TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.6 KB | 166 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 70

Hollywood Goes to Heaven


Filmmakers are haunting theaters with a horde of afterlife movies.
Is it a search for the Almighty, or just the almighty buck?

By MARTHA SMILGIS/LOS ANGELES


    In Hollywood, a town that loves formula films about cops
and buddies and fighter pilots, a hot new character has
emerged. Meet a hero for the 1990s: the dead. Or nearly dead.
Or just back from the dead. But don't be spooked. Hollywood
believes this could be fun and meaningful at the same time. Just
listen to the sales pitch for a script being peddled around the
studios right now: "It's a Ghost kind of Die Hard. It's a Home
Alone Ghost. Better, it's a Ghost Alone!"

    This kind of thinking has created a jarring change in the
buzz words of a town devoted to the glorification of the
earthly body and the display of riches. Producers are suddenly
locked in meetings pondering the intangibles: death,
resurrection, salvation, reincarnation, atonement, even saintly
behavior. Spellbound by the blockbuster success of last summer's
Ghost, a sweet, metaphysical love story that reaped $218 million
in the U.S. and $500 million globally, these obsessed producers
have loaded the pipeline full of movies about robust spirits. No
fewer than a dozen afterlife films will be released this year,
ranging from the silly (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) to the
serious (The Rapture). The subject has inspired TV movies as
well, including Hi Honey, I'm Dead and The Haunted.

    Hollywood's new formula neatly capitalizes on the search
for spirituality that has captured America at the turn of the
decade. The meaning of life and the approach of death are issues
that seem pressing to a baby-boom generation in the throes of
middle age. At the same time, teens who were raised on the
values of the materialistic '80s now wonder what to replace them
with.

    The more creative minds in Hollywood fear that as the
industry rushes to exploit the idea, the meaning will be lost,
and only the formula will remain. "Some of these films are from
the heart, but others are from the Xerox machine," says Larry
Gordon, chief executive of Largo Entertainment. "The audience
can tell the difference. People are looking for something that
makes them feel good. We all want to believe that death isn't
so bad."

    "Death is hot," agrees Bruce Joel Rubin, writer of Ghost.
A former hippie who studied Buddhism in India, Rubin admits the
seminal idea for the movie came from Hamlet's vapory father.
"The film's message is: Life turns on a dime, so tell people you
love them," says Rubin. Director Blake Edwards, whose current
film, Switch, tells the story of a male chauvinist pig who dies
and returns to earth as a woman, believes spirit-filled movies
are popular because "the kids are searching for something.
Filmmakers are merely attempting to tap it." Producer Robert
Lawrence recently paid $2 million for a proposed script called
Manhattan Ghost Story. Says he: "In these films you can moralize
without sermonizing."

    At their best, Hollywood's interpretations of the Great
Beyond are highly personal. In making Defending Your Life, a
sophisticated satire about Judgment Day, director Albert Brooks
was inspired by the death of his father when the director was
11 years old. Unpersuaded that the dead return to earth, Brooks
puts his main characters on a linear trajectory into the
unknown. Brooks is moved by the 20 letters a week he receives
from dying people uplifted by the film. "It's not a hospice
cocktail," he quips, "but close."

    The brush with death is actually a reincarnation of a
theme that Hollywood revisits from time to time. The 1978 hit
Heaven Can Wait was a remake of the 1941 film Here Comes Mr.
Jordan. In the '50s, Topper and the Kerbys explored the
hereafter on TV. More recently, Field of Dreams cloaked the
metaphysical in a baseball motif. In fact, the netherworld as
a dramatic device is as old as theater. Anthony Minghella,
writer and director of Truly, Madly, Deeply, a British variation
of carpe diem, hails the technique as an inventive way to deal
with loss and pain: "However dark these stories, they become an
affirmation of life."

    Unfortunately, many of the copycats deliver hokey,
improbable scenarios with the depth of a shampoo commercial. The
Grim Reaper and the fires of hell have been slickly supplanted
by a blissful feel-good death in the form of reincarnation.
Dying is depicted as a transitory state, at worst a move to a
new neighborhood. "All these ghosts are young, attractive
people," observes Scott Frank, writer of the forthcoming Dead
Again, starring Andy Garcia. "Who wants to see old ghosts?" One
notable exception will be The Rapture, an austere film, starring
Mimi Rogers as a woman who murders her daughter and faces a
biblical apocalypse, complete with four horsemen in a blinding
yellow light. "All for $3 million," boasts Michael Tolkin, the
film's writer and director.

    To some degree, the preoccupation with the afterlife
reflects the obsession of Los Angeles, the
crystal-and-channeling capital of the country, where people can
mention their past lives with the same seriousness as getting
the car engine tuned. No doubt Shirley MacLaine's philosophical
musings and Richard Gere's cassette-tape readings from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead have permeated the collective
unconscious of fortysomething producers forced to face mortality
through the death of their parents and the tragic toll of
colleagues who have died of AIDS. "Death is the great leveler,"
says Josh Baran, a former Zen teacher turned publicist. "Your
plastic surgeon, lawyer, trainer and agent can't save you. Thus,
it has to be confronted. These movies are an ego trip. Hollywood
wants to remain forever young, and what better way than to
extend yourself into another life?"

    In another sense, the spiritual windfall is a reaction to
the endless barrage of carnage films during the '80s. Audiences
are sated with special effects and numbing gore. Moviegoers want
to explore the big eternal questions instead, and many of these
viewers have not had a traditional religious upbringing.
"Conventional religion used to help you deal with death," says
Lindsay Doran, producer of Dead Again. "Now this is gone; those
comforts have been taken away."

    But worldly cynics in the industry think most of these
pictures simply pay homage to the almighty buck, not Almighty
God. In the recessionary '90s, when studio chieftains are
ostensibly tightening their belts, these films are relatively
cheap to produce. Moreover, the town's eye is fixed on the
lucrative Asian market, which devours ghost stories with fervor.
"The Japanese love ghosts and robots. Certain cultures believe
in the afterlife more than we do," explains Fred Olen Ray,
president of American Independent Productions, which made
Spirits, a low-budget picture, starring Erik Estrada, that will
be released this summer.

    By all accounts the spirit binge will fade after a while,
just as the recent spate of baby movies did. "The pack
mentality is rampant," says Stan Chervin, a story editor at
Tri-Star Pictures who is awash in "ludicrously bad scripts of
past lives." In executive suites these days, screenwriters are
fervently pitching stories they describe as "supernatural," or
inspired by the late guru of mythology Joseph Campbell. "This
vein will be mined fairly quickly," predicts director Brooks.
"Only so many times can you watch a dead person help a living
person with a math test." Amen!