Suddenly, the Red Planet Is Red-Hot

Given the scads of writers who pitch original movie ideas to studio executives every day in Hollywood, why does it sometimes seem as if everyone in town is on the same page?

Two lava-spewing movies, 20th Century Fox’s “Volcano” and Universal Pictures’ “Dante’s Peak,” vied for movie viewers in 1997. Last year came a couple of Earth-imperiled-by-flying -objects-from-space flicks (Disney’s “Armageddon” and Paramount and DreamWorks SKG’s “Deep Impact”) and two insect cartoons (Disney/Pixar’s “A Bug’s Life” and DreamWorks’ “Antz”). And this was the summer of boy-sees-ghosts thrillers, with Disney’s “The Sixth Sense” and Artisan Entertainment’s “Stir of Echoes.”

Now, it’s happening again. Two feature films, one TV miniseries and an Imax 3-D movie are currently in the works about the same topic: Mars. Brian De Palma is shooting Disney’s “Mission to Mars” in Vancouver for a March release. Warner Bros.’ “Red Planet,” the feature debut of commercial director Antony Hoffman, is in production in Australia and is due out by next summer. And writer-director James Cameron is producing and writing both the Imax film and a five-hour Fox miniseries planned for spring 2001.

To be sure, similarly themed films have shown they can do great box office--”Armageddon” grossed more than $201 million domestically while “Deep Impact” took in nearly $141 million, and both bug movies performed very well. Still, the tough job of luring moviegoers only gets tougher in a crowded field, upping the pressure to be original, edgy and hip.

“Frankly, to be in the same paragraph as James Cameron and Brian De Palma is pretty cool--and humbling and a little intimidating. It kind of revs it up a little more,” said Hoffman, who nevertheless is confident that his film will find an audience.

“Last year it was asteroids. Now, it’s Mars. Maybe in 2001 it’ll be starfish,” he said, laughing. “It’s the Hollywood way.”

How else to explain why one of history’s most famous martyrs, Joan of Arc, suddenly caught fire (creatively speaking) in Hollywood this year, with a two-part CBS miniseries and an upcoming feature film directed by Luc Besson. Or why there are currently two Muhammad Ali biopics in development--one at Sony Pictures (teaming director Barry Sonnenfeld with Will Smith as Ali) and another at Fox TV.

With Mars, at least, there is a timely peg and ample evidence that the public is interested. Two years ago, when Pathfinder spacecraft landed on the seventh-largest planet, millions tuned their televisions to watch the six-wheeled rover Sojourner root around in the pink dust and the official Web site had more than 700 million hits. And last week, the suspected destruction of the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125-million robotic spacecraft that may have flown too close to the planet’s surface, was front-page news.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Moreover, as planets go, Mars has proved an enduring cinematic subject, from “Mars Attacks the World” in 1938 (starring Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon) to director Tim Burton’s 1996 spoof “Mars Attacks!”

Still, one has to wonder: Is there such a thing as too much Mars?

Cameron, for one, can’t seem to get enough. Last fall, when he first began thinking about doing a Mars project, Warner Bros. had yet to green-light “Red Planet” (then called “Alone”), and the fate of Disney’s “Mission to Mars” was uncertain because director Gore Verbinski had dropped out. With the field potentially wide open, Cameron considered making a Mars feature, but decided against it.

“If you make a feature you’ve got to have big explosions and alien fossils and bigness, the kind of feature elements that allow a film to compete in a crowded high-stakes market,” said Rae Sanchini, president of Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment, who said HBO’s recent 12-part “From the Earth to the Moon” inspired him to try a miniseries. “He wanted to make films that while they have eye candy and scope and excitement, there is time to develop the characters of people who would invest years in something like this.”

Cameron says he is striving for “documentary accuracy” in his projects, which he hopes will do nothing less than create a groundswell for increased NASA funding. He has teamed to write the Fox miniseries (which will be directed by Martha Coolidge) with Al Reinert (who wrote “Apollo 13” and two episodes of “From the Earth to the Moon”). And the half-hour Imax project, which Cameron will direct himself, is being written with aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, author of the best-selling “The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.”

