Film Clipped

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was late October 1992, the week that an issue of the New Yorker containing an article called "Crisis in the Hot Zone" appeared. Toby Brown read the story and, as if infected by a killer movie bug, shouted, "There's a great film here! I'm writing a screenplay on this right now!"

Brown has no experience in filmmaking; he is a radiologist in Manassas, Virginia. But like a few hundred thousand other readers of that week's New Yorker, he was enthralled by the cinematic possibilities of Richard Preston's chilling true story about scientists battling to contain the Ebola virus, which is as deadly and gruesome as aids, yet has an incubation period of only one week. The story was full of pungent quotes like "There wasn't going to be any safe place in the world," and "Karl, you'd better come quick to the lab. Fred has harvested some cells, and they've got worms." It read like a ready- made movie in pleasing embryo form.

As it happened, Toby Brown did not write his screenplay and did not give up his practice. But almost any enthusiastic amateur might have spurred Crisis in the Hot Zone into production faster and with happier results than the Hollywood royalty -- Robert Redford, Jodie Foster, director Ridley Scott and producer Lynda Obst -- to whom 20th Century Fox entrusted this $50 million thriller. Nearly two years after Preston's article appeared -- time enough for him to expand it into a book, The Hot Zone, due in stores in a few weeks -- the film had not begun shooting. Last week, in fact, it looked kaput. Or, as a chagrined insider euphemized, "It's sleeping."

In this backstage story there are no villains, unless it is the lumbering behemoth that Hollywood filmmaking has become. In the '30s a director like Michael Curtiz made six or seven pictures a year. Even today, TV can crank out a news-based movie (on Tonya Harding or the Waco siege) within a couple of months of the event. But in theatrical features, where everyone is conscious of art, ego and the roll of megamillion-dollar dice, the average film takes a couple of years from first draft to opening day.

Hot Zone had a reason to move quickly. A rival film on the same subject, Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line of Fire) and starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, was also rushing toward a start date. Producer Arnold Kopelson had initiated the project at Warner Bros. after failing in his bid for the rights to Hot Zone. He got a script from Robert Roy Pool and Dr. Laurence Dworet, an internist. While visiting an Army virus center, the Outbreak screenwriters ran into Obst and Preston; it was like a cold war chance meeting of the CIA and KGB near the Berlin Wall.

Back at Hot Zone, Redford, Foster and Scott were all hoping to make a good picture. But they could never agree on what that picture was. Scott wanted a thriller, a true-life version of Alien, his 1979 sci-fi horror epic, that was strong on hardware and icky special effects, with maybe an ecological message. Redford, who signed on for $8 million and who had script approval, wanted an ecological message movie about a heroic virologist from the Centers for Disease Control -- his role. Foster ($6 million and script approval) wanted an ecological thriller about a heroic Army pathologist -- her role.

Foster's character, Lieut. Colonel Nancy Jaax, was the spunky heroine of Preston's piece, and the original script by James V. Hart kept it that way. But when Redford brought in Richard Friedenberg (screenwriter of Redford's A River Runs Through It), the weight shifted to the virologist, Karl Johnson, whom Redford was to play. Foster was miffed, and Fox, forced to choose between two stars, went with old-Hollywood glamour. "They lost Jodie for Redford," says a Hot Zone survivor. "And the script changed from a character study to monkey killers on a safari. Karl Johnson was jumping through a car to shoot a baboon." Finally, Paul Attanasio (the writer on Redford's forthcoming Quiz Show) tried to speed-type a version that would appease both stars.

On July 13 Foster, concluding that the script was weak and that there was not enough in her role, bowed out. After much deliberation, everyone agreed that Meryl Streep was right for the part. But she chose to star in The Bridges of Madison County instead. On Aug. 12 Redford decided that no shootable script would be ready in time for him to make the film and also meet other commitments, and he too quit. Finally Fox pulled the plug. "When Jodie Foster dropped out last month," says Preston, a fellow at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University who consulted with all the Hot Zone filmmakers, "it was like a train wreck in extended slow motion. It begins with a smell of smoke; then one wheel hops the track; then a freight car goes off; then it turns sideways and the whole train begins to telescope. That's when it goes off the rails and into the canyon. By Hollywood standards, this project took a long time to come apart. Usually they explode immediately."

Scott tried not to hear the noise; he hoped to plow ahead with stars of slightly lower wattage (Susan Sarandon as Nancy; Paul Newman, Jeff Bridges or Warren Beatty to play Karl). But Fox, believing it needed bigger names to sell a big-budget film around the world, nixed the idea, and Scott's company brought a claim for the $7 million it had already spent. Hot Zone may yet get made for about $35 million with less pricey actors, at Paramount. Or it may be headed for "turnaround," that lonely waiting room to Hollywood Hell.

"What made this different," says a Hot Zoner, "was the other project. If $ it weren't for that, we'd still be going." But studios have played this high- stakes chicken race with increasing frequency. The past few years have seen two Robin Hoods, two Wyatt Earps -- even, for goodness' sake, two versions of the 18th century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. This time somebody blinked.

The Outbreakers now say they are better off without the rights to the original article. "We take the story one step further," says Petersen. "If a virus gets airborne, that's the biggest horror you can imagine. All hell can break through." Choosing between a film in which a deadly virus is contained and one in which a deadly virus decimates Washington, a mogul might prefer Plan B. Truth is stranger than fiction, yes, but fiction plays better. "You can really shape the project," Petersen says. "This elevates our film above a mere medical story."

Still, Hot Zone has real-life terror. Preston, who says of the Outbreak team that "they have to be careful, or they're going to have major legal problems," believes his mere medical story is compelling enough to guarantee its eventual realization onscreen. "It's not like Alien," he says, "where people could shrug it off as science fiction. Now they'd be seeing someone come apart before their eyes and realizing that the virus could be sitting next to them in the theater. It could be anywhere."

If a killer virus can mutate and flourish, why can't a canny movie project? "I don't know that the story is completely dead," Preston says. "In Hollywood, it always depends on if you believe in reincarnation." And if no one there can put the project together, we know of a Virginia radiologist who's eager to try. Could he do worse?

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles