Proposal had begun as a novel by Jack Engelhard that posed a simple but spellbinding question: would a married woman sleep with a stranger for $1 million? The project had been developed by two young producers, Alex Gartner and Tom Schulman, who had stripped away some of the book’s more political elements. Unlike the novel, whose male protagonists were an Arab and a Jew, the screenplay by writer Amy Holden Jones centered on a yuppie couple badly in need of money, who consider a billionaire’s offer to have sex with the wife.
“It didn’t read as well as Fatal, but I remember thinking it was a terrific idea,” said Lyne. “The idea, ‘Would you fuck somebody for $1 million, and if you wouldn’t, would you do it for $5 million?’—the morality, or lack of it, around that question was just marvelous.”
Lyne was keen to bring in an experienced producer to join the relative newcomers Gartner and Schulman, and he turned to Lansing.
“Adrian said, ‘There’s something about this. I’d like you to look at it,’ ” she remembered. “The script was very dark and twisted, but it had that kernel of a great idea. I knew we were on to something when I was at a dinner with some women and asked what they thought, and they said they’d definitely sleep with a guy for $1 million, as long as he looked right. The men were outraged, and everyone got into a big argument.”
Negotiations commenced for Lansing to take over the movie. These were tough, unsentimental talks, and she insisted on being the sole producer, with Gartner and Schulman as executive producers, knowing she ultimately would bear the responsibility. Neither was happy (though Gartner was staggered by the amount Paramount paid him to take a lesser credit), but Lansing knew this was business as usual. “By then I’d grown up,” she said.
Lyne wanted to make some script changes and brought in William Goldman, one of the industry’s leading screenwriters (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men). “I remember meeting him in a large, rather gloomy apartment at the Carlyle Hotel,” he said. “He was concerned about his posture, so every doorway had a single word over it, like ‘tall’ or ‘upright.’ I thought that would be great in a movie.”
Lansing took Goldman at his word when he said he could fix the script in two weeks. “He was the hottest writer in the business,” she explained. But when the revised screenplay arrived, the producers’ hearts sank.
“Tom, Adrian, Sherry and I sat with Goldman on the speakerphone, marking up the script,” said Gartner, “and I went home and literally, with scissors and glue, cut-and-pasted his draft into Amy’s. I remember everything spread around my bed, and my wife and toddler watching me cut this script together, and that went to Goldman. He took another pass at it, which I believe was his last.”
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Warren Beatty was offered the lead, but as so often in his career, he hesitated. “Warren did his usual dance,” said Lansing. “I don’t think we ever got an answer.”
Lyne, in any case, was keen on a more rough-hewn actor or at least one who would add a genuine sense of danger, and suggested Tommy Lee Jones. But Jones had a reputation for being prickly, and Lansing favored Robert Redford.
Despite everything she had been through on The Verdict, she remained eager to work with him, and felt he had both the magnetism and the innate sense of class the role required. Lyne was vehemently opposed, afraid a star of his magnitude would overshadow the young couple and tip the entire balance of the film so that audiences no longer cared about them. His arguments with Lansing became so passionate that he almost left the film—he even quit at one point, but days later, he was back and agreed to meet with Redford.
“We went to his office in Santa Monica,” said Lansing, “and Redford walks in and says, ‘Hi. It’s really nice to meet you, Adrian.’ He was warm and charming and gracious. We talked, and he said, ‘I’d really like to do this movie. Would you like me to do it?’ And Adrian goes, ‘Well, uh—yes.’ He didn’t realize he was giving him the part.”
Redford’s star power had faded in the six years since his last genuine blockbuster, 1985’s Out of Africa. Many were dubious about his continuing box office appeal, and Paramount balked at paying him “full freight,” the multimillion-dollar fee he might otherwise have commanded. When the actor refused to do the movie for less, the two sides were at an impasse until CAA convinced him to lower his payment in exchange for a larger share of the profits. Redford received $5 million and 15 percent of first-dollar gross—that is, 15 percent of the revenue the studio received from movie theaters.
