The movie Walter Hill wanted to delete from history: “I told them it would be like shit”
Iconic action director Walter Hill was never a shrinking violet, but in the late 1990s, even his vociferous, foul-mouthed objections couldn’t stop a studio from torpedoing its own movie.
Hill, who achieved cult icon status in the 1980s for directing movies like The Warriors, 48 Hrs, and Streets of Fire, in addition to producing the Alien franchise, saw his career hit the skids in the following decade. Indeed, aside from Another 48 Hrs, his ’90s were defined by a series of flops that left his directing career on life support. Then, in ‘97, he saw a chance for redemption.
Seven years earlier, House on Haunted Hill director William Malone had pitched MGM on a sci-fi horror film entitled Dead Star, about a space expedition that returns ancient alien artefacts to Earth. These curios turn out to have an evil force attached to them (ain’t it always the way?), and chaos ensues. The studio liked the script and began development, but over the next seven years proceeded to change literally everything about it for no apparent reason.
By ‘97, so many writers had worked on different passes of the script that the story now followed a medical ship rescuing the sole survivor from a cargo vessel on the verge of being dragged into a black hole. This incarnation of the script was titled Supernova, and Romper Stomper director Geoffrey Wright signed on to direct. However, two months before the shoot was scheduled to begin, Wright walked off the movie, and star James Spader (who had already replaced previous star Vincent D’Onofrio) suggested that MGM offer the project to Hill.
Hill had always been interested in making a sci-fi movie, and he was intrigued by the prospect of working with Spader, so he agreed to come on board with only weeks before principal photography began. This is obviously not an ideal scenario in which to begin making any movie, and the fact that he spent the lion’s share of those few weeks rewriting the script was also not a great sign. Nevertheless, he persisted, and what ensued was a draining, infuriating disaster that saw the budget slashed in half midway through production, endless fights with MGM, and Hill quitting the project twice.
At one point, he spent 24 weeks putting together his first cut of the film, only for MGM to insist he screen this assembly cut to a test audience. The director was astonished because there was still a huge amount of special effects work to be completed. “They decided they wanted to preview the movie without the effects,” Hill lamented to the Directors Guild of America, “I said this was insane; it’s a science fiction movie. The effects had to be added.”
MGM argued that it just wanted to see how the movie played with an audience, even in its unfinished state, to which Hill bluntly told the executives, “It would be like shit”. He knew the preview would go terribly, and even told the studio that the results would be so bad that it would subsequently “give up on the movie”.
Unfortunately, the suits took this as Hill defying them, instead of a director being genuinely worried because his movie was in a vulnerable place. He was asked, “Are you saying you won’t preview the movie?”, knowing full well that the studio expected him to fall in line. Hill, though, has never been one to play the game (largely to his own detriment), fired back, “You own the goddamn thing. If you want to preview it, I can’t prevent you, but I won’t go”.
In the end, this test screening did go woefully, and Hill wound up not wanting any association with the film. In fact, he’d rather have hurled the final cut into a black hole, so he insisted MGM credit him as Thomas Lee. Then, when Supernova finally saw the light of day on January 14th, 2000 (nearly two years after its initial planned release), he was depressingly unsurprised to see it flame out at the box office and be torn to shreds by critics. Some projects just can’t be saved, no matter how hard you try.
