The 1984 movie John Carpenter got paid for not making: “He took the money and bought a helicopter”
The idea of being paid in full for not doing your job sounds fantastic, in all honesty, and John Carpenter was happy to take the money and run when he was pushed out of a potential directorial effort.
Not only that, but the filmmaker was paid so much for not doing the thing that he’d been hired to do that he bought a helicopter, which is one way of enjoying the fruits of a labour that never happened. He was entitled to do it, though, since he was smart enough to make sure the small print was ironclad.
In theory, if you were making a movie based on something created by one of the most iconic and formidable names in horror, you could do much worse than go with one of the most iconic and formidable names in horror to helm the feature-length adaptation, which was the original plan.
During shooting on The Thing, Universal decided that it wanted to stay in the Carpenter business and offered him the reins on Stephen King’s Firestarter. The tale of a pyrokinetic tyke trying to outwit, outrun, and outlast the shady government forces trying to capture and control her seemed tailor-made for his sensibilities, and he agreed.
The Halloween and Escape from New York mastermind signed on the dotted line, but when The Thing arrived in cinemas to withering early reviews and barely broke even, the studio changed its mind. Suddenly, they weren’t as sold as they had been a few months previously, but at least the director had an out.
“John had a pay-or-play deal, which meant that whether Universal made the film or not, he would get paid,” screenwriter Bill Phillips explained. When his seminal sci-fi horror film flopped, “They decided that since John is very good at delivering low-budget films, they would cut the budget from $27 million to $15 million.”
Under most circumstances, a filmmaker would have no choice but to acquiesce to their paymaster’s demands, but in this case, Carpenter stood his ground because he could. “Since John didn’t have to agree to that, he didn’t,” Phillips added. “He took the money, and with it bought a Bell Jet LongRanger helicopter, which he later rented out to the LA Olympics.”
He may have lost out on a job, but he nonetheless collected a significant enough paycheque to purchase himself a brand new chopper, which is a decent enough compromise. Firestarter would have been much better off with him than without, since King would summarise it as one of his least favourite adaptations of his work, and there’s been quite a few of those.
Carpenter didn’t want to make the movie with less of a budget than initially agreed, and as Phillips remembered, “When the Universal bean counters wanted him to cut corners, he decided he wouldn’t.” That’s fair, especially when he knew he’d be handsomely rewarded for his efforts, whether he made it or not.
