‘Red October’ Surfaces : Tom Clancy’s thriller arrives--with Connery, U.S. aid and emigres

Stage 15, Paramount Studios, a typical Hollywood day.

Sean Connery of Scotland is being made up to play a Soviet navy officer. Producer Mace Neufeld is praying for bad weather for an important sea shot near San Pedro. Co-star Sam Neill is rehearsing.

The set is a 16-ton mock-up of a Soviet sub’s control room, mounted on a huge mechanically maneuverable platform 22 feet above Stage 15’s concrete floor.

“Full left rudder!” Neill barks, and as he does, there is a quake. A real one, 4.5 magnitude, followed 25 minutes later by an aftershock. The second quake prompts some of the production crew to step outside, smartly.

No damage, no injuries, but the temblors do make one think. Herman G. Sinitzin, a Soviet emigre and an extra in the film, puts it best. “I repented,” he explains.

As the earth moves in Hollywood, author Tom Clancy, his wife and their four kids are somewhere in America aboard a private train that he rented, chugging to Hollywood to see Connery & Co. film the first novel he ever sold.

“The Hunt for Red October” is that book, a best-selling high-tech thriller about the skipper of a Soviet missile sub who, with key crew members, decides to defect with his sub to the United States.

The Soviet navy takes off in force to stop him. All head toward America’s East Coast. The U.S. government, which would love a look at the Red October’s deadly innards, must decide if all this is for real or a ploy to get into position for Doom Time.

With Connery aboard as the disillusioned Soviet skipper, Neill as his executive officer, Scott Glenn commanding a Navy attack sub tracking the Red October, and Alec Baldwin in the pivotal role of CIA historian-analyst Jack Ryan, Clancy’s book definitely has become what they call “a major motion picture.”

“Red October,” now being filmed at Paramount and several offshore locations along the West Coast, is costing more than $30 million to make and will be released next Easter by Paramount. If the film does as well as Paramount’s last military-themed action film, “Top Gun,” the budget will seem a bargain.

Connery was not originally cast in the film. Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, nominated in 1985 for a best-supporting-actor Oscar for “Out of Africa,” was to play the Soviet skipper, but Brandauer dropped out to direct and star in a West German film based on a failed assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler.

Enter Connery. The casting change may have been expensive for Paramount, but the 58-year-old actor’s scene-stealing supporting performances in “The Untouchables” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” have made him more popular with audiences than ever. Paramount may also benefit from the upcoming “Family Business,” a three-generation family drama in which Connery co-stars with Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick.

Connery says he had hoped for a vacation after filming “Family Business,” but there’s nothing like a windfall to keep a guy in Los Angeles. (Connery is reportedly being paid $4 million for “Red October,” a sizable leap over what he earned as an able seaman in the Royal Navy four decades ago.)

The star’s enlistment created no little anxiety on the set. Because of post-production duties on “Family Business” and promotional obligations on “Indiana Jones,” Connery did not show up for work on “Red October” until May 22, six weeks into shooting.

Few knew he definitely was aboard until late April when, during the filming of a Washington scene, a picture of the Red October skipper flashed on a screen at a top-level government briefing. Connery’s face was superimposed atop the skipper’s body.

Tom Clancy, who started all this with his book, is several times a millionaire with subsequent best sellers “Red Storm Rising” and “Patriot Games.” He is getting what he reckons as around $500,000 for movie rights to “Red October,” but that’s split 50-50 with his little-known publisher, Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, Md.

Clancy did not submit his “Red October” manuscript to major New York publishers when he finished it. Instead, he made a deal with Naval Institute Press, with whom he later got into a long drawn-out battle over the rights. He now has an agent and a three-book, $3-million contract with Putnam Publishing Group.

But it was the Naval Institute that got him started by publishing “The Hunt for Red October” in 1984. The book got the Naval Institute started in a new direction too. The 116-year-old institute had published only nonfiction works of interest primarily to Navy readers. After “Red October,” the Institute published another best seller, former Navy pilot Stephen Coonts’ “Flight of the Intruder.”

Producer Neufeld, who happened onto Clancy’s “Red October” when an aide spotted it at a booksellers’ convention, has also obtained the rights to “Flight of the Intruder” and plans to begin filming the adaptation this fall.

Neufeld, who produced the hit spy thriller “No Way Out,” optioned “Red October” for $40,000, $35,000 more than the Naval Institute Press paid Clancy for it originally. The option got bumped up to $50,000 when the book became a best seller, thanks in some measure to a March, 1985, Time magazine article that quoted President Reagan calling the book “the perfect yarn.”

Neufeld kept extending the option--and his costs--while he shopped the book around Hollywood, where one studio after another rejected it.

