“I didn’t wanna do that”: the erotic thriller that could have spared John Carpenter from director’s jail
Even though he was one of the most influential directors of his generation, who cast a shadow over filmmaking that still lingers today, even at his peak, John Carpenter wasn’t exactly bankable.
Halloween was never toppled as his biggest box office success, even though he helmed another 15 pictures after his breakthrough slasher, with his career defined by peaks and valleys that saw him alternating between moderate success and dismal flops.
The Fog and Escape from New York were profitable, but The Thing was not. Even though it’s one of the greatest horror flicks of all time and a certified classic, it didn’t make any money, and it was a pattern that would repeat until Carpenter finally called it quits after 2010’s The Ward, which was another bomb.
Christine recouped its budget twice over from cinemas, but Starman barely broke even, despite winning plenty of acclaim and earning Jeff Bridges an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’. Big Trouble in China was another crushing blow to his commercial viability, and Carpenter could have turned it all around with one movie.
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Hollywood was in the midst of the erotic thriller’s biggest-ever boom period, where titles like 9½ Weeks, Sliver, Basic Instinct, Body Heat, Wild Orchid, Body of Evidence, Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, and many more were landing in multiplexes with increasing regularity, and more often than not, they’d be hits.
The biggest of them all was Fatal Attraction, which cleared $300 million in ticket sales, notched six Oscar nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, and played a pivotal role in ushering in the cultural phenomenon in the first place. It was a turning point that brought eroticism rushing back to the mainstream, and Carpenter wanted no part of it.
He was offered the chance to direct the film, but turned it down, with Clint Eastwood the main reason why. “I didn’t like them,” he told Entertainment of the genre. “Fatal Attraction was simply Play Misty for Me. I didn’t wanna do that.” If he had, though, things would have been markedly different.
Having already knocked back an offer to helm Top Gun, Carpenter declined one of the top-earning releases of both 1986 and 1987. Instead, he made Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, nudging him one step closer to director’s jail when he could have pushed himself into the blockbuster bracket.
After Memoirs of an Invisible Man, In the Mouth of Madness, and Village of the Damned, he was basically done as a mainstream commodity, and that may not have happened had he been the one to steer Fatal Attraction to critical, commercial, and awards season glory.
