‘The Flood’ Almost Gets Caught in Disaster Eddy

He had been on the job only two months at Paramount Pictures when studio executive Rob Friedman faced a difficult, multimillion-dollar decision.

For weeks, Paramount had been rushing to complete post-production on “The Flood,” an action-thriller about a daring armored car heist set against the backdrop of an overflowing river that threatens a small Midwest town.

The film, which stars Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater, cost Paramount nearly $70 million and was scheduled to be released May 2--a prime period for studios to begin rolling out their potential summer blockbusters.

The movie was coming together. The marketing was all but in place. And, then Paramount blinked.

Friedman ordered “The Flood” be taken off the studio’s current release schedule until next autumn at the earliest. No new date has been set.

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But Friedman, who had left a lengthy career at Warner Bros. to oversee Paramount’s movie distribution, marketing and home video departments, felt he had no choice.

What happened to “The Flood” is indicative of how the business of releasing films has become a treacherous high-wire act in modern-day Hollywood, where studios feverishly jockey over release dates knowing the competition is so fierce that they often have only one weekend to launch their movies. One misstep or marketing miscalculation can lead to a box-office bomb.

Whenever a studio pulls a film from its release schedule, it naturally creates speculation that there is something terribly wrong with the movie itself.

But Paramount officials and the film’s producers insist that their decision to abandon the May 2 opening was not caused by any creative flaws in “The Flood.” Even now, they noted, no major reshoots are contemplated.

Instead, they said their decision arose from a combination of factors that made releasing the film in the current marketplace too risky for a movie Paramount believes in so strongly. These factors included a rival studio suddenly shifting one of its big-budget action films to the weekend before “The Flood” was to have debuted, a glut of disaster movies and a simple question of whether “The Flood” was misleading as a movie title.

Directed by Mikael Salomon from a screenplay by Graham Yost, the film began shooting the last week of August.

In the film, Slater and Ed Asner portray armored car drivers who are transporting $3 million from the local banks to the safety of higher ground. After their engine dies, stranding the armored car in waist-deep water, the drivers are accosted by a group of robbers led by Freeman. Slater flees into the darkness with the money, prompting an all-night chase.

From the outset, the movie proved a daunting challenge for Salomon and producers Mark Gordon, Gary Levinsohn and Ian Bryce.

To begin with, the filmmakers rebuilt a real-life town--Huntingburg, Ind.--to scale in Palmdale at Rockwell International’s plant, which had previously been used to construct B-1B bombers.

The 50 buildings that comprised Huntingburg took 12 weeks to assemble and then were lowered by cranes into the holding tank measuring 680-feet-long by 250-feet-wide. The tank held 5 million gallons of water, which served as the floodwaters in the movie.

“Ninety-nine percent of the picture was shot in the tank,” Levinsohn said. “What is amazing about it, is when audiences see the picture they will never in their wildest imagination believe it was shot inside a tank.

“All the events take place against the backdrop of water rising,” he added. “Water is in the picture 100% of the time. . . . We had three acres of rain and enormous rainbars raining down on everybody all the time.”

Post-production began the third week of January and the filmmakers were under enormous pressure to get it completed by March 31 so that Paramount could hold a press junket and begin screening the film for the news media.

“Everybody was feeling very rushed,” said one source. “It was a very tense situation.”

The filmmakers managed to have one test screening for an audience and put together a trailer that was not satisfactory to everyone. Meanwhile, Paramount had no billboard or advance posters up to create public awareness of the movie.

During post-production, Friedman was having second thoughts about the May release date.

“When I first came on board, one thing that concerned me was this wasn’t a disaster picture,” Friedman recalled, “but the title made me think that it was a disaster picture.”

Gordon and Levinsohn agreed, noting that the water is only an ever-present backdrop to the story of the heist.

“It was a title the writer slapped on the front page of the screenplay when he finished it,” Gordon said. “Who knew at the time there would be so many other pictures around it that would use natural disasters?”

“We never realized the so-called phenomenon of the disaster movies was something we would have to be working against,” Levinsohn said. “We knew from the beginning that we didn’t have a disaster movie.”

Disaster films took hold in Hollywood last year with the Warner Bros. release of “Twister,” an action film about tornado-chasing scientists. Then came Sylvester Stallone’s “Daylight,” which revolved around a disaster inside a tunnel. And more recently, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox raced to finish two volcano movies: “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano,” respectively.

“Dante’s Peak” won the race to open first, debuting Feb. 7. Fox, meanwhile, moved the release date of “Volcano” to April 25--one week ahead of “The Flood.”

“If we wanted to stay on May 2 we absolutely could have made it,” Friedman said. “But once Fox moved in ‘Volcano,’ I became increasingly concerned about that date. If it moved behind us, I probably would not have moved the date.”

Friedman said he couldn’t move “The Flood” into the summer because the studio already has the mega-budget “Titanic” set for July 2 release and later will release “Face Off” starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, and a sci-fi thriller called “Event Horizon” starring Laurence Fishburne.

Rather than see “The Flood” get lost, Friedman decided to wait.

“Competition is the most important issue we deal with in the movie marketing universe,” he explained. “We are ecstatic about this movie.”