A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : MONKEY BUSINESS : A New Yorker Writer Unleashes the Most Virulent Strain of All: Movie Producers

The article appeared in the Oct. 26, 1992, issue of the New Yorker. Under the heading “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” it told the story of a U.S. Army biological strike team’s race in 1989 to stop one of the world’s deadliest viruses from escaping into an American city.

Army volunteers in spacesuits had entered a company in Reston, Va., on a desperate mission: They were ordered to kill 500 lab monkeys that had been infected with a virus that killed nine out of 10 people it infected in villages along the Ebola River in Africa. Apart from rabies and HIV (the virus that causes AIDS), virologists said the Ebola Zaire virus had the highest mortality rate recorded for a human virus.

Hollywood knew a good movie thriller when it saw one. The magazine writer, Richard Preston, was inundated with serious offers from producers. It was said that directors Ridley Scott and Michael Mann were interested.

20th Century Fox eventually won the bidding war on behalf of producer Lynda Obst to make “Hot Zone,” but Warner Bros. is racing to be first out with its own virus movie, tentatively titled “Pandora.” Now, Preston wants to know if Warner Bros. is ripping off his article.

It is not uncommon for studios to develop competing projects. In recent years, Morgan Creek beat out Fox in the race to film a Robin Hood movie, Touchstone Pictures legged out TriStar Pictures for a new version of “The Three Musketeers” and Universal Pictures dropped its own Wyatt Earp movie when Warner Bros. signed Kevin Costner for a similar project.

In the case of “Hot Zone,” Preston believes that the Warner Bros. project “was inspired by the magazine article.”

Not so, responded producer Arnold Kopelson. “We are not basing our movie on that article,” Kopelson said. “However, I don’t believe that U.S. copyright laws protect anything he has published.”

Fox may have bought the rights, Kopelson said, “but there is nothing in (the article) that is not accessible to the public.”

The producer said he initially wanted to hire Preston as a consultant on his movie, but was “shocked and chagrined” when his bid was turned down.

Kopelson (“Platoon,” “Firebirds”) said he had been thinking of making a virus movie for some time, a film along the lines of “The Andromeda Strain” or “Panic in the Streets.”

He admitted that the impulse to launch it so quickly “all started with the article in the New Yorker,” but he added: “Our subject is totally fictionalized. It is not based on any characters in Preston’s article.”

When asked what kind of virus his movie will be about, Kopelson declined to answer. “Since we are racing time and racing each other, I don’t want to give anything out on this story,” he said.

Preston was paid $100,000 against $400,000 if the picture is made for the rights to his New Yorker piece.

He had been researching an article about viruses and had already conducted a number of interviews with leading virologists when he heard about the 1989 incident in Virginia. He recalled seeing something about the Ebola outbreak in the New York Times. Checking his files, he found a small story on “Page 26” about Army troops moving in on a bunch of monkeys with a virus. Preston knew he was on to a great story that the national news media had virtually ignored.

Preston said several events have made him suspicious that Kopelson plans to do a film about the 1989 Ebola scare.

To begin with, he said, Kopelson aggressively tried to buy the rights to his article.

In a Jan. 15 phone conversation with Kopelson, which Preston said he wrote down, the producer told him: “I’m passionate about your story line. Larry Dworet and Bob Poole (the screenwriters) have been on it three weeks.”

On Jan. 22--a week after the sale--Preston and Obst were meeting with commanders at the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick in Frederick, Md. The institute and its personnel are central to unraveling the mysterious virus outbreak in Reston and people who work there are the heroes.

After the meeting, Preston said, they ran into Dworet and Poole in the lobby.

“They were going to go in there and meet with the principals of our story,” Preston said. “They both looked like they were slapped upside the head and really looked that way when they learned that my companion was Lynda Obst.”

Preston said Kopelson also made a “frantic effort to buy the life story rights of every individual in my story” both before and after the sale was complete.

Preston vowed to sue if the Warner Bros. movie is similar to his article. “My father is a senior partner in (former U.S. Sen.) Paul Tsongas’ law firm. I don’t have to pay for it,” Preston said.

But Kopelson said “no one has an exclusive with the United States government,” and he is confident that the military would cooperate with him.

Asked if he envisioned including a scene in his movie where Army personnel systematically kill 500 infected monkeys, Kopelson replied: “No, we don’t.” He quickly added: “Anything is possible at this point.”

And that includes the monkey scene? “Lynda can kill all the monkeys she wants,” he said.