by Marc Eliot
However, as it turned out, far fewer filmgoers were interested in Michael’s forty-seven-year-old slightly saggy ass than in Sharon Stone’s (or her stand-in’s) young and perfectly shaped one. (A British film observer noted that “there is something gruesome about Douglas’ periodic bare buttock flashing … those pale orbs which suggest not so much Hollywood stud as 1950’s British naturist film.”)
The soft-core film that emerged from the febrile imagination of screenwriter/narcissist Joe Eszterhas, so in love with his own coked-up concoction, was, in essence, a series of sex scenes held together by a plot as thin as the rear strip of Catherine’s thong, when she wore one. Typically, in Hollywood fake-sex scenes, actresses wear what is known as a flesh-colored “Velcro of Venus,” to cover up their private parts, and actors wear a flesh-colored jock strap. For Basic Instinct, Stone quickly dispensed with the fake “skin” because, she said, “[e]very time you have to pee you have to unglue and reglue it, which is quite painful. Besides, Michael’s a real professional, and obviously there wasn’t going to be anything awkward, so I felt very safe. And of course, there isn’t anything sexy about doing sex scenes.”
And there was definitely no double used in the scene when Michael had oral sex with Sharon (nipple sucking and cunnilingus). It is difficult to believe any of it was simulated, given the position of the actors and the placement of the camera. In the seemingly innumerable interviews Stone gave after the film, in which virtually every questioner wanted to know about how the sex scenes were shot, Stone was always eager to elaborate: “We did nude sex scenes for two weeks! There’s nothing I haven’t seen about [Michael].”
The rest of the script, such as it was, went far beyond silly, with incomprehensible character twists and plot turns and at least two different endings that felt tacked on, including a brief fake fade to black shown with a soundtrack that sounds like its musicians are going to the electric chair.
Not surprisingly, the film was given the deadly X rating, the most restrictive designation of the day (the X was the equivalent of today’s NC-17, now used to distinguish mainstream films from pornography). With the dreaded X, a film could not get widespread distribution or be advertised in most mainstream newspapers, making it virtually impossible to survive strictly on word of mouth. Verhoeven, at Kassar’s desperate urging, made some cuts to the final theatrical version of the film, and at the last minute the rating was changed to the less restrictive R, just in time for a fresh round of protests from gays when it was confirmed that every lesbian in the film was portrayed as a psychotic multiple killer, conveying the idea that lesbianism equaled criminal insanity. Publicly the producers were nonplussed and insisted they had done nothing to offend the gay community. Michael, whose roots were in sixties protest, tried to reach out to the protesters and express some understanding, if not compassion, trying to reassure them that the film was not anti-gay.
But behind the scenes Kassar was thrilled; the demonstrations moved Basic Instinct from the film page to the front page and got it the kind of publicity money couldn’t buy. According to Sharon Stone, “I came up with this idea that we should get the Hell’s Angels for our security, and that was the beginning of the Hell’s Angels doing security on movie sets.”
And the “money shot” that took audiences all the way up Sharon Stone’s dress set off fireworks of another kind. Hard-core porn was easily accessible by now, but showing a woman’s privates was still taboo in mainstream movies—but, apparently, something everybody wanted to see, for once the film opened, the gay issue was overshadowed by Stone’s frontal nudity. The only other subject that engulfed viewers was the extra wow of Michael’s willingness to do extensive backside nudity.
SHINING THROUGH opened on January 31, 1992, to some of the worst reviews of Michael’s career. Janet Maslin in the New York Times wrote that “David Seltzer’s film version of Shining Through manages to lose the humor of Susan Isaacs’s savvy novel. Even stranger than that is the film’s insistence on jettisoning the most enjoyable parts of the story. There are also such memorable touches as Linda’s effort to leave a secret message inside a fish, her uncanny good luck at negotiating padlocks and locating secret documents, and her startling discovery of Nazi regalia in an acquaintance’s closet. When Shining Through has a bombshell to deliver, its touch is seldom light.”
Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, was far less tongue-in-cheek: “I know it’s only a movie, and so perhaps I should be willing to suspend my disbelief, but Shining Through is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn’t able to do that. Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously.”
The film was a modest commercial success, the popularity of its stars superseding the preposterousness of its script. The infamous Razzie Awards declared Shining Through the worst picture of 1992, with Melanie Griffith voted worst actress and David Seltzer worst director. There were also Razzie nominations for Michael Douglas as worst actor and for Seltzer in the category of worst screenwriter.
All of which made the upcoming opening of Basic Instinct that much more important to Michael. Now, after three mediocre films, he needed a big one to restore him to the A-list of Hollywood actors.
Basic Instinct opened on March 20, 1992—as it happened, Michael and Diandra’s fifteenth wedding anniversary—less than two months after Shining Through, and with far different results. On its opening weekend Basic Instinct grossed more than $15 million despite mixed reviews that were, as the saying goes, good when they were good and better when they were bad. Either way, the film’s advance notoriety had made it critic-proof.
Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin gave the film a soft nod—which, given the film and the fact that this was the Times, amounted to a rave—and for the most part ducked the sexual controversies: “Basic Instinct transfers Mr. Verhoeven’s flair for action-oriented material to the realm of Hitchcockian intrigue, and the results are viscerally effective even when they don’t make sense.”
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, the magazine that had published Eszterhas’s earlier journalism, also liked Basic Instinct, calling it a “guilty pleasure” film. “Verhoeven’s cinematic wet dream delivers the goods, especially when Sharon Stone struts on with enough come-on carnality to singe the screen.… Stone, a former model, is a knockout; Basic Instinct establishes Stone as a bombshell for the Nineties.”
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was far less enamored of Basic Instinct and gave it only two out of a potential four stars: “The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it, by the ending. Then it’s just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.”
Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote, “Funniest of all is that this whodunit gets so tangled up in its twists that half the audience can’t figure out who did dunit it when it’s over.”
As Michael feared, it became Stone’s film. He was, at best, an afterthought in most reviews, if he was mentioned at all.
TO THE SURPRISE of some and the dismay of others, Basic Instinct was invited to be screened that spring at Cannes, giving the film an extra boost of respect among the French, who, not surprisingly, were far less shocked by the film’s explicitness (and loved faux Hitchcock almost as much as they did the real thing).
At home, the film proved strong enough at the box office to make it the ninth-highest-grossing film of the year, taking in more than $117 million in its initial domestic release and $235 million worldwide.2 It brought Michael back into the spotlight, but no one considered it any kind of acting coup for him. In fact, there were many industry insiders who thought he had made a huge mistake appearing nude in a film where the focus ultimately fell on Sharon Stone. His love scenes with her made a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the scenes where he performed cunnilingus on Stone; even if he wasn’t actually giving her lip service, his face was close enough to her private parts that the difference would be
splitting hairs (parts of this scene were cut from the film’s first run but remained in the European release and were subsequently restored for its several DVD releases).
Why did he do it? Michael has said that he thought it was a good script, a good role for him, and that he knew it would be the big hit he was looking for. At the end of the day he walked away with $14 million in salary and additional money from his profit participation, laughing louder on the way to the bank than all those laughing at his performance.
But there was more to it than just money. To begin with, the film brought back the taunting by his father that had subsided for a while after Kirk’s helicopter accident. Even from his hospital bed, Kirk, recovering quickly, continually razzed Michael for being in Basic Instinct. According to one observer, “Instead of compartmentalizing his wife and lovers, as his father had done, he allowed his dybbuks to cavort in public.… He tipped over from the self-obsessed man-on-the-edge he played so well on film, to the completely selfish man-on-the-edge he played so callously in life. After years of self-loathing and repression, he had found a way to reclaim the lost territory of the large ego.”
