In the early 1990s, Sean Connery and Cher almost appeared together in a romantic adventure called Road Show. Here’s why it never got made:
The ending of this story is that the movie never happened. Sean Connery and Cher never came together in a feature film from the director of Die Hard, and if you follow their respective IMDB pages, you’ll know their streams never crossed.
But for time in the early 1990s, it nearly happened. The project that nearly brought them together sounds as unlikely now as the cast list.
For over a decade, a script called Road Show was doing the rounds among Hollywood studios. A romantic action-adventure set in and around a ranch, it was in turn based on a book called The Last Cattle Drive, penned by Robert Day, and it moved onto the docket of director John McTiernan just after he’d enjoyed success with 1990’s The Hunt For Red October.
In fact, McTiernan was on a bit of a run at the time. Notwithstanding the fact that he tried to get a Robin Hood picture going, which was abandoned when Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves made it to production first, by the time The Hunt For Red October hit big, he already had Die Hard and Predator to his name. He was in demand, and it was his then-wife, Donna Dubrow, who focused her producing energies on bringing Road Show to the screen.
She wasn’t the first to try. Over the previous decade, there’d been a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get Road Show moving, but the difference this time was that 20th Century Fox was looking to back the movie. The film was described as ‘The African Queen on the range’.
Dubrow had first become attached to the project in 1977, at a point when it was set up at MGM. According to one vintage article, MGM was circling Martin Ritt and Richard Brooks as potential directors, and casting chatter was underway as well. In fact, it got really close to getting the greenlight in 1983. At that stage, Jack Nicholson, Timothy Hutton and Mary Steenburgen were all aboard, and it was a ‘go’ picture… until the management changed at MGM. As is usually the way when a studio changes its boss, every project is then assessed, and Road Show became a casualty.
MGM put the film into turnaround and returned the rights to Donna Dubrow. She also got the scripts that had been worked on by Robert Getchell, and was free to set the movie up elsewhere (after a lengthy legal battle), if she could get a bite.
She got a bite. 20th Century Fox took on the film, and it was – as the attachment of Jack Nicholson had proven – a script that was interesting major movie stars.
Come 1990, Sean Connery was back on a roll. After famously returning to play James Bond in Never Say Never Again, lured by a fat cheque, his career would actually get fresh wind off the back of 1987’s The Untouchables, for which he won the only Academy Award of his career. Then, he joined The Hunt For Red October a week or two into production – he wasn’t the original Rameus – and had a massive box office hit on his hands too. His relationship with John McTiernan led him to nearly end up doing Road Show.
Cher’s involvement went back further. In the iteration of Road Show that Jack Nicholson was set to headline, Cher was at one stage going to be the female lead. Nicholson, though, vetoed her casting, but she remained aware of the script, and when Donna Dubrow got it moving again in 1990, she was close to signing on the dotted line.
She too was in a movie purple patch in her career. In 1987, she was involved in a trio of projects: The Witches Of Eastwick, Suspect and Moonstruck, every one of them a box office hit to varying degrees, and the latter winning her the only Academy Award of her career (to date. Still say Burlesque was robbed, though). She took a short break from movies, flirting with roles in the likes of Midnight Run, The War Of The Roses, The Witches and The Grifters – and also famously turning down Thelma & Louise – before plumping for the delightful 1990 flick Mermaids. It was around then that Road Show was back on the stove.
“It’s the movie that’s desperately trying to get made,” Donna Dubrow told the Tampa Bay Times in April of 1990, at the point when Fox was entering “serious discussions” with Sean Connery over taking one of the starring roles. Filming had been earmarked for the summer of 1990, with locations in Montana and Wyoming scouted out. “Just the idea of it”, she said of the potential Sean Connery and Cher duology at the top of the billing. “The sparks will fly!”
And yet they didn’t. John McTiernan had signed a lucrative deal with independent outfit Cinergi, and it had a chequebook and a half. As such, at the point Road Show was looking ready to roll, another film came across John McTiernan’s slate. Cinergi had paid around $3m for a script from Tom Schulman called The Stand: The Last Days Of Eden, and offered McTiernan a salary of $6m, with $10m going to Sean Connery.
Their heads were turned, and along with Donna Dubrow, they opted for that film instead. By the time it arrived inside cinemas, the title had changed to Medicine Man, and few would call it the finest work of all involved. Lorraine Bracco co-starred in the film, which was shot at a considerable expense on location in Mexico.
It was the last hurrah for Road Show as a result. Appreciating every prolific filmmaker has a bunch of projects that never saw the light of day, Road Show is unusual in that it attracted movie stars twice, and each time, couldn’t be dragged over the finish line.
Who knows, though? Somebody out there might still have the idea of The African Queen crossed with a cattle drive. How about Daniel Craig and Katy Perry for the leads this time around…?
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