A Test of Wills, Take 2

It is late at night in the Oval Office. The president leans over his desk, wincing in pain. He steadies himself, cracks open a bottle of pills and pops a couple in his mouth. His appointments secretary casually hands him a glass of whiskey. After the president has washed down the pills, the aide pours him another shot. Red-eyed, disheveled, his back clearly killing him, the president stares grimly at his aide, then at his brother sprawled on a couch.

The aide says what is on everyone’s mind. “Jesus Christ almighty.” They glance at one another, down their drinks and burst into nervous laughter.

It is Oct. 16, 1962. The front-page headline on the Washington Post on John F. Kennedy’s desk reads: “Giants Batter Ford, Even World Series.” But in the White House, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, it is Day 1 of the Cuban missile crisis, a saber-rattling two weeks when a missile showdown between JFK and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev will bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.

The CIA has just shown Kennedy U-2 photos of Soviet technicians installing medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Their assessment: The missiles could be operational in less than two weeks. If fired, they could land as far north as Washington, killing 80 million Americans in 10 minutes. At a hastily convened meeting of Kennedy’s top military and political advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend airstrikes followed by an invasion.

When Kennedy retreats to the Oval Office that night, he shares his worries with his two most trusted confidants: his brother Bobby and Kenny O’Donnell, a hard-nosed Boston Irish political operator who sometimes came to the White House wearing a gun in his trousers, telling visitors, “I’m the last line of defense around here.”

The story of the relationship among these three men during perhaps the most harrowing incident of the Cold War is at the heart of “Thirteen Days,” a political thriller that is in the midst of filming in Los Angeles and in the Philippines. The $80-million film stars Kevin Costner as O’Donnell, with Bruce Greenwood as John F. Kennedy and Steven Culp as Robert F. Kennedy. Screenwriter David Self based the script on a wealth of books and historical documents, including Kennedy White House tapes and nearly 100 hours of O’Donnell interviews from 1967, 10 years before O’Donnell’s death. Financed by Beacon Communications and New Line Cinema, it will be released in October, 38 years after the actual events took place.

It is a film many in Hollywood thought would never get made, having survived several years of agonizing ups and downs before finally going before the cameras last fall. Along the way, the project has been aligned with three studios, while at least eight directors were either interested or attached at various junctures.

The bruising struggle to launch “Thirteen Days” has a little bit of everything: brief flirtations with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg; lobbying from Ted Turner; and an acting tip from Dan Rather. It provides a sobering example of the difficulty of making a high-minded historical project in an era when studios are increasingly preoccupied by youth-oriented comedy and cost-conscious bookkeeping.

After years of Kennedy-bashing books and films about New Frontier-era womanizing and political opportunism, “Thirteen Days” focuses on the Kennedy White House at its best and brightest, when a small band of coolheaded pragmatists somehow defused a frightful Cold War confrontation.

“We look at history differently today because of what happened during those 13 days,” says Costner one afternoon during a break in shooting, his voice laced with the Boston Irish brogue he employs in the film.

The film is more than just a test of the commercial viability of serious historic drama. It’s also an opportunity for Costner to refurbish his media image, which has taken a beating in recent years, especially after his public feud with Universal Pictures before the release of his last film, “For Love of the Game.” Costner acknowledges that his reputation as a temperamental star played a role in his passing up the opportunity to direct “Thirteen Days” himself.

“The movie is going to come under so much scrutiny that it would’ve put too much onus on the film if I’d directed it,” he says from the set. “I’ve even taken lines away from Kenny and given them to Jack and Bobby because they couldn’t come out of my mouth. The media would’ve looked at everything as, ‘Oh yeah, Kevin Costner has changed the story so that it’s Kenny O’Donnell saving the world.’ ”

The film’s story certainly highlights O’Donnell’s role in White House affairs. There are several script scenes--including one in which O’Donnell telephones a U-2 pilot and one in which he gives Jack Kennedy a private pep talk at the height of the crisis--that are clearly Hollywood dramatic conjecture. But they seem in keeping with the film’s tone, which emphasizes a political heroism almost forgotten in today’s coolly ironic age.

“If you didn’t see Ali fight, you didn’t know how great he was,” Costner says. “If you didn’t see John Wayne in ‘Red River’ or ‘Liberty Valance,’ you didn’t know how good he could be. And for me, this movie offers us the opportunity to drop some of our cynicism and see one of the moments when Jack and Bobby Kennedy became golden. My character is just the window into the story. Once you’re inside, you get to see two guys saving the world.”

