Switching drivers

By John Horn

June 29, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

It can be as rewarding as taking over as manager of the New York Yankees in the middle of a pennant race ... or as terrifying as grabbing the controls of a 747 on a turbulent final approach.

This summer, three directors will take over movie franchises made famous by other filmmakers.

Fresh talent steps behind the cameras on “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” and “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde,” which both open Wednesday, as well as “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life,” which opens July 25.

Not too long ago, directors hardly clamored to take over a movie series established by another director. If Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to make another “Godfather” film, who would be so presumptuous as to swipe his chair? But as Hollywood grew increasingly reliant on film franchises -- and as the directors of the initial hit movies parlayed their success into different projects -- inheriting a sequel became increasingly attractive.

The advantages are numerous. In a ruthless business dependent on opening-weekend impact, you don’t have to worry about brand-name awareness. Instead of starting from a blank page, you theoretically can build on recognized characters and settings.

A film’s often complicated ground rules, in other words, are already neatly laid out, for both the audience and the director.

“You don’t have to waste any time with exposition,” says Alfonso Cuaron, who is directing next summer’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” The first two movies about the boy wizard were made by Chris Columbus.

But as any bride who tries to squeeze into her mother’s wedding dress knows, hand-me-downs don’t always guarantee a perfect fit.

Then again, if the new filmmaker makes too many alterations, suddenly you’ve got “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,” a film so widely berated that the franchise disappeared into the woods.

At the same time, any filmmaker with a shred of talent will want to put a personal creative stamp on the franchise. The challenge is to do that while remaining faithful to the often revered predecessors.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says MGM Vice Chairman Chris McGurk, who has hired new directors for every James Bond movie he has supervised, and has changed filmmakers for sequels to “Legally Blonde,” “Agent Cody Banks” and “Barbershop.”

“You lose the comfort of having the person who was able to find the characters and deliver the original vision. But a new director can take the franchise to a whole different level.” At best, audiences may never complain about -- let alone notice -- the switch.

It’s not always the directors changing seats. Sometimes, a studio is more interested in keeping a director than a star. Sony didn’t hesitate to consider Jake Gyllenhaal when it ran into problems with “Spider-Man” star Tobey Maguire.

Yet keeping the same director for a sequel doesn’t promise success, either, especially if you lose your key actor. Jan De Bont directed both “Speed” and “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” but the first was a smash whereas the second, missing original star Keanu Reeves, came to a screeching halt.

Beyond that, the three summer sequels with new directors each present unique tests:

* Can Jonathan Mostow, an acclaimed -- but largely unknown -- action director breathe new life into the “Terminator” series whose last sequel came out 12 years ago?

* Can Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, an untested independent filmmaker who has made a lesbian romantic comedy, mesh his offbeat vision with a big studio’s squeaky clean heroine in “Legally Blonde 2”?

* Can Jan De Bont, one of Hollywood’s top thrill-ride directors of the 1990s, not only regain his old form but also improve upon an underwhelming precursor with “Lara Croft”?

It’s not just these three high-profile summer films that are undergoing dramatic director transplants.

In addition to “Harry Potter’s” Cuaron, whose last film was the explicit teenage sex romp “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” Joe Carnahan, coming off the $7-million Ray Liotta drama “Narc,” is set to direct Tom Cruise in the next steeply expensive “Mission: Impossible” film.

The rewards of successfully taking over an established franchise are enormous, including instant ascension to the A-list. For some of these new directors, the pressure is understandably much greater than anything they’ve encountered in the past.

When Herman-Wurmfeld was handed the new “Legally Blonde” movie last fall, he said the studio had two things to tell him: Good luck, and don’t mess it up.

A CALL TO ACTION

Soon after Mostow arrived in Los Angeles after graduating from Harvard, he wandered into a theater to catch James Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi favorite “The Terminator.”

“I was broke and I was unemployed,” Mostow says. “And I had no idea how I would ever become a Hollywood director. And I saw this movie and said, ‘That’s a cool movie.’ It’s what I thought a movie should be.”

Nearly two decades later, the 41-year-old Mostow is no longer broke and he certainly isn’t unemployed.

In fact, he has just directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in the third “Terminator” movie. With a budget approaching $200 million, “Terminator 3” is one of this summer’s biggest wagers. Although much of the pre-release publicity has focused on whether the aging Schwarzenegger can still carry an action movie, few people have worried about Mostow’s credentials.

That’s not surprising. Mostow has quickly and quietly built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most inventive action directors. His low-budget 1997 thriller, “Breakdown,” with Kurt Russell, was one of that year’s biggest surprise hits (it grossed $50.1 million). In 2000, he made both a submarine and Matthew McConaughey come alive in “U-571.”

“Jonathan was on the top of the list from the beginning,” says Moritz Borman, whose Intermedia financed “Terminator 3.”

“There are great directors who are very good with actors, but they don’t know how to do special effects. Cameron can do it. Tony Scott can do it, and Ridley Scott can do it. Michael Bay can do it. But not many others.”