All in Favor of Manned Missions

“I want to make humans-to-Mars real in the minds of the viewing public,” Cameron said last month at the second annual conference of the Mars Society, a group that advocates funding manned missions to the Red Planet (and whose Web site, https://www.marssociety.org, outlines Cameron’s projects in detail).

Zubrin, meanwhile, who is founder of the Mars Society, is also a consultant for Disney, which purchased the rights to his book as part of developing its “Mission to Mars.” Tom Jacobson, the producer who spearheaded the $80-million Disney project more than three years ago, said that from the beginning he was committed to making the film realistic--not to drum up interest in NASA as much as to tell a gripping story.

“Mission to Mars” (written by Jim and John Thomas, Graham Yost and Ted Tally, among others) follows a team of astronauts sent on a rescue after the first manned mission to the Red Planet encounters disaster. It stars Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle, Connie Nielsen, Jerry O’Connell, Kim Delaney and Tim Robbins and has what Jacobson describes as a “speculative” ending reminiscent of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “2001.”

In other words, this fact-based science fiction project flirts with the idea of intelligent life in space, but probably won’t come down on one side or another.

“There is this collective unconscious desire to have Pathfinder come over a rise and find something, and part of our story addresses that desire on everyone’s part,” Jacobson said cryptically. “There’s no one hard and fast rule about how we actually do this. It’s not like the Apollo expedition in that it hasn’t actually been done. But the science adds a level of credibility and realism that is more respectful of the audience.”

To that end, Jacobson has also hired two former astronauts and Matthew Golombek, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory research scientist who worked on the 1997 Pathfinder mission, as consultants. Golombek was Jacobson’s “look-of-Mars expert,” helping transform a 300-acre sand pit in Vancouver to resemble the planet’s subfreezing landscape.

Warner Bros.’ $75-million project, meanwhile, also seeks to depict a feasible space voyage, though it does not have permission to use NASA’s name and logo (Disney’s project does). Hoffman, the director, said he spent months working with NASA and JPL engineers to make his film--set just 50 years in the future--as true to life as possible. Ultimately, however, the story line made NASA flinch.

Astronauts in Crisis in ‘Red Planet’

“Red Planet” (written by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin) has the same initial premise as “Mission to Mars”: the failure of the first manned mission. But it takes a different tack, focusing largely on the relationship of the one astronaut (Val Kilmer) who is left stranded and another astronaut (Carrie-Anne Moss) who must decide whether to save him. (The film also stars Simon Baker-Denny, Benjamin Bratt, Tom Sizemore and Terence Stamp).

“It’s definitely not ‘Armageddon.’ It’s not, ‘Let’s rock and take over the world!’ It questions whether we must go [to Mars] and at what cost,” said Hoffman, adding that NASA officials balked because in “Red Planet” one astronaut murders another. “NASA couldn’t get their heads around [that]. The system breaks down. They didn’t want that. And while I really wanted NASA’s approval, I said, ‘It’s more important dramatically to get what I need than it is to get the little logos on the ships.’ ”

Such irreverence seems fitting for a project that many are comparing to Warner Bros.’ breakout hit of this year, “The Matrix.” Not only does “Red Planet” feature Moss, who was the female lead opposite Keanu Reeves in that film, but it is using the previous project’s costume designer and production designer.

In the interest of realism, Hoffman has shot footage (like Disney did) in Jordan--a place whose rock faces and textures most closely resemble Mars. But he doesn’t sound too worried that he and De Palma are making the same movie. In addition to flawed astronauts, Hoffman’s picture has another element not common to most action flicks: a female mission commander (Moss).

“A woman saves a man in this movie. It’s a theme for all mankind,” said Hoffman, who likes to sum up the vastness of his subject matter by saying, “If the moon is like going to Catalina, Mars is like Marco Polo going to China. . . . If [this movie] does strike a nerve, it will be really different: It’ll be about something. If you can do that in Hollywood, that’s great.”