*

When Beacon chief Armyan Bernstein flew up with Costner to see Francis Ford Coppola at his Napa Valley home in February, he had two things that get a director’s attention: a hot script, written by newcomer David Self, and a movie star eager to be in it.

A host of A-list directors had already flirted with “Thirteen Days,” but Coppola was at the top of everybody’s wish list. As it turned out, he and Bernstein had a history together. Long before Bernstein emerged as a powerful producer, making such high-profile films as “Air Force One” and “The Hurricane,” he’d written Coppola’s 1982 film “One From the Heart.”

After Coppola gave Costner and Bernstein a tour of the vineyard, they had a long lunch on the veranda of his Napa home, with Coppola waxing eloquent about the script’s possibilities. “Francis is a wonderful guy to sit and talk to about movies,” Bernstein says. “You feel as if you’re in the middle of a great moment when he’s excited about a story. He had a fascinating take on the missile crisis, because he saw it as a different way of looking at fighting a war, that the only way you could win this war was by not fighting.”

Best of all, Coppola envisioned a way of making the film feel like a personal story, not simply a history lesson. He told his visitors: Imagine a gunman has come into your house and taken your family hostage. And while they’re locked in one room, this crazy guy is in the next room, putting together this gun that he’s going to use to kill them. It’s up to you to find a way to stop him.

Costner and Bernstein returned to Los Angeles full of optimism. As Costner put it: “He’s so special that you always want him to be a part of your movie because he’ll just make it better.” News of a possible deal with Coppola leaked to the trades, prompting a Variety story that had Coppola in “serious talks” to direct, with the expectation of a “finalized deal” by week’s end. The script had Hollywood heat--Steven Spielberg had liked it so much when he read it that he immediately gave the writer a production deal at DreamWorks.

Then suddenly the deal fell apart. Coppola’s not talking. But he dropped out of the project just after the death of Stanley Kubrick in March, telling friends that life was short and that he wanted to focus on writing a personal script. Coppola’s price may also have been too high. As a top director, he would, like Costner, get 15% of the film’s first-dollar gross, making it difficult for a studio to reap any sizable profits from the film.

It was a setback, but not the first. By then Bernstein had already invested several years in “Thirteen Days,” first in getting a suitable script and then in wooing a series of high-profile directors. The producer, who’d been a history major at the University of Wisconsin, had long been fascinated by the inherent drama of the Cuban missile crisis. But he had trouble deciding how to tell the story. He didn’t want to do another Camelot film, with “big movie stars” playing Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Bernstein wanted to see the Cuban missile crisis through someone else’s eyes, perhaps a low-level deputy, who was in the room where the big decisions were made.

“I kept trying to come up with all sorts of different angles and ideas about how to get into the room,” Bernstein says. “And then one night, at a party, I met this guy who said, ‘I know how to get you into the room. My father was Kenneth O’Donnell.’ ”

If there were ever a Kennedy insider, it was O’Donnell, a charter member of the Kennedy “Irish mafia.” “You see Kenny there?” Jack Kennedy once told campaign chronicler Theodore White, pointing to O’Donnell asleep on a plane. “If I woke him up and asked him to jump out of this plane for me, he’d do it.”

O’Donnell and Bobby were roommates at Harvard, where O’Donnell, as quarterback of the Harvard football team, once scored a winning touchdown playing with a broken leg. He managed Jack’s Senate and presidential campaigns and worked for Bobby when he was counsel to the Senate select committee investigating labor racketeering before serving as Jack’s key political operative at the White House. Costner says that when he was preparing for the role, he met Dan Rather, who’d known O’Donnell when he was a young reporter. Rather had a tip about how Costner should play the part.

“Dan said there were three kinds of tough--phony tough, street tough and prison tough,” Costner recalls. “And he said Kenny was prison tough, which was the toughest of all.”

Although his official White House title was presidential appointments secretary, O’Donnell was perhaps JFK’s most trusted political advisor. At the height of the missile crisis, when JFK convened a top-secret strategy session, he invited his top Cabinet officers, CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff officials, his brother Bobby--and O’Donnell. As White House reporter Haynes Johnson once wrote: “O’Donnell was the perfect aide--tight-lipped, shrewd, tough, totally loyal and never hesitant to say exactly what he thought.”

