Michael Douglas

by Marc Eliot

  Michael disagreed. “She had been so powerful and so evil in a Machiavellian psycho way that it left the audience frustrated. The audience wanted somebody to kill her. Otherwise the picture was left—for lack of a better expression—with blue balls.”

  No one was sure what the film was really about, if it was about anything more than merely being an entertaining thriller. According to James Dearden: “It was all rather bizarre and not altogether comfortable. You suddenly find that a film that you see as a piece of popular entertainment is on the rack and you’re being asked to account for things that weren’t your decision and things that certainly were not intended to be interpreted the way they were being interpreted. My feeling was just leave it alone as a good thriller with an interesting subtext. I wasn’t trying to make major philosophical statements about the human condition in 1987, nor was the film some kind of parable about AIDS. When I started the script [in 1978], AIDS was still perceived as a gay problem. I don’t see that Alex symbolizes the New Woman and is therefore made to appear ghastly to sabotage the New Woman’s cause. She has a career because she lives in New York, where it’s difficult to survive without one. For me, it was a fable about the irrational creeping into the everyday.”

  Michael saw it closer to home: “I think what was a big breakthrough for me as an actor, was that when you start preparing for a role you think about your character. And I remember having a moment when I said, ‘What character? This is not about putting on the make-up, this is about wiping yourself off. I mean, I could have been a lawyer in New York, I could have had an affair, this could have happened to me.’ ” Telling words from an actor in a marriage filled with passivity who had lived a life not that far from the character he was portraying. Michael had been with other women while maintaining a marriage that on the surface seemed to the public to be idyllic. Ironically, it took a film that showed him as closer to the man he thought he really was that allowed him to break away from the type of amiable action character audiences thought he really was.

  Indeed, Dan Gallagher is so difficult a part to play precisely because of the character’s passivity. To find the handle, Michael called upon his father for advice. According to Michael, “The picture used to really drive me nuts. It’s [Dan’s] inability to act. And it was structured that way. There were places where I felt handcuffed—you want Dan to do something. I shared this with my dad, all this inability to act.… He said, ‘Well, listen Mike, you do nothing better than anybody I know.’ ” Fatal Attraction was, if not the best, certainly the most talked-about film of the year.

  WHAT FATAL ATTRACTION was to sex, Wall Street was to money.

  While Michael was wrapping Fatal Attraction, he accepted an offer from Oliver Stone to appear as Gordon Gekko, the lizard-like Mephistophelean financier in the highly prescient if excessively overwrought Wall Street. Why did Stone want Michael? According to the actor, “He saw a killer.” It was not the starring role, but it would prove the most memorable performance in the film. As Fox film executive Tom Rothman, whose studio made the film, said, “Mephistopheles—now there’s a bad guy; but bad guys make great movies, especially if they’re seductive and charming rogues bearing the promise of all you could ever desire.” This deal with the devil of a movie would prove another big win for Michael.

  Killer or not, Michael was not Stone’s first choice to play the role, which was based in part on the lives of the iconic Wall Street names of the day—Owen Morrissey, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, Michael Milken—and Stone himself. At first Fox had wanted Warren Beatty for Gordon Gekko, but Beatty said no. Stone went to Richard Gere, who also passed. Stone then thought about Michael, and was advised by some that Michael was too soft (i.e., passive) to play the killer type that the role of Gordon Gekko demanded. What Stone really needed, they said, was someone more like a younger version of Kirk. But wasn’t that what Michael was? Stone offered him the role after viewing advance footage of Fatal Attraction.

  For the leading role of Bud, Stone went to Charlie Sheen, another son of a Hollywood star, Martin Sheen, who, in an interesting bit of casting “doubling,” plays Charlie’s moral-high-road father in the film. It is perhaps no coincidence that Charlie played a similar role—an innocent corrupted, or brought to experience—in Stone’s directorial breakthrough, 1986’s Platoon, Stone’s fourth film as a director and one of the most virulent antiwar films (or anti–Vietnam War films) ever made. In Platoon, Sheen played Chris, a name with significant sacrificial meaning. In Wall Street, he played Bud Fox—a reference to innocence (and drugs) and to a predator, which is what Fox turns into before his big fall.

