Dissolve: five years later. It’s 1989.
I got a call from my agent, Robert Bookman at CAA. “You remember that lion story?” I said I sure did. “Well, there’s some interest in the project at Paramount. Do you have a problem flying to L.A. to try for the job?”
I said I had zero problem flying to L.A.
But there was indeed a problem.
I have a bad back and it tends to go into spasm when it chooses—crippling me, usually for a week or two. And it had gone out just before Bookman called. When that happens, the worst thing is having to sit in a car for a long time. Having to sit in an airplane for a long time also isn’t so terrific. But I made the trip the next day, met with the Paramount Guys. The usual bullshit grunts of hello. Then it was my turn to sell.
This is not something for which I am noted. I have only tried one “pitch” in my life, and that was for friends, and I was so awful I quit halfway through. Now I was sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers. More precisely, they were sitting in the room.
Me, I was lying on the floor.
Pretty much in spasm.
Looking up at them.
I said I had no idea how to write the movie. I said I had no idea yet what the story was. But I also said I knew what the story should be: a cross between Jaws and Lawrence of Arabia.
I said they could doubt my talent to be able to successfully write that movie, but they could never doubt my passion for wanting to try. I mean, shit, I was flying six thousand miles more or less doubled over—that had to be indicative of something. (I was told that the meeting, because of my position, achieved a certain brief notoriety.)
At any rate, I was hired.
I delivered the first draft on April Fool’s Day, 1990. I always aim for that date—after all, we are talking about the movie business. Shortly afterwards, we met again, the Paramount Guys (PGs) and moi. Here is what they said: Yes, we like the script. Yes, we think it’s a movie. But it is also going to be a very very expensive movie. So we will make it only if we can get one of these three stars to play Patterson, the main character:
Costner
Cruise
Gibson
Well, those happen to be wonderful performers, and all three were good casting for the role. Serious about their careers and their choices of material. And huge stars.
The problem is, you just don’t get people like that for pictures like this (neither O’Toole nor Scheider nor Dreyfuss nor Shaw were huge stars) because stars know they inevitably are going to be dwarfed by the desert or munched by the monster. In the case of The Ghost and the Darkness, I knew that none of Paramount’s holy trinity would sit around while the lions stole the movie. So while I said “Terrific” to the studio about their casting choices, I’ve been at this a while and I have a certain sense for failure when it is coming down the track at me. I knew, old hand that I am, that none of the three would do it. The movie was dead in the water.
A week later, Kevin Costner said yes.
One of the points to keep in mind when talking about movie stars is this: not only do we change, they change. So today when people disparage the lovely Miss Roberts and wonder why she isn’t that smiling star of Pretty Woman, the answer is pretty easy: that child is gone. Julia Roberts was twenty-two then, we knew nothing much about her, and we all fell in love. Well, she’s in her thirties now, we know everything about her, some of it a bit disquieting. Our ardor has cooled.
The Kevin Costner of today, we know about: the divorce, the Waterworld budget, the fact that no one breathing saw The Postman, all that good stuff. But we’re still in 1990, remember, and Dances with Wolves is about to explode across the world, catapulting Costner into an orbit few stars ever attain. Remember how we rooted for him, putting his career on the line to do an, ugh, western? A three-hour, ugh, western at that. And not just to star but, for the first time, to direct?
Well, he gambled and won and we didn’t just love him, we carried him through our village shoulder-high. He had become, in front of our eyes, the new Gary Cooper. We could not find sufficient superlatives.
So as I flew out to the next meeting with the PGs, I knew that after half a dozen years, the gods were smiling.
“We know what we said last week,” the PGs began. “We know we said we would only do it with Costner or Gibson or Cruise. And we are thrilled that Kevin wants to do it so badly. That only proves what we felt about the value of the material. And since Costner agreed so quickly, we now know what we have to do.”
And then a pause.
Not just any pause. This baby hovering on the horizon was one of the longer lulls of my young life. I knew I was about to die, but I could not guess the method, poison or sword.
Then the PG spoke that most dreaded of all terms: “special relationship.”
There is something you must understand about studio executives (and these guys were absolutely standard: bright, decent, hardworking—and shortly to be fired for helping run the company off a cliff). Studio executives love stars. Because these are the executive’s two eternal verities:
1. they all know they are going to get fired, but
2. they also know that if they can just sign enough stars to enough flicks, they will delay their beheading.
Perfectly understandable behavior. I’d do it too. Where it gets dangerous is here: it is not enough that they love stars; in their continually fevered brains, they want to believe that the stars also love them. And so over the decades I have heard that “Sly and I have a special relationship” and “Dusty and I have a special relationship” and Arnold and I and Clint and I and Marlon and I and Paul and I and Steve and I and … backward reeleth the mind.
The truth is this: stars do not now and never have given even the remotest shit for studio executives. Stars only care, legitimately and correctly, about the material and the deal.