“I think the common reason (it was rejected) is that none of the executives at the studios ever read the book,” Neufeld said, with a shrug. “And I think they were also concerned about the expense of doing the film.”

“Red October” may also have been discounted because the story had no love interest, an ingredient considered essential for selling a military theme film to a broad audience. Consider Kelly McGillis’ extraneous but commercially essential performance in “Top Gun” as Exhibit A.

Neufeld insists there was no pressure to shoehorn a love story into “Red October.”

“No, everybody--the people at Paramount and ourselves--had that discussion in passing,” he said. “But that’s not what this movie is about. There’s no way to get Kelly McGillis into a submarine.”

Former Paramount production chief Ned Tanen green-lighted “Red October” in 1986, on the condition that the producers could get the cooperation of the Navy. They did. The Navy agreed to supply ships, helicopters, seamen and unclassified technical advisers and the hunt for “The Hunt of Red October” was on.

Neufeld, two screenwriters, director John McTiernan (“Die Hard”), and all the principal actors except Connery went down to the sea in nuclear-powered attack submarines for briefing. The aircraft carrier Enterprise, two frigates, and the San Diego-based submarine Houston also became part of the cast, the Houston doubling for the make-believe Dallas that Scott Glenn commands in the movie.

The Houston hasn’t had smooth sailing, though. In a freak accident June 19, the sub, on standby for filming a scene off Long Beach, snagged the barge cable of a civilian tug and sank it in 2,500 feet of water. The tug’s pilot was killed.

Two days later, the Houston cut through the nets of a San Pedro fishing boat. Both incidents are under investigation.

In agreeing to provide assistance, including submarine crew members and an adviser for the sound stage mock-ups of both the Red October and Glenn’s Dallas, the Navy reserved the right to order script changes. Neufeld said the only change requested “was a bad Hustler (magazine) joke, and we would have thrown it out anyway.”

Connery also had the right to make script changes and exercised the right, working with McTiernan and John Milius, who directed him in “The Wind and the Lion.” (Milius had previously been signed to direct “Flight of the Intruder.”)

“I felt that with the Russians, everybody sounded too American,” Connery said, in explaining the revisions. “I felt that the Russians should sound like somebody different, certainly have a different view on things, a different formation in terms of sentences . . . that was basically it.”

Tom Clancy had no part in the script, nor did he want to write it.

“It’s not what I do, I write books,” said Clancy, who wrapped up his latest novel, “Clear and Present Danger,” before heading to Hollywood from his new Maryland home on 80 wooded acres overlooking Chesapeake Bay.

When he popped in at Paramount in mid-June to meet the stars and watch the filming for two days, he decided on the spot, he says, not to even bother reading the “Red October” script, which was written by Donald Stewart and Larry Ferguson.

“I went to see the movie . . . about 10 minutes worth of dailies, rushes, whatever you call them, and I was damned impressed. Honest to God, I was impressed.”

About 15 real Navy submariners were part of the crew in the filming of scenes on a sound-stage mock-up of the film’s American sub, the Dallas. (Like that of the Red October in an adjoining sound stage, the Dallas mock-up was mounted in a gimbal that could be rotated 36 degrees in any direction to give the illusion of steep climbs, turns and dives.) For Scott Glenn, a former Marine and a hero to Clancy for his astronaut’s role in “The Right Stuff,” the real sailors in the Dallas’ pretend control room help give the movie the undersea right stuff.

“They kept you honest,” Glenn says. “We’d go to battle stations, and if it wasn’t right, they’d say, ‘No, this guy moves over here, these people are fire control, this person’s on sonar, the diving officer doesn’t stand there, the chief of the watch is over there.’

“They get you to fall into it very quickly. But just having those guys around really kept us honest, and their presence wouldn’t let us b.s. with the scene.”

With Baldwin, Glenn took his nuclear sub orientation ride in February for 24 hours aboard the San Diego-based Salt Lake City, a fast attack sub skippered by Commander Tom Fargo.

Glenn caused more than a few glances when he reported aboard. His hair, once sporting the famed white sidewall look favored by marine gunnery sergeants, was worn long and tied into a ponytail.

He grins. “When we were coming back, though, seven, eight guys would come by and say, ‘We just want you to know how jealous we are.’ ”

Ponytail or not, Fargo did something unusual as part of his effort to give the actor the feel of a sub commander’s life at sea: “He told me, ‘I’ve given all the men orders that when any reports are given to me, for the time you’re on board, they’re to turn around and give the same report to you. I’ve told them to treat you as though you’re of the same rank.’ ”

An interesting experience, particularly for a former enlisted man, Glenn says, “but I was too busy watching how Captain Fargo related to the men in his command, because I wanted to see how to deal with the guys when I was acting the part.”

