NBC’S ‘PETER THE GREAT’--FROM RUSSIA WITH RANCOR

Tonight NBC’s “Peter the Great” gives Americans their first popular video vision of the 17th-Century czar who led his people out of the Dark Ages and into the light of the Renaissance.

But NBC won’t be releasing any documentaries on the making of this first independent American production in the Soviet Union. The behind-the-scenes tale of Hollywood-meets-Moscow, an intrigue as complex as a Dostoevsky novel, featured a battle between corporate power and artistic freedom that nearly destroyed the $29.2-million production.

Nor will viewers see the complex version of the czar’s life that Lawrence Schiller, the hustling journalist turned independent producer and director (“The Executioner’s Song,” “The Patricia Neal Story”), sold to NBC and to the late Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov.

Instead, Americans will experience a simplified four-part version that Emmy-winning director Marvin J. Chomsky (“Roots,” “Inside the Third Reich” and “Holocaust”) made after being hired for $1 million to save the troubled project. Chomsky replaced Schiller, just as filming moved from Austria to the uncertainties of the U.S.S.R.

And, of course, as in almost any Hollywood story, there’s litigation. Schiller is suing NBC for $1.6 million in fees and costs he said are due him and $50 million more in punitive damages.

As if the making of “Peter the Great” had not already encountered enough obstacles, its kickoff tonight still has a ratings battle--what some term a “trash vs. class clash.” The opponent? Joan Collins and her “Sins” miniseries on CBS.

NBC’s eight-hour miniseries began with ground-breaking contracts--called treaties by the Soviets--between Sovinfilm, the state motion-picture agency, and Schiller, a Sherman Oaks film maker. The treaties seemed to open the way for many Western films to be made in the U.S.S.R.

But once production started, “Peter the Great” quickly devolved into rancorous fights between Schiller and his line producer, Konstantin Thoeren, who said Schiller was “out of control” and spending so wildly that after just seven weeks in Austria, the miniseries was $766,000 over budget and three days behind schedule. Thoeren feared Schiller would go $5 million over the $26.5 million budget.

Schiller says he was actually under budget and claims Thoeren manufactured the cost overrun figures to make himself appear to be a fiscal hero who saved the network from the television version of the financially disastrous “Heaven’s Gate” feature film.

The Canadian firm that issued the completion bond on “Peter the Great” on the strength of Thoeren’s reputation ended the fighting by ousting Schiller as director, an extraordinary act that sowed anger among the international cast led by Maximilian Schell, whom Schiller had wooed to the film.

Making the miniseries “was one of the worst experiences in my life,” Schell, 53, who earned $900,000 as leading man, later wrote in an angry memo. “I’ve never been treated in my 50-year-long career so badly.

“The core of this whole story was that the capitalist system treated the individual worse than a Communist system,” Schell told Calendar. “And that coming from a country where they say freedom is No.1--and executed in the Soviet Union, which is supposed to be the opposite.”

“Peter the Great” began in the fall of 1981 when Schiller failed to return a post card to the Quality Paperback Book Club and he found in his mailbox an unwanted copy of Robert K. Massie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Peter the Great.”

In his home, Schiller read Massie’s book at random. He seized on a few pages near the end about Peter’s mistress, who loved the Czar because he loved his dream of a modern Russia more than her. He also read about how Peter so loved the West that he killed his only son because he believed it was the only way to keep his dream alive.

“I saw a great story about these people and an important piece of history unknown to most Americans,” Schiller said.

Massie said he never expected his best-selling biography to become a theatrical or TV movie because the cost of building sets and hiring huge casts was too great and the story too complex. But Schiller’s vision was to go where no American movie maker had gone before--to Russia.

With the Soviet economy’s low wages and historic onion-domed churches, Schiller believed Peter’s story could be told at a price an American television network would pay.

Making “Peter” would be a huge step up for Schiller. A producer with limited directing experience, Schiller has long been one of the most controversial figures in both Hollywood and American journalism.

For years, every story he dug out and promoted into national prominence for magazines such as Life boiled with controversy, especially his exclusive interviews with Utah killer Gary Gilmore. But the book Schiller hired Norman Mailer to write, “The Executioner’s Song,” won the Pulitzer Prize, and the four-hour NBC movie Schiller made from it won critical acclaim for stretching the boundaries of TV films.

Without reading more of Massie’s book, Schiller telephoned Susan Baerwald, NBC vice president of miniseries, who knew him from “The Executioner’s Song.”