But studio executives, poor, put-upon, terrified, underappreciated like the rest of us, dream of being loved.
“We have a special relationship with Tom Cruise,” the head PG said that day. “We are doing a picture with Tom now and we want this to be his next. He has a lot on his plate at the moment, yes, but we are prepared to wait for him. Because we know he’ll love this. And we know he loves working with us.”
“Because of your special relationship,” I said.
Heads nodded all around.
We waited six months for an answer. The movie he was starting was indeed a plateful. It was called Days of Thunder and it was not the easiest shoot ever undertaken, and not only that, he was also producing.
Cruise passed.
Costner had taken off five months and three weeks before, very pissed off, and with very good reason. We never went to Gibson. No point. There was now no movie. And honestly, I felt, there never would be.
The Tsavo lions curled up inside my brain again, growled again, and slept for five more years …
Which is not to say there was zero action. Michael Douglas, who has a remarkable record as a producer (he won an Oscar for his first try, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and his partner, Steve Reuther, came aboard. And Stephen Hopkins was selected to direct. Stirrings, sure. But lots of movies get producers, bring directors on, then disappear. We needed a male star. Optimist that I have always been, I knew we would never get one.
But as the sadly missed Mr. Williams once wrote for Miss DuBois, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.” Because our salvation was taking place across town, on the Warner Brothers lot, where the actor Michael Keaton had what I can only call the most helpful fit of madness of my screenwriting career. (No, I meant that sentence just as I wrote it.)
Understand this about stars: they do not want to appear in commercial films. Oh, some will put up with them. Harrison Ford owes his entire fabulous career to three series: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Tom Clancy. Stallone exists because of Rocky and Rambo. Mel Gibson also had two, Mad Max and the Lethal Weapons. But these are not the norm.
Michael Keaton chose to ignore the ecolog
y of Hollywood—you do one for me, I’ll do one for you. He had been in the first Batman, which Jack Nicholson stole. He had done the second, this time bowing to Pfeiffer and DeVito. And that, apparently, was enough. He did not want to wear the dreaded Bat suit again. He felt the part of Batman wasn’t terrific. And you know what?
Dead right. Batman was and always has been a horrible part, a stiff the others got to be flashy by playing off of.
So Keaton walked.
And Val Kilmer replaced him.
Val Kilmer, who, it turned out, loved Africa.
Once more the phone rang from Hollywood. The lions answered it with me. We were alive again. Because the new Paramount people had always liked the Tsavo script. And suddenly there was this hot new star who wanted to play Patterson. Batman Forever had not opened yet. But the advance word was sensational.
Suddenly we were a “go.”
A dozen years passed between that first night on the Masai Mara and when we got released. We might have come out in ’91, in place of Robin Hood, riding the Costner love fest. And if we had, I think we would have owned the civilized world. We also might never have come out, because if Keaton had stuck with Batman, Val Kilmer wouldn’t have gotten his blink of sunshine, and no way any studio would have sent us into production without a star.
Anyway, that’s how movies get made.
The Lions
The real ones are—right now, as they have been for over half a century—in Chicago. The Field Museum of Natural History. I went to see them with Ilene soon after we got back from the Africa trip.
There they crouch in their exhibit, probably not as big as in your imagination. Partly because they were maneless males. (Not uncommon in certain parts of Africa. If they live in an area rich with thorn trees, as these did, the thorns rip the manes off them over time.)
But here is what you must know about them, and I mean this—
—they are scary.
There is clearly a madness at work, some raging insanity; I have never seen anything like them. I felt when I first heard about them just exactly what I felt that day when I saw them and what I feel now: that they were evil.
I called one The Ghost, the other The Darkness, for several reasons. I could differentiate the two in the screenplay, characterize them, if you will. More than that, the names were evocative, they would read well on the page; and more than that, if the movie ever happened, they would look good on the screen, these giant killing machines, with such easily identified manes.
Why were they so remarkable?
A few basic facts you should know about man-eating lions:
1. They are always old. Because they cannot hunt their rightful food (wildebeest, etc.), they are forced to go after something all lions are repelled by, us. Our smell tends to disgust them. To kill and eat humans is something only a close-to-decrepit lion would be forced to do.
2. They are always alone. Because they have been forced out by their pride. They can’t keep up, so out with them.
3. They return to the scene of their last kill. Again, perfectly logical. If they are lucky enough to get a snack at say, Seventy-seventh and Madison, why not go right back there again, and as soon as possible.
Okay. Old, alone, return for more goodies.
For reasons of greed, the British decided to build a railroad across East Africa. This was simply a giant undertaking, rating not far below the Pyramids. Thousands of men were employed. Brutal brutal labor.
In 1898, John Henry Patterson, the hero of the story, a thirty-year-old Scottish engineer, was given the job of building a bridge across the River Tsavo—thorn tree heaven—approximately 130 miles inland from the coast town of Mombasa.
