Dangerous Games

6/12/92
Entertainment Weekly
by Gregg Kilday

WITH 'PATRIOT GAMES' AUTHOR TOM CLANCY SNIPING FROM THE SIDELINES, HARRISON FORD TAKES OVER THE ROLE THE STUDIO HOPES WILL BECOMES THE JAMES BOND OF THE '90S

Here's how they shot scene 106CC for Paramount's big action-adventure release Patriot Games: & Harrison Ford is sitting quietly behind a desk in the study of a comfortable Maryland country house-actually a set on stage 18 at Paramount Pictures-while the crew around him readies the shot. In this scene, CIA director Adm. Greer, played by James Earl Jones, has come to warn Ford's Jack Ryan, the straight-arrow hero of the best-selling Tom Clancy techno- thrillers, of impending danger: An Irish terrorist, whose brother Ryan killed in an earlier sequence, has just escaped from prison. & Director Phillip Noyce calls, "Action!" but what unfolds is not very, well...active. Jones' approach is subtle, as Greer downplays the threat to Ryan and his family but quietly suggests that the risk should spur him to return to his former job at the CIA. Ford allows Ryan's alarm to show through only in the intensity of his gaze.

Greer: If he's left the country, the chances of his coming here are so remote...

Ryan: Still, your first thought was to come and tell me.

Greer: Want to come down and look at what we've got?

Ryan: Are you asking me if I want to come back?

Greer: Yup.

And here's how they reshot the same scene for the trailer:

Instead of sitting opposite Ford, Jones now stands directly in front of Ryan's desk. "Because it's for a trailer, it should be delivered with more urgency," director Noyce advises. Jones takes the advice to heart and shifts into his best stentorian boom.

Greer (urgently): There has never been a terrorist attack on American soil, Jack. These men are professionals. Personal revenge rarely plays into it.

Ryan (alarmed): But I killed his brother!

The scene looks like a keeper, and Noyce yells, "Cut." But Ford is warming to this new, manic version. He is on a roll. "But I killed his mother!" he goes on, edging into hysteria. "But I killed his mother's brother!" For the first time in an hour, a smile breaks out on his face.

On-set jokes aside, the $42.5 million Patriot Games is serious business. As shaped by Noyce and Ford, the movie is a sober-minded thriller, a thinking person's action-adventure. Still, it has to survive in the overheated summer market, between the high-octane explosions of Lethal Weapon 3 and the comic- book exaggerations of Batman Returns. And if getting the movie noticed requires hyping its tone for the trailer, that's just part of the process of launching a potential blockbuster.

As a sequel, of sorts, to 1990's The Hunt for Red October, the first of Tom Clancy's novels to be brought to the screen-and a $120 million box office winner-Patriot Games seemed like a movie that could be made almost on autopilot. Instead it encountered nearly constant turbulence, beginning even before the project got off the ground. After a showdown with Alec Baldwin, the dashing young Jack Ryan of the first movie, Paramount performed the risky maneuver of replacing him with the more battle-proven Ford. Another crisis emerged midway through shooting, when Clancy suddenly went ballistic, accusing the filmmakers of sabotaging his novel. Even at the 11th hour, Ford was back before the cameras filming a new, more violent ending that was patched in three weeks before the movie's release in 2,344 theaters last Friday.

Harrison Ford has just finished a stroll around his 800-acre property outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he lives with his wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison (E.T.), and their two children. The jagged Grand Tetons, still carrying their winter snows, loom in the distance. He has conferred with the landscapers sprucing up his front lawn and the workers building two guest cabins. He proudly points out the additions he built himself on the two-story, white clapboard house that he designed. Settling down with a mug of coffee in the detached office-workshop, the gentleman rancher is finally able to focus on his other life, in Hollywood-an hour and 45 minutes away by plane-as perhaps the most reliable leading man of his generation.

"I thought if I didn't use my license to do action-adventure, then pretty soon it wouldn't be viable," he says about his last-minute decision to sign up for Patriot Games. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Ford, even at 49, doesn't look all that different from the strapping, small-town hot-rodder Bob Falfa in 1973's American Graffiti, the role that first won him attention. But though he has starred in the two most successful movie trilogies of all time-the Star Wars saga and the Indiana Jones series-Ford's last two films, Presumed Innocent and Regarding Henry, have been what he calls "suit-and-tie movies," and he was itching to throw himself back into the action arena.

"I don't think the executives ever stopped thinking of me in terms of action-adventures," he says. "But I kept turning them down because of their overweening violence or because they lacked ambition. I wanted to deal with ideas within the context of action."