“Redford worked for a fraction of what he normally made,” said Lansing. “He eventually made a huge amount of money”—close to $40 million, sources said.
With their star locked in, Lansing and Lyne set about casting the young couple. One by one, some of the best-known young actresses of the day traipsed through their offices.
“Adrian is a great admirer of beautiful actresses, and he tested every beautiful actress at the time,” recalled Gartner. “Oh my goodness! Sophie Marceau, Irene Jacob, Nicole Kidman.” Rather than these, however, the director settled on the last actress to audition for him, Demi Moore, fresh off two big hits, 1990’s Ghost and 1992’s A Few Good Men.
Then he had to cast her architect husband. The role was problematic: if the man were too wishy-washy, he would run the risk of seeming weak; if he were too firm, he might appear harsh. Lansing argued for Woody Harrelson, but “Adrian wouldn’t even see him,” she said.
Harrelson was best known for playing Woody Boyd, the not-so-bright barman of NBC’s Cheers, and Lyne continued to resist until he saw his new film, White Men Can’t Jump. By then it was too late: Harrelson had committed to another picture, MGM’s Benny and Joon. It was a much smaller project, but a deal was in place.
Three weeks before Indecent was due to start principal photography, Harrelson ditched Benny for the Paramount film, and MGM sued the studio for more than $5 million, just about Benny’s entire budget. Alan Ladd Jr., the former Fox executive, was now running MGM and knew the long-term consequences he would suffer if he allowed a star to pull out of a deal: it would mean any star could leave any project whenever he or she wanted.
“I said, ‘Fine, we’ll let you leave, but we’ll also sue you,’ ” Ladd recalled.
Paramount settled for half a million dollars. But Harrelson got to make Indecent Proposal.
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In June 1992, the cast and crew assembled in Las Vegas, where they would stay for two months before moving to Los Angeles.
“We all sat around this long table—Adrian, Stanley, Woody, Demi, Redford and myself—and they did the read-through and it was perfect,” said Lansing. Any doubts Lyne had had about Redford vanished; his casual, comfortable reading took the director’s breath away, as it did Lansing’s. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” she said.
Then Redford asked for a meeting.
“We get a call—‘Mr. Redford wants to see you’—and we go up to his suite,” said Lansing. “I thought he was going to tell us he didn’t like something in the script. But he said, ‘I want out.’ ” Lansing couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “He said, ‘The kids are wonderful, but I’m not. It’s their movie.’ I said, ‘Bob, you’re amazing.’ And he said, ‘That’s very kind, but I have to leave.’ ”
The more Lansing argued, the more he stuck to his position. “We were dumbfounded,” she said. “But we couldn’t laugh because he was so serious.”
Worried that Paramount would shut down the movie if she lost her star, she asked CAA to intervene, and ran through a list of possible replacements. The agency suggested a simple solution: bring in another writer to make script changes that might allay Redford’s concerns. “They discussed that with him, and he agreed,” said Lansing.
While the search began for a writer, the various parties knuckled down and worked on the script themselves.
“It was a huge moment,” said CAA’s Bryan Lourd. “Doc [agent David O’Connor] and I were representing Redford at the time. Sherry, [Paramount executive]
Karen Rosenfelt, Doc and I were writing scenes to convince him to do the movie.”
CAA understood its client well, and realized that a general malaise was not unusual among stars, especially ones on the brink of tackling an important role. “He was never leaving,” said Lourd. “He knew what the movie could be and was committed to getting it right.”
He suggested hiring Robert Getchell (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), whose empathetic nature made him a perfect fit for the mercurial Redford.
The writer was baffled. “He said, ‘The script is wonderful. I don’t know what to change,’ ” recalled Lansing. “I said, ‘I agree. So here’s what I’m begging you to do: write whatever he wants, but make sure there’s nothing you add that we can’t cut out in the editing, if we need to.’ ”
Getchell accepted and flew to Las Vegas, where he ensconced himself in a hotel room and got down to work, adding a snippet of dialogue here, a new sequence there, but nothing so fundamental that it could not be eliminated in postproduction.
