On shows like “Dynasty” and “Dallas” in the 1980s, TV played high finance for oohs and ahs. In the 1990s, TV presents boardroom maneuvers for what they are: greed vs. greed.
“Barbarians at the Gate” (HBO, March 20) is a blackly comic attack on the corporate morality of the late 1980s, in which the winners made billions and the losers had to make do with merely tens of millions.
“I don’t see any of them as good guys,” says James Garner, who stars in “Barbarians” as hearty, fun-loving Ross Johnson, CEO of RJR Nabisco. Johnson’s company was taken over by Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts Co. in 1988 in a $25 billion leveraged buyout, making it Wall Street’s biggest smash-and-grab raid. Jonathan Pryce co-stars as Henry Kravis, the financial wizard who bested Johnson in the furious bidding war.
“What these guys did, messing with corporations like they were toys, was bad for the economy and bad for everybody who worked for them,” says Garner. “I play Johnson as honorable and true-believing, which he may well be. But considering the things he did, he’s not all that admirable. Besides, he got $53 million, which is a pretty good fallback position.”
Johnson’s error was to initiate a bid for his own company out of which he personally stood to make over a billion dollars. Kravis and other sharks smelled the blood of a company “in play” and topped Johnson’s bid. The subsequent feeding frenzy, reported seriously by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in their book, “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,” was scripted farcically and scatologically for HBO by Larry Gelbart, best known for creating the TV version of “M+A+S+H.” Oddly enough, in 1959 Garner played a character not unlike Kravis in a film about leveraged buyouts, “Cash McCall.”
Garner, a Depression-born Oklahoman who was brought up and remains a liberal Democrat (“Even in the years when those were dirty words”), has a short fuse when it comes to corporate shenanigans. The story of the go-go Eighties from his point of view was his long-running lawsuit against Universal Studios over profits from his “The Rockford Files” series. He claimed the studio used creative bookkeeping to keep from having to share the show’s profits with him.
He’s relaxed about the lawsuit now, sitting comfortably in one of his favorite places, the Grill Room of the Bel Air Country Club.
Of his lawsuit, he says, “You can say I won, but I didn’t really win, not in court. I had to settle. I fought ’em for nine or ten years and I spent $2.2 million in lawyer’s fees and there came a time when I couldn’t gamble. At least I brought to light what they did.”
Garner approaches issues like his lawsuit and the RJR Nabisco takeover on a personal level. “I’m from Oklahoma, where your word is your bond,” he says. “If you’re right, you’re right, and you should fight.
His fight against Universal coincided with a series of physical setbacks. “I had knees and hips and backs and aneurysms of the aorta,” he says. He had a quintuple bypass in 1988. Recovered now from all those ailments, the most he can complain of is tendonitis of the wrist, which has contributed to the rise in his golf handicap to seven.
He says he hurt his wrist “reading books. Or signing autographs, I can’t tell which. I was making this film, `Fire in the Sky’ (which Paramount released March 12) and I had so much spare time I must have read 12 books in a week. Some of ’em were pretty heavy. The town where we shot contained 580 people, but every time I showed my face 30 people asked me for my autograph, and I’m not very good at turning people down.”
In “Fire in the Sky,” based on an actual occurrence, Garner plays an Arizona sheriff. He says, “I’m investigating a disappearance that’s assumed to be a murder. The witnesses say this young man walked toward some huge light he saw and just disappeared. Five days later the guy who disappeared calls. It was evidently a visit from a flying saucer.
Garner thinks of a smallish job like “Fire in the Sky” and his cameo in “The Distinguished Gentleman” as “guest shots.” He says, “I like to keep my hand in. You can lose your touch. I’ll go to work if something comes along at the right time and isn’t too physically demanding.”
In the planned movie version of Garner’s 1957-62 TV hit, “Maverick,” he’s looking forward to playing “a fairly good role. I’ve talked to William Goldman, who’s writing the script. They want me in it to legitimize it. I’m not talking about a huge role, one that’s significant to the movie.” Garner has done this before: he starred in the pilot for the 1978 series, “The New Maverick.”
Goldman, the projected film’s writer, also scripted “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and can be relied on to retain the subject’s nonchalant tone. Garner says, “There were 15 Westerns on TV when ‘Maverick’ was on. We were such a success because we stuck our tongue in our cheek when everyone else was steely-eyed. Same thing with `Rockford.’ I kept saying, `Oh, don’t shoot!’, and it worked.”
Though he’s played some all-serious roles in TV movies recently (“The Promise,” “My Name is Bill W”), most of Garner’s jobs through the years have needed his light touch: the amiable scrounger in “The Great Escape,” the slick lawman in “Support Your Local Sheriff,” the dim gangster in “Victor/Victoria,” the crusty pharmacist in “Murphy’s Romance.”
No one knows where the Garner wit originated, for he had a horrific Dust Bowl upbringing involving homelessness and a wicked stepmother, about which he has never said much.
Of his future, he says, “I’d like to keep on doing one or two things a year. I’ll be 65 in April. I don’t want to work too hard and besides, leading roles for people that age are few and far between.
“So right now I’m out of the business. I golf and I read. I’m getting ready to build a house up in Santa Ynez about a mile and a half from where Michael Jackson lives. Gorgeous country. I’ll have a little vineyard on 400 acres. I’ll build a three-hole golf course. I’ll go out with a grader and build it myself. The only thing about L.A. I’ll miss is this country club. And if I ever want to work, I’ll be two hours away.”
