Finally, two weeks before filming was to begin, Roberts agreed to meet Donner, Silver, and Gibson in a suite at New York's Sherry Netherland Hotel. "I had person anxiety, because they're all so close," Roberts says. "They have a rapport down, and there's a cadence to the way they exist with one another." Although the actress says she is "not one to be badgered," she was stunned to learn that Silver wouldn't let her leave the room without giving him a definitive answer.
"I had sympathy for her because she was, in essence, having the door nailed shut too," Gibson recalls. Roberts had just finished My Best Friend's Wedding the week before, and "the word was not to push her," Silver recalls, "just to talk to her. I said, 'I'm not going to do that.'"
After a brief meeting with the three men — during which, Roberts says, "they promised me the moon and that they would work around my nap time" — the actress excused herself to make a phone call in the bedroom. Opening the door, she stumbled upon a brass band hired by Silver. As they started blowing their trumpets, Roberts turned to see Gibson standing behind her with a lamp on his head.
The lunacy of the situation pushed her over the edge of doubt: "She called me and I could hear the brass band in the background," Goldsmith remembers. "And she said, 'It looks like I'm going to make a movie this fall.'"
3. Conspiracy Theory exists because Captain Picard has a thing for smoked salmon:
Meanwhile, up in Vancouver, Patrick Stewart received a call on the set of Mastermind (a drama that will be released two weeks after Conspiracy Theory) asking him to return to L.A.; Donner wanted to discuss the supporting role of Dr. Jonas, a morally questionable CIA psychiatrist. The subsequent meeting in Donner's office was not what he'd expected. It lasted 45 minutes and not one word was mentioned about the part. "We talked about the weather, sports, and Canada," says Stewart, "everything but the movie."
Good topics, apparently. Stewart was offered the role immediately, although accepting it was, as he says, "a tough decision." In between Mastermind and a slew of other projects, Stewart had planned to take a few months off. "I was going to build a stone wall at my house in England," he says. What cemented his decision in favor of Conspiracy was a reported $5 million paycheck and the knowledge that a Gibson-Roberts doubleheader was, as he puts it, "hardly going to end up in obscurity." (Also, Silver agreed to work around Stewart's Christmas Carol run in Los Angeles, and the producers of the actor's next two projects, PolyGram's Dad Savage and Hallmark's TV miniseries Moby Dick, each bumped their schedules back a week to accommodate Conspiracy Theory.)
From the first day of filming, Stewart felt that he'd made the right decision. "Not on any project have I come close to this level of dining," he says. "No one else has served me smoked salmon and capers first thing in the morning."
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