by Marc Eliot
Eight weeks later, on March 20, 1977, thirty-two-year-old Michael Douglas married nineteen-year-old Diandra Luker.
When Michael told Jack he was getting married, Jack couldn’t believe it: why would anyone do that to himself?1 Evidently many others couldn’t believe it either: according to Michael, “A lot of people showed up for the wedding just to believe it was happening.”
MARRYING DIANDRA had turned Michael into some bizarre reincarnated version of his father. Diandra was reminiscent of Kirk’s first wife, socialite Diana (even their names were similar). Diandra had a lot of British friends and associates because of her father’s diplomatic career, and like Diana, she had lived all over the world. That contributed to Michael’s attraction to her. And, as it turned out, Michael was more like his father than he had realized. He needed to be married.
The wedding was held at Kirk and Anne’s relatively modest house in the heart of Beverly Hills, just north of Sunset. It was a smallish affair with about twenty invited guests, including Nicholson, Beatty, and Karl Malden and his wife. Kirk also invited his good friend Gregory Peck and his wife.
Not long after, Diandra enrolled at UCLA to continue her studies and Michael began to realize how great the age difference between them was: he had married a girl so young she was still going to school. Every day, like a dutiful husband (or dutiful father), he would drive her to campus and pick her up after classes.
Marriage was a new experience for both of them. Having spent most of her time in America in Georgetown, Diandra was not at all used to seeing a grinning Jack Nicholson hanging out around the house, usually half naked and dripping wet from the pool while she was studying, or Warren Beatty playfully coming on to her with his beautiful horsey smile and jaded come-hither eyes.
What she was used to was being sheltered and pampered and having her privacy. And Michael quickly discovered that Diandra could be brittle and inflexible when it came to the ways of celebrity life. She was not at all earthy like Brenda. There was not a whiff of the sixties about Diandra.
He also had a career to deal with. He felt the marriage would find its proper level, but his career needed most of his attention now. The one shortcoming for him about Cuckoo’s Nest, if it may be called that, was that because Michael had not starred in it, a lot of people were left with the impression that he had given up acting in favor of producing. The truth was, he was itching to get back in front of the camera, but he had learned enough to know that in order to enjoy that part of it, he also had to remain behind it, to make sure things were done the way he wanted. In that sense he was no longer an actor, but rather a producer who also wanted to act.
And although he had hit the jackpot with Cuckoo’s Nest, there was already a new crop of young, eager, and competitive producer-directors mostly out of film’s new training ground, Southern California’s film schools. They included Steven Spielberg (Cal State at Long Beach), George Lucas (USC), and Francis Ford Coppola (UCLA). To the industry—meaning the people in Hollywood with the money—they were the best bets. Spielberg’s Jaws, released the same year as Cuckoo’s Nest, proved far more popular with audiences, and Lucas’s 1973 American Graffiti was a huge coming-of-age success that preceded Star Wars, which would turn him into a one-man billion-dollar industry. Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather and 1974’s The Godfather Part Two had become part of the American cinematic vernacular, among the best American movies ever made, and both would still be remembered when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which wasn’t seen all that much in theaters after its Oscar sweep, was forgotten.
These three filmmakers, along with the European Roman Polanski and to a lesser extent East Coasters Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, were the names Hollywood turned to first. Michael, on the other hand, despite his enormous succès d’estime, was still considered something of an anomaly, a one-shot wonder. It was an impression he meant to change. The first thing he did to make that happen was to actively search for a script he could both produce and star in.
ONLY IN HOLLYWOOD does a business open its door and be considered a success when product comes in rather than goes out, even if most of what comes in is worthless. A big part of a producer’s job is to wade through the tons of rhinestones to find the one diamond, and that’s just what Michael did. Wading might mean reading two pages, one page, a synopsis, or just a title and immediately knowing the script that accompanied it wasn’t what he was looking for. He wanted something so great that it could outdo Cuckoo. He knew enough about the business to know that every film can’t be a blockbuster—his father’s career was strewn with failures, interrupted by occasional not-bad movies and one-in-a-million moments of greatness, but he kept searching for that elusive gem.