  Although The System was the subject, Stone originally wanted to use TV game shows for his metaphor, focusing on the notorious quiz show scandals of the 1950s. But he decided instead to tackle Wall Street. Perhaps tellingly, Stone’s father had been a broker during the Great Depression, and it was to his father that Stone dedicated the making of the film. Wall Street comes off as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment meets Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 All About Eve.

  The plot of Wall Street deals with Bud’s desire to work for Gordon Gekko. A little success turns Bud’s head around, and he allows himself to get involved with some dirty dealing. When he realizes that his father, a blue-collar airline worker, will go down with the bankruptcy of the airline as part of his deal done with Gekko, Bud wears a wire and gets Gekko to confess. The most memorable scene is when Michael as Gekko delivers his famous “Greed is good” speech.

  The film did not qualify as a water-cooler conversation piece the way Fatal Attraction did, but, like Fatal, it arrived at the height of the Reagan finance-gone-wild administration, when money was flowing freely and everyone was invested in the stock market, with cracks in the profit facade just starting to show; two months before the film’s debut the stock market crashed five hundred points, and a full-blown recession followed.

  In its way, the film was not only economically prescient but was as subversive as Platoon, stripping away the propriety that masked criminality on Wall Street at the time. In Stone’s vision, the dirty playing was nothing less than an attack on the American system.

  Stone was eager to begin production and pressed Michael to finish up his last dialogue-looping sessions for Fatal Attraction in Los Angeles and fly back to New York City to start work on the film. Shooting began on Wall Street that April, and the chemistry between Stone and Michael was apparent early on. Michael had nothing but praise for Stone: “That’s where I learned that a director doesn’t have to be a patriarch. He can just be a tough director and get the best work out of all the actors. Oliver Stone tests his actors rather than console them. And as a result, you look at all of his films and in almost every film his male lead has probably given the best performance of their life.”

  FATAL ATTRACTION OPENED on September 18, 1987, signaling the start of the holiday season, when the year’s most important, Oscar-bound films open. In the Los Angeles Times, Jack Mathews wrote that Michael’s weakness as a leading man was key to the film’s success: “When Douglas’ Dan Gallagher ruffled the sheets in Fatal Attraction, audiences trusted him in a way they might not have if he were played by Richard Gere.” J. Hoberman in the Village Voice also thought it had to do with Douglas’s cinematic image but saw that image a little differently, as the “well-fed yuppie with a face that bobs and weaves around the frame, pretending to menace the camera like a kid’s clenched fist. Douglas has perfected his ability to project a glowering sense of aggrieved, put-upon masculinity, taking on the defense of home, hearth, and career against a succession of castrating women.… [H]e is the heroic, resentful, white-guy, white-collar, heterosexual victim, the social hieroglyph and talk-show staple we might call the Mighty Kvetch.”

  Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times: “Fatal Attraction is a thoroughly conventional thriller at heart, but its heart is not what will attract notice. As directed by Mr. Lyne, who also made 9½ Weeks and Flashdance, it has an ingeniously teasing s
tyle that overrules substance at every turn. Mr. Lyne, who displays a lot more range this time, takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.… Mr. Lyne is well versed in making anything—a person, a room, a pile of dishes in a kitchen sink—seem tactile, rich and sexy.… [I]t also offers a well-detailed, credibly drawn romantic triangle that’s sure to spark a lot of cocktail-party chatter.… It’s even difficult to tell anything about this man’s inner life from Mr. Douglas’s performance, and that may be the point. He doesn’t understand it either.”

  Roger Ebert: “Fatal Attraction is a spellbinding psychological thriller that could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last minutes to give us their version of a grown-up Friday the 13th.” And J. Hoberman gave Michael his greatest review when he called the film “Douglas’ Spartacus.”