Michael had acted out his demons on-screen. Astute film historian and critic David Thomson made the connection in a far from negative, right-on-the-money take of Michael’s performance and motivation: “Imagine at the age of 16 or so, seeing your father announcing, ‘I am Spartacus!’—a nearly naked gladiator fighting for his life, then leading the revolt of the slaves and ending up crucified! And being the producer of the movie! Michael may have mocked Dad’s style of acting, and his total immersion in himself and his work. They may have argued and quarreled. But the fact of the matter is that Michael has the same kind of self-belief on screen, without irony or mercy.… The rivalry with his father had a very telling climax … [In Basic Instinct,] Douglas played a man who was a victim of his own libido and recklessness.… There was undeniable chemistry between the stars (Douglas is often good with strong actresses) and there was an inescapable air of sado-masochism in their bonding that was oddly reminiscent of Kirk Douglas’s crazed taste for mutilation, wounding and self-abuse in his pictures. There’s no need to build up the subtext of Basic Instinct unduly—give naked exploitation and sensationalism their due.… Douglas went a good deal further than the cool studs who are his contemporaries.”
AND THEN THERE was Diandra. If Michael couldn’t be the man of the house in real life, he was, if not the best actor in Hollywood during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most overtly sexual (as opposed to the sexiest), as if what he was lacking in assertiveness at home became the fodder for what he wanted to do and be in the movies. Not surprisingly, Diandra was furious with what she saw on-screen in Basic Instinct and this time intended to do something about it. Really.
WHILE CONTROVERSY continued to swirl about the film, Michael took a break from crazy women and excessive nudity to appear in a small independent film produced by Studio Canal+ and Regency Enterprises and distributed by Warner Bros., Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (released in 1993); Michael liked Schumacher’s work on Flatliners and wanted to work with him again. Often a Hollywood star will chose a small “artistic” film to follow a hugely successful one, to prove he is still a “serious” actor. Falling Down is an infinitely better film than Basic Instinct in almost every way, and Michael agreed to be in it for relatively little money, about half his base pay for Basic Instinct.3 It is no small fact that in many ways Falling Down could be seen as a remake of what Kirk has always referred to as his favorite film, David Miller’s 1962 Lonely Are the Brave, about a cowboy stuck in the modern world, out of his element, but unwilling or unable to move forward with his life.
Michael, in frightening crew-cut mode, plays William “D-Fens” Foster, a recently divorced man who cannot take the pressures of life and finally commits suicide by cop (played by Robert Duvall). A man unable to cope with the cards he’d been dealt in life was a character Michael wanted to play. Foster’s inability to deal with life is best summed up by the film’s tagline: “I’m the bad guy? How did that happen?” It is essentially the same question Kirk, as John W. “Jack” Burns, asks of the world in Lonely Are the Brave.
Joel Schumacher remembered being reluctant to ask Michael to be in his film, especially after Basic Instinct, not knowing where Michael was coming from. He drove himself up to the house in Santa Barbara to personally call upon his hoped-for star. “The defining moment was, Michael had this fantastic long, flowing hair, and when he committed to do it, I told him I was going to give him a buzz cut. There was about 30 seconds where he hesitated—then, when he let our hairdresser know that he was willing to have the buzz cutter go across his hair, I knew he was completely and utterly surrendering.”
AFTER COMPLETING Falling Down, perhaps to repair his relationship with Diandra, Michael took her and Cameron to Spain to spend the summer of 1992 at their hillside retreat in Majorca. They were joined for part of the trip by Jack Nicholson and his girlfriend at the time, Rebecca Broussard. It was not a good mix.
Upon their return to the States, rumors began to spread that Michael’s marriage was once again on the rocks, especially after it was reported that one night just before the trip, Diandra had found Michael in bed with another woman—a charge that was never acknowledged or denied. It was supposed to have taken place at Michael’s office at the Beverly Wilshire, and the woman in question was supposed to have been one of Diandra’s best friends. Whether or not it actually happened, what was undeniable was that Michael was drinking too much and taking too many drugs, and was filled with a kind of exhaustion and despair that no vacation in Spain could repair. Upon their return, with no warming between them, Diandra insisted that Michael either get professional help or get out of her life.
