May 06, 2005


How Schrader's 'Dominion' returned from dead


By Martin A. Grove
Schrader story: Movie deals fall apart all the time and projects have been known to crumble on the eve of production.

What never happens is that a film gets shot, edited, put into cold storage, remade totally by another director and released theatrically and then resurrected in its original form and distributed under a new title. That unlikely scenario is, of course, exactly what did happen to Paul Schrader's "Exorcist" prequel for Morgan Creek Productions, opening in limited release May 20 via Warner Bros.

Now titled "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," it was produced by James G. Robinson, Morgan Creek's chairman and CEO, and executive produced by Guy McElwaine and David C. Robinson. It was written by William Wisher and Caleb Carr and stars Stellan Skarsgard, Gabriel Mann, Clara Bellar and Billy Crawford.

Given the unique circumstances, I was happy to have the opportunity to ask Schrader how "Dominion" managed to return from the dead. Schrader was sent packing by Morgan Creek in September 2003 when the picture was already in post-production. At that time it was slated for release in early 2004 via Warner Bros., where Morgan Creek had been based for about 13 years. Since then Morgan Creek's deal with Warner ended and Morgan Creek now has an exclusive distribution deal with Universal.

"It is a unique situation and film schools will be forever grateful thanks to the Morgan Creek School of the Arts," Schrader laughed when he called me from New York on Tuesday.

I began by asking Schrader to trace his prequel's torturous road to the screen, going back three years to when John Frankenheimer was going to direct it. "John took ill and he had to step away because he couldn't get insured and I was hired," Schrader explained. Frankenheimer passed away in July 2002 at the age of 72. "They had scouted locations and were partially cast. They had some set designs. So I stepped into an ongoing situation. The script was completed. The film I made essentially comes from the Frankenheimer blueprint. I mean, I went in and made all the normal changes you do when you are a director who's also a writer. But this is the script I was given."

What Morgan Creek apparently was looking for at the time was a conventional horror genre film, but that's not the type film that Frankenheimer or Schrader were known for making. "I think of (it as) a case of buyer's remorse," he suggested. "We set out to make this film and somewhere toward the end of shooting it started to become apparent to me that this is not the film that Jim Robinson wanted any more. It's almost as if he went out and bought a Lexus and got home and said, 'I really wanted a Hummer.' And then he went out and bought a Hummer and then he had a Lexus and a Hummer. I don't know what was going on in his mind. It is a one man operation there. Something like this could not have happened at a studio with a board and with a layering of executives. This was a company (where) one man writes the checks and one man makes the decisions. And so if he decides to do a film (over) again, then he just does it again."

Robinson's control at Morgan Creek brings to mind the kind of power that legendary moguls like Jack Warner, Harry Cohn or Darryl F. Zanuck exercised in Hollywood's Golden Age. "In Jim's favor I'd say there aren't many men left in this business who actually write checks -- big checks -- and he's one of them," Schrader said. "On the other hand, I can say I don't think there has ever been a film that's come out of Morgan Creek that he has not, shall we say, 'fixed' in post-production."

After shooting was done, Schrader recalled, "There was pressure on me to deliver a first cut very, very quickly and that made me suspicious. I showed (Robinson) the first cut and there was maybe five minutes of conversation. I said, 'It's a little long. Let me take out some length. I'll show it to you again next week.' I showed it next week. He didn't show up and I was told to leave. So that leads me to believe that the decision was sort of made before he even saw the film. His mind was already moving on to (doing something else with it). And the problem is that the premise of the original Caleb Carr-William Wisher script inverts the premise of 'The Exorcist' in that an afflicted child is possessed and he gets better as he turns into Lucifer, the glorified angel, while everyone else goes crazy. And that is not a very good horror machine. Horror is when an innocent is being tormented while the clock runs. And horror is not an afflicted child getting better. They kept saying to me, 'We've got to make this scarier' and I said, going in, this was the premise and the mantra was always, 'No spinning heads. No pea soup (vomiting). Let's not compete with the original. Let's do a different kind of movie.' So somewhere along the line (things changed at Morgan Creek). It's probably just because of the success of some of the harder core horror films recently that Jim said, 'Oops, I made the wrong movie.'

"This would be the spring of 2003. They spent the summer trying to edit it, but of course they realized that (it couldn't be changed much that way). I told them, 'We never shot this material you're talking about and the problem is in your inherent premise.' So they asked me to leave and got rid of the editor. They brought in Renny Harlin. Renny then said the same thing. He said the problem isn't in the footage, the problem's in the script. And so they started (trying to re-shoot). A two week re-shoot became a four week re-shoot. It eventually became a total re-shoot. It became a total re-shoot when they started recasting. They dropped three of the four leads. They kept Stellan."

