell of smoke; then one wheel hops the track; then a freight car goes off; then it turns sideways and the whole train begins to telescope. That’s when it goes off the rails and into the canyon. By Hollywood standards, this project took a long time to come apart,” he added. “Usually they explode immediately.”
While The Hot Zone was haemorrhaging stars, Outbreak’s cast list was beginning to read like a ‘who’s who’ of Hollywood: two-time Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman and In the Line of Fire’s Rene Russo would headline as virologist Colonel Sam Daniels and his colleague and ex-wife Robby Keough; Kevin Spacey and Cuba Gooding Jr would play USAMRIID personnel; and Morgan Freeman would play a Brigadier-General. Then, when Joe Don Baker (Edge of Darkness) was dismissed several weeks into production, a bigger star, Donald Sutherland, took his place. Yet Outbreak was having script problems of its own: after Dworet and Pool’s initial drafts, a succession of screenwriters, including Jeb Stuart (The Fugitive) and Carrie Fisher (Postcards From the Edge), worked on the script, the latter at a reported cost of $100,000 per week. Petersen later brought in The Waterdance screenwriter Neal Jimenez to “improve the pacing and structure”, while Hoffman, unhappy with his lines in one scene, brought in prize-winning poet and novelist Maya Angelou to sharpen the dialogue. The script was still far from finished when, on 13 July 1994, Kopelson sent Petersen and his crew to shoot exteriors in Eureka, California, effectively announcing the commencement of principal photography, and throwing The Hot Zone into further crisis. “They shot second-unit monkey footage for weeks on end,” said Obst, “as they were raced into production without a script, too.”
The other difficulty for The Hot Zone, Topor explains, was trying to cast the film barely two weeks before production was due to begin. “There were very few [actors] available at such short notice,” he says, “and by this time there had been so much bad publicity in the papers, that even for people who might have wanted to work for him [Scott], it looked like they were coming into a troubled movie that was similar to a movie that was already in production.”
“When the Fox project exploded, they didn’t want to talk about it,” said Preston. “They were resolutely insisting that all was hunky-dory, and ten minutes later someone would be weeping [to me] about how the Fox project was like a shipwreck.” The fact that Scott was unable to set it up elsewhere — even at Paramount, which had originally bid for the story on Scott’s behalf — did not surprise Tom Topor. “I can understand why other studios didn’t pick it up,” he says. “It was a very expensive picture — $40 or $50 million — and Outbreak was already in the works. As [Paramount president] Sherry Lansing said to Ridley, ‘I like what you’ve got better, but it’s not that much
different.’”
“There was a sense of outrage that the producers of [Outbreak] had violated a kind of unspoken code: that if you spend a lot of dough and get the rights to a project — in this case an article — then you have in effect protected yourself from being ripped off. It’s yours to do and no one else’s,” says Friedenberg. “The Outbreak people lost the battle for the rights to ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’, and instead of going away as everyone else does, they just went ahead, claiming their right to use material in the public domain, like newspaper reports, etc. There was talk of suing and so forth, but they just ploughed ahead and won.” Adds Hart, “I was so angry because I thought Fox had a copyright infringement suit against Warners. They claim they didn’t, but Richard [Preston] and I both know that there were things in that screenplay that did not exist in any article, that had not been previously published, but that came out of the research [for The Hot Zone script], and the producers [of Outbreak] freely admitted they read every draft we turned in. The scene of the aerosol in the monkey house going up in the vents and coming down in the next room, the scene in the movie theatre, [and] people coughing and having it backlit in the air from a movie projector — stuff that’s in my script that didn’t exist in any book. But Fox business affairs did not feel they had a successful case against Warners. Warners out-managed and out-produced Fox. It was a big learning curve for everybody.” Worst of all, says Friedenberg, was that “it looked like a ‘go’ movie. We had Redford, Ridley Scott and a script in progress. That’s a lot to have. But instead of making it better, that just made everyone push to do a Hollywood number instead of an intelligent, thoughtful and honest film. I’d just worked with Bob on A River Runs Through It, a totally uncompromised project, and I naïvely thought that this could be the same. What an idiot.”
Finally, in August 1994, Fox pulled the plug on The Hot Zone. Warner Bros took the opportunity to shut down Outbreak, which was having problems of its own. According to Robert Roy Pool, the script for Outbreak had become a battleground, with both he and Laurence Dworet engaging in “extreme creative conflicts” with one of the Warner Bros executives, apparently over the writers’ desire to keep the story as realistic as possible. After working on the script for a year, they left by mutual agreement. Nevertheless, Pool maintained his link with the production, making frequent visits to the set, and remaining friendly with Petersen, producers Kopelson and Gail Katz, and the incoming screenwriter Neal Jimenez, “an old poker buddy” of Pool’s. Pool also claimed to have read “every draft by every writer”, and was therefore in a position to state that although as many as fifteen screenwriters had contributed dialogue to the final script, “ninety-five per cent of the dialogue changes were simple enhancements of ideas we had already introduced in our final screenplay of December 1993.”
According to Pool, the story, characters, structure and scenes in Outbreak were his and Dworet’s creations: “Ted Tally contributed exactly one scene in the movie, and it’s a very good one — Dustin Hoffman looks up at an air vent, the camera dollies through the vent, and Hoffman says, ‘It’s airborne.’” Pool noted that after Tally departed, Jeb Stuart was hired, but soon left through the door marked ‘creative differences’. Once Fox’s competing project fell apart, the Outbreak crew took a week’s hiatus, and Neal Jimenez was hired to rework the dialogue to Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction. Nevertheless, Pool suggested, “the phrase ‘Dustin Hoffman’s satisfaction’ is an oxymoron. Neal began to realize that Dustin would never be happy — not in this lifetime, anyway — and once the picture started rolling again, Neal showed up on the set less and less often. He felt insulted and ignored when the actors refused to speak the lines he’d written and substituted their own phrases.” On the final day of shooting, Jimenez told his old poker buddy that he might not have signed on for the job if he’d known what lay ahead.
