Barbarians on The Screen

By JOE QUEENAN

IN THE SERVICE OF TRUTH AND BEAUty, mankind has attempted many seemingly impossible tasks down through the ages. Michelangelo transformed a bare ceiling into one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Pablo Picasso fashioned a stunning work of art out of a pair of abandoned bicycle handlebars, and Marcel Duchamp achieved similar wonders with a cast-off urinal. Now the folks at Home Box Office have topped them all by making a reasonably watchable movie out of a book about a leveraged buyout: Barbarians at the Gate, which will receive its first showing on HBO this Saturday.

It helped that HBO had a very good book (the 1990 best seller Barbarians at the Gate, by Wall Street Journal reporters Bryan Burrough and John Helyar) and a very big leveraged buyout (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts' epic $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco in 1988) to work with. And the $7 million HBO earmarked for the project probably came in handy too. The film remains reasonably faithful to the spirit of the book, while vastly simplifying the plot. Whereas Burrough and Helyar recount a story that involves dozens of rapacious financiers, greedy executives, odious publicists, duplicitous bankers and devious attorneys, hbo has boiled down the cast of characters to only about a dozen. But they're all pretty avaricious, devious, duplicitous or odious, so very little has been lost in translation.

To refresh all our memories, let's recall that the whole RJR fiasco got started when a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, foul-mouthed Canadian expatriate named F. Ross Johnson, who for some inexplicable reason found himself running the 19th largest industrial company in the U.S., decided to take the food and tobacco colossus private in a leveraged buyout.

In this effort Johnson and six cronies combined forces with James Robinson III, the well-liked but not especially effective CEO of American Express, and Peter Cohen, the not-so-well-liked and not-at-all-effective chairman and CEO of Amex's subsidiary, Shearson Lehman Hutton. The triumvirate offered stockholders a bid of $75 a share, which added up to billions less than RJR was worth, making it quite a steal. Worse, the deal left Johnson in control and allowed him a package under which he and his pals could haul in as much as $2.5 billion. Yes, billion.

Johnson's brazen attempt at highway robbery attracted the attention of Henry Kravis, the pixieish juggernaut from KKR, the New York City firm that had written the book on leveraged buyouts. Kravis, who months earlier had met with Johnson and discussed the possibility of taking RJR Nabisco private, was furious at Johnson for his double-dealing. With his cousin, and KKR partner, George Roberts, Kravis submitted a blow-them-out-of-the-water bid of $90 a share.

Kravis' entry in turn aroused the interest of one after another of the wheelers and dealers of Wall Street, all avid for a piece of the action. After numerous bids, counterbids, leaks, secret phone calls, threats, pizzas, lies, midnight meetings, attempted bribes, snide remarks about cigarette smoke, and stabs in the back, Kravis landed the company for $7.4 billion more than Johnson had initially offered, and Johnson got to open a $53 million golden parachute and take a hike.

By the time Columbia Pictures started thinking about filming Barbarians, whose rights had been optioned to veteran producer Ray Stark (The Way We Were) for $700,000, evil junk-bond genius Michael Milken was well on his way to jail, the takeover era was over, and the public backlash against the excesses of the '80s had started in a big way. Moreover, the catastrophic flop of Brian De Palma's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990 had cooled Hollywood on the idea of making movies set in Manhattan's financial district. Columbia began to shy away from a project that did not seem to have much appeal to the Terminator II crowd. When no other studio expressed interest, Stark took Barbarians to HBO.

The script by playwright and television writer Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H) focuses on the struggle between the two central characters: Johnson, played by James Garner, and Kravis, played by Jonathan Pryce, who starred in the Broadway hit musical Miss Saigon. People familiar with Wall Street will have serious problems with these two pieces of casting because Garner doesn't behave much like Johnson and Price doesn't look anything like Kravis.

"Johnson is kind of a super maitre d', a guy who really knows how to work a room," Gelbart explains. But in the book, Burrough and Helyar also portray him as a Machiavellian cutthroat who betrayed numerous colleagues on his way - to the top, a spendthrift who moved the RJR Nabisco headquarters to Atlanta -- callously firing thousands of employees in the process -- in part because he didn't like "bucolic" Winston-Salem, and a derelict CEO who repeatedly misled his shareholders, his employees and his board of directors.

Garner, who has never met Johnson, and who deliberately avoided reading the book, plays him as a salty-mouthed backslapper who is always quick with a joke and whom everyone seems to like. Johnson comes off as a likable gasbag -- a rogue perhaps, but deep down inside an O.K. guy. Garner is simply too appealing to capture Johnson's reptilian qualities.

Kravis doesn't get off so easily. Clearly Pryce, a tall, refined, dapper Welshman, bears no physical or cultural resemblance to the short, nouveau- riche, noncharismatic Kravis. Moreover, the aloof Pryce does not seem like the sort of person who would ever threaten to break both of a society columnist's kneecaps at a benefit, as Kravis reportedly once did. In fact, Pryce does not look like the sort of person who would threaten to break even one of a society columnist's kneecaps. Nevertheless, his performance works, in part because he is so understatedly malevolent, in part because the question of Kravis' height (5 ft., 6 in., shoes included) is ultimately irrelevant. Pryce says this is the first time in his career he has ever played a living person. However, he hastens to point out, "I have played characters like him before." And who might they be? "Richard III," Pryce responds. "Macbeth."

The other figures portrayed in the film come off at least as badly as they do in real life. Peter Riegert is right on target as the cocky Shearson honcho Peter Cohen. The basset-mugged Fred Dalton Thompson, though a bit jowly for the part, is convincing as the charming but ineffectual Robinson, who last month was shown the door of troubled American Express.

Joanna Cassidy is perfect as Robinson's flack-from-the-inferno wife Linda. (It was her firm that cooked up the ingenious idea of sending its calaboose-bound client, Michael Milken, to Shea Stadium, chaperoning hundreds of poor black children, an incident that is still remembered as one of the most cynical, albeit futile, stunts in the sorry history of public relations.) Rita Wilson as Kravis' wife, the fashion designer Carolyne Roehm, is quite believable in the role of a woman whose single indulgence was a daily Oreo. Even the smaller parts work quite well, notably Leilani Ferrer as Johnson's thirtysomething wife Laurie, originally known to her critics as "Cupcake," and then, after Ross finagled her an honorary doctorate from some roadside Florida university, as "Dr. Cupcake."

What prevents Barbarians from being truly outstanding is Garner's miscasting plus Gelbart's reluctance to pull the trigger on the conniving Johnson. Example: in one scene, the born-to-shop Dr. Cupcake tells Ross a heart- wrenching story about her leg waxer's cousin, who was dumped from his job of 18 years when KKR took over his company. Seeking to illustrate the human carnage of leveraged buyouts, she informs hubby that the man went home and shot himself. Johnson looks concerned. Here, the film is taking real liberties with the truth. This conversation did not take place anywhere in Burrough and Helyar's book. This conversation did not take place anywhere on this planet.