How ‘Casualties of War’ Survived : Dawn Steel walked the point and kept the project alive for Columbia Pictures and Brian DePalma

Dawn Steel pointed to the priceless framed “From Here to Eternity” poster that hangs above the leather sofa in her Burbank office. “There have been four regimes here in six years, “ said the president of Columbia Pictures. “And almost nothing was saved. Our 70th anniversary is coming up--or is it our 75th?--and we are buying up memorabilia. I actually had to buy that poster.”

She shrugged. Dawn Steel understands purchase power--and executive shuffles. Almost two years ago she made a very publicized shift from Paramount to Columbia, and this Friday the first Columbia movie she green-lighted will be released nationwide in 1,500 theaters. It’s a dark and controversial $22.5-million Brian DePalma movie called “Casualties of War.” A true saga of the rape and murder of a Vietnamese woman (based on a 1968 New Yorker piece and subsequent book by Daniel Lang), the movie co-stars Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn as American soldiers ultimately pitted against each other. It’s set in a jungle climate rather like Hollywood--and the soldiers become as paranoid as some people in the movie business.

If there are obvious financial ramifications--”A war movie in August?” is the question insiders ask--there are emotional ones too. “Casualties” was originally developed at Paramount, Steel’s former studio. Her former colleagues are the people who developed this film from scratch. The movie’s producer, Art Linson (“The Untouchables”), claims “There’s no real downside for Dawn,” but there is a detective story here.

When Brian DePalma says, “This is the first war movie with a woman as the pivot,” he doesn’t just mean on screen. He means the pivot off screen is also female. Theories about what Steel saw in “Casualties of War” are rampant. “She actually went to the Thailand location,” said one stunned producer. Early this year, Steel profitably re-released David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which led to speculation that she had a childhood thing for all-male combat movies. She laughed out loud at the notion.

“I haven’t heard that one,” Steel said, swiveling in her chair in the middle of her second-floor office. “The first war movie I ever saw was ‘Platoon,’ and I was eight months pregnant. So my husband (producer Charles Roven) wasn’t sure I’d make it. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ is a whole other thing; ‘Lawrence’ is flawless. The day I sent David Lean a check was the most thrilling day of my life.

“ ‘Casualties’ is a commercial endeavor,” she added. “I admit it’s also an epic, and I do like epics. An epic is the canvas Brian DePalma paints on. DePalma thinks David Lean walks on water--not only ‘Lawrence,’ but he also loves ‘Bridge on the River Kwai.’ There’s this classic photo of DePalma at the ‘Lawrence’ premiere looking at Lean with such awe . . . I don’t want to keep comparing the two, but (‘Casualties’) is probably a direct result of (‘Lawrence.’)”

And nobody else wanted to make it. At Paramount, the movie was fully developed and cast, but when the budget abruptly jumped from $17 million to $20 million, the studio--within a month of the script’s completion--pulled out.

“Nobody else was breaking down our doors,” remembered producer Linson, who is based at Paramount. “Nobody but Dawn.” Which puts her in the David Puttnam position with her first Columbia acquisition. (Puttnam, her predecessor, left the studio in 1987 with almost $100 million in write-offs, primarily movies nobody else wanted to make.) “Casualties” reinforces Columbia’s faith in Steel and her strong histories with directors like DePalma and Martin Scorsese. (Steel had a role in the development of Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ”.)

After Sequel Summer (both “Ghostbusters II” and “Karate Kid III” performed below expectations for Columbia), the studio finds itself defending a movie many people in Hollywood are ready to dismiss. Even her Christmas gamble on Jane Fonda’s long-postponed $26-million “Old Gringo” seems more logical to some people than “Casualties of War.” But some people aren’t Dawn Steel.

“I think ‘Casualties’ appealed to Dawn because it offers an emotional dilemma that could take place anywhere,” said DePalma during dinner one recent evening. “It could take place in a high school.” (Or in Hollywood. Some of playwright David Rabe’s lines--”Are you on my frequency?” or “Kill the bitch”--sound like studio conversations.) “The fact of it being in Vietnam gives it a whole other dimension. Vietnam is America’s wound. No Vietnam movie has ever lost money. Especially abroad, war movies make money.”

This one has gotten a full spectrum of early reactions. DePalma can become almost defensive on the subject: “Women adore this movie more than any other focus group. Pauline Kael (The New Yorker critic) has called it without question the greatest Vietnam movie she’s ever seen. And Pauline hasn’t liked a movie of mine in eight years. And Pauline discovered me. She saw some of my short films in 1960 at the Chicago Film Festival.”

Forgetting the eminence grise of the New Yorker (who possibly won’t review the movie due to her summer hiatus)--the question still arises. Why “Casualties” now? “Why not?” responded a Columbia marketing executive off-the-record. “There are no more rules about seasonality of openings. The favorite thing in our business is to second-guess our colleagues’ release dates. A traditional fall movie would have been ‘When Harry Met Sally’ (which opened in only 18 cities, and is now on 1,123 screens) or ‘Dead Poets Society,’ which showed how gutsy Disney is. If you were there on opening night of ‘Dead Poets,’ you know what real magic is. The point is this: Nobody is wearing a sign saying, ‘Only Action/Adventure/Comedies & Sequels Can Work In The Summer.’ And you can’t pin the success of a movie on a star, either. There are only three stars in the whole business you can pin a whole release on: Eddie Murphy, Tom Cruise, and Tom Hanks.”

These stars are not those stars, obviously. “OK, it seems risky,” admitted Steel the other day, agreeing that the 17 days between opening day and Labor Day will play a big part in determining the film’s shelf life--or lack of it. “I am betting that young boys who are out of school in August will want to see Michael J. Fox in a war movie. So it’s risky. So? What I do for a living is risky.” She leaned in close to elaborate. “We are gamblers. We bet on people. That’s what we do. So as a gambler I bet on Art Linson and Brian DePalma.”

(The three of them did “Untouchables” while Steel was at Paramount, with an $76 million gross domestically--the movie was DePalma’s first mainstream hit, and as the director said the other night, “We also made Kevin Costner a star.”)

Steel continued: “After ‘Untouchables’ I wanted to do it again. These are people I believed in. I was the first studio executive to meet with Sean Penn after ‘Taps’ in 1981. I was anxious to develop things with him when nobody knew who he was.”

But why this movie? “Nobody is black and white,” she said carefully, “and here’s a big movie that says that. There’s a moment when Michael (Fox’s) character says, ‘We can’t keep treating people this way.’ It’s a modern moment. We are alive at a time when there’s a hole in the ozone. Crazed fans are killing people. . . .” She started to fan herself; the steam machine in the corner of her office overheats the room, and even the executive was warm. “I don’t want to depress myself. But this movie is about how we all have gray areas. I was moved by it.”

No, this isn’t a “Yentl” saga of a movie nurtured by a 19-year believer. Steel was actually on maternity leave from Paramount when DePalma and Linson finally put “Casualties” into development in 1987. The movie only became a Steel project after it was cast and almost ready to shoot. Steel, who became president of Columbia four days after meeting Columbia’s reclusive CEO Victor Kaufman in October, 1987, found herself in need of a slate of movies. Sequels, yes, to be sure: Columbia is planning remakes or sequels to “Pal Joey,” “The Way We Were,” “The Deep,” “The Big Chill, “Jagged Edge,” “St. Elmo’s Fire” and others. But what else?

All participants agree “Casualties” wouldn’t have been made without Dawn Steel. But exactly how did this movie get to Columbia? “There was an appetite for this movie at Paramount,” Steel said, without hesitation. “But there was also some fear. And then it got a smidge expensive. So the question is, ‘How much is too much? Or how much is enough? The pocketbook has to match the appetite.”

Paramount has exclusive hold on Linson, who produced the studio’s Robert De Niro-Sean Penn Christmas release “We’re No Angels,” through 1991. So Paramount could have contractually withheld “Casualties” from Columbia, but relented--at a price. The switch from one studio to another meant the movie went from costing $20 million to $22.5 million. “Paramount didn’t make it easier for us to acquire it,” said Steel. “They added things to make it more expensive.”

