by Marc Eliot
With Hal Holbrook in The Star Chamber, 1983. Rebel Road Archives
Lobby poster for 1985’s sequel to Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile. Rebel Road Archives
With Alyson Reed in A Chorus Line, 1985, made in New York City. Michael acted during the day and spent his evenings as a producer, prepping The Jewel of the Nile. Rebel Road Archives
With Glenn Close in the shocking climax of 1987’s Fatal Attraction. The film turned Michael into a sex symbol, Close into a star, and made a killing at the box office. Rebel Road Archives
Michael’s portrayal of Gordon Gekko in 1987’s Wall Street won him his second Oscar, his first for Best Actor. Rebel Road Archives
Reuniting with Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito in DeVito’s The War of the Roses, 1989, a black comedy about a crumbling marriage, a subject Michael knew something about. Rebel Road Archives
With Andy Garcia in 1989’s Black Rain, a film Michael made for Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe at Paramount.
Rebel Road Archives
Doing a little publicity with Maria Shriver on the Sony Pictures lot, 1992.
Rebel Road Archives
Michael carrying Melanie Griffith to safety in the soap-opera-ish Shining Through, 1992. The film made no sense, but set the table for Michael’s spectacular other 1992 film, Basic Instinct. Rebel Road Archives
Michael getting to know Sharon Stone in 1992’s Basic Instinct. The film nearly ended his marriage; not long after, he entered rehab. Rebel Road Archives.
Basic Instinct created a worldwide sensation. A poster for the Spanish version. Rebel Road Archives
A remarkably different-looking Michael Douglas in the post-rehab, off-beat Falling Down, 1993. Rebel Road Archives
Back on more familiar, sexual turf in 1994’s Disclosure, costarring the seductive Demi Moore. Rebel Road Archives
With Annette Bening in the pre-Lewinsky ode to the Clinton presidency, The American President, 1995. Rebel Road Archives
In 1996’s The Ghost and the Darkness, a film he coproduced with Michael Reuther, with a screenplay by William Goldman. The film disappeared quickly and so did the partnership between Michael and Reuther. Rebel Road Archives
With Gwyneth Paltrow in the Hitchcock-lite redo of Dial M for Murder, A Perfect Murder, 1998. Reportedly, the twenty-five-year-old Paltrow objected to having to play the romantic leading lady opposite the fifty-four-year-old Michael, feeling he was too old for the part. They never worked together again. Rebel Road Archives
With Robert Downey Jr., in Wonder Boys, 2000, one of Michael’s best films, though it never found its audience. Rebel Road Archives
Father and son in 2007. AP Photo/Adam Hunger
Michael with his troubled son, Cameron, in 2009. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
Michael, in remission after cancer treatment, with his second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, October 13, 2011. AP Photo/Phil Klein
CHAPTER 15
Coping stops you from much self-analysis or explanation. I hide behind my work a lot. When I talk about being a chameleon, it means basically reflecting who you are with at the time. You are always protecting yourself.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
“THE SEX FILM TO END ALL SEX FILMS,” AS IT WAS dubbed by its promotional team, Basic Instinct began in the 1980s as an original screen treatment by Joe Eszterhas, who’d spent six years of his childhood in Austria in refugee camps after World War II, where the world was viewed as a cold and nasty place, murder and death were commonplace, and the wealthy were perceived as villains—a worldview he carried forward into his life as an adult. A former award-winning senior editor for Rolling Stone, he shared a screenwriter credit with Tom Hedley for Adrian Lyne’s 1983 Flashdance and took solo credit for Richard Marquand’s 1985 courtroom thriller Jagged Edge, which starred Jeff Bridges (one of the other son-of-Hollywood pretenders to the leading-man throne in the 1980s) and relative newcomer Glenn Close, that began his immersion into scripts and stories that specialized in lurid sex and violence. After a brief bidding war, Eszterhas was given $3 million based on an outline of Basic Instinct.