Needless to say, Morgan Creek's production cash register had done a lot of ringing by then. "I think mine was about $35 million. I think Renny's was a little bit north of that, maybe $40 million," Schrader told me. "That's why we're having this conversation today. It's the triumph of greed over hubris. The redeeming power of greed has set my film free. It's enormously (a feeling of) vindication. I mean, if you made a relatively big budget film that gets thrown in the trash can, you cannot convince anyone -- not your wife, not your best friend -- that it was any good because people don't do that.

"For the rest of my life I would have to be trying to explain, 'You know, this film was actually pretty good.' And no one would believe me. And now I don't have to answer that question any more. It's like a millstone has been removed from my neck. More than vindication, more than revenge, the feeling is of enormous relief that I don't have to like Orson Welles be explaining how 'Ambersons' should have ended the rest of my life."

As film history buffs know, Welles' 1942 drama based on Booth Tarkington's novel was taken away from him by RKO after it was poorly received at a preview screening (double billed with a very unsuitable match -- the B comedy "Mexican Spitfire Sees A Ghost" starring Lupe Velez) and was then re-shot and re-cut. The picture's running time was slashed from 131 minutes to 88 minutes and a new and happier ending was added. Worse yet, the footage removed from Welles' original cut was destroyed so that the picture could never be put back together as Welles had intended.

Asked how the release of Schrader's film managed to come about, he explained, "I went and saw Renny's film with Bill Blatty in Bethesda, Maryland. (William Peter Blatty, who wrote the screenplay for the original 1973 'Exorcist,' had written the 1971 novel on which the film was based.) We saw it together and he was sitting next to me. By the end of the movie, he was furious because he remembered all the bad experiences he had had directing 'Exorcist III' (the 1990 sequel) at Morgan Creek, which was taken away from him. But I kept feeling better during the screening because I was looking at the movie and was saying, 'You know, that's really bad. I think there's a shot (at getting my version released). I think I've got a shot.' I was afraid it was going to be pretty good and then I would have had no shot. (There was hope) because of a couple of forces that didn't exist 10 years ago when Bill Blatty did his film -- and his version of that film is now lost. He was sort of removed and they added a whole new ending to it. He wanted to put his original version together and was told the footage no longer existed. They re-shot. They added the character of a priest and added an exorcism. There wasn't even an exorcism in his film."

Today, Schrader continued, it's a different story with "Dominion" thanks to DVD, where deleted scenes and other footage shot for films wind up being turned into valuable bonus features. "There was DVD and I was able to say, 'Don't throw anything away. This is potential revenue.' So that kept the material intact," he pointed out. "The other factor was the Internet. By working all of the fan based horror websites I was able to keep the myth of the film alive. We're not talking about a lot of people, but about a hard core band. They kept talking about it and sending around petitions (demanding), 'When do we get to see it?' So it never quite died the way a film dies when it's out of the public consciousness. There was always talk about it. Renny's film was not critically well received so that increased the talk about (Schrader's version). And then I showed it at a little horror film festival in Brussels (the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film), which Morgan Creek allowed me to do because the Dutch distributor asked them to because I had approached the Dutch distributor."

Schrader received favorable reviews from critics who were at the festival, he said, "and that set these events in motion. Now the truth, of course, is that the theatrical release for my film, in particular, but for most films is a kind of positioning for DVD today. More money is made on that end than theatrically. So for this to have a good DVD life, it almost needs a theatrical life in order to distinguish it from the other film. So that becomes the incentive in giving it a theatrical life. This interview we're doing now probably wouldn't be done if it went straight to video. So it's the theatrical release that kicks off all of the press, which helps the film establish its own identity."

What will Schrader do on "Dominion's" DVD? "Well, it's kind of tricky because Morgan Creek is still in charge of things," he replied, noting that the DVD will be distributed by Warner Home Video. "The content will be controlled by Morgan Creek. I know someone is working on a documentary about this situation. I know (the cable network) AMC wants to do a documentary about it. I know Farber in London wants to print a book about it. So eventually it will all come out. It may not come out on the DVD that's put together by Morgan Creek, however."

Has Morgan Creek asked Schrader to do a commentary for the DVD? "Yeah, I did a commentary," he said, "and I restricted myself to the film, itself."

Looking back at the two "Exorcist" prequels, Schrader observed, "The fascinating thing is (Vittorio) Storaro (an Oscar winner for shooting 'Reds,' 'Apocalypse Now' and 'The Last Emperor') shot both films. They look totally different. Some of the same scenes look different. Stellan Skarsgard gives two different performances. It is just endlessly fascinating when you think that a premise is kind of set in stone and then you see it move through channeled visions and come out so differently. You know, they do this in film school, only they give you a budget of $500. Nobody does it in film studios with a budget of $35 million."

It's been, to say the least, a rare experience for Schrader. "It's certainly not one I would want to go through again," he pointed out.