![]() ![]() ![]() According to the “Dish” report, Goldman said that he would only sign on if he could make the movie more in the “tone of his classic buddy pic ‘ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ than a super, kid-in-awe actioner.” The report quotes a source in the Goldman camp as saying, “Bill’s point is the two characters had nowhere to go. So the three got on the phone with Goldman (along with Head of Production Michael Nathanson, Executive Vice President of Production Barry Josephson and Arnold’s agent) and convinced Goldman to sign on, even though he was initially uninterested. At this point both Schwarzenegger and McTiernan were keenly interested in the project but not totally sold (its summer 1993 release date was looming). In Claudia Eller’s “Dish” column in the August 4,1992 issue of Variety recounts how Schwarzenegger and McTiernan wooed William Goldman, the Academy Award-winning writer and novelist behind “ Marathon Man” and “ The Princess Bride,” to come on board the project by issuing a conference call (along with Columbia chairman Mark Canton). William Goldman convinced both McTiernan and Arnold to sign on (or is it the other way around?) Also, this article is best read while listening to the AC/D C song “Big Gun” from the official motion picture soundtrack, on repeat. Equally invaluable were a pair of books with chapters on this very movie - “ Hit and Run” by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters, and “ Fiasco” by James Robert Parish. Three notes: Most of the information referenced in this piece was compiled with the help of filmmaker Charles Hood, who scoured the Academy library in Los Angeles for any and all tidbits about the tumultuous path “Last Action Hero” took to big screen infamy. But if you’ve never seen the film before, there’s a perfect opportunity just around the corner: on Saturday night the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles will be hosting a 20th anniversary midnight showing of the movie. The movie was seemingly doomed from the beginning, with an unrealistic production (and post-production) schedule, an ambitious but poorly planned marketing campaign, and a foolish screening schedule (supposedly a test screening held two months before release went so disastrously that the studio had the comment cards destroyed). ![]() James Cameron Has Some Regrets About ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’: ‘It Was Your Granddad’s ‘Terminator’ Movie’ ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |