What Just Happened? (17 page)

There either is or is not a Way Things Are. The color of the day, the way it felt to be a child, the feeling of salt water on your sunburned legs.

Sometimes the water is yellow and sometimes it is red.

But what color it may be in memory depends upon that day.
I'm not going to tell the story the way it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it
.

With Alfonso's lavish direction, Mitch's inventive screenplay, and spiked with Mamet's narration, we somehow wriggled our way to a decent picture. After this production wrapped, Mitch, Alfonso, and I didn't speak to each other for a couple of years. Some of the wounds are still wet.

The expression
pushing tin
is not an inside joke coined by a traveling tuna can salesman. In the dimly lit operations room of the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, air traffic controllers say they are ‘pushing tin' when referring to the daily grind of carefully guiding airplanes through the sky so they don't crash into each other. The allowable margin of error for this job is zero.

When I first read the article in the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
, written by Darcy Frey, documenting the horrors and the pressures of this occupation, my producer's heart started beating. The arena was a large room filled with radar scopes occupied by savagely bug-eyed air traffic controllers twitching and cursing as they tried to keep themselves from ‘going down the pipes' – words used for the high anxiety of dealing with the possible near-miss or the midair collision that was always one bad mistake away. As the multitude of dots on their respective radar screens randomly run amok, reaching their peak on holiday weekends, the controller, to retain his sanity, has to convince himself that these little dots are not metal death ships filled with real people, they are just dots.

The maddening pressures inherent in the job are so extreme that all of these guys are emotionally kicked in the ass one way or another. They either drink, adopt weird physical tics, cheat on their wife, acquire peculiar superstitions, or just go categorically nuts. One guy, according to the article, while guiding ten jets in a great
curving arc toward Newark, New Jersey, suddenly lost his communication system as he turned his pilots onto final approach. He rose from his chair shrieking and started tearing off his clothes. By the time someone stepped in to land the planes, he was quivering on the floor naked before being taken away. He was discharged on a medical leave until he could regain his wits. He tried a few times to visit his buddies at the TRACON station, but he never had the cojenes to return to the scopes again. When he did come in, his buddies looked the other way, superstitiously hoping that his bad juju wouldn't rub off on them.

What an arena!
M.A.S.H
. on wheels. The fallout of all this stress would be where the drama, the dark humor, and the morality tale would come together. There it was: The perfect setting for a movie. I figured it was so good, the geniuses at Fox would never get it.

I called Bill Mechanic and explained.

‘Bill, we gotta buy this.'

‘I agree.'

‘But, Bill—'

‘I agree.'

‘Bill, it might be expensive.'

‘I like it. Run it by Ziskin.'

I called Laura Ziskin, who was running Fox 2000.

‘Laura, I just spoke to Bill.'

‘I read the article.'

‘Laura, we gotta get this.'

‘I agree.'

Huh? This was eating ice cream for breakfast. Too easy. Within a week we were the proud owners of the article for the princely sum of $200,000, which included the right to use real moments from some of the controllers' lives. Things were so smooth, I started to hum the title song from
Car Wash
. I couldn't get the rhythm riff out of my head for three days. This must be what it's like to be Spielberg when he gets an itch for an idea. Everyone nods ‘yes' like a spring-loaded doll's head. Didn't anybody stand up and ask, ‘Who wants to see a bunch of nuts freaking
out in front of radar screens and then go home and fuck their neighbor's wife?'?

Quite frankly, no.

The next step in the producer's handbook after securing the rights to a stellar idea is to hire a screenwriter. The story seemed to be shaping up as a drama/comedy exposing the foibles of people whose jobs put them under massive anxiety. Actually, at the time, we didn't know whether it would be a comedy or a drama or maybe both, but the delineation of that didn't concern us. It was going to be a movie about people crashing, not necessarily planes crashing. I began the agonizingly endless procedure of reading screenplays from lists and lists of writers who might be right for this kind of an idea, someone who understood how to write comedy while drawing from real situations and real people. If you are looking for excellence, the list narrows quickly. Very high in this group were Les Charles and Glen Charles, the brother team that was the creative force behind the classic television series
Cheers
. I was being diligent. In fact, the more I thought about the Charleses, the more I thought they would be ideal. I was about to call Ziskin to make my case when the phone rang.

‘Hi, it's Laauurra,' she purred, always seeming to be surprised by the sound of her name.

‘Hello, Laura.'

‘I got an idea for you.'

‘Good.'

‘Do you know who the Charles brothers are?'

‘Well, yeah, I wa—'

‘Their agent just called the studio and said they want to write the air traffic thing.'

‘Laura, they called
us
?'

‘Yeah, he said they want to write it bad.'

‘Laura, I was about to ca—'

‘I think we should hire them.'

‘Uh … me too.'

I must have been in dreamland.

‘Laura, aren't they very expensive?'

‘So what?'

Could this producing thing get any easier?

I learned later that while we at Fox were trying to buy the article, the Charles brothers had read it, liked it, and tried to buy the piece privately. We got there first. They liked it so much, however, they decided to offer their writing services anyway. A deal was quickly struck.

Working with the Charles brothers was interesting. They came from TV. There's a weird line drawn in Hollywood between those who work for television and those who work for movies. Granted, the line has been blurred on numerous occasions, but the way I see it, in most cases TV producers/writers end up with the money (real big money) and film people are mainly left with attitude. The earnings from the syndication rights from a hit television series are so vast that the recipients never have to work again. Glen and Les Charles never had to work again. This was new for me, working with screenwriters who are laced with money and have no attitude. They were even politically connected. During the prep period when our production staff was struggling to get access to some California TRACON facility, one of the brothers unassumingly said, ‘Why don't I call Barbara Boxer [then a California U.S. senator]. I'm sure she or her office would be glad to help.' My God, a screenwriter with pull was almost an oxymoron.

Not only were they eager to write the script, they actually wanted to please us. They were always open to ideas, willing to collaborate, and available at all times to meet and rethink the direction we were going. Dealing with the Charles brothers was like melting butter. During filming, when I offered to fly them to the set in Toronto to discuss some additional script work, they politely declined our reimbursement gesture, saying they would come at their own expense. We soon discovered they had their own private plane and didn't want us to know they didn't like to fly commercial. It gets better. When the script was finally completed several months later, it was excellent.

It was just a first draft, but I decided to turn it in.

‘Bill, what'ya think?'

‘It's good.'

‘Bill, is it too soon to discuss the next step?'

‘Go get a director.'

‘Bill, that's the step I meant.'

‘I know.'

Hmmmm.

‘Hi, it's Laauurra.'

‘What'ya think?'

‘I really like it.'

‘I'm so glad.'

‘Go get me a list of directors.'

‘Why not?'

It was
Groundhog Day
for producers. I woke up and everyone said ‘yes.' I woke up the next day and everyone said ‘yes' again. Hell, let's find a director.

Before I had a chance to really examine all of the possibilities, I got another call from Ziskin.

‘Hi, it's Laauurra.'

‘Hello, Laura.'

‘What do you think of Mike?'

‘Nichols?'

‘No, Newell.'

‘Oh.'

Mike Newell's star had been rising quickly. He had directed the low-budget comedy hit
Four Weddings and a Funeral
and the recently released
Donnie Brasco
with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Without my knowing him, he seemed to have the right sensibilities for this piece. Maybe I should think it over. Whom was I fooling? I thought he would be terrific. I just wished that I had thought of it.

‘Well …' I said.

‘He's a friend of mine and I just talked to him about it,' she cooed.

‘You did?'

‘Guess what?'

‘What?'

‘He
responded
.'

‘Is there anything I need to do?'

‘Not really, I'll send it to him.'

‘Okay, then.'

