What Jonathan Kaplan found interesting about ”Fatal Attraction” was that ”the Glenn Close character, though clearly off her rocker, gave voice to a certain rage that women felt.”
Similarly, he said, his new film expresses ”a genuine, palpable tension between the classes.”
Kaplan-director of ”The Accused,” ”Project X,” ”Heart Like a Wheel” and the yet-to-be-released ”Love Field,” with Michelle Pfeiffer-was talking about his latest, ”Unlawful Entry.”
The production stars Kurt Russell and Madeleine Stowe as an upper-middle- class couple and Ray Liotta as a police officer who enters their life when their new home in Los Angeles is burglarized.
”The circumstances create a situation where they sort of interact with this guy on a social level,” Kaplan said. ”Suddenly this triggers what I consider the class rage that this movie is about.
”Basically, you have a cop who, when he drives up to their house, thinks: `Here we go. Another privileged couple. We`re going to go and risk our lives for their property.` She turns out to be very sweet and beautiful and kind of emotionally available. He`s kind of intrigued and smitten.”
Working from a screenplay by Louis Colick, Kaplan began film ing
”Unlawful Entry” for Largo Entertainment last October and said he hoped to finish by the end of January, for release this year by 20th Century Fox.
Not only was Kaplan intrigued by the character conflict in the script, but he also has been getting a kick out of the different ways Russell and Liotta approach their work.
”Kurt Russell reminds me a lot of Jodie Foster,” Kaplan said. ”They were basically brought up in the Disney system. He can be sitting there talking about hockey and then `Action!` and he`s incredible. He`s the guy.
”Then you have Liotta, who is sort of in the mold of Brando, Pacino, De Niro. With his research, his internal life, all that homework that actors do, he`s become a policeman. We worry that he`ll make a citizen`s arrest when he`s not on the set.”
– ”Father of the Bride,” the comedy with Steve Martin and Diane Keaton, is in the theaters.
”Shining Through,” a romantic thriller with Michael Douglas, Melanie Griffith and Liam Neeson, is to open at the end of January.
”Straight Talk,” a musical comedy with Dolly Parton and James Woods, is to open in April.
”Close to Eden,” the Sidney Lumet drama with Griffith, is to open in April or May.
And at the end of January, production is to begin on ”Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” a comedy about vampires who leave Romania in search of a better life in America and come up against a Valley girl.
What all of these films share is the imprint of Sandollar Productions. Sandollar, owned by Sandy Gallin and Dolly Parton, was founded seven years ago. Howard Rosenman, who is co-president of the company with Carol Baum, said there is an explanation for what seems to be a sudden burst of activity: ”It takes about five years to get a project off the ground.”
Baum added: ”It`s the fruits of all the development we`ve been doing.”
In the case of ”Father of the Bride,” Rosenman said, it took well over a year to obtain the rights for the remake of the 1950 film.
”The `90s are about commitment and family values,” Rosenman said.
”With all the talk about dysfunctional families, we really wanted to make a movie about something that was uplifting.”
In the case of ”Shining Through,” written and directed by David Seltzer and based on the Susan Isaacs novel about a New York secretary recruited for a spy mission inside Nazi Germany, Rosenman said the appeal was that ”it`s new wine in an old bottle-a very contemporary, brash female heroine at its center involved in the genre World War II picture.
”Rather than a man playing that role, it`s now a woman.”
In ”Straight Talk,” he said, Parton plays ”a woman from nowhere” who goes to Chicago, is accidentally put on the radio as a talk-show psychologist and takes the city by storm. Woods plays a tough reporter who sets out to expose her and instead falls for her.
Family values figure in ”Close to Eden,” which sends Griffith, as a New York City police officer, into a Hasidic neighborhood.
”All Judaism is about family and community and the commitment to that and the beauty of it,” Rosenman said. ”That`s what really attracted us to it.”
A lot less reverence is involved in ”Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,” which Rosenman likens to the black comedy ”Heathers.”
”Buffy is your typical Valley girl, cheerleader by day, vampire slayer by night,” Rosenman said. ”All she wants to do is shop at the malls and cheerlead. However, she was born with the mark of the vampire slayer. She meets this 400-year-old who is a vampire-slayer teacher. And eventually she comes up against the king of the vampires.”
”It`s very hip and funny and subversive,” he said of the script by 25-year-old Joss Whedon. The film is to be directed by Fran Kuzui, who made
”Tokyo Pop.”
What`s next?
”We`re going into production, hopefully in the spring, on Avery Corman`s novel about date rape, `Prized Possessions,` ” Baum said. ”And Mark Medoff, who wrote `Children of a Lesser God` and `City of Joy,` is writing the script and going to direct it for Warner Bros.”
With Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep as its stars, ”Death Becomes Her,” a comedy about love, death, jealousy and the quest for eternal youth, is in production for Universal Pictures.
Directing the film, written by David Koepp and Martin Donovan, is Robert Zemeckis, whose credits include the ”Back to the Future” trilogy, ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and ”Romancing the Stone.”
Willis portrays a plastic surgeon caught in a bitter rivalry between the vain, sinful, corrupt woman who is his wife (Streep) and the calculating and vengeful woman he loves (Hawn).
