CRISIS IN THE PLOT ZONE

It's more like the fantastical stuff of a Stephen King novel than nonfiction: a deadly virus that spreads like wildfire, causing profuse bleeding and certain death for its victims. And when Richard Preston's ''Crisis in the Hot Zone'' was first published in The New Yorker in October 1992 (he later expanded the article into his current best-selling book The Hot Zone), its nail-biting potential wasn't lost on Hollywood. * Preston detailed the travails of married U.S. Army virologists Gerard and Nancy Jaax, who, in 1989, sought to contain a lethal and unfamiliar virus that accidentally traveled from the Philippines to America via monkey. Working in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Maryland, where a torn safety suit or a pricked finger can mean a swift and horrible demise, the couple lived with constant paranoia. In short, it was a saga tailor-made for the movies. * The story, it seems, was as contagious as the virus. Last week, the thriller Outbreak opened as the nation's top movie, with a box office take of $13.4 million. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo as a once-married team of virologists investigating a deadly virus brought from Africa to America via monkey. Their characters work in Bio-safety Level 4, where they must contend with torn safety suits, pricked fingers, and constant paranoia. * While much of Hollywood thought Crisis in the Hot Zone would make a great movie, they didn't think it would be this one. The story of how Warner Bros.' fictionalized Outbreak made it to the screen, and of how Crisis in the Hot Zone-the version Twentieth Century Fox had hoped to base on Preston's book- fell apart, is a parable about what happens when the irresistible force of Hollywood encounters the immovable object of a book. It's also a case study of how following the rules doesn't always pay off.

On the afternoon of Jan. 18, 1993, in Princeton, N.J., Richard Preston told the teenager babysitting his two children that he didn't want to be disturbed and set off for his garage office. Moments later, the phone rang: It was Arnold Kopelson, the producer whose credits range from Platoon to The Fugitive, and a man not used to having to introduce himself. ''I said, 'Do you know who I am?''' Kopelson remembers of their first conversation. ''I never really know, and I want people to know I'm a serious filmmaker, I'm an Academy Award winner. And I wanted to make an important movie that would effect social change. This is what I want to do with my life.'' ''I don't know if he had a cigar in his mouth, but I think he did,'' Preston says. ''You could almost hear this faint sucking sound in the background. He said, 'First of all, call me Arnold. How are you, anyway?' and I said, 'I'm fine,' and he said, without missing a beat, 'I'm terrific,' and I thought, sitting there in my garage, 'Oh my God, I'm in Hollywood.' He said, 'I'm passionate to make this movie; I never make a picture for less than $50 million.''' Niceties notwithstanding, Kopelson ended the conversation on a darker note. ''Oh, by the way,'' he told Preston, ''we have the lawyers' opinion that we can make this movie without you.'' ''I didn't tell him I'm from Brooklyn and I don't like to lose, but I had that in the back of my mind,'' Kopelson acknowledges. That's about all the two agree on. Preston says Kopelson participated in the auction for his book and lost to Fox. Kopelson says, ''On my life, the lives of my children, my wife, and everything that is dear to me, there was no auction.'' Kopelson says that when Preston told him he had decided to go with Fox, where producer Lynda Obst (The Fisher King) had offered Preston $100,000, with an additional $350,000 to be paid the first day of production, Kopelson's matching offer was rejected. ''Baloney,'' says Preston, who insists that a matching offer was never made. Whatever the details, Kopelson says that a faithful adaptation of Crisis was never what he had in mind; he wanted the rights in order to secure Preston as a consultant. ''(Preston's article) was not a movie, it was merely background,'' Kopelson says now. ''It was about 100 monkeys, and all of them end up getting killed. First of all, I would have the animal rights activists all over me. Secondly, it did not have a beginning, a middle, and an end.'' In fact, a month before he first spoke with Preston, Kopelson had hired Lawrence Dworet, an emergency room doctor-turned-writer, and his partner, Robert Roy Pool, to begin work on a screenplay. (The filmmakers say Warner attorneys had assured them that because facts are public property, they could base a fictional story on events recounted in The Hot Zone.) Their first version, Kopelson says, was ''totally unsatisfactory.'' Dworet says he wrote the character eventually played by Hoffman as more ''Patton-like,'' and overall, the draft was more similar to The Hot Zone than the completed film, in which a rogue general obsessed with germ warfare attempts to cover up one government massacre and plan another. Warner wanted a grittier thriller, and hired Oscar winner Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs) to jump-start the story. ''There's a formula for making exciting movies,'' Kopelson