It was well past midnight, the drink was flowing, and John Boorman and Lee Marvin had reached an impasse over the Point Blank script which had been churned out by a couple of Hollywood hacks. "Lee finally said to me, 'Okay, I'll do this picture with you on one condition.' 'What?' I asked, and Lee picked up the script and threw it out of the window."
Boorman pauses before adding: "I imagine that a very young Mel Gibson was passing down the street below and picked it up out of the gutter." Gibson is the star and producer of Payback. He said his film would be a remake of Boorman's classic 1967 thriller Point Blank. But he changed his mind.
When Payback finished shooting at the end of 1997 everybody - including Gibson - seemed happy. The first-time director, Brian Helgeland, had delivered a taut thriller which fulfilled the promise the 36-year-old Californian had shown in his scripts for LA Confidential and Gibson's thriller, Conspiracy Theory. During filming, Helgeland said his script had been based on Point Blank's original source, Donald Westlake's novel, The Hunter, rather than Boorman's movie. Both films concern a professional thief taking revenge on the bosses of the syndicate.
The movie's producers at Paramount didn't like the film. In particular, they didn't like the new macho Mel. He was too hard-boiled, too mean. Maybe his character could he softened up with a few jokes? Then their marketing could lead with the logo, "No More Mr Nice Guy", instead of "Get Mad. Get Tough. Get Even".
Gibson, however, still believed in his role as a "stoic, deadpan Buster Keaton from hell". For him it would be a refreshing change from action heroes deflating violence with a wisecrack. But that was before the results from the test screenings came in. They were telling him his fans were confused by his new tough-guy persona. Was this a black comedy, a comic thriller or an out-and-out drama?
Gibson decided to seek advice from his old buddy Joel Silver. The high-stakes producer of the Lethal Weapon series immediately recognised the problem. The anti-hero did not come across as sufficiently "heroic". Helgeland's Payback began to unravel. And from this point on in the film's journey to a cinema near you, everybody's account of what happened differs.
Both Paramount and Helgeland have refused to comment, allowing Gibson - for whose production company, Icon, the film is being made - free rein with the press. "The early version, it wasn't that it was darker," Gibson now says, "it just didn't end, it just kind of stopped, which confused everyone. And there was no prologue, you didn't know where the guy came from. You needed to be invited into his mind." But disgruntled sources close to the production who have posted their comments on the Net say Gibson "panicked" and demanded Helgeland make "serious changes" to the film.
Helgeland refused, claiming Gibson "knew what he was getting into from the start," and that the changes he was demanding would "seriously damage" the film. The all-important question now was, which way would the studio jump? The answer is obvious. Making the choice between a first-time director and an actor who was paid a reported $30 million to star in Lethal Weapon 4, and has made more than $2 billion for Hollywood was no contest. Helgeland walked, and Gibson brought in Terry Hayes, an old buddy from Mad Max days, to change the entire last third of the script. He hired his former hairdresser, Paul Abascol, to direct the new scenes: Hollywood union rules prevent a film's producer rehiring himself as director, and this way the star-producer could call the shots through the crimper.
Gibson could now put a gloss on what happened: "Changes needed to be made," he explained to the media, "the studio demanded it." According to Gibson, Helgeland "was not fired... He stepped aside and we went in and did what we had to do as responsible producers to make the film work." Gibson points to the fact that the credits of the finished film still state that Helgeland is the director. "He left his name on it, it was fairly amicable, it wasn't a screaming ego thing."
Those close to the production tell a different tale. The unofficial Payback website claims Helgeland was "rightfully enraged" and asked - in vain - both the Writers' Guild and the Directors' Guild to take his name off the final version. Ironically, by this time in early 1998, the results of the test screenings on Gibson's Payback had come in - and they were worse than Helgeland's. But that was of little consolation to a would-be director still in search of a film to call his own.
Now wind the clock back 30 years to the film's predecessor. Point Blank was also jeopardised by studio executives after it had been shot - and for the same reason as Payback. It was MGM rather than Paramount which objected to the film's mysterious opening and ending and its hard-boiled anti-hero. "The only reason it survived in the form I made it," Boorman remembers, "was down to Margaret Booth, the supervising film editor there. She was marvellous, she'd edited Gone With The Wind. She was a tyrannical woman. When they screened it, the executives all started mumbling and she got up and said: 'You cut a frame of this film over my dead body'."
But even more crucially for a young director new to Hollywood, Boorman - unlike Helgeland - had someone protecting his back during the shooting. For the vital difference lay in the conduct of the leading man. Helgeland was betrayed by his star, but Boorman was saved by his. Because, as the veteran director now readily admits, he didn't really know what to do when he started filming the introductory, opening scene set in Alcatraz prison. Marvin came to the rescue. Rapidly sizing up the situation, he compromised his professional reputation by appearing to be drunk. Today Boorman sums up the situation by simply stating: "He bought me time". These days, it seems, megabuck-stars just can't afford that kind of time.
Gibson contacted Boorman before any shooting had begun on Payback: "He said, 'Don't get upset because we're just going back to the book. It's not a remake of Point Blank.' But there's an awful lot that comes from my movie which was never in the book.
"In Point Blank, there's an intimidating atmosphere rather than explicit violence. But this is what you get with Marvin: his very stillness carries the threat of violence, whereas with Gibson you feel it's phoney. I'm not speaking about Payback now but generally speaking, it's this little tough guy who..." Boorman stops himself but then blurts out, "It just feels fake."
Boorman's gripe over Payback has less to do with Gibson than with the Hollywood production system in general. "What's happened in Hollywood now, is that because of the way films are distributed - the studios go out with thousands of prints along with very expensive TV advertising - it means that the audience needs a recognition factor of a simple story and stars that they can identify with immediately. That's given a handful of stars enormous power. They choose the projects and they - rather than the studio - are the people in charge."
Payback is released today. Point Blank is available on video from MGM.
Remake of the remake
The Payback that is released today has been rewritten and re-shot to Mel Gibson's specifications. But what was in director Brian Helgeland's version? The differences are substantial:
Gibson's voice-over now peppers the film, from his opening remark: "They took 70 grand and that's what I was going to get back", to: "We made a deal: If she stopped hookin' I'd stop shootin' people" at the end.
Gibson no longer sticks two fingers down the throat of a disabled wino who tries to stop Gibson from ripping him off. But the dialogue, "Shuddup, I cured ya," remains.
Out goes Angie Dickinson (who starred in Point Blank), replaced as head of the syndicate by Kris Kristofferson. James Coburn and William Devane had to re-shoot most of their scenes so that any references to their boss became "he" instead of "she".
A torture scene, in which Mel's toes are sledgehammered by a syndicate street soldier - "This little piggy went to market" has been inserted.
Gibson no longer loses his 70 grand at the end to a vagrant who steals off with his bag in a shopping cart.
Instead of being left riddled with bullets and wondering whether he'll live or die, Gibson is now driven away from the final shoot-out by his girlfriend - "Where to?" she asks: "Just drive, baby".