When the missile crisis heated up, JFK was in Chicago at a campaign fund-raiser. It fell to O’Donnell to get Kennedy back to Washington without tipping off the press. He called in Pierre Salinger, the president’s press secretary, who was still in the dark. “All I can tell you now,” O’Donnell said, “is that the president may have to develop a cold tomorrow.”

*

O’Donnell’s son, Kevin, was a rising star in the Internet universe as a co-founder of Earthlink, a leading Web service provider, when Bernstein met him. He became part of Bernstein’s social circle and is now a partner in Beacon Entertainment, having helped bankroll Bernstein’s buyout of Beacon from its previous owner, Ascent Entertainment--an indication of the growing connection between the Web world and Hollywood.

Once he had O’Donnell’s blessing, Bernstein looked for a writer. His search brought him to David Self, a 30-year-old Stanford University graduate who’d written “Dawn’s Early Light,” an unproduced thriller about a terrorist attack on the White House. Bernstein had read the script when he was making “Air Force One,” worried that it might spawn a rival movie.

As Self remembers it, Bernstein approached him with the idea of doing a love story set against the Cuban missile crisis. Self was wary of the love story angle, but he liked the missile crisis half of the idea. “I persuaded Army that the story should be told from an everyman’s point of view, with a character that would get us into the White House. And Army said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this friend whose dad worked in the White House in some capacity.’ And of course it was Kevin O’Donnell.”

Self began writing the script in the spring of 1997, relying heavily on Kennedy White House tapes and newly available CIA documents. The Oval Office scene in which JFK shares his concerns with Bobby Kennedy and O’Donnell is a dramatization based on material from Bobby Kennedy’s memoir, “Thirteen Days,” as well as excerpts from the 1967 O’Donnell interviews conducted by TV newsman Sander Vanocur.

“The material was so informal and intimate that it really gave me a great insight into how these guys related to each other,” Self says. “It helped me get beyond the Camelot myth of the White House. With the Kennedys, you’re dealing with such iconic figures that you and the audience have a preconceived notion of what they’re like. But when you do the research, you find ways to capture them from a fresh angle.”

As soon as Self began work on the script, Bernstein started recruiting directors. The first director attached to the project was Lawrence Kasdan, an old Bernstein pal, who met with Self when he was still writing the script. “He said, ‘Go ahead and finish it and then I’ll look at it,’ ” Self recalls. But before Self was finished, Kasdan had decided to write and direct “Mumford,” which came out last fall.

Self delivered a first draft of the script late in the summer of 1997. He worked on revisions with Bernstein and delivered a final draft in early December. Bernstein liked it so much that he immediately gave it to Costner, another old friend. It wasn’t just a casual choice--Kenny O’Donnell is a classic Costner character, a laconic all-American hero whose moral compass is put to the test by historic events. Within hours, Costner called Bernstein back, saying that it was a great script.

“I knew I’d read something special and I wanted to be a part of it,” Costner says. “If I’m going to make a life out of working in film, I wanted this to be part of my filmography.”

*

With Costner on board, Bernstein went to Universal Pictures, where Beacon had a first-look deal. Casey Silver, the then-chairman of the studio, was enthusiastic about the project. Under Beacon’s deal, the movie would be co-financed, with Universal putting up 40% of the budget in return for the domestic rights to the film. Once the script was in hand, Bernstein began auditioning directors. One of the earliest suitors was John Frankenheimer, who’d made the classic political thriller “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Bernstein liked Frankenheimer, but he wanted to shop around. He met with several other directors, including Ed Zwick (“Glory,” “Courage Under Fire”), but he couldn’t find anyone who shared his take on the material. Spielberg even had a brief flirtation with the script, but as Self dryly explains, “then he went off to Hawaii and read ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and that was the last I heard about him doing the movie.”

Silver suggested Phil Alden Robinson, who seemed a good fit; he had a strong political sensibility, he’d directed hits for Universal, and he’d had a good working relationship with Costner, who starred in “Field of Dreams,” a hit film Robinson directed.

Robinson was eager to work with Costner again. Moreover, as a student of the ‘60s--Robinson’s new TNT movie, “Freedom Song,” is based on a true story from the civil rights movement--he could bring a special authority to the material. But Robinson felt the “Thirteen Days” script needed work. He wanted to enlarge the role played by Jack Kennedy, envisioning Daniel Day-Lewis playing him as a more aloof, Hamlet-type figure. Robinson worked with Self on the script but eventually lobbied Bernstein and Costner to write a new draft himself.

