As I said yesterday, I chose it because it’s From Page to Screen week here at redblog, and not many people (myself included until a few months ago–despite it being one of my favorite action films of all time) know that the film is actually based on a crime novel.
No, it’s not King Kong. And no, it’s not The Towering Inferno, though good guess, Elizabeth–that disaster actually inspired the author to write the novel.
Yes, of course it was 1988′s Die Hard, the film that made Bruce Willis an international action star. In first place we had the omnipresent Donna, runner-up was her archnemesis Millar74, and in third was Tammy Lochridge.
Youngsters may not remember, but when Die Hard first came out there were mocking cries from the peanut gallery that Willis couldn’t play hard-core action–after all, at the time he was best known for doing bickering humor in TV’s Moonlighting and his first few film starring roles were the Blake Edwards “comedy” Blind Date and the movie-cowboy flick Sunset.
In fact, Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza’s screenplay had been originally intended for Frank Sinatra. Yep, O’ Blue Eyes had played private detective Joe Leland in the 1968 crime thriller entitled, cleverly enough, Detective. That first film was based on a 1966 pulp novel by Roderick Thorp. A few years later Thorp saw The Towering Inferno and later had a dream about a guy with a machine gun chasing bad guys through a burning skyscraper. Ta-da! Thorp then wrote the sequel to Detective in hopes there’d be another Sinatra film made from it: 1979′s Nothing Lasts Forever. (It was basically Die Hard in an office building. Ba dum bum.)
Much of Nothing Last Forever‘s plot will ring familiar: PI Leland is visiting his daughter (not wife) at her LA workplace: an oil company’s giant corporate office building. (His daughter’s last name is Generro.) German terrorists led by Anton (not Hans) Gruber take over the building, although their motive is purely political, rather than just terrorism disguising a grand theft, as in the film. There’s Gruber’s right-hand man Karl, out to avenge his brother’s death early on at Leland’s hands; and an LA cop named Al Powell sent to investigate the building, and there’s even a drugged out company exec named Ellis who tries to “help.” In fact, quite a bit of the film’s events and some of its dialogue are straight from Thorp’s novel.
For a few years producers tried to get Nothing Lasts Forever made with Sinatra starring again. When that didn’t work out, they re-purposed their adaptation for Arnold Schwarzenegger as a sequel to 1985′s Commando. When that fell through, they looked around for another tough action star. In fact, every action star: Burt Reynolds, Richard Gere, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Nick Nolte, Tom Berenger, Don Johnson and Richard Dean Anderson all turned them down. Finally they settled for Willis. It worked out well because Willis wasn’t seen as an action hero–part of what makes Die Hard great is that John McClane (at least in that first film) comes off more like a flawed, breakable Everyman rather than some pumped-up super-cop. That makes the wild, over-the-top action feel more believable.
Whenever I bitch about sloppy plotting in action films and someone says, “hey, lighten up, it’s just summer cheap-fun,” I see red… and then I go see director John McTiernan’s Die Hard again. It’s lasting, towering proof that shallow, pure-entertainment thrill-ride films can be tightly, perfectly plotted. I think when I was writing reviews for the University of Iowa student newspaper back in 1988 (um, I was a Doogie Howser child prodigy and was in college when I was… let’s see… five years old… yeah, that’s it!), I said something to the effect that Die Hard’s story and script is so solid you could roll it off a cliff (or a burning skyscraper) and no pieces would fly off. It’s a dang masterpiece of action film making.
“You ask for miracles? I give you the Eff… Bee… Eye….”
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