Then Schiller borrowed $25,000 from a friend, contacted Massie, optioned the book for $50,000 and got on the phone with European businessmen for advice on how to approach the Soviets.

Schiller told NBC that a six-hour miniseries could be made for $15 million. He promised a cast of major stars and a script by Edward Anhalt, who won Oscars for “Becket” and “Panic in the Streets.”

NBC now argues that even then Schiller knew “Peter” would cost far more than $15 million. The network contends, in documents filed in court, that Schiller “planned to pull NBC deeper and deeper into the project so that NBC eventually would be unable to abandon it without incurring huge losses.” The network quotes Schiller as saying, on several occasions, that his intent was to get NBC “as pregnant as possible.”

Schiller said NBC approved progressive budget increases as the miniseries grew in length from 6 to 10 hours. In the end, NBC got eight hours for $29.2 million.

In the early ‘80s, the Reagan Administration blew on Moscow with an Arctic breath while the Soviet leadership was occupied with passing power from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev. It was also a time when the Soviets were trying new ways of dealing with the West, especially getting their spokesmen and experts on U.S. television news.

In this milieu, Schiller telephoned Soviet officials in 1982, explaining his plan, emphasizing that he was a principal and asking--in a land where patience can make the impossible possible--”Would it be possible to do this?”

Sovinfilm had a mandate to attract foreign productions and Schiller soon landed an audience with its head, Alexander (Sasha) Sirakov.

Schiller said he made friends with other influential Soviets, notably Vladimir Pozner, a Moscow broadcast journalist who was reared in Brooklyn. Pozner often appears on American TV news programs where he explains the Kremlin’s position on world events.

Pozner, reached by telephone at his Moscow apartment, said he helped Schiller make important contacts in Moscow because the miniseries “seemed, in my personal opinion, a way to tell a very important part of Russia’s history, a part that continues to influence Russia today. And, if done in an objective manner, it would be beneficial to understanding between our countries.”

Schiller and his executive in charge of production, Joel Katz, negotiated a series of treaties with Sovinfilm, which agreed to provide 21 leading actors, the facilities of Gorki studios in Moscow and costumes. Even the Soviet army was marshaled into service. And all for a prix fixe of 5 million U.S. dollars.

Schiller, in turn, agreed to pay for English lessons for the principal Russian actors, which meant that even if their voices had to be dubbed, their lips would sync with the script.

Ultimately, Schiller knew, the script would have to win approval from the highest level in the Kremlin. When negotiations stalled, Schiller threw a fit and demanded to see cinematography minister Filipp T. Yermash, telling Sirakov: “Either I see Yermash in five minutes or I’m getting on the plane and going home.” Schiller was ushered into the minister’s presence.

In January, 1984, Schiller gave Pozner Anhalt’s script to translate. They argued about the liberties Anhalt had taken--at Schiller’s urging--including inventing events. (One of the many “gratuitous inaccuracies” that author Massie says riddle the film is a scene of Charles XII of Sweden, an ascetic and celibate warrior king, getting out of bed with a woman. “Why on American television do people always have to be getting out of bed?” Massie asked.)

Pozner said that “if a movie about George Washington moved events around, put Valley Forge before it happened, Americans would be very upset, especially if this were done by Russians.” But Pozner said he appreciates how drama sometimes requires distortions of history and he believed Schiller’s “grand plan” would create an important movie alleviating America’s “appalling ignorance of Russia and the Soviet Union.”

When Pozner’s translation won approval, suddenly Schiller’s crazy dream of making “Peter the Great” in Russia was about to become real. Everyone involved felt they were part of a great adventure that would build reputations, fatten bank accounts and boost NBC’s ratings and prestige.

Yet as the project moved toward the Soviet Union, murmurs began that “Peter” would never be shot there, that too much money was at stake to risk with the Soviets in the uncertain climate between Washington and Moscow.

To pressure the Soviets--who have an impeccable reputation in business circles for honoring their commercial commitments--to perform as promised, Schiller told Sovinfilm he had a backup plan to shoot in Yugoslavia. The chairman of the completion-bond company said it made plans for Bavaria, plans that Schiller--the film’s owner--said he knew nothing about.

In May 1984, the cast--which included Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, Omar Sharif, Sir Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard and Hanna Schygulla--gathered in Vienna to begin shooting with Schiller, now the $600,000 director.

