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Like
the best making-of books, Jane Hamsher's Killer Instinct
(now out in trade paperback from Broadway, $13) is less about
a specific movie -- in this case, Natural
Born Killers -- than it is about a stew of egomaniacal,
ambitious, or inept personalities boiling over. It makes for
tasty reading, though I sure wouldn't have wanted to be there.
Hamsher produced NBK with her business partner Don Murphy
(whom she clearly adores as a friend and highly respects as a
partner, even though she spends half the book goofing on him);
she was the logical left brain, he was the hot-headed right brain,
and they were surrounded by no-brains -- including the touted
geniuses Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, whom Hamsher characterizes
as textbook cases of arrested development.
Hamsher is a witty writer, sometimes devastatingly so; it seems
to me that women who struggle in power positions in Hollywood
always have sharper senses of humor (perhaps out of necessity)
than the analogous male players. She often appears to be the
only sane person working on the movie, though she admits that
eating 'shrooms with Oliver and company in the desert wasn't
impeccable judgment on her part. The book chronicles the making
of NBK from its humble genesis as a nearly-forgotten Tarantino
script to its red-hot post-O.J. release in August 1994, when
it scandalized critics and tantalized Gen-Xers. By then, Hamsher
felt as if she'd been through combat -- a good way to describe
working with Oliver Stone, who likes to stir up conflict and
emotion on his sets.
The production, in retrospect, reads like a recipe for catastrophe.
Filming the riot scenes in a real Chicago prison, with real prisoners,
resulted in a real prison riot -- well, duh ... did nobody see
that coming? (In the film, when Tommy Lee Jones gets pegged
in the head with a milk carton and the milk drips down his face,
that was real -- a prisoner chucked the milk, it hit Tommy Lee,
he didn't break character, and Stone kept it in the film.) Hamsher
has 20-20 hindsight, but she convinces us that, with a chaotic
project like NBK, it becomes almost impossible to tell
what's insane and what's just business as usual. At its best,
the book is about two ambitious young producers who attached
themselves to a script they liked and ended up enduring the ultimate
baptism by fire.
Oddly enough, the people you'd expect a producer to slam in a
Hollywood memoir -- the stars -- are gently treated. Cynics may
say that Hamsher just doesn't want to jeopardize her star relationships,
but in this case she seems genuine; her descriptions of the stars
don't seem out of character for them. Woody Harrelson, Juliette
Lewis, and particularly Robert Downey Jr. are shown as nice,
down-to-earth people who get sucked into the vortex that is NBK.
Hamsher reserves her venom for the men in charge.
Hamsher's take on Stone is realistically hot-and-cold: sometimes
she hates him, sometimes she kind of likes the guy (Stone knows
how to turn on the charm when he wants to). Her take on Quentin
is pretty consistently disdainful, but Quentin is a saint compared
to some of the friends surrounding him, like Rand Vossler. Eventually
credited as a co-producer on NBK (for doing nothing --
he was given the credit, basically, to pacify him), Vossler is
painted here as an egotistical crybaby who threatened to hold
up Hamsher and Murphy in court so he could regain the rights
to NBK and direct it himself. According to Hamsher, both
Stone and Tarantino are talented men irreparably damaged by all
the yes-men and kiss-asses surrounding them. (There's a bit of
mournful respect for Roger Avary, who, it turns out, is pretty
much responsible for Quentin's career: he wrote a script called
The Open Road, which Tarantino expanded into a monstrous
400-page epic from which he later cannibalized almost every script
he's written. If you want back-up for an argument that Tarantino
is little more than a parrot for other people's work, this is
the book you want in your corner.)
Killer Instinct is sinfully readable; I rocketed through
it in two days, and when it was over I leaned forward a little,
as if I were in a speeding car that slammed on the brakes --
I wanted more. Well, Hamsher and Murphy are now producing the
upcoming Apt
Pupil, a Stephen King adaptation with its own controversy
and problems (related to whether director Bryan Singer coerced
teenage boys to appear naked in a shower scene). Maybe that mess
will yield its own tell-all book, and I hope Hamsher survives
to tell the tale. |
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