Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [132]
Feldman was outraged by the selection of this film, but because Steve had the right to choose the project, he had to agree to it. Warner, wanting to have a piece of two new Steve McQueen films, came aboard An Enemy of the People as its distributor before it even knew what the project was, a deal it, too, couldn’t get out of.
Steve managed to put together a great international cast, including Bibi Andersson (as Catherine Stockmann, Thomas’s wife, after Julie Christie turned down the role), Durning (Nicol Williamson had agreed to play Peter but changed his mind and bowed out of the project), and Michael Cristofer (who would go on to become a noted playwright). To direct, Steve chose TV director George Schaefer, who was a veteran of dozens of Hallmark Hall of Fame dramas during TV’s golden age but had yet to direct a feature. Steve felt he was perfect for the job: competent and willing to take orders, someone who would make the film the way Steve wanted it made. He knew he couldn’t get that with any name director, even if he could afford one. Over lunch, Steve convinced Schaefer to direct the picture. At the first production meeting, Steve showed up still grossly overweight, with a scraggly beard and round eyeglasses that all but hid his blue eyes.
The film that was meant to return Steve to the big screen after four years away took eighteen months to shoot, went way over budget (Steve paid for the cost overruns out of his own pocket), and never officially opened.4
No one could figure out why Steve had chosen a project that was so sure to self-destruct. Some saw it as his revenge against First Artists for holding him to his contract. Others saw it as Steve’s desire to do some “real” acting. Still others thought he had finally and completely lost his mind. To Steve, the answer was simple: “At this stage in my life, I don’t want to make ordinary movies anymore. If I can’t make movies above average in quality, I’d rather take it easy. I wanted to do something I’d be proud of”—that also paid him millions of dollars.
Warner and First Artists made it no secret that they were furious. Steve, according to many who worked on the film and knew him personally, said he was crushed at their reaction to what he believed was his Method masterpiece.
IN NOVEMBER 1977, while still making An Enemy of the People, Steve read something in the November issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal that made him quite angry. Ali had told an interviewer, “If they put a freeze frame on my life right now, I’d say I’m leading exactly the sort of life I want. I don’t know about Steve. You’d have to ask him.”
Before the heat left his face, Steve signed the final divorce papers that officially ended his marriage to Ali, which she did not contest. He was determined now to start a new life with Barbara as far away from Hollywood as he could get. It meant cleaning house, in every way, and Steve was committed to doing it, even without having delivered his final film to First Artists.
At the same time, Tony Bill, then a producer at Warner as well as an up-and-coming movie actor, had found a script called Nothing in Common that he wanted Steve and Ali to do together; he was willing to let it be made under the banner of First Artists. Steve said no, and it never got as far as Ali.
Director Bob Rafelson, one of the hottest independent directors of the 1970s after his highly regarded 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, which helped cement Jack Nicholson’s rise to stardom, wrote Missouri Breaks for Steve, but Steve turned that down too and it went instead to Nicholson and Marlon Brando, with Arthur Penn directing. Alexander and Ilya Salkind wanted him for the title role of Superman, in a film that would co-star Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Ned Beatty, Raquel Welch, Michael York, Telly Savalas,