A LIBERTY SCRIPT SESSION THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN . . .

Kirk was wrong when he said I didn’t know where movie scripts left off and life began. A script has to make sense, and life doesn’t. --Humphrey Bogart in “The Barefoot Contessa”

Scene: April 1, 1985. A conference room at a major Hollywood movie studio. A fable.

STUDIO HEAD (S.H.): OK, so we’re going to go ahead with “Stranglers in Paradise” and send “Hot Cereal Killers” back for a rewrite. Now, let’s talk about “Miss Liberty.” I want to get that moving.

PRODUCTION HEAD (P.H.): I think we’re ready. The Stallone script came in yesterday and it’s terrific. This is going to be the most upbeat patriotic movie since “Red Dawn.”

MARKETING HEAD (M.H.): I’m licking my chops already. Stallone and the Statue of Liberty together? (Whistle.) We’ll sell enough toys and dashboard ornaments alone to pay for the picture.

JUNIOR PRODUCTION EXEC (J.P.E.): Gosh, fellas, before you get too far into that, I’d like to make one last pitch for Jean-Louis Longuet’s original script. It’s a wonderful, sensitive love story about a sculptor and the woman who was his inspiration for the Statue of Liberty. We could make it for $3 million.

S.H.: That’s a French movie, for crying out loud. You can’t make a patriotic American picture with foreigners.

J.P.E.: That’s the charm of it. Longuet captured the attitude of Europeans toward America a century ago. He explains why the French gave us the statue in the first place.

M.H: Who cares why they gave it to us? It’s ours now, isn’t it, S.H.? I mean, we don’t have to cut a merchandising deal with France, do we?

P.H.: Forget all that. The Longuet script is history. We all agreed that we had something special here when Madonna said she wanted to play the girl.

J.P.E.: That’s another thing. Madonna as a French woman?

P.H.: She’s not going to be French. In Stallone’s script, she’s an American fashion model who goes to Europe on vacation and falls in love with a brilliant but struggling Italian sculptor named Soldato di Liberta. Means “Soldier of Liberty” in Italian. Great title, huh?

J.P.E.: The sculptor of the Statue of Liberty was named Frederic Auguste Bartholdi. He was French.

S.H.: French. Italian. It doesn’t matter. What I want to know is how this story gets back to the U.S. You know, I expect to see the statue in about 80% of the shots.

M.H.: Yeah, and before I faint, talk action to me. I can’t put Stallone on a billboard holding a paint brush. He’ll look like a wimp.

P.H.: Ye of little faith. You think Stallone sees himself as Toulouse-Lautrec? His Soldato is going to make John Rambo look like Rainbow Brite.

J.P.E.: How? Bartholdi was a gentle, passionate man.

P.H.: So is Soldato . . . in the beginning. See, he falls in love with this American girl and follows her to Paris where he gets a gig sculpting the Statue of Liberty while she models for it. Just when he finishes the statue, a gang of Bolsheviks set off a bomb, crushing the girl under her own likeness. Her last words to Soldato are, “Put your face on the next one, you’re better looking than I am.”

J.P.E.: I guess you know there were no Bolsheviks in the 1880s.

S.H.: Let’s not start nit-picking. Has anybody talked to Madonna about this? Does she know she’s going to die in the first reel?

P.H.: Her agent said she won’t mind as long as she still gets to do the sound track. Her album, “Madonna, the American Dream,” will be pegged to the release of the movie.

M.H.: The rock video will be a killer.

P.H.: Anyway, the rest of the movie is Soldato slaughtering the Bolsheviks trying to stop him from rebuilding the statue in New York Harbor. Finally, the Red Army, emotionally and physically overwhelmed by the determination of the fighting sculptor, throws down its arms and its ideology and begins cheering, “Soldato, Soldato, Soldato.” There is a great final scene where Stallone, bleeding and bruised, hangs from the torch yelling to the horizon that the statue will stand forever as a warning to foreigners with bad attitudes.

J.P.E.: Actually, the statue is a symbol of freedom. It is a welcome to oppressed people. . . .

P.H.: We’re talking about a movie, not a term paper.

M.H.: I smell money. I could sell this one with my eyes closed.

S.H.: All right, “Soldier of Liberty” is a go. We’ll offer Stallone $15 million to star, write and direct, plus 15% from film rentals and 25% from merchandising. What do you figure the budget on it, $40 million?

P.H.: That will cover everything but the statue. Stallone wants that, too. He collects them.

S.H.: What statue? We don’t need to build one for the movie. We’ll use the real thing.

P.H.: That’s the one he wants.

S.H.: What??!!!

M.H.: Do you think we could get it for him, S.H.? We could build our whole promotion and publicity campaign around it.

S.H.: Let somebody else make the movie. It’s a great project, but I’m not going to buy the Statue of Liberty to get it made. It would cost a fortune.

J.P.E.: That’s the trouble with today’s stars. No sense of reality.

S.H.: You’re catching on, kid.