AN OFFER THEY COULDN'T REFUSE ... BUT DID!

The British film industry (if it can really be called an industry, and not just a storm in a china tea cup) has long been in a perilous state, teetering on the very edge of extinction, clinging on only by Hugh Grant’s fingernails. But all is not lost. Just when you thought you would rather stay in and have a cup of tea than go out and watch another film about people staying in and having cups of tea, something comes swooping down out of the sky with rescue on its mind. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a big green thing shaped like a flying tortoise and supported by strings.

Yup, Thunderbirds are go. Sir Lew Grade, the 88 year old ATV henchman responsible for such cinematic masterworks as The Cassandra Crossing and The Legend Of The Lone Ranger is back in business, announcing plans last week for a film version of Gerry Anderson’s puppet sci-fi series. Not even International Rescue could have saved Sir Lew’s £30 million disaster Raise The Titanic (after the complete failure of which he famously quipped “It would have been cheaper to drain the Atlantic”) but following the trend towards turning old American TV series into blockbuster movies (The Untouchables, The Addams Family, The Fugitive, Maverick, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Flintstones, as well as the forthcoming Brady Bunch and Mission Impossible) he has decided to exploit Britain’s own rich TV heritage. He has mooted a possible film version of the pseudo-existential thriller series The Prisoner (apparently to be filmed on the original locations in Port Merrion, which should at least satisfy the Merchant Ivory fans) but first on the slate is a live action Thunderbirds. The immediate question that springs to mind, of course, is where are they going to find actors with heads proportionately twice the size of the rest of their anatomies?

Call me old fashioned, but I always thought the whole appeal of the series was those ridiculous puppets bobbing about with their arms in front of them, talking without moving their lips and denoting emotion by swivelling their eyes from left to right. Unless they get Sylvester Stallone to play all the parts, we are liable to end up with a bunch of method acting Young Thunderbirds, with the likes of Charlie Sheen, Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff and Kiefer Sutherland (OK, not so young Thunderbirds) trying to figure out what their motivation is for jumping on to a three hundred foot slide every time they have to get into their spaceship instead of just taking the lift.

And that will be just the beginning. Before you know it, it will be Sooty: The Movie, Bob Hoskins as Captain Pugwash, Macaulay Culkin as Joe 90 and Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson as Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men. Face it, these people are no respecters of culture. All I can say is, if anybody starts talking about a big screen revival of The Wombles, then they really will have to call International Rescue out.

In the mid-80s, when Judge Dredd was first mooted as a movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger held talks with the producers and told them, “You can either do this properly, or do it without me.” Eventually tiring of waiting for him to become available, they did it with Sylvester Stallone. Of course, Stallone and Schwarzenegger are relatively interchangeable – both muscular icons who have trouble speaking comprehensible English.

On the same principle it is easy to see why Christian Slater got the call for Interview With The Vampire after River Phoenix died. Hollywood rarely lets a little thing like death stop the show. When Tyrone Power collapsed during a sword fight on Solomon And Sheba, Yul Brynner quickly stepped into a wig and the starring role. After Carole Lombard’s untimely demise, Joan Crawford slipped into her costumes for They All Kissed The Bride, and Paul Newman got his big break in Somebody Up There Likes Me only after James Dean’s driving made him unavailable (nobody got a break on The Crow however, the film-makers instead using computer generated special effects to reanimate deceased star Brandon Lee). Slater has been at pains to tell anyone who will care to listen that he is not cashing in on Phoenix’s sorry demise, and will be contributing his fee to charity. But he seized on the part to revive a slipping career, and no doubt will be available for sequels.

It doesn’t necessarily take death to give another actor their break, lack of foresight will usually do it. George Raft famously turned down Dead End, High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, all of the parts going to Humphrey Bogart, turning the latter into a superstar and Raft into a laughing stock. John Travolta is almost single-handedly responsible for Richard Gere’s career, since he turned down Days Of Heaven, American Gigolo and An Officer And A Gentleman while Charlie Sheen passed on White Men Can’t Jump, Indecent Proposal and The Cowboy Way, making him largely culpable for foisting Woody Harrelson on an unsuspecting public (Sheen, presumably, was too busy making films like Men At Work, Major League and Hot Shots to bother with anything like a blockbuster, which means he has nobody to blame for his own career but himself).

But not all such second choices seem quite so obvious. A young, hot and, er, black Eddie Murphy replaced Sly Stallone on Beverly Hills Cop, while the short, bearded and balding Richard Dreyfuss was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenneger on Total Recall. And although Robert De Niro was Martin Scorsese’s first choice for the title role in Taxi Driver, he only got the part when the studio’s choice, Jeff Bridges, turned it down (saving us the spectacle of a blow dried Travis Bickle shooting everyone in sight then sighing, “Phew, rock‘n'roll!”). Some parts belong so singularly to the star it is almost impossible to imagine them played by anyone else: Robert Mitchum as Dirty Harry? Well, maybe, but Montgomery Clift saying “I coulda been a contender” in On The Waterfront? I don’t think so. But that’s who the studio wanted, Brando only getting his shot when Clift passed. Mind you, even stranger is the star who picked up the majority of parts Brando turned down. Not some method mumbler, but short, stocky, square-headed, middle-aged Mr Average, Glenn Ford (who became the number one box office movie star for several years running in the mid sixties).

There is a pecking order, and nobody gets their shot at stardom until a bigger star has turned up their nose. Jim Carrey is set to pick up $7 million for Ace Ventura In Africa, but he was only paid a fraction of that for the original after it had been turned down by every leading comedian in America. As Carrey himself has commented, “Before Ace Ventura it was like, ‘We’ll send you a script Jim, but the first 10 pages are soiled.’ Yeah, because they were the scripts Tom Hanks wiped his ass with.” What I really want to know is, who is responsible for Tom Hanks’a career? And what are they going to do about it?