What things?

“Stuff.”

“We built the movie from the ground up,” said Linson. “Every set you see was built in Thailand. Paramount was well-vested in this movie, and they got every dollar back from Columbia.”

A Paramount source explained that the studio “believed in the picture we green-lighted, at the price agreed to--$17 million. Good business means you don’t suddenly come back with a figure of $20 million.” Countered Linson: “Costs add up even before you shoot in a foreign country. You’re on their turf. Suddenly it was going to cost a little more. I think that was a little frightening to Paramount. One phone call to Dawn, and the movie was set at Columbia. Who knew it was her cup of tea?”

“Do you remember Charlie Bluhdorn?” Steel invoked the name of the legendary Austrian founder of Gulf + Western, and one of her mentors. “Charlie used to say we needed Bank of America awards, like Academy Awards, for the bankers who back our passions. We have to make some movies we have passion for, respect for. You do sequels because they are tent poles. They open well, and they hold the tent up. But in between you make a movie you respect. A movie like ‘The Accused’ would be an example. Sometimes that movie surprises you.”

Steel is accused of competing directly now with Paramount, of going up against Paramount’s acknowledged state-of-the-art marketing and distribution network. She nodded. “Paramount sets the standard, from a marketing standpoint. And, yes, you are trying to compete with them. You are competitive with everybody. What I am trying to accomplish here is to get the top couple of slots for Columbia, to make some slots for us.

“But I’m glad Paramount didn’t do this picture. Obviously, they’re waiting to see what this picture will do. One man’s turnaround is another man’s hit. I’ve been there. I know. And the lesson is always the same lesson: Nobody knows nothing.”

Steel chose as an example the Disney summer hit “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” She remembers calling Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg “at 8:30 on the Saturday morning after it opened. He seemed startled. I said, ‘C’mon, Jeffrey, don’t tell me you don’t know the numbers.’ The picture did $5 million on a Friday night. He thought they’d do ‘five’ for the whole weekend. But Disney knows how to make movies that open, not just movies with intentions.”

Steel’s intentions are obvious, but her battle is so uphill it staggers even her: “It’s more uphill than I ever dreamed. It’s all so . . . operational. It’s like a tanker floating on an ocean. Have you ever seen a tanker on a newsreel? Do you know how hard it is to turn a tanker around? I haven’t turned it around yet, but. . . .”

But they’re watching, they’re observing her like Richard Zanuck was observed in the ‘60s, or Alan Ladd Jr. was observed in the ‘70s. She’s verging on being a household name. The articles she doesn’t cooperate with are being written around her. The people who remember her in her Fiat, obsessive and single and looking , are now asking questions like, “What are the colors in her office?”

Almost nobody doesn’t know now the former Dawn Spielberg (her father, a semipro weightlifter, changed the name to Steel). The press is having a field day with the first true female executive star since the pioneering Sherry Lansing. When Steel visited writer Nora Ephron in New York’s Hamptons last month, even hard-edged New Yorkers were ga-ga. Dawn Steel’s arrival was Topic A at the choicest Easthampton softball games.

“I want them to write about me less,” she said as if she meant it. She knows Jacqueline Onassis was uncanny and correct when she said privately that the worst thing a person can give up is anonymity. “You become this persona and you can become mythic,” Steel said. “Visibility is dangerous because if a guy cuts you off in traffic, you can’t call him a name--it might get to the press. But I wanted to build a stable and I wanted to build momentum and it takes 18 months. Maybe 18 months from now I won’t have to do press.”

Much will depend on “Casualties of War.” Steel uses adjectives like excited and nervous and agonized. “I wanted to save this movie for October or November; it should be considered for Oscars. But Brian and Art felt, always, that this should be treated as a commercial enterprise. We want a lot of people to see it or we wouldn’t have cast it this way. In terms of focus groups, no non-sequel has tracked this high all summer.”

More reasons, more enthusiasm: “There’s an awareness, a want-to-see. We really wanted peak playing time, and that’s the end of summer. People are tired of what’s out there.”

