Costner’s ‘Dances’: How Big the Sweep?

There are a few lesser items of suspense in this year’s Academy Awards, but most of these relate to the major item of suspense and interest: How big a sweep will develop for “Dances With Wolves”? How many of its 12 nominations can it cash in?

The film has key characteristics the academy’s voters have traditionally liked a lot--earnest and liberal sentiments, technical achievements on a large scale and, harder to define, a kind of maverick likableness that suggests the industry is still able to renew itself and kick over its own traces.

Some critics and voters have pointed to flaws in the film: an overstatement of its point of view, however admirable; action too frequently silhouetted against glorious dawns and dusks; a romance a century ahead of its time in its handling and expression. But these same minuses are seen, probably by a majority of the film’s viewers, as pluses.

Beyond its merits, “Dances With Wolves” has been well-served--in the way no filmmaker or distributor can ever really predict--by its timing. It has been up against films that were expertly trivial (“Pretty Woman” and “Ghost”)--fun but not exactly the kind of films you take home to mother and marry. Or films that were expertly done but populated by characters it was not easy to like or to identify with (“GoodFellas,” “The Grifters,” “Reversal of Fortune,” “The Sheltering Sky”). Or films that were simply disappointing in terms of the expectations, or over-expectations, that one had for them--”Godfather III” being a case in point, despite its many excellences.

“Dances With Wolves” is already a critical and commercial success. It has gone through the roof, as they say, in its recent openings in Britain and Europe. (Only four cinemas in England would book the film sight unseen. All performances at the four are sold out daily, and other exhibitors are presumably diluting their tea with tears.)

All of this has been a genuinely amazing increase of fortune for Kevin Costner, who not only co-produced, directed and starred but who appears to have willed the film into being, against the apologetic reluctance of the major distributors to back the film. (One consequence of having had to find his own domestic financing is that Costner’s children will own the overseas rights to “Dances With Wolves” forever.)

It is an even more amazing increase of fortune for writer Michael Blake, who only a relatively few months ago was crashing alternately with Costner and producer Jim Wilson and, stony broke, occasionally sleeping in his car. Now his novel from which the movie was drawn is atop the best-seller list and Blake is in some danger of ending up a fairly wealthy man.

Costner’s advice to Blake in pre-”Wolves” days was to stop writing scripts. “Write until it’s completely ended. I mean, find the complete arc, and don’t let it fall into the format of the 120-page script,” Costner recalled the other day, shortly before adding the 1990 Directors Guild of America award for best feature direction to his growing list of honors. The novel resulted.

What anyone who saw “Dances With Wolves” is likely to remember longest is the buffalo stampede. No one, Costner says, had run with the buffalo for 150 years. On the first day, Costner got reports from a helicopter that the 3,500 buffalo were an hour away, then 30 minutes, then 15, then the alarmed cry that they were out of control and going the wrong way, away from the cameras.

“When I saw the buffalo going away, I said to these guys (the riders), ‘Go get ‘em.’ And they all looked at me, like, ‘Wow!’ And they did. That’s the power of directing.”

The riders got the herd back under control and the shooting resumed the next day, with seven cameras working and two others buried in the ground. “They were called Eimos but I called them Need-Mos because they were always getting busted.”

Costner says he had no illusions about getting studio backing. “I knew that I was going to have to go independent before I ever went independent. I knew I was going to need that kind of room. But it wasn’t them against me.”

In studio terms there were at least four strikes against “Wolves”: it would be long, and a Western, and with subtitles, and with children, and with a dark ending. Make that five strikes.

He knew he needed the independence, Costner says, the time, the control. (“You don’t give up control of the cutting to people who profess not to understand the movie.”)

Once, Costner--with the help of Canadian film financier Jake Eberts--had acquired substantialEuropean money toward the $18.5 million budget, Orion came aboard as a helpful but helpfully hands-off distributor.

The skies are spectacular in the film but Costner says, “We never waited for a sky. We never planned. It was God’s gift to this movie.” The attacking Pawnees were designed to come out of the sun like fighter pilots but the day dawned foggy. Then unexpectedly, the sun broke through. “We were up there trying to figure out where the sun was. And we took what nature gave us, and it gave us this blood-red canvas.”

By a nice irony, this is the first film Costner has starred in that has gone over $100 million gross domestically. “ ‘The Untouchables’ was a big hit, but it was only $90 million domestically.” The difficulty he had in raising $9 million overseas for “Dances With Wolves,” is that despite the string of hits he’d had as an actor--”No Way Out,” “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams”--each was different from the others and there was no clear Kevin Costner image.

Sylvester Stallone, Costner believes, is an easier pre-sell abroad because of the Rocky and Rambo series. The only real link between the Costner films, he thinks, has been a certain level of literacy. (Exit polls in the early weeks of “Dances With Wolves” indicated that nearly 60% of the customers were college graduates.)

Costner had a very, very clear image of John Dunbar, the character he played, down to his vocabulary. He and Blake argued over a journal entry. “I met an Indian today and he was scared,” the script said. Costner argued (and won, for “frightened” instead. “Scared” was a comment; “frightened” was less pejoratively a man-to-man observation.

“Dunbar’s not a cliche. Typically in American movies if your hero is a military man, you usually know he’s at odds with the military. Dunbar’s not like that at all. He likes being in the Army. And that’s not really cool, if you think about it. He should be more like, ‘Hey, I hate what the Army’s doing.’ ”

Costner adds that “the one thing I never wanted to do in the movie was to say in the journal, ‘I am now an Indian.’ He doesn’t become an Indian. He’s a person. His loyalties are now with the woman he loves and the world in which she operates is a world in which he’s comfortable and in which he’s been accepted.”

After “Wolves” was finished Costner went to England to play Robin Hood in a film somewhat costlier than his had been. “Now I keep thinking I’ve got to fight my way back into the 20th Century.” He will, playing in Oliver Stone’s movie about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Costner had started out studying marketing in college, but he quickly felt, as he says, “like a white rat going down a maze. I just stepped outside and I said, ‘This can’t be what my life has to be. I have to find what makes me happy.’ ”

He found acting, but then found a goal within the goal. “At the point of ‘The Big Chill,’ I took control of my career. I wanted to have a big career, in the sense that I wanted to work in the highest circles . . . to work with the best people. In a collaborative medium, it makes no sense to work at any other level. My goal was not driving down Sunset in a big old limo. I’m not immune to the perks in this business, but my goal was to brush shoulders with the best minds in the business. . . . I’ve always been able to live with disappointment, but I like to get it from the source.

“What you should never get caught doing is not trying to make a good movie.”