What he found, he says, is that because of long submerged deployments, close quarters and a relatively small ship’s company of 140, sub skippers tend to be more informal than the surface variety of ship’s captain.

“When I first got the (role), I thought of the skipper of a sub as a hard ass. But when I went aboard a real sub, I realized that’s not the way subs are at all. There’s no question that Tom Fargo is in charge of the Salt Lake City. And when you go to battle stations, the chain of command becomes very formal, very rigid, very specific.

“But at other times, things tend to be very loose. You call the guys by their first or last names, they’ll joke back and forth. There’s a sense that the captain, under those circumstances, almost is somewhere between a father and a big brother.”

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Ever since filming began in April, there has been a steady stream of visitors to Paramount’s two-sub fleet. The list of visitors is varied--Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III, assorted admirals, singers Grace Jones and David Crosby, and even the mayor of Montreal.

Depending on when they dropped by, they got a look at the spacious mock-ups of either the Dallas or the Red October control rooms. Huge by the squeezed-in standards of World War II, the 32-foot-by-32-foot Red October mock-up can and does get cramped, indeed a bit funky at times despite cool, fresh air blown in via hoses jury-rigged to air conditioners.

In addition to director McTiernan and his camera crew, a squad of technicians moves around and above, easing by about 20 extras in the dark blue uniforms of the Soviet navy.

Two of the Soviet seamen--Billy Wely and Tim Frye--are American submarine crewmen from San Diego. But 10 of the others are emigres from the Soviet Union, the latest arrival being Vladimir Goretov, a shy, soft-spoken kid of 18 whose family moved to the United States 2 1/2 years ago.

This is Goretov’s first movie, he says with quiet pride. He says his battle station is at a chart table, “right behind Sean Connery.”

Herman Sinitzin, 49, is the mock sub’s “chief of boat” and Russian interpreter. A former Intourist worker who moved here nine years ago, his regular day job is as a Russian interpreter for Los Angeles-area businesses and courts.

Sinitzin helped recruit about 25 former Soviet residents for the film, many of them young members of a Pentacostal group whose members live in Alhambra and Hesperia.

During the filming, a visiting reporter and Sinitzin compared notes on their lives upon finding out that each served in the army of his respective country during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when the Soviet Union and the United States were on the edge of nuclear war. The visitor said he was in a rifle platoon then, in the Second Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., which had packed its live ammo on trucks and was on alert for what could have been the invasion of Cuba.

Sinitzin nodded. He was in a Soviet nuclear missile regiment, he said. “There was talk of a pre-emptive strike.”

They smiled and shook hands.

“Red October” is set during the waning years of the Cold War, before Mikhail Gorbachov, glasnost and the start of arms reductions.

The movie’s emigre extras--they always seem to have a chess game going when between scenes--and their Soviet-posing colleagues are kept busy shuttling in and out of a variety of grim control-room scenes. But there’s time for levity even amid that. Such as in Take 2 of a crisis when the Red October fills with fake smoke and Sam Neill crisply orders, “Then bypass it. Seal it manually. Move!”

Connery, behind the camera, feeds Neill the skipper’s lines. Neill, looking straight at the camera, responds rapid fire, then flubs a line, grins and shakes his head.

“Oh, do get it right, deah!” Connery says in prissy mock anger, prompting a burst of laughter from the film crew.

The laughter keeps things loose, but the truth is, there is little give in Connery’s schedule. The actor was on the set for only a month, and shot his final scene June 23. The film is scheduled to wrap on July 20.

Connery said the experience of working in “Red October” makes him think of those who serve in real life aboard Soviet and American submarines.

“The film really touches on a lot of stuff that scares one,” he said, during a break on the set. “For example, I myself would have great problems in going down in a submarine. It calls for a certain kind of mentality that must have a terrific faith in the other guys who are with you.”

Neill, a quiet New Zealander who took an orientation ride about the Houston before filming, admires and praises its crew.

“Those guys were very good to use. I’d never had an experience like that in my life.”

Neill was on an attack sub, which unlike nuclear missile boats, are designed to track, attack and sink other subs and surface ships. They also carry surface-to-surface missiles, which may be nuclear weapons, although the Navy won’t say.

What did Neill think while in a boat full of the tools of destruction?

A long pause. “That’s a very difficult question,” he finally says. “I mean, I think these weapons are absolutely terrifying. And what’s interesting about being close to these things is how prosaic it is, how routine and everyday it all is.

“And yet the potential for destruction is on a scale that you can’t even begin to comprehend.”