Brian DePalma has the table manners of someone who just got out of prison. He tackles a Musso & Franks prime rib like a hungry inmate; he turns a head of lettuce into a victim. His friend, director Martin Scorsese, claims DePalma simply puts on a “tough front,” that he’s actually loyal and devoted. To his friends, maybe, and his movies certainly. Nineteen movies in 19 years, in a spiral that’s gone upward and more toward middle-of-the-road: “Greetings” his 1968 debut was as underground as the late ‘60s ever got; “The Untouchables” made him a mainstream director.

It’s power--the power of working all the time--that DePalma now enjoys. The misconception is that he’s still living in the two-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment, a long way from Hollywood. In fact, he has a house in the Hollywood Hills, and feels no estrangement from the company town. “This is our industry,” he said, without apology. “I don’t distance myself from it.” But “Casualties of War” is like a casebook history on how hard it is to get movies made--for DePalma or anybody. Even without any distance from Burbank.

The director, like everyone associated with “Casualties,” remembers reading the New Yorker piece by Daniel Lang in 1969, and wanting to film it. He talked with James Woods early on about playing one of the soldiers. The 19-year-old saga is not a new story: A Robert Redford with “Ordinary People” or Robert Benton with “Kramer vs Kramer” can tell the same story. DePalma, the workhorse, simply (compulsively) did other things. He sat next to Angie Dickinson at a dinner for the mayor of Montreal, and wrote “Dressed to Kill” for her, then directed it. He spent 18 months with writer David Rabe on “Prince of the City” before they were replaced by Sidney Lumet and Jay Presson Allen. “Not until ‘The Untouchables’ did I have the muscle.”

How much muscle depends on whom you listen to, and how closely, and what questions you ask. By all accounts, DePalma’s success with “The Untouchables” got Paramount to develop “Casualties” and finally to green-light it, at $17 million. When producer Linson (“Scrooged”) came back with a $20-million figure in late 1987, Paramount put the picture in turnaround.

“I just made $200 million for them (worldwide gross, on ‘The Untouchables’) and they say things to you like: ‘We love being in business with you. But what else have you got?’ Paramount listened very carefully and seemed very excited, so to be told ‘No’. . . A director of my stature, they wind up paying you because it’s a pay-or-play deal. But I was so infuriated I couldn’t stand it. Because they have Eddie Murphy, they have ‘Indiana Jones,’ so it’s not like Paramount can’t afford to release a few important or serious movies.”

How strongly did DePalma fight? “Oh yeah, we had heated debates,” he said, lighting another link in a chain of cigarettes. “I was never in a more impassioned debate. I’d hear lines like ‘Does anybody want to see another Vietnam movie?’ And this was shocking to me because they’d developed it, and got it passed.”

DePalma invoked every argument. When he recounts them, fearlessly, you can see two things. First, you see how everybody in Hollywood fights at every level for every important gain. You also see how successful you must be, how independent, to speak up. The power structure is so small, the list of names so short, you have to be big bad Brian DePalma--a man who ultimately is fighting for a movie and not only his ego--to talk.

“All the good war movies made money,” he said, as if it was conventional wisdom. “ ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Deer Hunter,’ ‘River Kwai,’ and ‘Platoon’ . . . Also, Vietnam is not like something people aren’t interested in. It’s an unclosed book to Americans. It’s something that’s never been exorcised in the American psyche. . . . So we were begging them at Paramount. It was a ‘go’ at $17 million and then it went up a couple million, and in a day we were in turnaround.”

DePalma doesn’t just want to answer this question, he wants to address it. “I pulled out all the stops, I wanted to give them a package. They want a contract producer? So, OK, Art Linson (who has a long-term contract there.)”

DePalma quieted down a moment: “It’s like you can’t get too excited about these things. In the movie business it’s like they move the zeros over here, and get rid of some guys. Like the executives who passed on ‘Dressed to Kill’ went to Filmways, and their contracts were bought by another company, which ultimately released the film. So then we have to sue the other company for monies owed us. So these same people who passed on the movie originally are now the ones we are suing for monies owed.”