Patterson faced problems, varied and serious: a shortage of material; surly natives who threatened to rebel (and on at least one occasion, tried to kill him); malaria; lack of food; insufficient medical supplies. Not a whole lot of fun, but he was stubborn and it was going well enough.
Until March of that year and the first lion attack.
No big deal at first; a lion jumped out at a coolie on a donkey, then ran away.
Yawn.
Patterson spent all night in the trees waiting for the lion to come back to the spot, and when it did, he nailed the sucker.
Back to the bridge.
Then, slowly, like acid dripping, bad things happened. A lion attacked a coolie, dragged him into the bush, you could hear the coolie’s scream and his bones breaking. More of that. Then the awful realization that there were two lions. And they were young and they were fearless and they began attacking large groups of men in broad daylight. They also began leaping nine-foot thorn fences and dragging coolies out of their tents, and the coolies began sleeping in the trees, which was fine except there were so many of them sometimes the trees bent and the coolies fell to the ground, where the lions were waiting for them. During all these days, Patterson was working on the bridge when it was light, spending his nights alone in the trees.
Now the natives began to think the lions were not normal. Natives always do that in Tarzan pictures: “Bwana, these beasts are not of our earth,” and Tarzan always proves them wrong. Well, Tarzan wasn’t around in Tsavo, and as the months went by, some militia were sent from Mombasa—not many, there weren’t many, and they couldn’t be spared long, and they saw nothing. And when they departed, back came the lions. And now professional hunters came, and they killed a lot of baby lions and stayed until the big two began eating them, and now Patterson was dying from fatigue but he came up with a plan. He stuck three of his best shots in a railroad car, protected them with metal bars across the middle, put some meat on the far side from them—a ridiculous plan really—the killers were to enter on the far end and when they did they would trip a wire and the door would close behind them and they would be helpless as the three shooters blew them away—
—ever hear anything so moronic?
Well, it worked.
Kind of.
One of the lions came, and it was trapped, and these three great shooters blasted the shit out of it at close range—
—and missed—
—yes, missed; they couldn’t but they did—
—and they blasted a hole in the car and the lion got away.
The workers began to leave, going back to other parts of Africa, back to India; and Patterson was killing himself, days on the bridge, where work was slowing, nights trying to stay awake in the trees.
Then another plan, this time a great one: move the hospital in a day, leave the old one smelling of blood and sheets and take the sick and the wounded to a clean, odorless one, while Patterson waited for them to attack in the blood-smeared hospital. He even spread cattle blood all around to make it irresistible—
The attack came, he could hear them outside—
—then silence—
—then horrible death screams in the night as the lions savaged the new clean perfect hospital, killing on and on. The natives took off after that, the railroad came to a dead halt.
Back in London, Parliament was having these screaming matches because they ruled the world, the sun never set, etc., etc., and here in Africa this great railroad had been stopped—
—dead—
—no work was being done—
—by two lions.
—and why can’t somebody do something?
Patterson finally did.
It took him nine months, but he got the first. Then, Christmas week of ’98, he was in a tree when the second came by, and he shot him, but the lion came up after him and he jumped down, broke his leg landing, and when the lion got back to earth Patterson shot him again—
—but it would not stop—
—Patterson could only watch, no bullets left—
—the lion took a huge hunk out of a tree limb, died six inches from Patterson’s body.
I still think an amazing and great piece of narrative material.
Plus this: lions have never behaved like that again. Never have two young males join
ed to savage the countryside. No accounting for it. How can you explain nine months of miraculous escapes, of knowing what the enemy will do before the enemy did it? Patterson later found a cave where they took their victims. Bones forever. They didn’t eat their victims a lot of the time. Sometimes they licked the skin off, drank the blood.
One hundred thirty-five men dead, the most of any lions in history.
I still hold with evil …
The Hero
Patterson’s life was never quite the same. He wrote a book about his experiences that sold extremely well. He fought in many battles as his life went on, a strong figure in the battle to found Israel. But wherever he went, he was the man who killed the lions.
I don’t think anyone can doubt his bravery.
I have seen the trees he spent his nights in—fifteen or eighteen feet up, sometimes less—trying to stay awake, while out there somewhere he knew they were watching him, waiting for him.
I have seen lions kill, seen them shred slaughtered and dying animals, been shocked not just at the blood, but at their speed. When they are moving in for a meal, they are not the bewhiskered cuddly things the Disney Organization would have us believe them to be.
I have been to Tsavo, though not for long—it is not a place for your dream house. Looked at where Patterson went. Night after week after long bloody month. As the total of dead mounted. As the sense of the enemy’s power mounted. As the bridge slowed, stalled, stopped. As his fatigue began to drive him toward Lord only knows what madness.
And I don’t know how the man did it. For me, that is genuinely heroic behavior.
And I hope you agree. I need that from you now.
The Willie Mays of Firemen
I once had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with a wonderful old New York City fireman. Retired. Irish, of course. Father had been a fireman, both his sons were too.
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 9