Return of the ‘Cocoon’ : Sequel Being Made on Same $17.5-Million Budget

Ron Howard’s “Cocoon,” one of the biggest hits of the summer of 1984, was widely praised for its sensitive treatment of older people, and one of its older stars, Don Ameche, ended up winning an Academy Award for his work in the film.

But as production on “Cocoon II: The Return” winds down here on the east coast of the Florida peninsula, the film makers haven’t forgotten that the age issue was not considered a plus until the movie was released and audiences said it was.

“Featuring them as prominently as we did was something that happened in the editing process,” said Lili Fini Zanuck, the co-producer on both films with her husband, Richard D. Zanuck, and David Brown. “In the screenplay the older characters were very carefully balanced against the other elements.

“In fact, the fear that the first one wouldn’t work for an audience was so strong that (20th Century Fox) dictated that members of our older cast were not to have their pictures taken for publicity reasons without a member of the young cast. And the (poster) was just the hardest thing to come up with because we couldn’t use the older cast members in it at all.”

Lili Zanuck, who bought the rights to “Cocoon” when it was an unpublished novel and nurtured it through to production, sighed as she recalled the initial audience reaction to the first film.

“The movie was a hit, bringing out not only young audiences but also people who had not been to a movie theater since ‘The Sound of Music.’ So we don’t have those prejudices from the studio or elsewhere going into this, and if we want to focus on our older characters, we have the freedom to do so.”

Zanuck said the only prejudices to overcome this time out were those she and her husband have against sequels.

“The studio had the legal right to make a sequel, and it was going to exercise that right whether or not we were involved,” said Richard Zanuck, who had succumbed to another studio’s pressure years earlier on a sequel to “Jaws.”

For “Cocoon II,” the Zanucks worked with writers Stephen McPherson and Elizabeth Bradley and came up with a concept that once again emphasized the value of life as seen through the eyes of older people.

In this film, scheduled for release at Thanksgiving, the aliens return to Earth to recover a cocoon (a shell protecting one of their brethren) from the ocean floor. The earthling elders who abandoned the nursing-home life for an outer space adventure at the end of “Cocoon” decide to revisit their home planet, and each one begins to question whether to stay and once again become mortal, or make the return trip to Antarea where they will live forever.

Zanuck said “Cocoon II” is being made on the same $17.5-million budget as the original, but the balance of payments has shifted. For “Cocoon,” the actors came fairly inexpensively and the effects cost a fortune. For “Cocoon II,” the effects--having already been researched and developed--were relatively inexpensive and the actors cost a fortune.

The fact that the actors’ fees have risen is not unrelated to the success of the first film. For example, Zanuck said, Ameche’s fee has quadrupled.

Ameche, like all the returning cast, declared himself to be delighted to be working again with his “Cocoon” cohorts.

“They’re not only brilliantly talented people,” he said, “but they’re nice people, down-to-earth, (not) the average actor.”

While most of the returning cast stressed the similarities between young Ron Howard and 67-year-old Petrie, Ameche, while praising Howard’s character, said he prefers working with the more experienced Petrie.

“Dan has a security that Ron didn’t have,” Ameche said. “When Dan gets what he thinks is what he wants in a shot, he prints it. He doesn’t ask for one more and then another one and another one. Ron did.”

Petrie’s technique, he concluded, is “easier on the performer.”

At least two of the actors felt that the sequel allowed them to delve more deeply into their “Cocoon” characters.

Maureen Stapleton said she was able, with film husband Wilford Brimley’s support, to make her character somewhat less passive than before.

“In the first one, he wanted to go to another planet--she goes to another planet. Now he wants to come back--she comes back. Then he wants to go back again and . . . I said, ‘Can’t I just say (no) once in a while? Can’t I just say ‘I don’t wanna--even if I have to, I don’t wanna?’ ”

Jack Gilford’s character undergoes perhaps the greatest transformation. In the script of the first film, his sour, eventual widower was supposed to join the others on the voyage to Antarea. But Gilford, feeling this ending “was not true to this character I came to know so well” and also “too pat and sticky” as storytelling, prevailed upon Howard and the Zanucks to shoot an alternate ending.

The physical demands of the project and the issue debated in the script have inevitably caused the older cast members to ponder their own mortality. In the 3 1/2 years since the original, Stapleton, Brimley and Gwen Verdon have all entered their 60s, and Ameche, Gilford, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy sailed into or through their late 70s.

“According to the script, we’re all supposed to act 20 or 25 years younger than we really are,” said Tandy, “and when I read that my character was supposed to run along a beach, I found myself asking, ‘How far and how fast, and how many times will I have to do it?’ In the end, though, it turned out to be no problem.”

Nor was there a problem with the basketball game that her on-and-off-screen husband Hume Cronyn had to play with Ameche and Brimley.

“I guarantee you that in the normal course of things I would not be in a hotel parking lot practicing shooting baskets,” Cronyn chuckled. “But for that very reason, this part has been good for me. Yet, the way I feel today--I’m doing a lot of waiting around, which I find to be the most strenuous part of movie making--if there was a fountain of youth nearby, I’d jump right into it.”

There would be no jumping into a fountain for Gwen Verdon, an actress-dancer whose musical-comedy roles on Broadway have won her four Tony Awards.

“If all my friends were to survive along with me, sure, life would be terrific,” Verdon said. “But I’ve lost so many friends, either because of AIDS or death for other reasons, that I don’t particularly want to live forever.”

Petrie, whose films include “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” agrees with Verdon.

“If I have one prayer, it is that my children do not pre-decease me,” he said. “And if you are sipping at the spring of eternal life, or eternal youth, that prayer is not going to be answered. In spite of the fact that I do love the first ‘Cocoon,’ I felt a little let down in the end when they all went off to this Nirvana. I thought, ‘Well, is that all that desirable?’

“So I was interested in debating here whether the vicissitudes of life are strengthening in spite of the fact that they are vicissitudes and they sometimes involve suffering.”

Despite his private stand in the debate, Petrie insists that the debate in the film will be evenly balanced.

“I think that audiences will be happy with the way the characters in this story solve the dilemma facing them, happy for the people that go and seek again a life that will never cease, and happy also for those who stayed and passed up the opportunity to live forever.

“In that sense, I hope the film will be an affirmation, though I want to make people think a little--as well as to entertain them royally--along the way to it.”