“The relationship between the actors and director was very beautiful,” said Jan Niklas, the German who plays Peter as a young man. Schell, Schygulla and the other stars developed an intense loyalty to Schiller and his vision of a grand artistic achievement, an epic film that, it just happened, would be aired on television.

But disrupting this harmony among artists was open warfare between Schiller and his line producer, Konstantin Thoeren, whose job was to control finances. Schell said he and others watched in absolute disbelief as Schiller and Thoeren continually screamed at each other on the set.

Schiller, NBC says in court documents, went behind Thoeren to countermand orders and hire and fire staff. Schiller, who said he acted within his jurisdiction, said he had no real power to hire anyone because only Thoeren could sign checks.

“In any film, when you have your line producer and director fighting in front of the crew, this does not make for a good situation,” said David Anderson, a Schiller loyalist who was first assistant director until family illness forced him to quit before the seven weeks of filming in Austria ended.

“When you’re all there to get it done quickly and efficiently and you have two people at the top fighting, well, it is simply debilitating,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s successor, Newt Arnold, arrived on Aug. 12, 1984, to find, as he later wrote in a letter of support for Schiller, a “marked and pre-existing conflict between Mr. Schiller, on one side, and the production-financing entity on the other.”

The major “point-of-view difference,” Arnold wrote, “related to whether we were making ‘a quality film to be viewed on television’ as opposed to a ‘TV show.’ ”

Schiller wanted to make a bigger film than the then $20-million budget allowed. Thoeren drew up a $26.5-million budget. NBC agreed, provided Schiller sold the film outright to the network, which up until then was only licensed to broadcast it.

“But if I do that, you could fire me the next day,” Schiller said he told John Agoglia, NBC’s production chief. Agoglia said NBC had no such plans; Schiller sold the film to NBC.

Three days later, at a quarter to six on the morning filming was to move to the Soviet Union, an anguished fellow actor awakened Jeremy Kemp, who plays Gen. Patrick Gordon, an exiled Scotsman who teaches Western military strategy to Peter.

“I looked into his face and said, ‘Either you’ve been fired, I’ve been fired or someone else has been fired,’ ” Kemp recalled recently.

“It’s Schiller,” Kemp’s colleague replied.

NBC hadn’t fired Schiller, but the bonding company insisted NBC effectively do so by holding him in breach of contract in connection with the fights with Thoeren. In return for guaranteeing that a film will be finished within its budget, bonding companies are given almost unlimited power to remove employees or do almost anything else they deem to be in the film’s best interest.

Douglas Leiterman, chairman of Motion Picture Guarantors, the bonding company, said he was distressed that Schiller was even talking about “going into the contingency” budget to cover unanticipated costs since filming had just begun and the uncertainties of Russia and winter loomed.

Leiterman telephoned Maximilian Schell to ask if he would direct the next week’s shooting in the ancient Asian trading city of Bukhara.

“I was flabbergasted when the man called and said they had fired Schiller--the man who had created it!” Schell said.

“It was also absolutely insensitive toward the actors,” Schell said. “Here is a nine-month project; I shake hands with one man, who tells me a lot of things which convince me to do the film. . . . It’s like being married to one man and the government decides you have to leave him.”

Both Schiller and Agoglia, NBC’s production chief, say the miniseries nearly died right then.

Schell and Schygulla tried to quit over Schiller’s ouster, but NBC held them to their contracts. Two-time Oscar-winning director of photography Vittorio Storaro (“Apocalypse Now,” “Reds”) did quit, but soon returned, cabling Agoglia that he wanted to “complete Schiller’s dream.”

Schiller took an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. He said he wanted to explain his ouster and ask the Soviets to delay the film briefly in hopes he could get reinstated; the bonding company told Calendar that Schiller tried to kill the project.

Meanwhile, Schell refused the bonding company’s request to direct the few Bukhara scenes; so did Storaro. Newt Arnold not only refused, he quit.

Actor Jeremy Kemp recalled that “we arrived in Bukhara with no director, no assistant director and no idea whether we would ever get out of there.”

The actors sat around for five days until Marvin Chomsky, the triple Emmy-winning director with a reputation for getting along with producers and making do, arrived.

Winter came early to Suzdal, the historic Russian city whose ancient buildings framed the massive wall that stood in for Moscow’s 17th-Century Kremlin, 150 miles to the southwest.

