The Futurist by Rebecca Keegan

Author:Rebecca Keegan [Keegan, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-46033-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

7.

MYTHS AND LIES

Little Movie, Big Deal

After the astounding success of Terminator 2, Cameron reached a pivotal moment in his career. The sequel had earned him heaps of Hollywood capital—every studio in town wanted to be in business with a filmmaker who both dreamed and earned on a spectacular scale. But Cameron had his eye on something more intimate, a nonfiction book by Daniel Keyes called The Minds of Billy Milligan, about a rapist in Ohio who suffers from multiple personality disorder and whose lawyers successfully use his mental illness as a defense for his crimes. “I was looking for a small drama after the ‘most expensive movie in history,’” Cameron says. The director found Milligan’s story and his long history of childhood abuse both moving and intriguing as a cinematic exercise. “To do all those characters and externalize the drama that was playing out in that guy’s head would have been as big a challenge, in its own way, as making The Abyss.” He optioned the rights to Keyes’s book from Sandra Arcara, a New York–based restaurateur who was trying to establish herself as a producer, and he got to work on a script with Todd Graff, the actor and writer who had played Hippy in The Abyss. Cameron and Graff’s script, “The Crowded Room,” employs a lot of the same visual flourishes that mark the director’s sci-fi writing, but this time the science and the set pieces take place inside the human mind. “The Crowded Room” uses a flashback structure like the one Cameron would employ on Titanic and reads as a great psychological thriller. But Cameron’s little movie was about to hit a big wall.

In the spring of 1992, Cameron signed an unusual $500 million, multipicture domestic distribution deal with Fox that gave him power to put any movie he wanted into production without Fox’s approval up to a budget of $70 million and retained for him ownership of the copyrights to his own films. In exchange, Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment would have to shoulder its own overhead costs as well as take responsibility for any budget overages, which the company planned to do by selling the foreign distribution rights to its films itself. It was a remarkable deal for a filmmaker—typically, studios acquire the worldwide rights to a film, pay for the entire production, and own the movie outright. The deal gave Cameron both more control and more responsibility than a director typically enjoys or bears. “I’d just made T2 for Carolco and I admired how they rolled, being their own bosses, mavericks, entrepreneurs,” Cameron says. “I’d been fed up with the studio system after Aliens and The Abyss, both of which I felt were not released properly. So I figured coming off of T2 I could set up a structure which would allow me to call the shots myself.” The Los Angeles Times said the deal “may be a classic” and heralded the ingenuity of its architects, Lightstorm president Larry Kasanoff and Cameron’s agent at ICM, Jeff Berg.

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