Directed by Doug Trumbull, 1983 sci-fi thriller Brainstorm could have been deleted as an insurance write-off – but then a London bank intervened.
When Warner Bros announced its plans to effectively delete the films Batgirl, Scoob 2 and Coyote Vs Acme, the reaction was one of outrage. Studios destroying films as a tax write-off is nothing new, however: on the 21st June 1933, the Charlie Chaplin film A Woman Of The Sea (previously called Sea Gulls) was burned on the steps of Chaplin’s own studio. The five witnesses who saw the negative go up in flames then signed a letter confirming that the film had been lost to history.
A film directed and produced by one of the most important visual effects pioneers of the 20th century almost suffered a similar fate. Brainstorm, which went into production in the early 1980s, was directed by Doug Trumbull and featured a superb cast, including Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher and Cliff Robertson. When Natalie Wood tragically died as filming neared its end in November 1981 however, its studio, MGM, was determined to scuttle the film and declare it as a $15m insurance write-off; it was only thanks to the intervention of a London bank that an ambitious, even important film was rescued from oblivion.
Brainstorm began life in 1973 as a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin, who later became a Hollywood success with the darkly wonderful Jacob’s Ladder and the smash hit supernatural romance, Ghost, both released in 1990. Originally called The George Dunlap Tape, Rubin’s script was intended as a small genre piece he intended to make himself for around $400,000. It was about a scientist who creates a new piece of technology – essentially a kind of video recorder – capable of recording everything a human being sees, hears and senses.
When funding for the film collapsed at the last minute, Rubin began trying to sell the script to other filmmakers, and Doug Trumbull became interested in it around 1979. Trumbull, known for his visual effects work on such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, was looking around for another project to direct following his 1972 debut, Silent Running. In particular, Trumbull was hunting for a story that could be used as a platform for the process he’d invented called Showscan, in which images were presented on 70mm film running at 60 frames per second.
Read more: 2001: A Space Odyssey | Douglas Trumbull’s contribution to a sci-fi classic
Paramount had already asked Trumbull to make a film using Showscan, and reading Rubin’s script, he came up with the concept of shooting the sequences where the audience is projected into the minds of its characters using that process – the idea being that the high frame rate and sharper film resolution would give the sequences an immersive sense of hyper-realism (the rest of the film would be shot at the industry standard 24 frames per second).
It quickly became evident that it would be too expensive to shoot and present a movie at two frame rates and on two types of film, however, though Trumbull eventually came up with a compromise: Brainstorm would still be shot using 35mm and 70mm film, but with both running at the 24 fps that projectionists were used to.
By this point, Paramount had put the project into turnaround and MGM stepped in to make a deal instead. Filming began in September 1981, with the shooting script heavily revised by writers Philip Frank Messina and Robert Sitzel; Rubin eventually managed to get a ‘story by’ credit.
As in Rubin’s draft, Brainstorm’s about the invention of a device which can record human experiences and play them back, allowing users to see and feel exactly what another person felt. It’s a technology that allows scientist Dr Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) to rekindle his spluttering relationship with his wife, Karen (Natalie Wood); but then the researchers discover that their invention could eventually be used for sinister purposes by the military, and they attempt to destroy it.
Rubin expressed his disappointment that so much of his original script had been ejected, but noted that it at least contained some of his ‘metaphysical’ ideas, particularly in its final reel, where Michael gets a glimpse of life after death. “What Trumbull pulled out of my script at least had some spiritual content,” Rubin told Cinefantastique magazine years later. “I’m thankful for that.”
“The original screenplay was too complex – too many amazing ideas to put into a two-hour film,” Trumbull told Film Comment magazine in 1983. “It was just incredibly dense with fabulous concepts. But it also was weak in terms of character development. You can’t do both.”
In November 1981, however, tragedy struck. Natalie Wood and her husband Robert Wagner had spent the Thanksgiving holiday aboard their boat, Splendour, when Wood suddenly went missing on the night of the 28th. Her body was found in water near Santa Catalina Island a few days later. The tragedy was the subject of rumours and salacious news stories for years afterwards.