The generous payer was Mario Kassar’s Carolco Pictures, an independent production company already under a crushing $180 million debt prior to its release of Paul Verhoeven’s futuristic Total Recall, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The film would eventually gross nearly $300 million and pull Carolco out of its financial hole, and the release of Basic Instinct would temporarily line Carolco’s pockets with more gold, but neither film would prevent Carolco from going bankrupt in 1995.) Kassar was desperate to make Eszterhas’s sexy, or at least sex-laden, script, originally titled Love Hurts (which reappears in the film as the title of one of Catherine Tramell’s bestselling paperback novels), because he understood one of the most ironclad rules of Hollywood: sex sells.
According to Carolco’s many press releases for the film, Kassar wanted Michael Douglas and only Michael Douglas to play the lead role of Detective Nick Curran. However, Michael was far from the only choice, and certainly not at the top of Kassar’s list. Other actors who were offered it but wanted no part of Eszterhas’s masturbatory screenplay were Peter Weller, Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Kurt Russell, Mickey Rourke, Alec Baldwin, Don Johnson, Tom Cruise, and Patrick Swayze. Only Michael, whose instincts were impeccable, could see Basic Instinct as not just a big picture, but a phenomenon, one that would polish his slightly tarnished leading man image by allowing him to play a slightly tarnished rogue cop. The Academy, he knew, loved that kind of doubling.
Kassar eventually agreed to Michael, not necessarily for his acting abilities but because no other big name would do it. Now he hoped to pick up the dropped ball of Michael’s success with Fatal Attraction by making another controversial film filled with sex and nudity about a damaged man who becomes emotionally entangled with a woman who may or may not be murderously psychotic.
However, the similarities between the two films ended there. Whereas Fatal Attraction had been written by the relatively unknown and talented James Dearden, from his original story, carefully developed over years of writing and the production of one experimental short based on his own script, Eszterhas’s film slipped through the cracks of his funky, stoned, and coked-up imagination; it took him only thirteen days to write it, and played like it on-screen. The plot was confused and contradictory, the characters behaved without any obvious motivation, and bodies piled up for no apparent reason and with no visible reactions from those who killed them.
Nonetheless, Eszterhas knew Carolco was desperate to film the screenplay, which already had created a buzz around it in Hollywood, and loudly expressed his usual caveats about producers who take his precious, brilliant scripts and turn them into something conventional and mediocre (and more often than not, turn a profit). This time Eszterhas took advantage of Kassar’s desperation and had written into his contract the right to approve of the choice of producer. He also made the studio head put up $1 million in escrow that would immediately go to Eszterhas if Kassar didn’t keep his word.
Eszterhas’s choice to produce was Irwin Winkler, who had done the inexplicably popular if hopelessly cornball Rocky movies, but also Martin Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull and even one of Eszterhas’s early and superior scripts, 1988’s Betrayed—a vehicle for the then red-hot Debra Winger, directed by prestige-of-the-moment European director Costa-Gavras—which had done fairly well at the box office ($25 million in its initial domestic release). With all his blockbuster “serious” hit movies, Winkler had earned Eszterhas’s trust. Eszterhas especially liked Winkler’s ability to easily slip back and forth between literate films (which Eszterhas believed Fatal Attraction was) and popular pulp (which he also thought Fatal Attraction was).
At a July 1990 meeting, Paul Verhoeven, whom Winkler had hired off the success of Total Recall, clashed with Winkler over the extensive changes the producer wanted to make to Eszterhas’s script; Verhoeven felt it was fine the way it was, with all its sexual deviation int
act, including Catherine Tramell’s ambiguous S&M preferences.
In Eszterhas’s original script, Tramell is a successful detective novelist whose real-life adventures feed the plots of her novels, or perhaps vice versa. Verhoeven and Winkler nearly came to blows over one explicit lesbian love scene, which Verhoeven wanted and Winkler didn’t, that required extensive nudity from its leading characters, but Kassar thought the team he had assembled, despite their differences, could make a movie that approached the edge of acceptability without going over the line.
