Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [131]
Steve also turned down Sir Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far, a World War II battle epic. Despite the fact that he and Attenborough had remained good friends since The Sand Pebbles and the role was only a cameo (part of an ensemble all-star cast), Steve asked for $3 million. Attenborough had to say no; the film had too many stars and not enough budget. There was, perhaps, an extra incentive for Steve not to want to make this film: Maximilian Schell was in it.
There was one project that caught Steve’s interest. An inveterate TV watcher, he thought the famous Israeli raid on Entebbe, about the freeing of hostages from a hijacked plane taken by Palestinians to Uganda, would make a great film, but he could not get it funded. It’s unclear how hard he tried. The project eventually wound up as an Irvin Kershner TV movie in 1977 starring Peter Finch as Yitzhak Rabin, the role Steve had originally wanted to play.
In the spring of 1977, the National Enquirer ran an “exclusive” photo of Steve, claiming that he now weighed an unrecognizable 240 pounds (perhaps the real reason he couldn’t get the Entebbe film made). He apparently didn’t care. Steve’s response to the photo was short and to the point: “I could go anywhere I wanted and not be recognized. It was great.”
However, First Artists had something to say about that. Steve still had two pictures left on his three-picture deal with them. The company was not doing well and needed a big picture, and wanted Steve to deliver one. After consulting with his lawyers, he realized he could not get out of the contract; part of the original deal had included funding of The Getaway, which meant that if he broke the contract, he would have to turn over every cent he’d made from that movie, which was several million dollars and counting.
In 1977, Phil Feldman, the president of First Artists, met with Steve and Marvin Josephson, who had taken over control of CMA from Freddie Fields, and all three agreed Steve needed to get himself in shape and come in with a viable project he could make for the same $3 million budget he had agreed to ten years earlier, even though the budgets of nearly all films had quadrupled in the seventies.3 It didn’t sit well with Steve that Barbra Streisand’s third and final film for First Artists, A Star Is Born, had been given a $6 million budget because of the presumed commercial appeal of the project.
Not long afterward, while Steve was in Palm Springs with Barbara, Josephson personally delivered to him a script called The Continuation of Gone with the Wind. ICM held the rights to the Margaret Mitchell novel, and after resisting for several years, her estate had agreed to a sequel to the original film. ICM wanted Steve to play Rhett Butler.
Steve turned down the offer, went back to Feldman, and asked him for one $6 million payout, in return for which he would do two pictures that would complete his obligation to Feldman.
Feldman went for it, and the first film Steve chose to make was based on Arthur Miller’s 1950 version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People, a full-length political metaphor about a well that is the town’s main attraction and primary source of income, and what happens when the well is discovered