One such script came across Michael’s desk in April 1977 via the U.S. mail—in other words, directly, with no interceding agent or manager. It had been written by a young screenwriter named Mike Gray and was about a disaster at a Connecticut nuclear power plant. Despite some flaws in the plot and technical theoretics, the subject matter connected Michael to the San Francisco protest era that he had so much been a part of. He was then and continued to be against the testing and production of nuclear weapons and the building of nuclear power plants in America. The script was about a nuclear accident capable of producing a meltdown that if unchecked might send radioactive material through the earth all the way through to China—just like what mothers warned children would happen if they dug too deeply in the sand at the beach.
The script was called The China Syndrome. Michael saw it as “a great horror movie, a movie about man against machine, a movie about an individual fighting the system. It had an interesting social message with all the aspects of a great thriller.” The only real problem Michael could see was that Gray also wanted to direct, and that wasn’t going to happen.
For the New York Times he elaborated further on the task confronting him: “The Jack Godell part was the heart of the story. There was no woman. The near-accident was observed by three documentary filmmakers. I thought it was a wonderful character study of a man against a machine. I like pictures about average guy heroes who aren’t smarter or stronger than anyone else but who make moral decisions and risk their lives, like McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest.” Godell was the technician who single-handedly tries to permanently shut down the power plant following a near-apocalyptic accident.
Michael wanted to cast Richard Dreyfuss in the role of the TV news cameraman, but Dreyfuss, whose breakthrough in Jaws had led him to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, both directed by Steven Spielberg, and who was set to star in Herbert Ross’s The Goodbye Girl (for which he would win a Best Actor Oscar), couldn’t fit The China Syndrome into his schedule and reluctantly passed. The fact that he asked for $500,000 didn’t make Michael all that eager to try to change his mind.
Dreyfuss’s rejection of the project made Michael start to wonder how much he really had to offer an A-list actor, and not just in terms of money. He didn’t have the reputation of a Spielberg or a Lucas, and despite Cuckoo’s Nest he didn’t have studios and distributors throwing money at him. Sure enough, when he made the rounds, he couldn’t find any financial backing for The China Syndrome. “I had thought after ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ that all the financial doors would be open to me. I had a bit of a shock when I was turned down by twelve money sources, including two major studios. They thought the nature of the material was uncommercial—awfully talky and awfully technical.”
Even Zaentz wanted nothing to do with it. He had since dissolved their partnership and moved on with several new projects, including 1984’s Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman, which would win second Oscars for both Zaentz and Forman.
AT THE SAME TIME that Michael was struggling to get his next film produced, Diandra announced that she was pregnant. Now she insisted they had to move out of smoggy L.A. and up to Santa Barbara, where the environment would be much better for their baby. Having to leave Hollywood, where he needed to be every day to hustle his new project, was about the
worst news possible for Michael. But he did it for Diandra.
They bought the first house they looked at, a Spanish Colonial Revival villa a mile from where Michael used to live on Banana Road. Diandra loved it (though she would go on to spend $10 million rebuilding it top to bottom) and quickly transferred from UCLA to UCSB to continue her studies. Michael believed that her classes and the redirection project would keep her sufficiently occupied so he could return to L.A. and try to get The China Syndrome off the ground. In the meantime, Michael appeared in a quickie movie at MGM called Coma.
Coma, a hospital-based horror film from the novel by Michael Crichton, co-starred Geneviève Bujold and Rip Torn. Unfortunately, it was also directed by Crichton. It is never a good idea when a powerful novelist believes he can direct his own movie better than anyone else, especially professional directors. The characters in Coma are undefined and the plot muddled, having something to do with missing bodies that are being warehoused (with references to Don Siegel’s classic 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The film did well, although exact box office figures remain unavailable.