  In its opening weekend, Fatal Attraction took in $7.6 million; it grossed $157 million in its initial domestic release ($321 million, foreign and domestic, and another $70 million including cable and video), for a picture that cost $14 million to make. Michael’s salary was reportedly between $4 million and $6 million, plus percentage points, making him, at the age of forty-three, one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. Fatal Attraction was the second-highest-grossing picture of 1987, just behind Leonard Nimoy’s Three Men and a Baby, a modest and inexplicably successful fish-out-of-water comedy about three bachelors having to care for an infant, which grossed $168 million.7

  WALL STREET WAS released on December 11, three months after Fatal Attraction, to mixed-to-good reviews. Roger Ebert: “Stone’s most impressive achievement in this film is to allow all the financial wheeling and dealing to seem complicated and convincing, and yet always have it make sense. The movie can be followed by anybody, because the details of stock manipulation are all filtered through transparent layers of greed. Most of the time we know what’s going on. All of the time, we know why.” He also liked Michael’s performance but thought Sheen was miscast. “I would have preferred a young actor who seemed more rapacious, such as James Spader, who has a supporting role in the movie. If the film has a flaw, it is that Sheen never seems quite relentless enough to move in Gekko’s circle.”

  Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, was less enthusiastic: “Mr. Stone’s heart is in the right place but, ultimately, his wit fails him. The movie crashes in a heap of platitudes that remind us that honesty is, after all, the best policy.… [A]t its best, ‘Wall Street’ is an unequal struggle. At its worst, it’s a muddle.” But he loved Michael’s performance. “Mr. Douglas, in the funniest, canniest performance of his career, plays him with the wit and charm of Old Scratch wearing an Italian-designer wardrobe.”

  The rest of the important reviews pretty much followed suit: nobody really cared for the film’s hackneyed plot line (the climactic, plot-resolving wearing of a wire is as overused a cliché as there is in film); most were so-so about Sheen; and virtually all thought Michael was the best thing in it, playing a character with echoes of Burt Lancaster’s J. J. Hunsecker in Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 Sweet Smell of Success.

  Michael, however, preferred his performance in Fatal Attraction to the one he gave in Wall Street. Regarding Dan Gallagher, he said, “If the situation … if the situation ever occurred, I’d like to think I’d have told my wife, especially after the ante got raised. But I don’t know what I’d have done. That’s what makes it fun to play that guy.” As for Gordon Gekko: “Gekko’s conduct is not in my moral vocabulary. I believe you can conduct yourself in a basically moral sense and succeed. I’ve always tried to conduct myself in a decent way.… Hollywood is a small community and your reputation is one of the few things that you have.”

  At Oscar time the Academy completely misread the pulse of public opinion. If any movie in recent history had stirred the interest and emotions of its audience and made a killing at the box office while doing so, Fatal Attraction was it and Wall Street wasn’t, but the latter was the film that received all the attention and accolades. As for Fatal Attraction, the Academy tossed a few nominations its way, but gave it no coveted golden statuettes. As Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza wittily put it in their book, The Academy Awards, “Fatal Attraction couldn’t manage to pull a rabbit out of [Oscar’s] hat, much less out of a pot of boiling water.”

  THE SIXTIETH ANNUAL Academy Awards ceremonies were held on April 11, 1988, at the Shrine Auditorium, adjacent to the USC campus, where they had been moved to accommodate the award show’s red carpet, which every year kept attracting larger crowds. The ceremonies, hosted by Chevy Chase, opened with a listless version of “I Hope I Get It” from A Chorus Line that was as dull as it was when the movie itself was released two years earlier, as it played to a half-filled venue due to a massive L.A. traffic jam.