Michael, too, had expressed concern about how his character was written, especially Detective Curran’s sexual passivity. Curran seemed little more than a foil for Tramell, who was the whole show, and who was too easily able to sexually entrap men. He told Winkler there had to be more scenes that showed Curran’s aggressive side; the character needed to be stronger emotionally (even though that would take away from the manipulative sway Catherine has over him). Michael was looking for major attention with this film, and he didn’t want to be lost in the shadows of Catherine’s broad reach.
Winkler assured him that everything would come together the way he wanted. Michael trusted him and officially signed on. What didn’t come together were the divergent opinions of Verhoeven and Eszterhas. Following a few more preliminary meetings, both threatened to quit. Eszterhas didn’t want his precious script changed for Michael, and Verhoeven didn’t want Eszterhas or anyone else telling him how to direct. Kassar called for a break, to give both sides a chance to cool off.
Two weeks later, Winkler and Eszterhas together informed Kassar that unless Verhoeven was fired, they were leaving the project. When Kassar refused, both Winkler and Eszterhas quit, taking their guaranteed pay-or-play total of $4 million with them and leaving behind Eszterhas’s script for Kassar to do with it whatever he wished.
Kassar was less than thrilled. He had by now paid out nearly $20 million and for it didn’t have a polished script, a producer, or the two crucial leads.
Moreover, the gay community was now up in arms at the way lesbian behavior was being portrayed in the script, whose juicier parts had already been extensively and luridly leaked to and summarized to the gossip press that fueled the anger of Hollywood’s well-organized gay community. At that point, sensing that the film might never get made, Verhoeven softened his position. After the departure of Eszterhas and Winkler, Verhoeven suggested to Kassar that he hire Gary Goldman to rework the script and reduce the amount of the straight and gay explicit sex it contained.
However, after Kassar rejected Goldman’s draft, Verhoeven personally called Eszterhas to try to bring the screenwriter back into the fold. Once again they screamed, cursed, and threatened each other, but this time each was willing to cooperate for the sake of saving the film. A few modifications were made to what had been Eszterhas’s original script, and that was that—the film’s writer was back.1
The next step was crucial: finding the right leading lady to play opposite Michael, someone who was hot, young, beautiful, not afraid to show full frontal nudity, willing to expose her private parts, and not be shy about performing in explicit sex scenes that included lesbianism, bondage, and drugs. At one point the list of potential leading ladies ran to 150 names, but the line of actresses actually showing up at Carolco’s door was not nearly that long. With the early negative press the film had already gotten, and the internal skirmishes that had threatened to abort the project before a single frame was shot, Verhoeven decided he had no choice but to cast the little-known Sharon Stone, who had all but stolen Total Recall from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The young Pennsylvania-born former Ford model had worked on high-fashion gigs all across Europe before returning to America at the age of twenty-two to become a film actress. She quickly landed a tiny but memorable role in the last scene in Woody Allen’s 1980 Stardust Memories as “Pretty Girl on Train.” The role consisted of all of two minutes on-screen, but Allen’s movie hinged upon the impact of her face and her flirtatiousness through the train window.
What followed was twelve years and seventeen features’ worth of mannequin roles before Verhoeven cast her in Total Recall, a meatier mannequin than she had thus far been able to land, one where audiences would see her spectacular face and body for more than a couple of seconds. Playboy magazine quickly came calling, and she happily posed nude for it. Verhoeven liked her for Catherine and knew he could get her, no matter what the role called for her to do. At thirty-two, relatively late in the game for Stone, she would agree to make it with men and women, with or without clothes, appear to enjoy bondage and discipline games, and even flash her private parts in one brief scene that sent the other characters, including Michael Douglas’s, into cold sweats, as it would male audiences everywhere (and would become known as “the beaver shot heard round the world”).
Michael felt he had the right to choose his leading lady and was less enthusiastic about Stone. He was concerned she wasn’t a big enough star to play opposite him. “Between the hype of the [$3 million] script and the nudity, a lot of actresses we had hoped for were put off by the part. Women are often caught between politics and a particular role. But I thought that as dangerous as the film was, it was also that good of a woman’s part. The irony is that for many male actors, playing a good heavy has made their careers.” His personal short list included Julia Roberts (who had done an excellent job for him in Flatliners), Michelle Pfeiffer, Geena Davis, Ellen Barkin, Cher, Kim Basinger, and Kathleen Turner (although she was older and had put on a significant amount of weight since The War of the Roses and might no longer be able to pull off the role of the femme fatale as believably as she had in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 Body Heat).