In August 1991, when Paramount first broached the possibility of his starring in Patriot Games, it was by no means a sure sell. Several years earlier, when the studio was casting The Hunt for Red October, Ford was approached about playing Jack Ryan and summarily rejected the idea-if anything, he had said at the time, he'd be interested in playing the part of the Russian submarine commander, but then he backed off from that as well. (Sean Connery eventually made that role his own.) "I said, 'Submarine movies, uh-uh,'" Ford recalls with a laugh. "That's how smart I was." This time he was more receptive. "This one was a character-driven story," he says. "It deals with a decent man's reaction to violence and the threat of danger to his family. I thought that you could make it into the kind of picture that I wanted to do."

Ford had another reason to consider the part: He had been trying to develop a period piece called Night Ride Down, about an 1890s railroad strike, but that Paramount project had just fallen through. Still, he didn't have to be told that Patriot Games was quickly developing a history of its own.

On the heels of the successful 1990 debut of Red October, its producers, Mace Neufeld and Robert Rehme, acquired the screen rights to two more Clancy novels, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Though a sequel looked inevitable, the producers still had hurdles to jump. Alec Baldwin's contract gave him the right to approve their choice of director, Phillip Noyce, who first won Hollywood's attention in 1989 with the taut jeopardy-at-sea thriller Dead Calm.

No sooner was Baldwin's approval secured than Brandon Tartikoff, the former head of NBC Entertainment, took over as chairman of Paramount Pictures, necessitating a new review of the project. Fortunately, Tartikoff not only knew Noyce, who had recently directed a pilot, Nightmare Cafe, for NBC, but he also was eager to turn the Jack Ryan novels into the kind of continuing series-like the Star Trek movies or the James Bond pictures-that studio executives call "tent poles," dependable money-makers capable of propping up the rest of a studio's release schedule. To enhance that prospect, Tartikoff immediately bumped the movie's budget from $29 million to $35 million. With Baldwin set to receive $4 million for Ryan's return, final rewrites were moving ahead when the project hit another roadblock.

The movie's anticipated September 1991 start date had been pushed back twice, first to October, then to November. Baldwin asked for a definite stop date-a guarantee that his work on the film would be completed by an agreed- upon deadline-so that he could begin rehearsals for the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. There were reports that he began demanding as much as $700,000 in perks as well.

"Alec Baldwin had a contract with Paramount-the dollars and terms were all negotiated," producer Neufeld insists. "But he had not approved the screenplay even though the work was ongoing. Phillip and I urged him to commit. But we couldn't give him a stop date. It was finally a question of let's stop dancing and make up your mind. He was given several days to decide, and he passed." The view from Baldwin's camp is slightly different: "His intent was to try to work it out and accommodate both schedules," says a representative.

The pressure play was a stunning display of brinkmanship on the part of Paramount, but the studio had a trump card. Before negotiations with Baldwin ended, the studio slipped a script to Ford, who signaled his interest. With Baldwin out, Paramount quickly agreed to pay Ford a reported $9 million. Asked if he had any concerns about taking over a role originated by another actor, Ford is coolly professional. "It really didn't figure into it at all," he says. "It was never an issue."

At their first meeting in Noyce's Hollywood home-a Spanish hillside retreat that once belonged to Barbara Stanwyck-Ford didn't sit down until he had surveyed the room critically. "You're going to get a lot of leaks," he warned. "The workmanship is appalling." Rather than take offense, Noyce could only laugh. He knew he had met someone who shared his own sense of craftsmanship.

"I had some concerns about the complexity of it," Ford recalls of his first discussions with Noyce about the screenplay-in-progress. "I had some plot problems. I had some questions about giving the character a little bit more humor and a more specific relationship with his wife and child."

Noyce was determined not to let the screenplay-by Donald Stewart, W. Peter Iliff, and an uncredited Steven Zaillian-stray too far from the original novel. "I actually enjoyed the book," the director says. "Not for its literary value but for the world it took me into. Clancy's research is exemplary."

Clancy welcomed Ford, Noyce, and Neufeld to his modern estate in Maryland. Then, as shooting approached, he frequently weighed in by phone. "He sent me reams of faxed comments, all of which were appreciated," says Noyce, adding with a laugh, "His almost anal-compulsive attention to detail saved me a lot of research."

But as Clancy's faxes grew longer and his phone calls more argumentative, the filmmakers began to realize that placating the cantankerous author was becoming a major part of their jobs. Still, they were dumbfounded when, with the film only weeks from completion, Clancy's bitter complaints wound up on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. "They have a movie called Patriot Games that uses my characters-but it's not my story," Clancy told the Journal. The screenplay was riddled with technical errors, he said; for example, it had coral reefs in the Chesapeake Bay, where there are none. He even accused Ford of being too old to play the part.

& "I was very distressed because I felt we'd treated Tom with the utmost respect," says Neufeld. "We'd spent enormous amounts of time with Tom, and there were enormous numbers of changes made as a result of good suggestions that Tom made. But in the movie business nobody ever gets 100 percent of what he wants."