  The nominees for Best Picture of the year were Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News, Fatal Attraction, John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, and Moonstruck. The two films that dominated the awards that night were The Last Emperor (a box office failure, something the Academy normally shuns), which won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, including Best Picture, and Moonstruck, which was nominated for six and won three, including Cher for Best Actress, Olympia Dukakis for Best Supporting Actress, and John Patrick Shanley for Best Screenplay. Fatal Attraction received six nominations, including one for Glenn Close for Best Actress, one for Anne Archer for Best Supporting Actress, and one for Best Picture, and won none. Michael was nominated for Best Actor for Wall Street but not for Fatal Attraction.8

  As the evening dragged on and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor piled up wins, both the Fatal Attraction people and the Wall Street crowd began to noticeably fidget in their seats. When it was time for the Best Actor Award to be given, Marlee Matlin, the hearing-impaired actress who had won a Best Actress Oscar the previous year for her performance in Randa Haines’s Children of a Lesser God, did the presenting. After signing a quick introduction about the joys of acting, she vocally announced the names herself. The first belonged to William Hurt, who received a light round of applause—he was not in attendance and not especially well liked in Hollywood. The second was Michael Douglas (for Wall Street), to whom the audience gave a noticeably louder cheer than it had for Hurt. Dressed resplendently in black tie, with long, flowing hair neatly pushed into place and hanging over his collar, Michael smiled to the crowd and the camera. Matlin’s enthusiastic reading of Robin Williams’s name for Good Morning, Vietnam brought even louder cheers, mostly of appreciation for her struggle with this difficult-for-her title. She then announced Marcello Mastroianni, a crowd favorite who also wasn’t there, and finally Jack Nicholson, for Hector Babenco’s Ironweed. Nicholson received the loudest ovation. Dressed in a tux and wearing his signature dark glasses, Nicholson flashed his signature grin.

  And then Matlin ripped open the envelope, said softly, in her special way, “Let’s see,” then spread her arms wide and announced, “Michael Douglas in Wall Street!”

  The audience erupted. Michael stood up, bent over to kiss Diandra, and shook the outstretched hand of comedian and actor Albert Brooks, who minutes earlier had lost the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in Broadcast News to Sean Connery, for The Untouchables. Michael then strode toward the stage while the orchestra played “Fly Me to the Moon.” He was handed the Oscar by Marlee. He smiled, looked around the room, and, as the applause died down, began to speak: “Thank you … thank you all very much. I really want to thank the actors’ branch of the Academy first, for just being a nominee with four actors I really admire, and at least one that I admire and consider a close friend.” He nodded toward Jack Nicholson. “Thank you for that. And for this fellow [the Oscar] from all of the Academy I just want to share it with all the good work that was done by all the branches, whether you were nominated or not tonight. This is all with you. A large part of this award belongs to Oliver Stone. Not on
ly as the director, but having the courage to cast me in a part that not many people thought I could play. I’ll always be eternally grateful for that. And as a writer, Oliver and Stanley Weiser wrote a part that was the best part that I’ve ever had in my career. To Charlie and Martin Sheen, two wonderful actors who happen to be father and son, I thank them all very much for their help.” After thanking a host of producers and studio people, he paused, took a breath and said, “I’d like to dedicate this award to William Darrid, Diana Douglas Darrid, Anne Douglas, and Kirk Douglas, my parents and stepparents, who have been extremely supportive and loving to me over the years. In particular to my father, who I don’t think ever missed one of my college productions, for his continued support and for helping a son step out of the shadow. I’ll be eternally grateful to you, Dad.” At this point the audience interrupted the speech with a round of loud applause. When it died down, Michael concluded: “Finally, to my wife, Diandra, and all my old friends who are smiling with me tonight, thank you. And to all you movie buffs I just really appreciate for making this a wonderful night for me, thank you. And good night, Cameron, I love you!” With that, the music rose and Michael triumphantly left the stage, golden statuette in his hand.

  Later, he reflected upon the personal impact of that night: “It was tremendous … there are very few second-generation actors who’ve succeeded at all, so that question is there. It was a lovely night.”

  And a game changer for Michael. It was the first time he felt he had definitively stepped out of the giant shadow of his father’s fame. He could, for the first time, walk alone and like a man.