Although there were still three weeks of filming left to complete on Brainstorm, all but two of Wood’s scenes had been shot. MGM was in financial problems at the time, however, and having already heard of stories of a chaotic production – including reports that Walken was “pretty much directing his own scenes” according to first assistant director David McGiffert – the studio was keen to shut the production down.
In the foreword to his Jacob’s Ladder screenplay, Bruce Joel Rubin recalls the clamour that unfolded following Wood’s death in late 1981. Journalists were contacting him, asking him for quotes about the late actor, whom he’d befriended only months earlier; he said something vague about the ‘strange connection between the subject of the film and Natalie’s death,’ which tabloid newspapers, hungry for eye-catching headlines, promptly ran.
Meanwhile, Rubin added, Trumbull had gotten word that MGM wanted to shelve or perhaps destroy his film, and so he “locked himself in the vault with the negative so no one could touch it.”
“When [Wood] died,” Trumbull told Film Comment, “all the sets were locked and frozen on all the stages. No one could get in or out without special permission while all the negotiations took place.”
Those negotiations were between MGM, which didn’t want to put up any more money to complete the film, and Lloyds of London, which knew that MGM was refusing to finish Brainstorm because it wanted to claim $15 m back as an insurance write-off.
“Why should they pay an insurance claim for something that wasn’t really damaged goods?” was how Trumbull put it.
Eventually, Lloyd’s bank decided to stump up the money for the film itself, with $2.75m going towards finishing the shoot and $3.5m for post-production. MGM, for a time, suggested it might sell Brainstorm to another studio, before MGM executives “figured they’d look like jerks if they let it go and it turned out to be a big success” according to Trumbull.
This fear of looking like ‘jerks’ was later echoed by Universal boss Jimmy Horowitz, who in 2017 decided to cancel the animated family film, Larrikins. DreamWorks Animation had produced the movie, directed by Tim Minchin and Alessando Carloni, but Universal was its distributor; according to Minchin, Universal had little faith in its chances of success, and so decided to write it off against its taxes. Netflix had at one stage offered to buy Larrikins, but Horowitz refused, saying – again according to Minchin – “It’s schmuck insurance – if someone made a lot of money out of it, we’ll look like schmucks.”
At any rate, Brainstorm – following a lengthy fight between Trumbull, Lloyd’s and MGM – finally went back into production in autumn 1982. According to Rubin, the crew marked the resumption of filming by wearing t-shirts that read, “BRAINSTORM, A LLOYD’S OF LONDON PRODUCTION!”
The film was finally released – by MGM, via its subsidiary United Artists – in September 1983, ending almost two years of legal wrangling. Trumbull was so embittered by the experience that for years he refused to direct another film. “Moviemaking is like waging war,” he’d said. “It destroys your personal life, too.”
Rubin added that, far from helping his career as a screenwriter, having a credit on Brainstorm – which underperformed financially and was divisive critically, to say the least – had threatened to end it. “It was a painful experience,” Rubin later wrote. “In fact, almost everything to do with Brainstorm had been painful.”
Although hardly a hit (it made $10m against an $18m budget), Brainstorm went on to acquire a cult following, and there’s certainly much to enjoy in it over 30 years later: Trumbull’s pioneering visuals – which must have looked terrific on the big screen – and a stand-out performance from Louise Fletcher as a chain-smoking, sharp-witted scientist. It could even be argued that some of its ideas anticipated other sci-fi movies, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days or Christopher Nolan’s Inception by several years.
Brainstorm also highlights the paradox of consigning films to oblivion. By writing them off, studios are essentially saying that they have no value; but by writing them off, the same studio also has to assign a cash figure in order to claim the money back. As Paste Magazine wrote in February, “There’s no push for anyone to justify this contradiction.”
Nor is there much talk, at least from the studio executive side of the equation, about the artistic value of films when they’re placed on the chopping block. When the work of hundreds of animators, actors and other artists is rendered moot in the case of Coyote Vs Acme or Batgirl, Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav didn’t talk about his studio’s output in creative terms, but about “what content is going to help us win.”
Brainstorm was one film, at least, that was saved from oblivion. MGM may have been right to have been wary about its commercial prospects, but it remains a creatively fascinating artefact that, unlike Coyote Vs Acme, can still be enjoyed decades later.
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