Outbreak opened in the US on 10 March 1995, grossing $13.4 million in its opening weekend, and a total of $187 million worldwide. “On opening day, [Fox chairman] Peter Chernin and I were talking on the cellphone,” Hart recalls, “and he said to me, ‘We shut down for the wrong movie!’, meaning we never should have folded our tent. They could have opened both of those movies on the same day and The Hot Zone would have been the one that people went back to see a second time.” Preston was among those who paid to see Outbreak. “I’m just sitting here laughing,” he told Entertainment Weekly afterwards. “It just wasn’t scary. You have scabs that look like Gummi Bears. The blood was put on with an eyedropper. In a real [Ebola attack], the men bleed out of their nipples. I would have liked to see Hoffman bleed out of his nipples.” Robert Roy Pool, one of only two credited screenwriters on the finished film (Dworet was the other), had had enough. In a letter to Entertainment Weekly published in full on 21 April 1995, he strove finally to set the record straight about the origins of the movie, stating that he and Dworet had not “ripped off” Preston’s story — but that the author had gained a great deal of publicity from claiming otherwise. On the contrary, Pool went on, he and Dworet had written the entire screenplay for Outbreak, notwithstanding embellishments by three subsequent writers, the cast and Wolfgang Petersen.
According to Pool, Warner Bros had been trying to persuade him and Dworet — a qualified medical doctor — to write an action-suspense film for them for more than two years, but had not found the right project until November 1992, when a senior executive asked them if they would be interested in writing a screenplay based on ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. At the time, they declined, believing that the story had several fundamental problems. “First, nothing very dramatic happens — it just threatens to happen,” Pool explained. “Second, the climactic action of the story is the euthanization of hundreds of monkeys — an extraordinarily grim finale for a major studio feature.” The writers believed that a movie was unlikely to emerge from Preston’s story — and even if it did, would struggle to find an audience.
Instead, Pool and Dworet drew the studio’s attention to an idea they had been working on for more than a decade, following Dworet’s research into another haemorrhagic illness, Lassa Fever, at medical school in 1975, which seemed to presage the end of the world. The pair worked up a story idea in February 1982 which Pool described as follows: “an emergency room doctor leads a battle against a bizarre African virus spreading in a small Idaho town. This battle eventually assumes a military dimension when the National Guard has to be called in to enforce the quarantine and protect the world from a devastating plague.” Pool and Dworet were fascinated by the social and moral implications of the story. What would really happen if such a virus broke out? Tough decisions would almost certainly follow. Would they isolate — or even annihilate — an entire town in order to prevent the spread of a contagious and incurable disease? A decade later, in 1992, Pool and Dworet sold the pitch to Warner Bros, at which point Arnold Kopelson suggested optioning Preston’s magazine story. “We told him that we had no intention of using Preston’s story,” Pool said, “and that Preston didn’t own the underlying subject matter — no one could.” Although Kopelson’s lawyers agreed, the producer decided to bid for the story regardless, feeling that Preston’s research might prove useful to the project. When he was outbid, he went back to working on the Pool-Dworet story while Fox fast-tracked its adaptation of ‘Crisis in the Hot Zone’. And so the race was on.
In spite of the chaos surrounding the picture, however, Pool felt that Wolfgang Petersen had ultimately managed to make one of the most exciting movies he had ever seen, and that while Outbreak stretches credibility, “it’s never boring.” As for Richard Preston, “[he] is very talented... but he has amazing arrogance to think that, by writing one story for The New Yorker, he somehow owns an entire scientific subject.” On the contrary, Pool said, many other writers have addressed the subject of deadly plagues, from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722 to John Fuller’s Fever!, published 250 years later, detailing Nigeria’s Lassa Fever mini-epidemic of 1969. “Laurence and I rea
d scores of articles about haemorrhagic fevers in medical journals and found hundreds more we didn’t have time to retrieve. We won the competition fair and square,” he concluded. “Richard Preston should stop whining and start writing his next book.”
Yet, like the virus it described, it appears that The Hot Zone cannot easily be subdued, and may yet return in mutated form. “Because I lost the race on Hot Zone doesn’t mean it won’t be made,” Obst wrote in 1996, by which time Preston’s book had been on the bestseller list for almost two years. “Maybe I just lost the race to mediocrity; so every time I meet a new director who could be right or read a new writer who could save the script, Hot Zone moves to the front burner, ready to start cooking.” Sure enough, on 2 July 2002, Variety reported that Fox was reviving the film, with Scott McGehee and David Siegel (Suture, The Deep End) set to direct a new draft by Emmy-winning writer Erik Jendreson (Band of Brothers, The 300 Spartans). “It’s a great script,” said McGehee, “very similar to the original story.” Hart remembers being contacted by Lynda Obst when Jendreson was first brought in, around the same time that a small outbreak of the Ebola virus occurred as thousands of refugees were streaming across the border to escape the genocide in Somalia. “Lynda called me — I think it was after Contact, so it must have been 1998 or 1999 — and said they were bringing in [Jendreson,] who had just won an Emmy for E.R.. She wanted to know if I would be willing to work as an executive producer on the project, and work with this writer in a supervisory capacity. I was flattered,” he says, “but I also was not stupid — I had been through this a number of times before.