DePalma waited for a reaction. “Part of doing business in this community is that you normally have to litigate to collect money owed you. So the executives who passed on a project can be the executives you wind up litigating against, because they change companies so fast. Imagine in eight years what interest you could have been collecting. Tell me this isn’t ironic. Just tell me.”

Suddenly, the director shifted gears. He went from stone to soft. “Where we were fortunate was with Dawn. She’s a great believer in me and the project. She’s an entrepreneur, and yet she understands the cry of the last decade: What are the numbers? What’s brave about Dawn is that she knows there are no mistakes in the movie business. You make a mistake and you are watching it the rest of your life. This is a tough call, this movie. This is Dawn’s baby. Usually you start a movie and when you finish, the executive is no longer there. In that case, it’s better to be paid off than to make the movie. You should not spend time with administrations without heart.”

Heart isn’t a usual label for the director. So you have to ask him what are the usual adjectives for Brian DePalma? He answered spontaneously: “Master manipulator, wry, cackling, witty, violent, anarchic, which means I’m from Anarchica, I guess. Outrageous. I’m like Dan Quayle, it’ll never change. Once the media gets a fix, they get control. That’s the whole problem.”

That’s why DePalma never stops. Next year, he shoots Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” (“The best book in a decade,” DePalma calls it). “The search for Sherman will be like the search for Scarlett. I never made a great book before. It’s the ‘Lolita’ challenge.”

And meanwhile?

“I like our word-of-mouth. Three months ago, ‘sex, lies, and videotape’ had word of mouth, but that was three months ago. Our movie gives you an emotional pounding. Have you had an emotional pounding this summer?

The image led to a mention of DePalma’s mentor Orson Welles (whom he directed in “Get To Know Your Rabbit”). “The lesson I learned from knowing Orson so well was ‘Don’t try to do it all yourself.’ ” The problem is, success gives strong directors complete control. It’s dangerous how your ego grows,” admitted DePalma. “You get successful enough, you say to yourself, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to do another meeting with that guy.’ When that guy might be the ultimate right guy.”

The right guy, the producer, just now for DePalma is--unsurprisingly--Art Linson. Both of them come from ‘60s sensibilities, and “The Untouchables” took both of them to another level. Linson knows who the artist is, and so does DePalma, and Linson knows how to handle an artist. His “relationships” with complicated people like Robert De Niro, David Mamet and Sean Penn are enough to give him a status of sorts.

Mamet wrote “Speed-the-Plow” about Linson and his long friendship (dating back to the music business in the late ‘60s) with Paramount’s Ned Tanen. Though the roles as written aren’t really flattering--Mamet being Mamet--Linson doesn’t mind. He’s one of the luckiest people in Hollywood and knows it, and has so far stayed lucky. He’s also a pragmatist. When his directing career didn’t work (“Where the Buffalo Roam,” “The Wild Life”) he stayed a producer; his 3-year production deal with Paramount is exclusive, which meant the studio had to approve his taking “Casualties” to Columbia. Linson got the approval. He has it both ways--he lives at Paramount and has now worked at Columbia.

In the Robert Evans-Otto Preminger office on the Paramount lot, Linson looks the part: cashmere socks, cuffed khakis, tan silk shirt. He says Ron Silver, the actor who played Linson in the Mamet play on Broadway, is better-dressed, but that’s debatable. Why this producer in cashmere socks wanted to make a war movie in Thailand (where one sweats profusely) is a question.

“The theme of this movie is, a guy turns on the men who befriended him,” said Linson. “What a dilemma. Originally I said to Brian: ‘What a tough movie. Must we pick this one?’ It’s a dilemma that could have happened in high school, but the fact of it being in Vietnam makes it a whole other kind of movie.”

That could be the same question Paramount was asking, once the budget hovered at around $20 million.