HE STARTED contacting actors, believing The China Syndrome would be a faster sell with a “name” attached. Robert Redford said no in a one-sentence letter. Nicholson actually thought about doing it, but before a deal could be set he signed on with Stanley Kubrick to make the film version of Stephen King’s The Shining.
Michael then approached Jack Lemmon, another liberal-minded actor who happened to be active in the anti-nuclear movement. He had recently narrated an PBS television documentary called Plutonium: An Element of Risk that had upset a lot of network people as well as viewers, marking the end for a while of anything that smelled like a political broadcast by the network during prime time. None of that, Michael knew, helped The China Syndrome, but he thought he might try to get Lemmon to be in the film anyway, since he wouldn’t be immediately put off by the material.
Sure enough, Jack was eager to play Jack Godell. After only a two-minute conference phone call with Jack and his agent at William Morris, Lenny Hirshan, Jack was aboard.
The way the original script was written, Jack was far too old to play Godell, who was originally supposed to be a thirty-two-year-old fiery idealist. No problem, Michael said, and hired a relatively unknown writer (for a relatively small fee) to revise Godell’s character to fit the fifty-something Lemmon.
This project was still going nowhere fast when another major player came in out of left field. Despite her pedigree and having been one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Jane Fonda, at the time, was anathema to the studios, for her outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam—her 1972 trip to North Vietnam had gained her the dubious moniker “Hanoi Jane,” that she would never be able to completely shed.
Columbia Pictures was one of the few studios that didn’t turn away from Fonda. Sherry Lansing, high up on Columbia’s executive scale and a personal friend of Fonda’s, was politically sympathetic and suggested to Michael that she just might be able to get his nukes-gone-wild film moving.
At the time, Fonda was in London with producer Bruce Gilbert trying, without much luck, to develop a film based on the Karen Silkwood story. Speaking to Michael over the phone, she suggested they somehow combine the two similarly themed projects into one film.
Just not right away. Fonda had committed to Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (for which she and her co-star, Jon Voight, would win Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively, Voight for his portrayal of a paraplegic Vietnam veteran and she for her role as the married woman who falls in love and has a physical relationship with him).
One day during the filming of Coming Home, Michael visited the set, and over lunch he, Gilbert, and Jane agreed she would make The China Syndrome in partnership, provided she could play the female reporter who works with Godell to help uncover and then publicize his story. (In the final script there is a scene where the car Jane’s reporter character is driving is almost run off the road by another car; the scene was added at her request so at least something reminiscent of the Silkwood story would appear in The China Syndrome.)2
With this team of actors in place, including himself in the role of Richard Adams, a maverick cameraman who plays an integral part in the unfolding plot and its ultimate resolution, Michael, partnered with Jane’s IPC Films, went to Columbia, and struck an unusual deal with Sherry Lansing. The studio would not produce the film but instead agreed to finance a $5 million note for Michael to allow his company to produce what would be a small, independent film, which Columbia would then distribute, with the first monies earned going to the studio to pay off the loan.
Hiring Jane Fonda meant that the picture had taken a step up in both budget and (to some) prestige, and that Mike Gray was officially out as director (he had never been a real consideration, but Michael had no reason to eliminate him before a deal was set). Gray vehemently protested that his “little” film was being taken away from him, but Michael calmly explained the facts of Hollywood life. There was no way Columbia would let a first-time screenwriter direct his own script.
Michael offered the job to James Bridges, whose credits included 1973’s hit film The Paper Chase, for which he had been nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. Bridges initially turned down the project, unsure of where the nexus of the drama lay, and also a little bit afraid the story might be too political and wind up hurting his own career. Fonda, however, kept at him, and nineteen days later she convinced him to make the movie. “Jim’s reasons for refusing weren’t valid,” she said later. “He was just scared of working with stars.”
