Word: dearden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pascali's Island is a film destined to remind people of this and more about the Ottomans. And although it may serve as a history lesson to some, it will also reawaken old stereotypes about Turks, about their greed, their savagery and their pettiness. Written and directed by James Dearden (who also wrote the screenplay for last year's sleeper, Fatal Attraction), Pascali's Island is a different kind of empire film. Instead of glorifying empire, it is decidedly unsympathetic. Stripped of the pageantry of the Raj, the decadence of a forbidden city and intriguing tribesman, this film ineffectively belittles...
...wedlock for a weekend tryst, isn't supposed to be deadly either. But drama is often the imagination of disaster, and horror is the escalation of primal anxieties (pregnancy, puberty, even dentistry) into touchstone fantasies (Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Marathon Man). Says Fatal Attraction's screenwriter James Dearden: "I wanted to take every situation to the worst-possible-case scenario and see what happened...
Fatal Attraction was conceived by English Screenwriter-Director Dearden eight years ago as a 45-minute film called Diversion. In 1983 Producers Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe hired Dearden to write a feature-length script based on his idea. (Later, Screenwriter-Director Nicholas Meyer rewrote some of the scenes involving Dan's family, which Paramount executives had thought insufficiently sympathetic.) Michael Douglas was in on the project early, but Close arrived only after Debra Winger had rejected the role and Barbara Hershey was unavailable. The film began shooting in September 1986 under Lyne's direction. Flashdance had proved that Lyne...
...filmmakers tried for something more crimson. "We sat in a room for four days," recalls Dearden. "Obviously the present ending makes Alex a complete psycho. It works well as a piece of cinema but makes her less authentic." In July they were back in Mount Kisco, N.Y., for reshooting. Dearden wrote the new ending, "because I wanted to maintain some degree of influence over it." (The original ending may be used when Fatal Attraction is released in Japan next year...
...Michael Douglas) is a lawyer with a wife (the lovely Anne Archer), a child and a career to lose if his two-night stand is discovered. That the two principals are ostensibly mature professionals, not adolescent airheads, gives the film some of its fatal attractiveness. So do James Dearden's plausible, nicely observant script, Adrian Lyne's elegantly unforced direction, and Close's beautifully calibrated descent into lunacy. Together they bring horror home to a place where the grownup moviegoer actually lives. Men will suddenly, squirmingly, recall times when they barely escaped the consequences of their caprices. Women have been...