You get where this is going. Of course, Newell wanted to direct the movie. I became immobilized. I sat at my desk waiting for the phone to ring so I could yell, ‘Blackjack!'

With Newell's commitment we were able to assemble an outstanding cast of special actors. John Cusack would play the high-flying air traffic controller Nick Falzone, the best of the best. That is, until the crazed daredevil Russell Bell, played by Billy Bob Thornton, comes to town and derails him. As they engage in games of one-upmanship, their respective wives, Cate Blanchett and Angelina Jolie, get embroiled in the complicated mess.

To save money we agreed to shoot the movie in Toronto and make it look like Long Island. Production went along swimmingly. The dailies looked good. In one scene, Angelina Jolie grabs Billy Bob's ass, then nuzzles his neck, which made me think that was some damn fine acting until I was told they had fallen in love on the set for real. We even stayed on budget and pretty much kept to the schedule. We all got along, and even the artistic disagreements were manageable. But by now, you already knew that.

There was only a minor hint that everything might not be kismet. After the movie was screened in Los Angeles, I was walking down the hallway by the marketing division, near Bob Harper's office, where I thought I overheard a female voice saying, ‘Does anyone really want to see John Cusack naked?' I stopped to listen for the answer. I leaned into the doorway. Too late. Two secretaries looked up. The moment had passed, and I chose to ignore it. Anyway it was compensated for by Peter Travers's
Rolling Stone
review, which said, ‘Like the best movies,
Pushing Tin
takes us into a new world. And this world, which finds fresh hell in the phrase “fear of flying,” is a lulu. It's rowdy, raunchy, and
action-packed, even if it is bound to turn audiences into infrequent fliers.'

A couple of weeks after
The Matrix
overwhelmed the box office, our movie opened in eighteen hundred theaters, April 23, 1999.

Total cost: $38,000,000.

Total domestic gross: $8,400,000.

Do the math.

‘Get it, Jerry …
do the math
.'

‘I get it.'

‘You see what I'm sayin'?'

‘Sure, sure.'

‘Stay with me, Jerry.'

‘I am. I liked the last bit.'

Greased on wine and waiting for dessert, Jerry had conspicuously lost interest in my journey. By this time, Giorgio's was packed. Getting from one table to the next required moving and bumping into people's seats just to get to the door. Each table was filled with some Hollywood type. Agents, producers, writers, directors, and those that service these people were all jammed together. Oddly, even though all the patrons knew that the layout of the room forced intimacy, each person was doing his best to ignore the others. Jerry was completely moonstruck. His mood had turned wistful and sour simultaneously. He was no longer paying much attention to what I had to say.

‘Look who's here.'

‘Jerry, look who isn't here.'

‘No, turn your head to the right over that fat girl in leather pants.'

‘I don't turn.'

‘It's Ovitz.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Well, it's interesting's all.'

‘What's interesting about it, Jerry?'

‘He's gritty, I'll give him that.'

‘A real battering ram,' I said.

‘What a shame, huh?'

‘What part?'

‘Falling off the power chart'n' all.'

‘Shit happens quick.'

‘It's cyclical, don't you think?'

‘Like a karma thing, Jerry?'

‘That's right.'

‘I see … what comes around …'

‘Yeah, it's a circle, pal. Ovitz shoved some testicles down some people's throats and then, of course, Eisner shoved them down his throat.'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Well, he did get a ninety-million-dollar check as a booby prize.'

‘Jerry, I'm glad to see you keep current.'

‘You gotta like it, it's got symmetry.'

At that moment, Ovitz and his group got up to leave. They had to make the uncomfortable slide past our table. He got so close, I had to move my chair forward. As he tapped my shoulder to get through, I was forced to turn. He glared down on us, semisurprised, with a steeled grin. The effort made him appear as if his dinner had suddenly rotted from the inside. My first reaction was to say, ‘It's not my fault,' but I went the other way.