“Phil wanted to take the script in a very different direction, with the president as the main protagonist,” Self says. “He got Army’s permission to do a new draft because he didn’t feel he could direct my version of the story.”

After working on the script for a month, Robinson submitted a new, leaner, more JFK-dominated draft. Neither Bernstein nor Costner thought it was an improvement. “The problem was that Phil wanted to change a screenplay that Kevin and I loved and a lot of people already loved,” Bernstein says. “It wasn’t that it was better or worse. It was just different from the story we wanted to explore.”

So Robinson was out. And by then, so was Universal, which in the wake of the studio’s purchase by Edgar Bronfman Jr. was going through a cutback in its financial commitment to films. The studio wanted to scale back the scope of the film for budgetary reasons. Bernstein argued that audiences expected a certain bigger-than-life quality from a historical thriller: “You need to work on the same kind of scale as ‘Apollo 13.’ We’ve got ships on the high seas, spy planes being shot out of the sky. It wouldn’t have the same scope if we lost all that.”

Free to go elsewhere, Bernstein went to Sony, where Gareth Wigan, one of the studio’s top executives, had been a fan of the script. Sony remained enthusiastic even after Robinson dropped out. In fact, the studio had its own candidate for director: Martin Campbell, who’d just made “The Mask of Zorro,” a big hit for the studio. Campbell initially seemed eager to make the film and had a couple of productive meetings with Costner.

But the director and the star couldn’t agree on who should play Jack Kennedy. Costner wanted the part to go to Michael O’Keefe, a TV and movie actor best known as the son in “The Great Santini.” Campbell didn’t see O’Keefe in the part. When other differences surfaced, Campbell dropped off the project.

By then, Sony’s ardor for the film had cooled. Faced with a big budgetary commitment, the studio saw the picture as a difficult sell to young moviegoers and overseas audiences. It was the kind of movie that studio executives enjoy watching but get nervous about financing, often for good reason--the lackluster box office for “The Insider” is a recent example.

“It’s a great story, but it’s a tough sell,” says Columbia Chairwoman Amy Pascal. “It’s a period film, and it’s difficult to reach a broad audience with a historical drama. It’s always about how many risks you’re willing to take.”

*

All along, Costner’s presence was something of a double-edged sword: He was the project’s biggest selling point and its biggest stumbling block. As an A-list movie star, he provided some much-needed commercial punch to a story that was considered a difficult sell.

But his very star clout made it difficult to package the film. Like many top stars, he had de facto approval over the film’s director and major cast members, while his $20-million salary inflated the film’s budget.

A director himself, Costner was known as an opinionated, often difficult collaborator. He’d clashed with his friend Kevin Reynolds, who’d directed Costner in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and “Waterworld”; Reynolds quit both films before their releases after heated battles with the star. Last fall, Costner also had a public feud with Universal over the running length and rating of “For Love of the Game,” a baseball drama that flopped at the box office after Costner lambasted the studio for caving in to the Motion Picture Assn. of America ratings board. (To get a PG-13 rating, the studio took out some language Costner wanted kept in.) So it was hardly a coincidence that several of the directors Bernstein approached all had something in common--they’d had good experiences working with Costner.

With Universal out and Sony’s interest waning, Bernstein phoned New Line production president Michael De Luca, who’d made a pitch for the movie months before. When Bernstein asked De Luca if he was still interested, the New Line executive replied: more than ever. It didn’t matter that so many directors had dropped out along the way. De Luca thought he had what counts--the right actor and a good script.

“Sometimes a script comes along that makes you want to roll the dice,” says De Luca, whose company is putting up $35 million of the film’s $80-million budget. “It’s an uplifting story that makes you nostalgic for an era where there were real heroes. I think it’s a great antidote to the times we live in now, where it seems like everything is about cynicism and corruption.”

Worried that another studio might make a last-minute play for the film, De Luca played a trump card. He’d just watched a Ted Turner-inspired TV series about the Cold War that had a segment about the Cuban missile crisis. When he called to congratulate Turner, the man largely responsible for New Line being a part of Time Warner, De Luca told him he was chasing “Thirteen Days.” Turner got excited; he was not only a big history buff, but also a Costner pal. Turner called Costner and made a personal pitch for New Line, saying it would be a great place to take the project.

