As Tom Berenger lounged on a twelfth-floor hotel patio, smoking a cigarette, he talked about two recent difficult experiences. A resident of South Carolina, he was among those forced to flee from Hurricance Floyd. “I was in that evacuation of three million people, the largest evacuation in the history of the United States. I drove up to the mountains of North Carolina. It would have taken five hours ordinarily, but it took fifteen. On these little back state roads, there was a traffic jam that looked like Los Angeles, all the way from Charleston to the middle of the state.”
But the natural disaster seems positively reasonable compared to the actor’s struggle over the release of his new film, “One Man’s Hero,” an historical epic in which he plays the John Riley, the leader of the St. Patrick Brigade, a group of Irish immigrant deserters from the U.S. army who fought on the Mexican side during the war of 1845-47. The picture was actually shot in the fall of 1997, and even then, as Berenger remarks, “I was kind of tired, because I had kind of worked on producing the thing for three years.” Apart from some difficult Mexican locations, the shoot was marred by the accidental death of a member of the crew, an electrician perched atop a huge crane that collapsed on the penultimate night of filming. It was obvious that Berenger was still shaken by the incident.
But the making of the picture was only the beginning. “This was an Orion film,” Berenger explained, “and actually while we were shooting Orion got bought and merged with MGM. A tragedy–another studio gone, you know. And I don’t know where MGM is–I didn’t know where they were before, when I did two movies with them and they just dumped them. And I said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m back with them again.'”
Berenger’s fears proved well-grounded. MGM has kept “One Man’s Hero” on the shelf for nearly two years, and now is giving it only a token release in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. “Our premiere out there [in Los Angeles] is being paid for by the Catholic Church and the Mexican consulate,” Berenger noted. “The Vatican’s seen the film. I don’t know how they heard about it, but they did, and they asked if they could have a copy of it to see. But we couldn’t get the money from MGM to do the premiere–I don’t know if they’ve ever even seen it! You know, a new regime comes in, or somebody else’s logo is on it, and they go, ‘Eh.’ With ‘Someone To Watch Over Me,’ when they fired David Puttnam, they killed that movie. It’s the only business I’ve ever seen do that–kill inventory. If Ford bought Chrysler, would they destroy
all those cars sitting out in the lot, the inventory? No, they’d sell them. You sell them, you don’t send them to the trash heap. That’s the situation we’re in.” Luckily demands by Berenger’s fans–as he described it, “a grass-roots campaign, like a prairie fire, on the Internet”–eventually moved the studio to reconsider and give the picture a limited release, which could be expanded if the numbers warrant.
“One Man’s Hero” certainly has an interesting pedigree. Berenger was actually looking for a script on the San Patricios for some time as a producer, when his agent learned from producer-director Lance Hool’s counterpart that the filmmaker had one on hand. Berenger said: “I got the script from Lance and said, ‘Yeah, this is the one.’ I’d read a couple of others I wasn’t crazy about. Then I found out that the script is thirty-five years old. The writer, Milton Gelman, has just died a couple of months before we got started on it. His family is just totally dumbfounded that it’s been made.
“Lance Hool had gotten the script because he’s half-Mexican and had grown up in Mexico, and as a young mn he got to know John Huston, who loved to shoot down there [in Mexico] and wanted to do this story,” Berenger continued. “I was telling Charlton Heston about it when we worked together, and he said, ‘No kidding, you’re going to do that? Huston wanted me to do that!’ Then Peckinpah was going to do it with Paul Newman, but he died of a heart attack. Lance ended up getting the script from Huston, who said, ‘Here, kid, you take it. I’m not going to be around much longer. You take it; maybe you can do something with it. I wish I could have done it.'”
And so after three and a half decades, the script was filmed, and after two years of sitting on the shelf, the film’s been released. Now audiences will decide whether it was worth the wait.
