Hollywood ending

A cranky old guy on the run with his two full-grown elephants? Now that's a movie.

LAST WEEK I wrote about researching the book At Large: the Fugitive Odyssey of Murray Hill. As a nonfiction author, I tried to choose projects I thought might also make good movies. I tried to write scenes a reader could visualize, and to tell stories using a three- or four-act structure. At Large did OK in hardcover—I believe it sold about 25,000 copies in North America—but where it made real noise was in Hollywood. Soon after publication we got a couple of dozen feelers from production companies and major studios.

This was the early 1990s, and the timing was ideal. The Japanese economy had been frothy in the 1980s and “the Japanese way” was being embraced by North American companies. Japanese conglomerates were gobbling up American assets. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in New York., a Japanese company bought the Pebble Beach Golf Club, and SONY bought Columbia Pictures, one of the major Hollywood Studios, putting the slick Peter Guber and boorish Jon Peters in charge.

After a brief negotiation, Columbia bought—not optioned, but purchased outright—film rights to the book. Or had Columbia, by the time we signed the deal, already handed off to Trimark? Or Guber-Peters Entertainment Corp.? Or Mandalay? Corporate sleight-of-hand was on full display as SONY sank hundreds of millions into the movie business and Guber and Peters spent it hand over fist. (The long version of how they bankrupted Columbia is told in a remarkable book called Hit and Run.)

If you wonder why Hollywood movies (a) cost a lot to make, and (b) rarely show a profit (at least to anyone entitled to a share of it), my experience with At Large may be educational. Once the rights deal was agreed upon, all involved—Murray, his daughter, my agent, me, and some guy hoping to be an executive producer—were flown first class to Los Angeles from cities far and wide. We were picked up by limo at LAX and put up in a clever little hotel in Westwood. Anything we wanted we signed to our rooms.

At the studio offices we met Stacey Snider, a smart, no-nonsense lawyer from Philadelphia who was then head of production at Columbia (she later became CEO at three different studios). She and a couple of other executives showed us around the lot in Studio City, where Steven Spielberg happened to be directing Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, who were goofily dressed as pirates, on a big fake ship in the movie Hook.

Stacey Snider went on to run 20th Century Fox, and then DreamWorks.

That evening, we were taken to dinner at a buzzy, high-end place. Half a dozen studio executives introduced themselves as we took our places around a private table. The menu did not include prices, and our champagne glasses were refilled the moment they ran low. I don’t know what the evening cost, but if it were my company’s credit card I would certainly have questioned the need for such lavish celebration (not that I was about to object). At the time, the studios seemed to be in a race to outspend each other, and I suppose Columbia (Trimark? Guber-Peters?) was just keeping up.

THE NEXT DAY I had lunch in Chinatown with the screenwriter they’d hired to turn the book into a movie. Barry Morrow was a lovely guy, a Minnesotan about my age whose original story and screenplay for Rain Man had helped propel that film to four Oscars—Best Picture; Barry’s for Best Screenplay; Dustin Hoffman’s for Best Actor; and Barry Levinson’s for Best Director. Movie folk don’t soon forget who wrote the highest-grossing film of the year, and Barry was a hot property.

Screenwriter Barry Morrow with his Oscar for Rain Man.

Over lousy Chinese food, Barry chuckled at my stories about the quirky people I’d met in the circus/carnival world. I offered what insights I could into Murray Hill and Dick Drake, his antagonist. Barry sent me a draft of the screenplay, and I could not have been more pleased—short on the obvious physical comedy possibilities, long on pathos, gentle humour, and sympathy for the purloined elephants.

WHAT HAPPENED next I can only recount second-hand. I was told that Dustin Hoffman was going to play Murray Hill. Fantastic—he’d be perfect as a cranky little guy moving his elephants across the country. Then I was told that Hoffman had a conflict, had backed out, and that Bill Murray was considering the role. The studio gave him Barry’s script, my book, and the other research materials. He apparently said he’d take the part if his pal Howard Franklin was brought on to direct. The two had worked together on a so-so film called Quick Change.

Columbia (or Tristar, or Guber-Peters, or whatever) already had a director lined up—Robert Zemeckis, fresh off his triumph with Tom Hanks and Forrest Gump. The studio, understandably, wanted to stick with him. This seemed like a terrific A-list team, and I was greatly excited by the prospect of seeing my book become a major motion picture.

At that point, I was told, Bill Murray simply went dark. Incommunicado. Radio silence. Until, some months later, a rival studio, MGM-United Artists, announced the release of a new picture. It was called Larger Than Life, with an original screenplay by Pen Densham, Garry Williams, and Roy Blount Jr. It was directed by Howard Franklin and starred Bill Murray.

I’ve not met Bill Murray, but I don’t feel the warmth for him many people do.

IN THE MGM film, Bill Murray plays a salesman named Jack Corcoran who inherits an elephant and needs to transport her to the San Diego zoo. The folks at our studio weren’t happy to hear news of this film, and there was talk of legal action. Barry called me and asked if I’d join a lawsuit aimed at gaining compensation from the knocked-off film.

I spoke to an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, who explained why legal action would be futile. First of all, Larger Than Life opened and closed in short order. Wikipedia puts it plainly: “The film was financially and critically unsuccessful.” It cost $30 million to make, got lousy reviews, and earned less than $10 million. Even if a court ruled that we were entitled to a share of profits, there were no profits to share.

Moreover, said the lawyer, copyright protection does not extend to concepts or themes. The concrete expression of a concept, such as a screenplay, can be copyrighted, but the Larger Than Life screenplay bore little resemblance to Barry’s script. A few years earlier Art Buchwald had sued Paramount for basing the Eddie Murphy film Coming to America on a treatment Buchwald had circulated in Hollywood, and actually won a settlement; but that case was blatant and a rare exception.

Almost all suits claiming plagiarism or copyright infringement in Hollywood, the lawyer told me, fail. Nor did I wish to spend five years paying an LA lawyer and giving depositions for a legal action being adjudicated in California (I was living in British Columbia). So I told Barry I was unwilling to join in such a suit, wished him well, and that was the end of that.

Unfortunately, the Bill Murray film made another elephant-on-the-road movie untenable for the foreseeable future. In the unlikely event the studio would have allowed us us retrieve film rights and try to set it up elsewhere, the rights would have a cost a fortune. Easier for the studio to write off the loss, bury the project, and move on to other things.

Which is why, as far as I know, Barry’s screenplay, paid for ultimately in Japanese yen, still sits in a dusty archive at Mandalay, doomed never to see the lights-camera-action of day. Meanwhile, without a movie to support it, no American publisher wanted to do a paperback edition of At Large.

Win some, lose some.