Tales From Development Hell (30 page)

They also gave Hart licence to bring one of the world’s most famous virologists, Karl Johnson, into the script, because although he played no part in the Reston outbreak, and did not interact with the Jaaxes in real life, everyone agreed he should be part of the story. Says Hart, “I was able to fictionalise a professional relationship [between Nancy and Karl] based on their real credentials, [as if] Karl had been involved in the outbreak at Reston. Nancy had actually studied Karl’s work in real life, so all of the strings we pulled together had roots in reality, we just fictionalised them.” At one point, Hart flew to Montana and spent time with Johnson and his wife: “He sat me down and played me audio tapes that he still had from the 1976 Ebola outbreak in Zaire, where they stood in the middle of a village not believing what they were seeing, and trying to set down for voice record a tape to send back to London, so they would know how serious this outbreak was. So I got
to go back and do Zaire [in the script] the way nobody had ever seen it, what really happened on the ground when they went into these missions and these villages, and the whole primitive approach to disease control, and how these native tribes dealt with it.”

Although elements of the story would be fictionalised for dramatic reasons, both Hart and Preston were adamant that the pathology and histology of the virus itself must remain absolutely true to life. “I was writing a work based on non-fiction that was going to be fiction,” Hart explains, “but every element of it had to be true. We couldn’t invent a cure. We couldn’t say, ‘Okay we’re gonna do this because this is how the virus behaves, or we’re gonna make this happen.’ Everything in those early drafts absolutely comes from the pathology of virus research and what the pathogens actually do and how they’re tracked and what they do to the human body.”

Hart’s numerous consultations and conversations with Preston yielded other nuggets of fact he was able to use in his script, including a so-called ‘magic bullet’ — a nun who had been infected with Ebola during the 1976 outbreak, but whose antibodies had somehow fought off the disease, and could perhaps be used to generate a serum. “The nun is real,” Hart says. “Karl Johnson told me about [her]. They actually still had her blood samples recorded at USAMRIID or CDC. Now ultimately she died, but she lasted a long time, and there were two or three other people who survived it, and all of their blood samples were sent back to this country in 1976. Tiny, the worker at the monkey house, was real, but nobody had ever told those stories, so we just amped up the story of Tiny — that if he was a carrier but also immune, he might hold the ‘magic bullet’, his might be the magic blood antibodies that could save people if they could throw off an antiserum. Karl even explained to me how to spin a blood sample in a helicopter with a coat hanger when they were in the field: because they didn’t have the lab equipment where you throw off the red and white blood cells, they would get a coat hanger and spin it as fast as they could to try to spin off the blood cells. So these guys knew what they were doing, and nobody understood how serious the outbreak was in the monkey house, and how widespread the Ebola virus could be — the only evidence we had of how virulent it was was 1976.”

Hart wrote intensively throughout the summer of 1993, finally delivering his first draft on 9 October that year. The script opens in the Ebola River region of Zaire in 1976, as Center for Disease Control virologist Karl Johnson visits ground zero during the first outbreak of the Ebola filovirus among humans. Ten pages later, the equivalent of ten minutes of screen time, the
story leaps forward to 1989, as Nancy Jaax and her ex-Army husband, now a veterinary surgeon, learn of a disease which is wiping out imported monkeys at a biological research laboratory located next to a day care centre in Reston, Virginia — just twenty-five miles from Washington, DC. It is another thirty pages before Jaax contacts Johnson to ask for his help, from which point on the pair work together to contain the spread of the virus by culling the infected monkeys. Within days, however, one of the monkeys’ handlers, Tiny, shows symptoms of the disease, indicating that the virus can jump species and is airborne. In one particularly gripping sequence, Tiny, unaware that he is carrying the virus, walks into a crowded cinema — a scene which would certainly bring home to a cinema audience the risks involved with such a virulent contagion.

Hart says his script was greeted with great enthusiasm by all concerned. “The studio were real happy, the real-life people were happy, Lynda was happy, and I was thrilled because I’d redeemed myself for getting slaughtered on
Contact.
The studio wanted me to do one more draft,” he adds, “[and] there was a lot of anticipation about it from actors, directors — everyone was sort of in line to see what we were up to. I did a bunch of drafts, but the next ‘official’ one was in December of 1993, and that’s the draft that Jodie Foster signed on to.” With Nancy Jaax very much the heroine of the film, it was perhaps unsurprising that finding an A-list actress proved relatively simple. Nevertheless, signing two-time Academy Award-winner Foster was a major coup. “Jodie loved the character of Nancy Jaax,” says Hart, “and I was thrilled when she signed on. She was the first piece of talent to attach herself.”

Behind the camera,
Das Boot
director Wolfgang Petersen — then riding high on the success of
In the Line of Fire
— topped the wish-lists of the producers of both
The Hot Zone
and
Outbreak.
“I got the scripts on my desk the same day,” Petersen told
Entertainment Weekly.
“I decided to do
Outbreak.
Sometimes you can tell a better story with fiction.” When Petersen passed on
The Hot Zone,
Fox began negotiating with director Ridley Scott, on whose behalf Paramount had unsuccessfully bid for the rights to the article, and whose own production company, Scott Free, was ready to bring half of the financing to the table. Says Hart, “It turned into a very complicated negotiation, and we were losing time against
Outbreak,
[because] they had a script they were somewhat happy with.” Preston clearly did not agree, describing Neal Jimenez’s
Outbreak
shooting script as
“Curious George Gets the Andromeda Strain”.

Scott finally signed on to direct the film in February 1994, at which point Hart suddenly found himself off the project, another victim of Hollywood’s
fondness for developing a great script into a mediocre one by throwing too many writers and too few ideas at it. Thus, he says, “After all this excitement about the script, I found out one day that Michael London, who was the executive on the project, had called other agencies looking for new writers. I was not happy,” Hart continues, “because the one thing I said to Lynda Obst after
Contact
was, ‘If I deliver for you, don’t replace me. Let me stay in the trenches with you — I’ll have done the research, these people will trust me.’ Richard Preston and I had been in constant contact, and every one of the real people was thrilled with how they had been portrayed in the script, with how the science worked, how the histology of the disease worked. To his credit, Tom Jacobson called and said, ‘Look, Jim, you’ve done the heavy lifting here, you’ve gotten us this far — this was a decision that was made in order to develop this further, because of this time crunch we’re up against,’ blah blah blah. And I said, ‘Okay, Tom, you make your own decision.’ I took my family, and went to Florida on vacation, and said, ‘You know where to find me.’”

In the meantime, Scott brought in screenwriter Tom Topor
(The Accused)
for what he describes as “an eleventh-hour, page-one rewrite” of the script, which Topor says Scott saw as “a science-fact thriller”. Although Topor describes Preston’s story as “brilliant”, he notes that it was basically about how everybody dodged a bullet, “and you can’t really make a movie about that. So Ridley’s picture was going to have to
invent.
It wasn’t exactly
fantasy,”
he adds, “because the research starts with the Ebola virus. But the script went way beyond the science.” Before Topor could begin work, however, Robert Redford had entered into negotiations for the role of Karl Johnson. The resulting disagreements over the direction the script should take sparked an internal power struggle between Robert Redford — who had signed on for $8 million and script approval — and Ridley Scott, with Topor caught in the middle. “I had a long talk with Ridley and Lynda Obst,” Topor recalls, “and the next thing I know, Lynda told me that Bob [Redford] wanted a writer he’d worked with before.” Redford’s choice was Richard Friedenberg, who had scripted Redford’s most recent film as director,
A River Runs Through It.

“I can’t remember how I got on the project, although I’m sure Bob [Redford] had something to do with it. I read and worked from Jim Hart’s script,” Friedenberg recalls, adding that he was guided by ‘notes’ — Hollywood jargon for advice on how the script should be developed — from Obst, Scott, Scott’s producing partner Mimi Polk and others. “Everybody gives writers notes,” he points out, “[even] the garbage man. And the notes always conflict.” Friedenberg says that Redford was not involved in the day-to-day development, yet his prime directive was to expand the role of Karl Johnson into one more suitable for an actor of Redford’s stature. “I met the author, Richard Preston, a wonderful guy,” says Friedenberg. “We had a good time. Talked a lot. I did research in Maryland at the centre that was in the book. Met a lot of very interesting people, learned a lot. That’s the best thing about what I do.”