Days later, Redford was a man transformed. He thanked Lansing for bringing in the writer and assured her things were going fine.
“I wasn’t sure if he lacked confidence or if he just wanted to be certain his character was fully fleshed out,” she said. “He’d say things like, ‘I don’t understand the part,’ and then deliver an amazing reading.”
She was struck by Redford’s acting gift, especially when shooting the scene in which he first meets Moore. “He did it a couple of times, and then said, ‘Just a second,’ and took out a pen, and started crossing things out of the script until all Getchell’s additions were gone,” she recalled. “Then he smiled and said, ‘You’re right. It worked just the way it was.’ ”
During the sequence where he makes the “indecent proposal” at the heart of the film, “I crouched in the back of the room to watch,” she said. “When Redford delivered the line, offering Demi $1 million to spend the night with him, he just threw it away, as if he was asking to borrow a jacket. A bad actor would have paused and delivered it sotto voce. But Redford made it lethal by his casualness.”
“What he did, as only a brilliant film actor can do,” said Lourd, “was subtly rewrite the script through his performance—not by putting pen to paper but by how he played things. He made you care about this character who was the most horrible guy on the planet. Later, when we got to see the rough cut, Sherry called and said, ‘He’s now the sympathetic center of the movie.’ ”
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To everyone’s surprise, Redford was almost always punctual. “I know this will sound crazy: he wasn’t difficult at all,” said coproducer Michael Tadross. “He said, ‘What do you need from me?’ and I just told him [where to be and when]. He was only late one day through the whole movie.”
On that particular day, the film was shooting in Watts, part of the inner city of Los Angeles. Lyne had insisted on filming there over Lansing’s objections because he wanted to use a real-life classroom. This was at the height of gang warfare, and extra security had to be brought in.
“You needed an escort just to get to your trailer,” said Lansing, “and then Redford left the set to go off and do something, and nobody could find him.”
Tadross was so frustrated by the slowdown, he started pounding his chest in mock-rage. “He said, ‘Jesus Christ! What am I doing here?’ ” Lansing remembered. “There were gang members going by in their souped-up cars. And he thumps his chest, shouting: ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’ ”
Hours passed, and still Redford did not appear. When word spread finally that he was back in his trailer, safe and unharmed, “Demi was so angry, she marched into his trailer and lectured him,” Lansing recalled. “She said, ‘You obviously don’t like working with me.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You’re disrespecting me, the crew and the movie.’ ”
Redford listened, chastened. Five minutes later he reemerged, “and from that day on he arrived early, and he was completely charming,” said Lansing. “When we’d break for lunch, I’d shoot him a look and he’d say, ‘Don’t worry, boss. I’ll be back before you know it.’ ”
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Lansing was sure she had a hit, but test audiences again disagreed. “Every screening was worse than the last,” she said. “The results were a disaster.”
She tried to reedit the film with Lyne, but “we couldn’t find the movie. Adrian shoots a lot and does a lot of takes and gives many, many possibilities. Then it’s a question of: Do you keep this scene or not? Do you move it here or put it there? We couldn’t find the arc that would make you root for the couple. Each time we thought we had it, we realized it wasn’t right.”
The more they worked, the further off they seemed. “We would test it on the Paramount lot,” said Gartner, “and sometimes [one part of] the movie would be playing while we were still mixing reels in the cutting room, and we’d run the other reels down to the theater. Then we’d cut all of the next day and test it again the next night.”
Women walked out, nauseated by some of the darker moments of the film, which included scenes in which Harrelson fantasizes about Moore having sex with Redford. “They just couldn’t handle it,” said Gartner.
Little by little, the less palatable elements were removed, while other sequences were restored to make Harrelson more sympathetic. “You had to care for the couple,” said Lansing. “That’s everything we were trying to do. But the scenes with Redford were so good and so romantic, it took a long time to find the right balance.”