As soon as Turner got off the phone, Costner called Bernstein. “Kevin was really impressed,” Bernstein says. “He said, ‘You want to hear something really cool? Ted Turner just phoned, and he said he really wanted to be a part of this, that it could really be a great movie.’

“Ted’s call really sealed our decision to go to New Line. After all, Edgar Bronfman and Rupert Murdoch weren’t calling. It was a big deal to us.”

*

The project had new momentum, but it wasn’t entirely back on track. The movie still needed a director. Enter Roger Donaldson. The Australian-born director, best known for such films as “No Way Out” (which starred Costner), “The Bounty” and “Dante’s Peak,” was a teenager at the time of the nuclear showdown. He still has the front page of the Melbourne Herald with the first headlines about the crisis. Although he was a good student, Donaldson stopped doing his homework, figuring there was no use in sweating out geometry if the world was going to end.

“I kept a diary about what was going on in my life, and I have this whole page about the Cuban missile crisis, basically with me wondering if the world was going to be here tomorrow or not,” he says. “Even for a 16-year-old boy, it was a very tumultuous time.”

When Donaldson met with Bernstein, he read him entries from his teenage journals. “I knew Army was talking to another director, because I’d read the stories in the trade papers,” the director says. “So I went off, thinking it wouldn’t happen. But much to my surprise, he tracked me down and I got the job.”

Even though Donaldson is not considered an A-list director, he has several important qualifications: He’s budget-conscious, adept at blending action with drama, and he got along with Costner on “No Way Out.”

With Donaldson on board, the film went ahead full steam. By then, Costner had softened his stance on casting O’Keefe as JFK, letting Donaldson see other actors. The role went to Greenwood, a veteran TV actor who also appeared in “Double Jeopardy.” The Robert Kennedy part went to Culp, a TV actor who’d recently played Bobby in the TV movie “Norma Jean and Marilyn.” Both actors wear front-teeth mouthpieces to heighten the Kennedy resemblance.

The film, which has been shooting in L.A. since October, moves this week to the Philippines, which will double for Cuba in scenes involving U-2 flights and the confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships during the American naval blockade. The film has a military advisor and a White House advisor (for protocol issues). But the Department of Defense has not cooperated with the production, citing the script’s negative portrayal of Kennedy’s military advisors, especially then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay, who is portrayed in most historical accounts as being an overeager advocate of a first-strike air attack and invasion.

“LeMay is a perpetual skeleton in the military’s closet,” says Self, who is now adapting the historical novel “Gates of Fire,” about a battle between the ancient Spartans and Persians. “Every book has him as the archetype Cold War general who wanted to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Without official cooperation, the production had to launch a search for suitable equipment, eventually locating 10 period Air Force jets at Clark Air Force Base near Manila, which is now used by the Philippine military.

The film’s production team says Costner has been fiercely loyal to the script and its historical accuracy. Asked about his input into the script, Costner replied: “Of everyone who’s been involved, I’m the only guy who ever said, I just want to make the movie. I don’t want to change a thing.”

It’s a slight exaggeration. Costner acknowledges that he asked Self to write two new O’Donnell scenes, one with O’Donnell and JFK, the other with O’Donnell and Jackie Kennedy. He also suggested a rewrite of the film’s ending. “It wasn’t about beefing up Kevin’s part,” Self says. “For Kevin, he’s not playing the hero, he’s playing the friend. So he felt it was important to flesh out the nature of his role in the White House and his relationship with Jack and Bobby.”

*

Seeing the actors on the 1962-era Oval Office set, the walls decorated with etchings of Jack Kennedy’s favorite old naval clippers, it’s hard not to savor the idea of having a front-row seat at America’s most epic Cold War confrontation. Here are the fabled Kennedy brothers flying blind, unsure of what course to take, knowing one wrong move might spark a nuclear conflagration. As they debate a plan of action, wondering what advice to take, O’Donnell cautions them: “There is no expert on this subject, no wise old man. [Expletive], there’s just us.”

After Donaldson films the scene several times, Costner sits down in a director’s chair to watch the video playback. Scrunching up his shoulders, he points to the nerdy pocket protector on his shirt pocket, full of ‘60s-era fountain pens. “Look at me,” he says. “I dress a little frumpy and my hair’s been darkened. My job is not to look golden in this movie. That’s what you see when you look at Jack and Bobby Kennedy. They’re the guys who saved the world.”