Stars accustomed to a private trailer and catered delicacies on location endured bitter days in subzero weather without so much as a windbreak or open fire to warm themselves. They say they rode in vehicles with bald tires and queued for half an hour in the Arctic wind for miserable grub. Kemp slept in his clothes when heating at the modern GTK Hotel failed.

Treatment of the actors was “shabby and disgraceful,” Kemp said. “It was remarkable no one died.”

NBC approved liberal allowances for actors to fly in and out of Russia, but this generosity did not appease the stars’ building frustration.

On Oct. 14, 1984, with subzero weather already the norm, Schell, Sharif and the other stars addressed an extraordinary protest letter to Thoeren to “voice . . . extreme dissatisfaction” with conditions. They demanded proper accommodations for the actors--Western and Russian--on location, including warm and dry shelter, a place to sit or lie down and drinking water. And the letter declared: “No actor will change (clothes) in a field any more nor ‘squat’--in costume--behind a bush!!”

The actors described as “intolerable” the “total lack of communication” between them and the production staff. “We are obliged to ‘function’ largely on hearsay and rumour,” under a “secret shooting” schedule. “How can we prepare properly as things are?” they asked.

They complained that they had no interpreters, that their lunch break (“Passing quickly over the quality!!!”) was ill-organized, and the shooting schedule routinely violated their maximum 12-hour workday.

What the actors--Western and Russian--got was an old bus, which with the engine running sufficed as a place in which to change, relax and get warm on location. Meanwhile, Schell got sick and couldn’t work for four weeks. Director Chomsky was off ill for six days. In the end, only two pages of script got shot per day.

On March 16, 1985, his last scheduled shooting day, Schell typed an angry memo to Thoeren, titled “Pressure, pressure, pressure and threats.”

“Our request to the director (Chomsky) to have at least one hour every week to speak to the actors, which is really the least you can ask for, the whole letter, which offended you so much, demanded the most simple and basic conditions one can ask for on such a giant production--(it) has never been answered, neither from the director nor from the production,” he wrote.

Schell complained that “I finally had to hire in February, 1985, at my own expense my own interpreter, because living in Russia without speaking the language, as you know, is unbearable-- you (Thoeren) had an interpreter and you had a warm office and good working conditions; we didn’t “ (Schell’s emphasis).

Motion Picture Guarantors, Schell wrote, pressured Thoeren and Chomsky to finish the film quickly without regard for quality. “In my contract it is not written I have to play ‘Peter the Great’ fast, no matter how,” Schell wrote.

NBC wanted Schell to stay another 11 working days, until filming was complete. But Schell had a contract to direct at the Berlin Opera and refused the network’s offer of big money and a private jet to shuttle between Berlin and Moscow.

NBC, Schell wrote in his memo, threatened to ruin his reputation and sue him because the bonding company’s doctor believed Schell feigned a second illness.

Director Chomsky, Schell wrote, warned him that NBC was “preparing a cannon against you which you have never faced before in your life.”

Its leading star gone, NBC hired a photo double, Dennis de Marne of London, to replace Schell in two dozen scenes. Schell protested to the Screen Actors Guild about the photo double, whose voice he dubbed.

“I’ll give you an award if you can tell which scenes have the photo double,” Chomsky told Calendar.

“Just watch on TV,” Schell fumed later. “You’ll win.”

If the cast and crew were shocked by what happened on the “Peter the Great” shoot, the Soviets were also shocked by Schiller’s ouster.

“What happened to Schiller was to many people here totally incomprehensible,” said Vladimir Pozner. “How anyone who had put so much into a film could be fired like this personally shocked me.”

But Pozner added that this is what Soviets expect from “man-eat-man capitalist society.”

Schell had a different interpretation as he reflected on the fury over Schiller’s ouster and the parallels between “Peter the Great” and Peter the First of Russia.

He said Schiller lost the film because “he loved it too much and didn’t protect himself. He was like the man who wants a house because of this view,” Schell said, looking down on Los Angeles from his two-bedroom Chateau Marmont suite.

“Larry was like such a man, a man who loves the view so much that he doesn’t see that there’s no basement and he doesn’t care that the price is much too high and when they ask if he has the money to buy it says he does because he thinks he can get it.”

Despite this, despite all the rancor, Schell said, the four-part miniseries is “excellent” and can teach Americans much about the history of the other superpower.

The quality of the final product, Schell said, proves that “the (Hollywood) system works, but it also teaches me as an individual that the individual doesn’t count.”