In the summer of 1991, just returned from shooting the film version of Prelude, I came to Bob Rehme’s office on the Paramount lot to meet with him, Mace, and the director Phillip Noyce. Red October had been a success, so it was time to discuss the next installment of the Jack Ryan series. Rehme, an arid, patrician Southern Californian by way of Cincinnati, was Mace Neufeld’s partner and a man I’d had little to do with during the making of Hunt. I had sensed that something less than wonderful was brewing earlier when I learned that McTiernan would not be returning to direct the sequel. Mace had offered some explanation, but people at movie studios lie or obfuscate at least five times before breakfast, so I ignored him. McTiernan himself suggested to me something about his schedule or something in his deal. But now, in the room with the current “team,” Rehme glared at me like I was a communist at a HUAC hearing he was conducting.
As I talked, measuredly, about what I thought of the current script, I felt as if no one in the room was really listening. When I suggested adding a scene in a pub where I thought we could see Ryan’s face on the front page of every newspaper on the heels of his heroic stunt, prompting a small, nondescript gaggle of British pubgoers to sing “God Save the Queen” in his honor and top off their tribute by handing him a pint, they all just stared at me. Unbeknownst to me, their nonresponsive looks, I would soon find out, were the first signal of my exit from the film series. They had trouble concealing the fact that they really didn’t want any notes from an actor who wasn’t going to be playing the part. But nothing was mentioned in that meeting. It was just odd and frosty.
After the meeting, I flew through Chicago to Syracuse, which took all day. My mother and sister Beth had moved there a couple of years earlier. The next morning, I accompanied my mother to her consultation, during which she was told she needed to have a double mastectomy. I developed a deeper level of concern for her right there in that room. While I stood in a conference room at the hospital making calls, my office patched me through to Mace. The call brought to mind the classic film Sorry, Wrong Number, when an apoplectic Burt Lancaster must convince his invalid wife to go to the window and cry out for help or she’s going to be murdered. (Great movie, by the way.) My call with Mace wasn’t quite that high-stakes. Nonetheless, he asked where my deal was at and why it wasn’t closed. I told him that I was trying to schedule both the film and a chance to star in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway the following spring. “You’ve got to close this deal and get this done,” Neufeld said, his voice a tad strained. “The play, the dates, it will all take care of itself. But sign that deal.”
I spent the next day or two with my mother while she recovered, then flew to Long Island for the weekend. When I got to my friend’s house in the evening, it was still early in LA, and I called the office of David Kirkpatrick, the very successful and very self-absorbed executive in charge of the sequel. On that call, Kirkpatrick told me he wanted me to sign a deal with neither a start date nor a stop date. The movie would start when it was ready and end whenever it ended. That meant the film had no schedule, which was untenable and absurd. I asked when that information would become available and he didn’t have an answer, suggesting that it wasn’t my concern. The premise that he had no real idea when the film would begin was ludicrous, since all studios have schedules linked to release dates. I had gone from costarring in the first film, which had done well at the box office, to the place where all of my suggestions, inquiries, and requests were now intrusions. Kirkpatrick said I had until Monday to make up my mind.
The final piece of the puzzle came in a call from none other than the normally phlegmatic John McTiernan, who asked how my deal was progressing. After I filled him in, he took a long pause, sighed, and told me that Paramount was unethically negotiating with another actor, a big star, to take my place. He told me he was scheduled to shoot a film with this big star. The producer of that film called him to say that the big star was out because he was moving on to another project and “You’re not gonna believe which one.” McTiernan told me that Harrison Ford was going to replace me in the sequel.
John told me he spoke with Ford and asked if he was aware that Paramount was in an active negotiation with me. Ford’s reply, according to John, was “Fuck him.” Ford wasn’t merely employing a different strategy from me in the same game. He was playing a different game entirely. In need of the next franchise to keep the flame of his stardom burning bright while earning him tens of millions more, what choice did he have? The carpenter who walked onto a set and then into movie history knew that these roles were his legacy.
Ford is one of the most successful stars in movie history. He has abundant fame, wealth, and the adulation of an adoring public and everyone in the town. One thing he does not have is an Oscar, which must frustrate, if not burden him, after his long career. Ford’s lack of any serious accolades for his acting is somewhat odd. In a review in the LA Weekly of his performance in the Scott Turow drama Presumed Innocent, the critic wrote “watch Ford’s acting go from beige to taupe.” He certainly has had every advantage. He has worked with the best directors. One would assume that his projects have budgets for the best writers, designers, craftspeople, shooting schedules, and casting. They have lots of money for marketing and ad campaigns during awards season. Every single asset that Hollywood can bring to bear is rolled out on behalf of his films. And yet Ford is, Oscar-wise, empty-handed.
Years later, when I met him in LA at a benefit reading of a play that his girlfriend was in, he smiled politely and muttered some greeting. I realized then that the movies really do enhance certain actors, making them seem like something they really aren’t at all. Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.
Earlier that year, while shooting Prelude in Jamaica, I had met with Phillip Noyce, who seemed to want to have a constructive conversation about the next Jack Ryan film. But Noyce is a studio director to the marrow. Given his marginal talent and the attendant insecurities, he wouldn’t dare tip me off as to what was going on, assuming that by then he knew the details. In fact, he probably wet himself at the thought of the eventual outcome.