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Rights for copywriters, more management murders, the promise Bill will keep, and other matters. RETURN OF THE EVIL BUSINESSMAN
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Everybody and his uncle, not to mention the present writer's grandson, have been chattering frenziedly about Jurassic Park, the $100 million blockbuster now being rolled out by Universal Pictures. Our own perspective on this enterprise is possibly a bit idiosyncratic. We see it as an overdue comeback for a genre once prevalent in filmland: the movie centered on evil at the corporate apex. During the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Hollywood generated an avalanche of oeuvres about high-placed corporate malefactors, and reviews attesting to the films' transcendent dumbness were once a staple of Keeping Up. But friends, there has been a long dry spell. It is now five years or so since any major film has carried on about malignity at the top-management level, the last such effort brought to our attention being Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987), starring Michael Douglas as a Boeskyesque bad guy ultimately undone by good- guy Charlie Sheen and good-regulator SEC. At that, the movie was tame stuff, focused heavily on the venial sin (we claim) of insider trading. Far more spirited in sticking it to profit seekers was The Final Conflict (1981), the third part of the ''Omen'' trilogy, in which the head of the multinational corporation turns out to be none other than our old friend the Antichrist. In Looker (1981), you could have observed smoothly sinister James Coburn, CEO of Reston Industries, orchestrating the murder of assorted curvaceous models for no reason at all. We mean that literally: In the final cut of the film, the dialogue offers absolutely no explanation for the murders. In Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline (1979), the directors of a company said to be larger than General Motors spend all their time trying to murder controlling shareholder Audrey Hepburn just because she refuses to take the company public. In Heaven Can Wait (1978), the multinational madmen plot to pollute the atmosphere and wipe out a lovely English village. In Tucker (1988), we have the Big Three auto companies trying to ruin and then frame on criminal charges a lovable guy who just wants to produce a car that goes 130 mph and yet is totally safe. In Take This Job and Shove It (1981), the bad guys take over a beer company and speed up the production line even though this results in the product's tasting rotten. Arguably less problematical than being the Antichrist, and yet some would not hesitate to label it evil. Assuming that Jurassic Park remains reasonably faithful to the novel by Michael Crichton (who, coincidentally or otherwise, also wrote Looker), there will be business badness aplenty on the screen. It will be mainly corporealized in Richard Attenborough, usually a director but here pretending to be a power-mad billionaire who runs theme parks and overrides the advice of earnest scientists warning against his plan to populate one of them with carnivorous cloned dinosaurs. What happens to him in the end will cause numerous ticket holders to say he deserved what he got. To be sure, that is what they always say about filmic businessmen. |
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