Bridges wanted to shape the story more as a thriller than a straight polemic. To do so, he followed the plot as it unfolded in real time, with very little backstory of the film’s characters.
Michael then had to find a suitable location to make the film. As he had with Cuckoo’s Nest, he wanted to shoot on location. He knew that finding a cooperative nuclear power plant would not be easy. Much to his surprise and delight, the Trojan Nuclear Plant in Oregon—without the cooperation of the Department of Energy—agreed to let the production crew take photographs inside the plant that were later used to create a duplicate of the interior in Hollywood. At the same time, Jane was busy working with Bridges on the script, carefully deleting anything that made her sound preachy or overly technical. She correctly continued to insist that in order to work, The China Syndrome had to be an entertaining film with a message, rather than a message film that might or might not be entertaining.
There was relatively little trouble during the shoot, even as Columbia was preparing a seventy-two-page PR document that mentioned the title of the film but not once the word “nuclear,” despite the fact that a nuclear accident is central to the film’s drama and the fate of Godell, and that mentioned Fonda as little as possible. In fact, in order to sell the film to distributors and theaters, they positioned it as a suspenseful drama without mentioning any political issues at all: it was “a contemporary thriller about a television news reporting team” and “an astonishing look at the uses of power—redemptive as well as corruptive,” a “monster movie with technology the monster.”
Upon completion of filming, Columbia planned a selective advance screening program, providing cards so that preview audiences could give their opinions. Three weeks prior to its official release, Columbia began a $1.5 million TV ad campaign, something then still relatively new to the film business, and set up dozens of media interviews for its stars. Columbia had managed to book the film into seven hundred venues, a relatively large number for what they still considered a small picture.
Talking with Look magazine, Michael downplayed the film’s more controversial story line of the nuclear power plant mishap. “In telling The China Syndrome story, everyone gets sucked right into this nuclear issue. It’s very volatile and we don’t want to categorize it as a Jane Fonda anti-nuke film.” Michael later told one reporter asking how good it was to work with his co-stars. “Jack Lemmon was such a gentleman—a treat. Jane Fon
da was just extraordinary. And she had a great butt. She still does.”
THE CHINA SYNDROME opened on March 16, 1979, to respectable box office. The next day Michael, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and James Bridges went to Central Park’s Tavern on the Green for a luncheon that the New York Times described, perhaps unintentionally, as a “blinding flash of promotion.” Michael, looking pale and slender, told a reporter from the paper that he had spent “time riding around Los Angeles with a television news team to add verisimilitude to his portrayal of the cameraman whose persistence and courage uncovers callous corruption imperiling an entire city in the operation of the nuclear power plant.”
In its first two weeks The China Syndrome grossed $15 million in its initial domestic release, bringing it close to a profit position (after production and promotional costs), despite an expected corporate-energy-based organized protest against the film. The filmmakers were labeled as irresponsible fear-mongers, with the events of the film dismissed as a never-could-happen scenario designed to turn people against the business of nuclear power. Jane Fonda’s name was frequently dragged into the attacks, which called the film another propaganda product of the anti-American “Hanoi Jane.”
The film received good reviews, although no out-and-out raves. Variety called it “a moderately compelling thriller about the potential perils of nuclear energy, whose major fault is an overweening sense of its own self-importance.” Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “a terrific thriller … that incidentally raises the most unsettling questions about how safe nuclear power plants really are … but the movie is, above all, entertainment.” Andrew Sarris noted in the Village Voice that “most of the acting struck me as subtle, sophisticated and modulated. But somewhere along the line I got the feeling that something was missing.” He also described Fonda’s performance as “self-parody.… She may even be reflecting her own transition from the Roger Vadim era of narcissistic display to the Tom Hayden era of political activism.” Almost in passing, he dismissed Michael Douglas’s acting as resembling that of an “unregenerate ’60s style radical.” Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, praised the acting and the direction but ultimately decided that “The China Syndrome doesn’t keep us on the edges of our seats because it’s so uplifting.”