Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [133]
Steve was also offered the starring role in The Betsy, again with Ali. It was a screen version of yet another Harold Robbins novel, this one about the car industry. He immediately turned it down, and Ali was never officially offered the film. Irwin Allen was set to do a sequel to The Towering Inferno but didn’t even seek Steve out. The Gauntlet came Steve’s way, via First Artists, after Brando bowed out of it, but Streisand, set as Brando’s co-star, didn’t want to work with Steve, and the two leads eventually went to Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke, with Eastwood directing and producing. Sir Lew Grade (“Sir Low Grade,” as he was often called, for the quality of his films) wanted Steve for Raise the Titanic, but Steve asked for too much money and Grade withdrew his offer. The same thing happened when Spielberg wanted him for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Columbia refused to meet his price and the role went instead to Richard Dreyfuss, after Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson all passed.
In August 1979, Steve offered to film Harold Pinter’s play Old Times. Both First Artists and Warner Bros. told him not to bother—there was no way they would ever distribute it.
Fed up with First Artists, Steve exercised the nonexclusive clause in his original deal and signed a $5 million contract to star in Richard Fleisher’s film version of James Clavell’s bestselling novel Tai-Pan.5 To seal the deal, he demanded and got a $1 million nonrefundable payment upon signing, with another $1 million contractually guaranteed to be paid on a specific date. When the second check arrived late, Steve walked off the project, legally free of it. According to Marvin Josephson, Steve’s agent, “One large payment was made to McQueen when he signed the contract with [producer Georges-Alain Vuille and his Lausanne, Switzerland-based Beverly Films].… [T]hey failed to meet one of the conditions in the contract, that of a major money payment. Therefore, Steve [did not] proceed with the film.” What had really gotten Steve and Josephson angry was that Vuille had already made $18 million in foreign presales of the film using Steve’s name, but was late making his second payment.
Steve and Josephson now set Steve’s asking price at $5 million, with a $1 million nonrefundable advance upon signing. Amazingly—despite the fact he hadn’t had a hit film in nearly five years, and was involved with the dismal failure of An Enemy of the People—because of the Tai-Pan contract and payouts, without shooting a single foot of film he had become 1979’s highest-paid actor in Hollywood.
LATE THAT same year, First Artists stepped up the pressure to get the second movie Steve owed them. In response he sued them, claiming that their refusal to distribute Old Times had completed his obligation to them. Before the case went to trial, Steve and First Artists’ Feldman reached an out-of-court agreement that stipulated Steve would star in Tom Horn, a film about the life of a man out of place and out of time. Horn was the man who captured Geronimo, became a folk hero, outlived his own legend, spent a brief time as a bounty hunter, and eventually was hanged for a murder he probably didn’t commit. Tom Horn, both sides agreed, would satisfy all remaining obligations of the Steve McQueen/First Artists association.
However, even as the ink was drying on the deal, ABC Pictures announced it was making its own version of Tom Horn, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, that would reunite Redford with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid screenwriter William Goldman. Pollack called Steve personally to discuss the situation and was told by him in no uncertain terms that his film was going ahead. Redford, not wanting to be involved in competing pictures with Steve (or anybody), dropped out of the film, and ABC put the project into turnaround. The much-coveted Goldman script