‘Welcome to Mooseport’: The Oscar-winning classic Gene Hackman almost wrote, directed, produced and starred in
Gene Hackman is a rather stoic and serious performer, often known for playing weathered and haunted authority figures such as the paranoid surveillance expert in The Conversation and a rugged detective in The French Connection. After working with infamously controversial directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin, both known for their relentless work ethic on set and sometimes aggressive approach to collaborating, Hackman’s final project came in 2004, working with Donald Petrie on the bizarre comedy Welcome to Mooseport, which led to an almost-project that would have ended his career in a very different way.
Petrie is known for his work on the rom-coms of the late nineties and early 2000s, creating films such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Little Italy and Just My Luck. All his movies have a light-hearted and flippant tone, something that doesn’t necessarily line up with the mood board of Hackman’s previous work, especially given that it was Hackman’s last ever on-screen appearance.
The film follows a former US president and newly elected Mooseport mayor (played by Hackman) who is in love with his secretary and struggles to find a way to tell her of his secret feelings. Given the seriousness of Hackman’s other films, Welcome to Mooseport is distinctly unserious and silly, with a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings synonymous with romantic comedy.
But perhaps even more surprising than his choice to star in this film was his decision to retire from acting altogether after its release, with many people speculating about the actor’s reasons for doing so. Hackman, however, attributed the decision to retire to his health, saying that “the doctor advised me that my heart wasn’t in the kind of shape that I should be putting it under any stress”.
However, his retirement led him to pursue other creative endeavours, with Hackman writing his own novels and collaborating with his next-door neighbour, Daniel Lenihan, on multiple projects. The pair recently wrote a novel called Escape from Andersonville: A Novel of the Civil War, following a Confederate Officer trying to rescue his men from a prison camp. Hackman later bought the rights to a popular crime novel with the intention of adapting it into a screenplay and potentially producing and starring in the film himself.
When asked about this process, Hackman said: “I was so respectful of the book that I was into it 100 pages and had about 300 pages of the script! So I could see that I didn’t have the experience to do that kind of thing at that point, so I let the project go, kinda regretfully.”
Whilst many film lovers would gladly watch another performance from the legendary actor, Hackman’s decision to leave the project was perhaps for the better, as making a movie is famously not the most relaxing vocational hobby. Hackman’s last appearance on screen remains to be Welcome to Mooseport, but who knows if the actor will be struck by inspiration again and pursue one final project.