explains. ''You have to have a central character, you put obstacles in his path, and he overcomes them and wins in the end.'' Meanwhile, the Hot Zone filmmakers were having problems of their own. Producer Obst knew she was racing the Outbreak team to the screen but was hampered by script problems. When screenwriters Richard Friedenberg (A River Runs Through It) and James Hart (Bram Stoker's Dracula) failed to whip the story into shape, Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Disclosure) got the call. However different the direction of the competing scripts, the research was similar. Both sides visited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Fort Detrick, Md., where many of the events recounted in The Hot Zone took place. And both met with Col. Nancy Jaax, the virologist heroine of the book, their visits so close that Hot Zone's Obst and Preston arrived at Fort Detrick as Outbreak's Dworet was leaving. Naturally, even the meeting with Jaax has two versions: While Kopelson says he was impressed by her, Preston says that Jaax was less effusive about the producer. ''She walked into the meeting and said, 'Number one, you get your goddamn limo out of my parking space,''' Preston says. '''And another thing, if there's a female colonel who looks like me in the movie, there's going to be a major lawsuit.''' By January 1994, Obst's and Kopelson's scripts were ready to send out to directors. Wolfgang Petersen, reveling in the success of In the Line of Fire, was on both producers' lists. ''I got the scripts on my desk the same day,'' Petersen says. ''I decided to do Outbreak. Sometimes you can tell a better story with fiction.'' He, like Kopelson, had a problem with a movie that ended with a mass monkey murder. ''They had a scene where they beat (an orangutan) to death,'' Kopelson claims of Crisis. ''I would never put something like that in my movie.'' (Preston's dry reply: ''Outbreak is like Curious George Gets the Andromeda Strain.'') When Petersen chose Outbreak, Obst handed Crisis to director Ridley Scott (Alien). The directors began to line up talent: Scott snagged Robert Redford and Jodie Foster; after lunch with Hoffman at Toscana in Brentwood, Petersen decided to go against what he saw as a ''Harrison Ford- type'' role, and cast the actor as Outbreak's hero. Russo, who had worked with Petersen on In the Line of Fire, agreed to play opposite Hoffman. With cast and crew set, both movies rushed toward production, knowing that the first film out would almost surely be the box office winner. If either side tried to hide its progress-or lack of it-from the other, it was a miserable failure. ''I was getting copies of their script, and they were getting copies of ours,'' Kopelson says. ''Every draft they came out with, we read.'' Last summer, Kopelson realized it was time for a grand gesture: On July 13, 1994, he sent Petersen and his crew to shoot exterior shots outside Eureka, Calif., announcing in the trades that production had begun. Although it meant filming would begin with a far-from-finished script, Kopelson's bet paid off. Crisis began to fall apart almost immediately. While nobody involved with the production will comment, Foster reportedly became unhappy with her less-than-starring role in Attanasio's script, and dropped out later that week. ''The first draft had Jodie as the star of the movie, and then her role was diminished,'' says Kopelson. Redford abandoned the project a month later when no replacement for Foster was found. With no stars and no chance of beating Outbreak, Fox put the brakes on Crisis in the Hot Zone. Even Preston concedes that Fox's inability to pull together a workable adaptation of his book was at least as much a factor as Outbreak in Crisis' demise: ''When the Fox project exploded, they didn't want to talk about it. They were resolutely insisting that all was hunky-dory, and 10 minutes later someone would be weeping (to me) about how the Fox project was like a shipwreck.'' But beating Crisis couldn't make up for Outbreak's shortened preproduction period, even when Kopelson stopped production for one week in order to work on the script. Dialogue was written minutes before many scenes were shot; Donald Sutherland, who plays the villain, was brought in at the eleventh hour, even though it meant replacing actor Joe Don Baker and scrapping a half million dollars' worth of work. The frantic schedule, Petersen says, ''was unfortunate. I didn't like it at all.'' To that end, he brought screenwriter Neal Jimenez (The Waterdance) onto the set to ''improve the (script's) pacing and structure.'' Apparently, it needed more help: Though Dworet and Pool are credited, Outbreak is the work of eight screenwriters, from The Fugitive's Jeb Stuart to script doctor Carrie Fisher, whose price was a reported $100,000 a week. And when Hoffman wasn't satisfied with his dialogue in a climactic helicopter scene, he called a writer not usually associated with punching up action- speak: prize-winning poet and novelist Maya Angelou. ''But remember Casablanca,'' Petersen says. ''They were struggling with the script all the time.'' Outbreak wrapped after 97 days of filming. True to Kopelson's word, it reportedly cost over $50 million.