Whatever the actual tipping point, on September 17, 1992, while his on-screen lover Sharon Stone continued to bask in her belated but enormous fame, a grim-looking Michael, using the alias Mike Morrell, wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and sandals, checked into the Sierra Tucson Clinic, located in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains of Arizona, for a thirty-day program to treat alcohol abuse and, as it was reported by some at the time, sexual addiction.
According to John Parker: “Encouraged by his counselor, Michael [reportedly] began his program of self-discovery when he stood up, head bowed, and gave a lengthy commentary about his inner demons and the problems that had turned him into something of a Jekyll and Hyde character. He confessed to the group of eight fellow sufferers: ‘Sex is just a wave that sweeps over me, an impulse that is overpowering. I’m helpless. Every time.’ He also admitted to a problem with alcohol and drugs, although he denied that he was addicted to either. He also said his wife had ‘kicked him out’ of the bedroom, having been repulsed by his apparently uncontrollable actions.”
Michael’s supposed sex addiction landed all over the tabloids, and that, of course, was apparently enough proof for TV’s venerable self-styled sensation-chaser Geraldo Rivera. The next day, on his TV show Geraldo announced that “Michael Douglas was one of several high-profile men who had used the services of prostitutes connected with Heidi Fleiss,” at the time a well-known madam running a house of prostitution catering to Hollywood’s rich and famous. Michael immediately threatened to sue and Rivera quickly backed down and apologized on the air, “regretting any misunderstanding or any inconvenience to Mr. Douglas.” But Geraldo, a lawyer himself, well understood that once a statement is made, whether or not the jury is told to disregard it, it cannot be ignored.
Ruth Morris, a reporter for the Independent on Sunday in London, used a little more tact in her analysis of whether or not Michael was a sex addict: “His time in rehab at Sierra Tucson was for drugs and booze. No, for the record, Michael Douglas is not a sex addict. No, indeed. He just does it a lot.”4
Later on, Michael had this to say about his addictions: “Despite all the information one accumulates, and despite the damage you know smoking wreaks on people, they still do it. It’s the same with alco
hol. Drinking has nothing to do with highs, thrills, whatever. It has to do with many other causes. Some of them inherited, as alcoholism is. Anyway, I’m not self-destructive … where did that sex-addiction stuff come from?… Some smart British editor decided to make the story about sex addiction.… That hung around since 1992, and that little lie that got a lot of press, affected how people looked at me.”
When Kirk heard about it, he laughed and said, “What’s wrong with sex addiction? I’ve been addicted to sex my whole life!”
After thirty days, Michael was released, and he took it easy for a while before gearing up for the February 26, 1993, scheduled release of Falling Down. When the film did open, it proved only a modest hit. Made for a budget of $25 million, it grossed $41 million in its initial domestic release.
DIRECTOR BARRY LEVINSON then offered Michael the lead in Disclosure, yet another dressed-up sexploitation film in which another aggressive woman battles another passive man.
In the film, which is set in the modern corporate world (filmed in Seattle), executive Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) uses sex to seduce and ultimately control former lover Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). He works for a newly merged high-tech conglomerate, DigiCom, in which she has been appointed his boss. Early on, Johnson calls Sanders into her office and, in one of the film’s more memorable scenes, makes it clear she expects him to resume their affair. Sanders, married now, rejects her sexual advances, and she vows revenge. She then institutes a sexual harassment lawsuit against him. He eventually comes up with evidence that helps get the lawsuit dismissed. However, there is more to it than that. The setup is actually a double double-cross, a corporate coup against Sanders. In the end, after a scene of high-tech electronic suspense that looks more like a pinball machine gone wild, Sanders manages to save his job, his career, the company, and quite possibly the universe. There is some suggestion that two “good women,” his new boss and his female lawyer, helped him survive and endure. In Hollywood parlance, it was clearly an attempt to cash in on Michael’s past successes—Fatal Attraction meets Basic Instinct meets Wall Street.