Leave it to WB to hit where it hurts the most.
Russell Crowe, perhaps best known for his role in Gladiator, recently revealed that the studio went all out in an attempt to kick him off a project from his early days in Hollywood. In fact, they’d been so desperate to replace the leading man with a more renowned face that they stopped paying Crowe’s hotel and rental car bills so that he’d be forced to call it quits. Yikes.
L.A. Confidential – WB Wanted Russell Crowe to Walk Away
Russell Crowe might be a force to be reckoned with in the industry today, but back when he led Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, he’d just begun to branch out his career by stacking up diverse projects in his portfolio. So, to many, the actor had still been an unknown face at the time since his ascend to international fame started after the 1997 film.
Distributed by Warner Bros. and produced by Regency Enterprises along with The Wolper Organization, the neo-noir crime venture went on to win two Academy Awards out of nine nominations after becoming an instant hit upon release. But before all the celebratory champagne was spilled, the studio had a falling out of sorts with Crowe, who according to the latter, wanted to banish him from the movie.
Talking to Vanity Fair about the same, the 59-year-old Oscar winner claimed that just “a few days into rehearsals,” WB stopped paying for his hotel and rental car expenses in an effort to push him off the script and replace him with the likes of Robert De Niro and Sean Penn instead.
“The studio didn’t want me to be in that role. They wanted, I think, Sean Penn and Robert De Niro in the film or something. Things that they could quantify and understand. There was probably a four or five-day period there where I was leaving the hotel of a morning by going down the back stairs because I knew the manager of the hotel was waiting for me in the foyer to ask when the bill was going to be paid.”
Things had gotten to such an extent that by then the studio was just waiting for an opportunity to use it against Crowe and expel him from the set. “If I paused and said, ‘I’m not turning up to work,’ [the studio] would have taken that opening to get me out of the movie,” he said. In hindsight, however, the studio probably made the right choice by not replacing Crowe because the trajectory of success that L.A. Confidential was on might not have been guaranteed had someone else led the film.
Curtis Hanson Went Behind WB’s Back For the Sake of the Film
The threat of replacing the lead actor wasn’t the only obstacle that L.A. Confidential hit in the road. When the director proposed submitting the movie to the Cannes Film Festival, WB refused to entertain the idea, worried that the international fest would be biased toward such a big studio project.
But Hanson “really really believed in the film” and was adamant on letting it explore its true potential. So, he went over the studio heads to secretly submit the film anyways. “He took a print by himself and he flew to the Cannes Film Festival,” The Pope’s Exorcist star revealed. And voila, it got shortlisted for “the main competition!”
“If it had not been screened at Cannes in the way it was, I don’t think it would’ve gotten the attention that it did,” Crowe admitted. And he’s right, because while its box office reception was lukewarm at best, the movie left both the audience and critics in complete and utter awe and also made a splash at the Oscars.
L.A. Confidential can be streamed on Amazon Instant Video.
Source: Vanity Fair | YouTube