While they were editing, word about the film began to spread, eliciting a flood of negative responses. Patricia Ireland, then president of the National Organization for Women, said it demeaned women, even though she had not seen the movie, while Peg Yorkin, chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation, called its premise “disgusting.”
“The most astonishing aspect of this picture is that it has made so many people of such varying views so apoplectic,” wrote Elizabeth Kaye in the New York Times. “Last week, a local Manhattan news show interviewed [sex therapist] Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who categorically stated that the picture cheapens love….One station conducted man-on-the-street interviews with men who stated categorically that the picture demeans them. In the New York Post, society columnist William Norwich reported that the English author Barbara Cartland ‘has gone ballistic.’ ‘The whole idea is absolutely disgusting, degrading and vulgar,’ Mr. Norwich quoted Ms. Cartland as saying, ‘and no woman with any pretensions to being decent would do it.’ ”
The film’s billboard stoked anger even further. It showed Moore lying half naked in a pile of cash, seeming to suggest that a woman was for sale. Anonymous opponents unleashed their rage on Lansing, plastering a picture of her face over Moore’s on billboards across Los Angeles.
“It was so personal,” said Lansing. “I felt completely humiliated.”
When the critics got to see the movie, they savaged it, and its fate looked certain: this was a large-scale flop. Then, curiously, even as the film was being pilloried by liberals and conservatives alike, by art-house reviewers and mainstream pundits, the public’s interest grew. The sheer venom the picture provoked made it more intriguing. Audiences wanted to see what the fuss was all about.
When Indecent debuted in April 1993, ticket buyers flocked to the theaters and the movie opened to $18 million, a monstrous number for a spring weekend. Redford’s career was redeemed. “[That] was a whole reconnect for him in pop culture in a huge way,” said his agent, Lourd.
Like Fatal Attraction, the movie had penetrated the culture. And like Fatal, a controversial theme had given Lansing a massive hit, proving that even without Jaffe, she was among the most capable producers in the business. She was at the height of her powers and she knew it. The uncertainty she had felt in her youth had melted away.
“I was night and day from the woman I’d been before,” she said. “I knew how to produce, and I wasn’t scared.”
With all of Lansing’s success, somet
hing was missing.
Her brother and sisters were married now, and even Norton, after Margot’s death, had found happiness with a new partner in Florida. They were spread across the country, each living full and varied lives, while Lansing was alone.
“I took a hard look at my life and career,” she said. “I knew the choices I’d made kept me happy and sane. But I was lonely and I didn’t want to stay alone.”
In the years since her 1970 divorce from Michael Brownstein, she had never remarried. True, she had had boyfriends, some remaining in her life for years, and yet none had become a life partner. She had spent seven years in an on-and-off relationship with Wayne Rogers, but they were an imperfect pair at best. He saw the world in black and white, she in shades of gray. Her passion for her work added a further strain.
“Studio executives, at that particular time in my life, represented an amorphous sort of group that blended together,” said Rogers. “I didn’t see anything individually exceptional about any of them.”
After Lansing’s appointment at Fox, Rogers’s irritation with her lifestyle grew more marked, not least when a reporter arrived at Lansing’s house for a lengthy interview and he had to cool his heels, waiting for her to finish. This became a pattern. Once, when they decided to live together, Lansing felt a wave of panic at the mere sight of his jacket in her closet. He moved out almost as soon as he’d moved in.
“We were like two ships passing in the night,” he said. “She was addicted, to a certain extent, to the responsibility of the job, and that was her first priority.”
Their relationship sputtered to an end in 1982, though they remained friends.
“Wayne was a very talented actor and a great businessman,” said Lansing. “He was intellectually curious and had a tremendous love of life. He was volatile and passionate and unconventional, but he couldn’t handle my work. After him, I came to believe I was never going to find anyone, because I couldn’t stop working. I thought every man I met was going to take something away from my life rather than add to it. With each man I felt a loss of self, rather than an increase.”
Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker Page 20