Although unable to recall specific problems which he was called upon to solve, or issues his rewrite was to address, Friedenberg says that he was trying to create something “real and tough, without the usual Hollywood crap. That was the big battle — no dying daughter, or dying girlfriend, etc. How do you dramatise the situation realistically? How could it actually spread? How could you stop it? And how could you make it appeal to the studio mentality without adding in a lot of stupid, improbable rubbish? I worked out a story [outline] that I thought was quite good,” he says. “Lynda agreed. We presented it in a meeting with a lot of people. Everyone liked it except Ridley’s partner,” he adds, referring to Mimi Polk. “She said, ‘It’s crap,’ as I recall, and suddenly everyone agreed. I remember Lynda excused herself at that point and went into the lobby of the office and lay down for a while. That was the beginning of the end.” After working on the project for several more weeks, Friedenberg says he hated it so much that he begged to be fired. “I spoke to the Fox executive after a particularly egregious notes meeting and gave him all the reasons he should fire me. He took pity and let me off the hook.”

Jim Hart was still in Florida when he received a call from Tom Jacobson, begging him to come back to work on
The Hot Zone.
“He called me and said, ‘We’re under pressure from the Warner Bros project, [and] I’ve got a week to land a new outline for Redford.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘It’s moving away from what we all like.’” Hart learned that Richard Friedenberg’s outline had expanded Karl Johnson’s character, since that was the one Redford was going to play, and moved it away from Nancy as the hero of the piece. “Richard and I spoke,” Hart remembers, “and he said, ‘Use any of my work you can find in there, if you can do it. Read it, use it, good luck — I’m so glad to be off this.’” Hart agreed to come back to work on the film as soon as his vacation was over, and was ultimately able to salvage several ideas from Friedenberg’s outline, including a major plot point about a worker in the monkey house who would emerge as a carrier, and drive the third act as Jaax and Johnson hunt him down.

At this point, more cracks were beginning to show in the relationship between Ridley Scott and Lynda Obst. Says Hart, “The politics started getting real strange, because you had Redford’s influence creeping in, Ridley’s entire
gang of talent that came to the table, and you had Lynda, who really had been the driving force behind this, and is one of the most creative producers that we have in the business — she is a writer, she works well with writers, and she’s very tenacious and knows storytelling. But Ridley brought his whole company, and he was bringing half the financing to the table, so it was going to be a Ridley Scott movie, and suddenly Lynda Obst is moved outside the inner circle. And Ridley was not necessarily the friend of movie stars, and I don’t think there was any love lost between Ridley and Redford, and Ridley and Jodie.”

On top of which, Hart says, “the project had suddenly become more important than any element involved. It was now a cause: the race between this project and
Outbreak.”
It was a race that Fox wanted to win, he adds, “but at the Warner Bros studio, they had one of the longest running managements at any studio at that time, they knew what they were doing. They’d played this game before, and they knew how to win.” As Obst put it in
Hello, He Lied,
“Getting any picture mounted is a Sisyphean task, but this one was complicated by a closely observed struggle between studios and rival producers... The press and each side’s self-interest had turned [the production] into a frenzied competition between studios and rival producers that soon escalated into a pitched battle... It was the most unstable project I’d ever worked on.”

“I thought I had seen the extent of the joys and disappointments that Hollywood had to offer,” Obst added. “But none of it had prepared me for the highs and lows and lower lows of
The Hot Zone...
Every Friday, after I’d spent a full week keeping the package — the director, the script, and stars — together, it would fall apart again.” Every weekend, Obst had to hustle to put it back together. Every Monday the press would call to ask (for example), ‘Is it true that Ridley Scott is dropping out?’ ‘Of course not,’ she would reply, relieved not to be lying (at least for the moment). Then the package would threaten to fall apart again, Obst would put it back together, and another Monday would come... “This is the greatest crisis for a producer: the threat of watching your baby die. I had to keep it alive, hour by hour, day by day.” Ultimately, says Hart,
“The Hot Zone
began to founder because there were — and rightfully so — all of these very successful egos to-ing and fro-ing over this project. I remember being on the phone to Richard Preston and he would say, ‘What’s happening?’ And I’d say, ‘This is what’s gonna happen, this is why it’s gonna happen. Just watch — this is why it’s gonna unravel.’”