The filmmakers defended themselves, explaining that Clancy had taken issue with drafts of the script that had already been revised, and in fact, none of the details to which the author objected are in the finished print. As for Clancy's objection to casting Ford, Neufeld adds, "I have a letter from Tom Clancy from 1987 in which he says, 'I saw Witness last night. You're absolutely right-Harrison Ford is Jack Ryan.'"

Once the bitter dispute had gone public, though, each side was in effect hostage to the other: If Clancy kept bad-mouthing the movie, he could damage its prospects. At the same time, Neufeld and Rehme held sequel rights-not only to Clear and Present Danger but to the Jack Ryan character as well-and if Patriot Games were to fail, neither they nor anybody else would be likely to film any more Jack Ryan adventures.

Still new to his job as studio chief, and seeing his tent-pole series teetering on the verge of collapse, Tartikoff made three trips back East to meet with Clancy. Not everyone thought Clancy would listen to reason. "No matter what one does," Ford says with an edge in his voice, "Mr. Clancy cannot be satisfied."

Yet somehow, Clancy suddenly shifted from lobbing grenades to blowing kisses. Tartikoff's diplomatic missions had paid off. Among the Patriot Games camp, word quickly spread that Tartikoff had brokered a new $10 million to $12 million deal with the recalcitrant author. But Clancy's agent, Robert Gottlieb, says, "That figure is incorrect. No deal has been closed, but we are in discussions. Based on the relationship that has developed between Tom and Brandon, it is fair to say that Paramount has expressed a strong desire in acquiring The Sum of All Fears (Clancy's most recent novel), future Jack Ryan novels, and other works by Tom."

Although Tartikoff declined to comment on the emerging detente-a studio spokesperson simply said, "We have been talking about future projects with Tom Clancy for some time"-Clancy was almost effusive in his praise of the studio chief. "I must say I'm very impressed with the guy, and I don't impress all that easily," Clancy said, speaking from his home a week before the movie's ! release. He warned that he hasn't seen the final print, but Tartikoff did show him a rough cut. The author still had quibbles-which he is uncharacteristically keeping to himself-but he lavished praise on the film's depiction of the nuts and bolts of intelligence work.

"What's impressive about it is not so much that they show what (the satellites) can do. They also show what they can't do," says Clancy. "There's a whole canard about how they can read license plates on cars and headlines on newspapers from 200 miles up in orbit, and they can't. At least they listened to me on that. They got the Clancy seal of approval."

The author sounds as if he has even begun to accept Ford as the new embodiment of Jack Ryan. "We'll be working together," he predicts. "I only met Mr. Ford once. I liked what I saw then. It'd be nice to be able to sit down with him and talk a while. In fact, that's one of the things Brandon suggested we ought to do."

But even as Tartikoff was hurling olive branches in Clancy's direction, the filmmakers faced yet another setback: The movie's ending wasn't playing well with test-screening audiences. As originally staged, the final moments in Ryan's battle with his nemesis, terrorist Sean Miller (Sean Bean), had been filmed underwater. "I knew from the moment that we began shooting it that it wasn't working, because we couldn't see well enough, and that meant that emotional moment was hard to capture," says Ford. "The resistance of the water rendered everything balletic."

"The bloodthirsty under-25-year-old males," Noyce admits, wanted an ending that was more "spectacular and bloody." Finally, he agreed to Neufeld's suggestion to reshoot the last 50 seconds of the battle back on board a 20- foot motorboat (the result is a somewhat more formulaic thriller finale). The news that Patriot Games was going back before the cameras electrified Hollywood. They must really be in trouble, went the buzz. The truth was much less dramatic-the reshoots took only two days-but the reports hit just as the summer blockbusters were lining up at the starting gate and the handicappers were making their predictions. "It was maddening," Noyce says of having to complete his first big studio film in such a highly charged atmosphere.

Though a veteran of countless other high-stakes productions (see filmography), Ford sounds ready to spend more time on his Wyoming spread-and less in Hollywood. "Right now, I really don't want to work for quite a while," he says. What then of the possible sequels? "It's a commitment in spirit," he says, choosing his words judiciously. "I have reserved prerogratives to ensure myself that I will do it only if it makes sense-if we get the scripts that I'm comfortable with."

But before talk of sequels and tent poles is really in order, this sober, adult-oriented thriller needs to carve out a serious niche in the marketplace. Ford's Jack Ryan may be handy at fending off terrorists, but the box office competition could be his toughest test.

COMPLICATIONS FOLLOWED Noyce into the editing room. ‘We made the film up to 10 minutes shorter, but it didn’t seem to make it better, just shorter,” says Noyce, whose movie wound up clocking in at 142 minutes. “The studio constantly encouraged me to put material back.” So did test audiences.

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