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HUGH GRANT ON “MICKEY BLUE EYES”
Hugh Grant, dressed entirely in black and clearly exhausted from a grueling publicity tour, brushed his hair back and lounged on a Dallas hotel couch to talk about his new starring vehicle, “Mickey Blue Eyes,” which follows “Notting Hill,” his smash romantic comedy with Julia Roberts, into theatres by only a few months. The two flicks mark his return to the screen after a hiatus of nearly three years, and “Mickey,” about an English auctioneer in New York who becomes involved with the mob, is the second project (after Grant’s last flick, 1996’s disappointing “Extreme Measures”) undertaken by Simian Films, the production company founded by the British star and his significant other, actress-model Elizabeth Hurley.
As it happened, “Notting Hill” and “Mickey Blue Eyes” were both ready for release almost simultaneously. “We asked which one should we bring out first?” Grant said. “We decided, let’s bring out the one with Julia first–that’s more guaranteed box-office. You know, Julia could do a film with Hitler…”
As originally written, “Mickey” was rather different from the picture that finally made it to the screen. “Like any production company, you get thousands of scripts, most of them unreadable,” Grant explained. “Someone clever spotted this one as having potential. It was originally written with a lead character who was a very neurotic, kind of anal lawyer living in New York who gets involved with the mob, and it made me laugh. So we had a read-through. We got all kinds of people together. Janeane Garofalo played Gina,…and John Mahoney was Frank. They were all excellent. I was crap. That’s when we knew we had to make it British, and with that thought came the idea that maybe that’s funnier anyway: ‘Brit meets Mob.’ We’d never seen that before. Then we thought, well, what job would a Brit have in New York that’s really convincing?”
They settled on the position of an auctioneer in a swanky establishment specializing in works of art, which accentuated the differences between the two worlds that clash in the plot. But Grant didn’t spend much time learning about the business before undertaking his role. “If I was any kind of actor I would have researched it in detail,” he noted with typical self-deprecating humor. “Daniel Day-Lewis would have spent five years doing that. But I forgot completely to do any research until the last day before we started shooting, and I quickly went to an auction at Sotheby’s in New York…. But they go so fast that I just made up my own auctioneering style, which I think will now be widely copied.”
Grant and his colleagues did, however, research the mob background of the story more thoroughly. “My friend Mike Newell, who directed ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ and [the Mafia drama] ‘Donnie Brasco,’ called me and said, ‘You have to meet a guy called Rocco.’ I said, ‘What’s his last name?’ and he said, ‘No, there’s no last name.’ So we met Rocco, and Rocco took us around Queens, and we had a number of dinners with these guys, and became very good friends with them. They loved the script, but what they really loved was Elizabeth. They just worshipped her. She was very good with them–she’d sit on their knees–she even got a couple of senior mobsters down to the Estee Lauder spa at Bloomingdales!”
Of course, a good deal of the proper atmosphere was provided by James Caan, who plays the mobster dad of Grant’s fiance Jeanne Tripplehorn liked a middle-aged Sonny Corleone. “He’s fabulous,” Grant enthused. “A great icon of my growing-up. He hates me saying that–it ages him so horribly. I was in awe of him for about three days [when shooting began], and then we developed this sort of banter that’s been going on ever since. He decided quite early that I was an English wimp, and he’s been giving me hell for it ever since.” Then he added dryly: “And I think it’s disrespectful. After all, he’s certainly got a producer who plucked him from his old peoples’ home and gave him a job! My other theory is that he’s in love with me–some of his mob hugs lasted longer than they needed to do.”
Grant sees “Mickey Blue Eyes” as representing a bit of a stretch for him–“I thought I was pushing the envelope a little here–I’ve never stripped and massaged my buttocks on camera before (though I’ve always wanted to),” he said in reference to one uproarious sequence–but he noted that just before our arrival he’d read two reviews of the picture in industry papers. The one in Daily Variety praised Grant for trying something new, but that in the Hollywood Reporter said “that Hugh Grant does exactly what he’s done before,” as the actor paraphrased it.
“The Hollywood bloody Reporter,” he muttered.