“I didn’t want to walk across the street,” Linson said, referring to his momentary segue to Columbia. So what happened? “This is vague, this is speculation. But frankly, Paramount, and every other studio, felt the elements weren’t as certain as they now are. ‘Colors’ wasn’t out yet, and Sean (Penn) hadn’t had a box-office hit since ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’--which he did with me. But then suddenly you have Sean in a successful movie. So if you talk to the guys here now, it’s a different story. But at the time nobody wanted this movie. Look, I know this story from scratch. The guys here said, ‘We have enough on our plates.’ And Dawn said, ‘I will make this picture.’ ”

The producer sees an object lesson here: “Studios should be judged on the movies they make and not the ones they passed on. I’m not an executive, and nobody ever asked me to be. The only given I see right now in Hollywood is that they all want to make sequels to hits.”

DePalma talks about fighting for “Casualties”--”pulling out all the stops”--but Linson presents a cooler version. “I would have liked Paramount to make it. The movie was there to be made if Paramount felt they needed it. Did I throw a fit and stamp my feet? No. I said, ‘Yes, it is tough, and no, it shouldn’t have to be a blockbuster to justify itself.’ It’s so complex. These are not blockbuster ingredients, but certainly all early signs point to it succeeding internationally.”

There was a reason Linson could stay cool, an ace-in-the-hole, so to speak. “At all times I knew I could say, ‘If you guys don’t want to do it, Dawn will.’ ”

Linson isn’t being cavalier because he can’t be. His “production home” is Paramount, and the track record is there. “I’ve made three of the four movies I’ve developed here. If Dawn didn’t step up, would Paramount still make other movies with me? Sure. To be frank, Paramount could have allowed this picture not to be made. So if this was a personal thing, there would have been no movie. It was very cordial. It was a business decision.”

But business being business, are all things equal? Is one Hollywood studio not so much different from another? Is “Casualties” the same movie at Columbia it would have been at Paramount? “It’s the same movie,” Linson says. “Paramount has the best marketing and distribution system in the movie business. Other than that, there’s not much difference between companies. I hate being put in the middle here. I’m out of the loop.”

Sources at Paramount suggest Linson was a little in the loop. “We developed, we green-lighted, we even cast this picture,” said one executive at Paramount. “The budget was set, the movie was going forward. And one day Art came back and said, ‘It’s going to cost a little more.’ ” Linson said the additional expenses--for “odds and ends across the board, fringes and drivers, a whole collection of things”--came to about $1 million. A source at Paramount estimated the over-run at $3 million.

“Art is great with writers and creative people, but budgets concern him less,” the Paramount source said. “He came back on this picture and said, ‘It will be another $3 million.’ This was after we had approved everything. But don’t get me wrong. He’s very well-liked here.”

There is some dispute about the casting of Michael J. Fox. There are references to his character’s height, his being a “tunnel rat” in the script which were never defined in the final film. There was talk of “Casualties” as a package because both Fox and DePalma have Bauer/Benedek as agent. Columbia sources talk about Paramount not really wanting Michael J. Fox. Paramount sources talk about how Fox was always first choice--that the issue of Fox is merely a smoke screen--that the real problem was that $3-million “smidge” Dawn Steel talks about. Said the Paramount source: “It was a business decision to say no to the extra money. It was a way of letting creative people know that we will go this far--and no further.”

Linson isn’t convinced the movie is as risky as others say. “The upside is for Dawn,” he says confidently. “If nothing else, this movie is a loss leader. It offers proof that she’s in the movie business, and not in a silly frivolous way. Sequels are not it . It’s a prestige picture that keeps you on firm ground. There are so many sequels now it’s like we are watching TV. Why sequels? Because you can open them. But this movie takes Dawn out of the sequel business. I’m serious. She wanted to be in the movie business with something good.”

And so it came down to the David Rabe screenplay, according to both DePalma and Linson. “She read the screenplay David Rabe wrote,” said Linson. “She knew what was there. And Dawn knows one of the major secrets of our business.”

Which secret?

“The writer is the real deal in Hollywood. That’s the secret. The writer is the thing. Would Bob De Niro have played Al Capone if David Mamet hadn’t written it? I doubt it. And I am not underestimating the genius of Brian DePalma.”