They all said no, saving Verhoeven the unpleasant task of saying no to them (except Turner, who briefly considered it, until Verhoeven ultimately decided not to offer her the role). Eventually, due to the process of elimination, Sharon Stone’s name made it back to the top of the list. Michael then looked at her screen test again, still worried about being upstaged, but decided to green-light her.
For the crucial supporting role of an Internal Affairs therapist who had had a secret lesbian affair with Catherine in college that more or less plays into the film’s central plot, such as it is, Verhoeven chose the luscious and underappreciated Jeanne Tripplehorn. Michael and Verhoeven agreed that if their leading lady was a relative unknown, the supporting female leads—Tripplehorn as Beth Garner and Leilani Sarelle as Catherine’s current and crazy female lover, Roxy—had to be even bigger unknowns, in the crisscross bottom-line parlance of industrial Hollywood.
As production began again in April 1991, the director immediately focused on the sex scenes: the opening S&M-and-murder scenes with Catherine and Johnny Boz, the former rock star; the near-rape of Beth by Nick (apparently added at Michael’s suggestion, to make Nick appear more twisted; the shoot went through endless retakes plus twelve pairs of panties specially made for Tripplehorn so they could be torn away by Michael); and Nick and Catherine’s two lengthy and explicit sex scenes. (Doubles were reportedly used for both Stone and Michael, their bodies cleverly intercut with the stars’. Regardless, there was a lot of flesh exposed by both actors.)
And then there was the scene. In it, Catherine is called in for questioning following the S&M ice-pick death of her lover Boz in his own bed at his luxe manse, which the police strongly suspect she committed. Catherine, vodka in her veins, sits in a lone chair opposite half a dozen detectives. With a spotlight shining down on her, she singles out Nick: “Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick?” was one of Eszterhas’s more poetic lines of dialogue. As she does, she uncrosses and crosses her legs, and the camera reveals not only that she is not wearing any panties but that she doesn’t shave, as it gives us a clear, if momentary, view of her privates. It marks the moment, and the pathway, of Stone’s entrance to stardom (after Basic Instinct, Stone’s asking price to be in a film started at $2.5 million).
Much has been made about the scene, and both
Verhoeven and Stone contradict what the other says actually happened. According to Stone, “It was Paul Verhoeven’s idea. We talked about it from the beginning but it was a big surprise how it turned out. The way it was put to me was that you wouldn’t see up my dress, you would just have the illusion that you could see up my dress. I was surprised when you actually could. It was a big shock to have that kind of graphic nudity.” She also claimed that when she saw the rushes she slapped Verhoeven in the face. She may have been looking ahead and trying to put some distance between her and the character, with her eye, rather than other body parts, on future projects.
However, witnesses there told a different story. One person on the set during the filming and also at the screening of the dailies said, “Sharon loved it!” That sentiment was echoed by Stone herself before the film was released, when everyone was talking about what they thought (hoped) they were going to see. “At least it proves I’m a natural blonde!” she joked to anybody who would listen. (But she reportedly expressed her true priorities to the cameraman, threatening, “If I see one ounce of cellulite on the screen, you’re a dead man.”)
Verhoeven too dismissed what he considered her Janey-come-lately protests, claiming that every frame of the film was storyboarded and Stone knew what was expected of her. Also, as instructed, she wore no panties for the scene, and with the way it was lit and the position of the camera, it would have been impossible for her not to know what was being filmed.
The scene didn’t bother Michael for its borderline pornographic explicitness as much as it confirmed his fear that Stone was, indeed, going to steal the film, which may explain why he, too, was suddenly willing to be naked in several sex scenes, as long as his privates were not seen frontally. In their penultimate sex scene together, Stone ties him up as she had Johnny Boz, leading the audience to think that Nick is either going to be killed or going to get what he later describes to his partner as “the fuck of the century.”