The Gene Hackman movie disowned by its creator: “I made a fundamental error”
No actor has a flawless track record for making good movies. Point to any Hollywood legend with a stack of bona fide classics to their name, and they’re bound to have made a handful of duds, too. The late icon Gene Hackman was no different, as for every Mississippi Burning, The French Connection, or Crimson Tide, there was a rogue Welcome to Mooseport or Under Suspicion.
However, only one Hackman movie was actively disowned by the man who wrote it – and the story behind its creation is a stark lesson in how Hollywood should never put the horse before the cart.
In 1994, hotshot producer Brian Grazer came to Universal Pictures with a prospect he knew would be a surefire megahit. He had been shown a one-page outline of a new legal thriller by John Grisham, the scribe behind recent blockbusters like The Firm and The Pelican Brief, in addition to future hits The Client and A Time to Kill. The outline was pretty vague about how the story would take shape, but the core elements of a murder, a Death Row sentence, and a race against time for justice were present and accounted for.
Amazingly, Grisham was so hot at the time that Grazer talked Universal into shelling out $3.75 million for the movie rights to what would become The Chamber. When Grazer’s production partner, Ron Howard, became attached to direct and Brad Pitt expressed interest in starring, Grisham began to get excited. There was only one problem, though: he hadn’t written a word of the book yet.
What followed was a torturous process for the writer and the studio, with the finished book seemingly satisfying nobody. “I bought it before I saw any words,” Grazer told Entertainment Weekly. “I just knew it was Grisham, and I wanted to snatch it.” He admitted to buying the project based on the sales pitch from Grisham’s agent, but the final product “didn’t totally correspond with the synopsis paragraph I read. And that didn’t exactly correspond with the book.”
As he wrote the book, Grisham’s creative muse took him into darker territory than Universal was perhaps expecting. The Chamber became the tale of a young idealistic lawyer trying to save the life of his KKK member grandfather, who is on Death Row for supposedly bombing the office of a Jewish civil rights lawyer. Grisham soon found his writing micromanaged by studio executives, which he bristled against, telling EW that he “got some unsolicited vibes on how to write. Some of the studio people had some ideas about what should be in the book, and it was infuriating.”
The situation went from bad to worse, though, when Howard and Pitt dropped out of the project, and new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross) set about making sweeping changes to the screenplay adaptation, which iconic writer William Goldman had been paid a cool $1 million to create.
Grazer admitted, “Foley changed everything. Some of it was fine by me, some of it wasn’t. Grisham got wind of it and wasn’t happy.” Goldman was even more scathing of his time on the project, writing in his memoir, Which Lie Did I Tell? “It was a terrible experience. It wasn’t a very interesting one, and besides, I never saw the movie and neither did anyone else, so no one would give a shit.”
Ultimately, Goldman wasn’t wrong with his hilariously cutting criticism. Despite starring Chris O’Donnell between Batman movies, and Hackman playing the enigmatic Sam Cayhall, The Chamber made a paltry $22.5m at the worldwide box office on a $40m budget. It was torn apart by critics and audiences alike, with most observers believing Hackman was the film’s only saving grace.
As for Grisham, he admitted, “It could not have been handled worse by those involved, including me. I made a fundamental error when I sold the film rights before I finished writing the book.” In the future, he insisted on scripting, directing, and casting approval on all adaptations of his work, and never again sold a project based on an idea.
It was a painful lesson learned for the scribe, who did pluck up the courage to watch the film, unlike Goldman, although he probably wished he hadn’t. “It was a dreadful movie,” he grumbled. “Gene Hackman was the only good thing in it.”