What also impressed Intermedia and producers Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar were Mostow’s candid script worries. Unlike the other two directors who are inheriting summer sequels, Mostow enjoyed the luxury of time. He wasn’t rushing to make a release date, and he wasn’t about to start work on the movie until his concerns about story were resolved.

“Let’s face it,” Mostow says by phone. “How many movies with the number 3 after the title are that great? I didn’t want to make a retread of what has been done before. Because if you want a retread, you might as well go out and rent ‘Terminator 2.’

“I wanted to make a movie that, from a narrative perspective, was a seamless part of the legend.”

With college classmates and longtime screenwriting colleagues John Brancato and Michael Ferris (“The Game”), Mostow spent more time revising the script -- a full year -- than this summer’s other two new franchise filmmakers had to rewrite, film and edit their movies.

He jettisoned almost all of the Tedi Sarafian script that Intermedia had developed. He ditched the character of Sarah Connor -- made famous in the first two movies by Linda Hamilton -- in favor of her son, John (Nick Stahl). When Mostow started revising the script, John Connor was working at a dot-com and about to be married; now he’s on the run from killers from the future. As originally written, the female Terminator played by Kristanna Loken could become invisible. “But that didn’t work for me,” Mostow says. “It’s not visceral.”

Then the director and his writers added scenes that made “Terminator 3” feel more like the road movie Mostow wanted to make. They also made sure that the film subtly reflected its star’s age (Schwarzenegger is 55) by highlighting how the Terminator is nearly obsolete compared with Loken’s T-X killing machine.

“It’s always great if you can have your protagonist or hero be completely outmatched,” Mostow says.

Not that Schwarzenegger wasn’t still in great shape: Mostow says the actor’s body measurements were “exactly, to the inch” the same as when he made “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” in 1991.

Mostow hopes the resulting film is both true to the “Terminator” legacy and reflects Mostow’s own filmmaking style.

Compared with Cameron’s epic-length movies (“Terminator 2” was 137 minutes), Mostow’s film is aggressively tight, lasting but 109 minutes. Yet Mostow still has room for an extravagant chase sequence that feels like a big-budget brother of his “Breakdown.”

“You can give five filmmakers the exact same script, and you will get five completely different movies,” Mostow says.

“On a movie like this, a director makes maybe 1 million decisions. So how can the movie not reflect the director’s sensibilities? It’s impossible that it not.”

At the same time, he has been careful not to jettison the rich legacy developed by Cameron, who didn’t want to work on this film and had nothing to do with its making.

“If you go out and buy Rolling Stones tickets, you don’t want to hear Mick Jagger sing opera,” Mostow says.

“You want to get the right combination of honoring the mythology and the franchise, and give the audience something they have never seen before.”

HIGHER STAKES

In the new “Legally Blonde” movie, the preternaturally pink Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) has moved from Harvard Law to the nation’s capital, and before her Jimmy Choo boots are even scuffed, she has crafted and submitted an animal rights bill. Taking a break from finishing the film’s sound mix and special effects at a Los Angeles scoring stage, director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld dials into a conference call to discuss Washington campaigning, hoping to document on film the moments that define a politician’s life.

“We need to find out what feels real, what feels good,” the director says. Except that the movie he’s talking about doesn’t star Witherspoon. It stars former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, for whom Herman-Wurmfeld is volunteering by making short documentaries about the candidate.

A longtime liberal activist but relative filmmaking newcomer, Herman-Wurmfeld is inheriting MGM’s comedy from director Robert Luketic, who passed on making the sequel. It’s a formidable assignment for Herman-Wurmfeld, who has had just one feature film released, 2002’s indie romantic comedy “Kissing Jessica Stein,” about a young woman who hasn’t yet realized she’s gay.

The financial stakes are much higher this time around. “Legally Blonde” is among MGM’s most important movie assets. The first film grossed $96.8 million, and star Witherspoon is collecting $15 million to reprise her leading role. Herman-Wurmfeld is being paid more than the entire budget of the $960,000 “Kissing Jessica Stein.”

“I maintain that on this film I am earning back all the money I didn’t earn working over the last 15 years,” says the 36-year-old director, who just a few years back was staging irreverent rock operas in small San Francisco theaters.

“Basically, I’m a revolutionary at heart,” the director says. But do revolutionaries really make $45-million movies about women who at age 3 consider themselves professional shoppers? Herman-Wurmfeld says memorializing both Woods and Dean isn’t necessarily contradictory. “The beauty of Elle Woods is that she’s a populist,” he says. “She starts out as a yuppie, but she is compassionate and kind and articulate. When she sees an injustice, she speaks out.” Indeed, the new “Legally Blonde” movie is an indictment of special-interest-driven government.

As soon as he concludes his Dean conference call with the words “We’re going to win,” Herman-Wurmfeld gets back to work on his sequel. He is fretting over one of the film’s incomplete visual effects shots. Among the many challenges Herman-Wurmfeld faced in making the sequel was his inability to film in Washington, D.C. -- no small obstacle for a movie that is set there. “The city was locked down,” the director says, noting that filming close to government buildings after Sept. 11 was nearly impossible.

