Word: kopelson
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quite. They--or, rather, producer Arnold Kopelson--read it in a New Yorker article in 1992. "Crisis in the Hot Zone," Richard Preston's true story about the near escape of the Ebola virus from a Virginia lab, threw Hollywood into a bidding frenzy, and Kopelson was one of the pursuers. When Preston sold his rights to 20th Century Fox, Kopelson decided to make a fictional plague film, Outbreak. It scurried into production while the Hot Zone project dithered in development and then aborted. So if you want to see a virus epic, Outbreak...
...threat of plague, a White House crisis-oh, and a pretty blond child set up for a big bad monkey bite-aren't enough for one doomsday movie; the military has to go bats as well. We can only surmise that back in 1986, when he produced Platoon, Kopelson contracted a deadly strain of the con-spiracy virus from Oliver Stone...
...Zone had a reason to move quickly. A rival film on the same subject, Outbreak, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (In the Line of Fire) and starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, was also rushing toward a start date. Producer Arnold Kopelson had initiated the project at Warner Bros. after failing in his bid for the rights to Hot Zone. He got a script from Robert Roy Pool and Dr. Laurence Dworet, an internist. While visiting an Army virus center, the Outbreak screenwriters ran into Obst and Preston; it was like a cold war chance meeting...
Triumph of the Spirit might be expected to transcend this label, if only because of one line in the movie's final credits: "Filmed on location at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps." Co-producer Arnold Kopelson won ! permission from Polish authorities to use the huge camps (now museums) as the setting for his story. How chilling it must have been for the actors and especially the extras -- many of them Auschwitz survivors -- to see the place restored as if in full working order...