Word: paramount
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Somebody did make Fatal Attraction. And this fall, what if became wow! Striking moviegoers with the startling power of a madwoman in your bathroom, Paramount's lurid romantic thriller is the zeitgeist hit of the decade. It has been box-office champ for each of its first seven weeks in release, and shows little sign of slackening. Last week it reached the $80 million mark, to rank as the year's second highest grossing film. It's the movie with something for almost everybody. Says Michael Douglas, who plays Dan: "People leave saying 'I laughed, I got turned...
...Paramount, which also released the year's No. 1 and No. 3 films (Beverly Hills Cop II and The Untouchables), is getting more than that. People can't stop talking about this movie, arguing about its characters, seeing in Dan, Beth and Alex creepy visions of themselves and their old flames. "Everybody can identify with obsessive love," says Co-Producer Sherry Lansing. "All of us have made a call in the middle of the night when we shouldn't have, or driven by somebody's house when we shouldn't have. I've never boiled a rabbit...
...visit. Glenn Close, who plays Alex, was recently approached by a mid-40s woman with her husband in tow: "She had enjoyed Fatal Attraction, and was taking him to see it 'so he'll never cheat on me.' And he goes, 'Huh-huh' -- this nervous little laugh." Sidney Ganis, Paramount's marketing boss, observes, "There is a fever out there. It is more than a movie. It's part movie, part real life." Adrian Lyne, the film's director, is amazed by its reach: "The movie is almost like a living thing that feeds off the public and takes...
...wanted to get her out of his life, she just went nuts on him." But once the horror-movie mechanism begins turning in the last two reels of Fatal Attraction, the audience revels in its hatred of Alex's villainy. "Alex is sick," says Ned Tanen, president of Paramount Pictures, "not some predatory creature feeding on men. No one ever doubts that she is pregnant with Dan's child. Yet at the end you hear the audience screaming 'Kill her! Kill the bitch...
...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 knew which buttons to push...