Unlike final-cut directors who aren’t obligated to listen to what anybody says, Herman-Wurmfeld was scarcely on his own to call every shot on the “Legally Blonde” sequel. He tried, but failed, to hire his “Jessica Stein” cinematographer, Lawrence Sher (the sequel was photographed by “White Oleander’s” Elliot Davis).

“The whole notion that a director is ever free is ridiculous,” he says. “There are constraints and shackles and input, both welcome and unwelcome. But I took [from the first film] what I loved, and I left behind what I didn’t like.... This will be a Charles Herman-Wurmfeld movie because I am here making it.”

There are plenty of personal touches. Herman-Wurmfeld, who is gay, added several gay jokes. Among the gags: Woods’ tiny pet Chihuahua, Bruiser, comes out of the closet, suddenly in love with a strapping Rottweiler owned by a conservative congressman.

As he watches a scene of the two male pooches snuggling (the studio asked him to cut some more romantic moments), Herman-Wurmfeld admires the West Hollywood leather-bar outfits the dogs wear. “Oh,” he says, “I’m going to get a lot of letters about that.”

DEADLINE PRESSURE

Jan De Bont wears two watches. The one on his right wrist shows Los Angeles time, while the one on his left tells the time in London, where he’s editing “Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.” No matter the time zone, the clock is ticking fast, and De Bont is sprinting to finish his $100-million film’s intricate visual effects, which must be completed in mere days.

De Bont has engaged several effects houses all a few steps from Piccadilly Circus, and on a May afternoon he hurries from London office to office, sitting down in one screening room for a few minutes before he strides across the street to examine other shots in an editing room. With both “Speed” and “Twister” on his curriculum vitae, De Bont knows much about eye-popping visuals, and the “Tomb Raider’ sequel is overflowing with them.

The 59-year-old director signs off on a scene of star Angelina Jolie racing a motorcycle atop China’s Great Wall, but he thinks a scene of Jolie and co-star Gerard Butler’s (“Reign of Fire”) rock climbing needs several fixes. “Look here,” De Bont says to his visual effects team, using a laser pointer to highlight an oddly contrasted background. “This is still a little on the crispy side.”

For all the fine-tuning, there is a larger concern. Even though the first film grossed $131.1 million two summers ago and established Oscar winner Jolie’s box office clout, many found “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” a high-flying bore. That’s partially why original director Simon West wasn’t invited back. “The first movie was very successful,” producer Larry Gordon says, “but we thought we could do better.”

De Bont, a Dutch cinematographer who shot “Basic Instinct” and “Die Hard,” also is trying to bounce back. Although his last film, “The Haunting,” sold nearly $100 million in tickets, he still carries the sting of the bomb “Speed 2: Cruise Control.” What’s more, his autocratic style and short temper have alienated crews and studios alike.

“I have mellowed a lot,” the director says. “But you can’t be wishy-washy. The crew hates it when you don’t know what you want. And if people get paid a lot of money and don’t do their jobs well, you have to take care of it.”

Like Herman-Wurmfeld, one thing De Bont doesn’t have is a lot of time. Paramount locked in a July 25 release date before De Bont was even hired, and he was still filming in March.

De Bont knows that simply having a recognizable concept does not ensure success. On the doomed and very expensive “Speed” sequel, star Reeves jumped ship, replaced by Jason Patric, and a fast-moving bus was replaced by a lumbering cruise liner. “Can you imagine making ‘Lara Croft’ without Angelina Jolie? You wouldn’t do it,” the director says.

With both the original star and no story restrictions on the “Tomb Raider” sequel, De Bont was free to stay faithful to and reinvent the story, which began as a hit video game. “People have certain associations with the first movie, so we have to make sure this movie stands on its own,” De Bont says diplomatically. “There’s adventure and action at the same time,” says De Bont, who filmed in Greece, Kenya, Tanzania, Hong Kong and Wales.

The film has several spectacular stunt sequences, including a jump from the 81st floor of a Hong Kong high-rise. Taken together, these images remind you of the bold style that first established De Bont as a top filmmaker.

“But it’s also a lot more character-based,” De Bont says of the film.

“Her character is more mature. In the first movie, she’s much more reactive. In this movie, she’s active. She’s really initiating everything, which is different. There’s a lot more to Lara Croft than was initially there.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

New directions

Switching jockeys in the middle of a horse race can be dangerous. But new filmmakers have grabbed the reins of established brands, generally with success.

The “Batman” franchise

“Batman” (1989): Tim Burton

“Batman Returns” (1992): Tim Burton

“Batman Forever” (1995): Joel Schumacher

“Batman & Robin” (1997): Joel Schumacher

The “Alien” franchise

“Alien” (1979): Ridley Scott

“Aliens” (1986): James Cameron

“Alien3” (1992): David Fincher

“Alien: Resurrection” (1997): Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The first “Star Wars” franchise

“Star Wars” (1977): George Lucas