Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This movie materialized right after The Godfather," said Olmos in a recent interview, referring to the script which was written in 1974 and originally had been designed as an Al Pacino vehicle...
What accounts for the star stampede? The obvious answer is just such box- office magic. Impresarios often conclude, as did Roger Berlind of Death and the Maiden and Richard Seader of Shimada, that a new script by an unknown author absolutely requires star clout. Says Berlind: "The average straight play costs more than $1 million to produce. Doing one on Broadway without the protection of name recognizability is almost a lost business." Seader is even blunter: "We were originally considering off-Broadway. I don't think we would have done Shimada on Broadway without stars...
There's no need to make a cosmic case against Basic Instinct. It's just another entertainment that went more wrong than right. Maybe its script isn't worth $3 million, but its basic premise is not a bad one. It proposes an untrammeled San Francisco woman named Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) who writes murder mysteries that have a nasty way of predicting actual crimes. They also provide, of course, a perfect alibi. No one in her right mind would create fictions that make their author a prime suspect...
Basic Instinct is the latest candidate for admission to this inner circle of the cinema's damned. Its script was bought for a record $3 million, and people immediately started saying nothing could be that good. Then location shooting was disrupted by gay activists claiming the film promoted a cruel stereotype -- that lesbians are literally man killers. Finally, when the picture was finished, it was slapped with an NC-17 rating. After a few cuts (less than a minute's worth) and many hot words, that was changed to an R, but such wrangles usually do irreparable box-office harm...
...catch up with himself. At times he keeps pace, knowingly talking shop with Coppola, Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg, once childhood idols, now professional confidants; or he adopts a man-of-the-world tone as he kindly reassures auditioning actresses that none of the women in his new script are "prostitutes, maids or welfare mothers," the demeaning roles that black women are usually required to play in films...