Highlander at 40: Part 1 of 2
Really Good Idea, Hollywood Screenwriters, EMI, Getting Sean
To celebrate one of nature’s most dazzling spells–unveiling hours more light a day–Video Days celebrates spring with five sword and sorcery films from another time.
HIGHLANDER (1986) might be the worst movie to ever launch a franchise, at least a franchise that has spread from film to television to print with this sort of wildfire intensity, and forty years after its release, has yet to be contained. Its novel blend of new world action and old world adventure is a big part of its appeal, the original film mining the best of both worlds to introduce something as fresh now as it was then. When it comes to achieving greatness, both screenplay and casting get halfway there, leaving much to be desired.
Gregory Widen grew up in Laguna Beach, California and by the age of eighteen had already trained as a paramedic. He had his mind set on becoming a firefighter. In 1980, the year Widen graduated high school, he accompanied family on a trip to the United Kingdom. Among the tourist sites the Widens visited was the Tower of London. “They have the world’s largest collection of armory. I was walking through it and I thought, ‘What if you owned all this?’ Then I thought, ‘What if you wore all this?’ And then I thought, ‘What if you never died and you were giving someone a tour saying you owned all this?’ Visiting the Scottish Highlands pitched the seeds for what would become Widen’s story about an immortal Scotsman. After taking a gap year to complete his training as a firefighter, Widen enrolled part-time in the graduate screenwriting program offered by the University of California Los Angeles. His love of movies had introduced him to The Duellists (1977), the feature film directing debut of Ridley Scott. The historical drama dramatized a fifteen-year rivalry between two soldiers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) fighting for France during the Napoleonic Wars.
Tasked with completing a student thesis screenplay, Widen imagined a rivalry between two immortals spanning five hundred years. With the working title Shadow Clan, his script was set mostly in present day Washington D.C., where a Scottish warrior from the 16th century named Conor MacLeod is lurking around. His adversary, the Knight, seeks to be the last immortal standing. Widen transitioned between police investigating a series of headless corpses piling up in the present and MacLeod’s mentorship five hundred years ago by an immortal Spaniard named Juan Cid Romirez. In the climax, MacLeod duels the Knight at the Jefferson Memorial. Two of Widen’s UCLA screenwriting classmates were full-time students and roommates, Fred Dekker and Ethan Wiley. Widen huddled with the duo to generate a stronger title for his script. (In the category of things least likely to ever occur, Highlander would open in the U.S. one weekend after a horror picture Dekker had started writing and Wiley had finished, adding much tongue-in-cheek humor, as House). Their instructor Richard Walter saw in Widen’s screenplay the nuts and bolts for a script that might sell. He contacted a literary agent named Harold Moskovitz, a player who trusted Walter to scout UCLA for fresh writing talent.
Agreeing with the instructor’s positive assessment of Highlander, Moskovitz got Widen’s script to the producing tandem of Peter S. Davis & William Panzer. Davis had started his career in New York as an attorney before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s with dreams of producing movies. Panzer was a graduate of New York University Film School, who as a cameraman or editor was working in commercials. In an executive producer capacity, Davis had helped raise financing for a crime film Panzer produced titled The Death Collector (1976), which featured Joe Pesci in his first movie role. They followed this with a thriller that predated The Stunt Man (1980) titled Stunts (1977) starring Robert Forster, based on a story by Robert Shaye, founder of New Line Cinema. Davis originated the story for Steel (1980), which Lee Majors both starred in and produced, and spent nearly eighteen months wrangling for a theatrical release, briefly opening under the title Look Down and Die. Panzer’s first impression of Highlander came with coverage by Harold Moskovitz, who’d retain an associate producer credit for his services.
Panzer recalled, “He said, ‘I don’t think this is the best script I’ve ever read, but a really good idea.’ It did have some of the principal characters in it and the idea of immortality, the idea of Immortals in conflict, but it was much darker. And it was less romantic.” In late 1982, Davis-Panzer Productions took out a $1,500 option on the script and didn’t waste time bringing in professional screenwriters to forge the material into a movie. Peter Bellwood held an M.A. in History from Cambridge University, where he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights and met Peter Cook. After a stint in advertising, Bellwood was invited to write and perform with Cook & Dudley Moore in the stage revue Beyond the Fringe. Once the show completed two national tours of America, Bellwood remained in New York, writing the libretto for the 1970 Broadway adaptation of the novel Elmer Gantry, a notorious flop. Moving to Los Angeles, Bellwood found a writing partner in Larry Ferguson, who’d grown up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Ferguson was a red-blooded jock who discovered theater arts in high school and spent much of his youth pursuing an acting career in New York and L.A. Bellwood & Ferguson were commissioned to write what qualified as Davis & Panzer’s biggest success to that time, the disaster drama St. Helens (1982), one of the first made-for-television pictures by HBO.
Working off a 62-page outline of Gregory Widen’s screenplay, Bellwood & Ferguson started adapting Highlander in early 1983. The faster typist, Bellwood took dictation while Ferguson prowled the room generating ideas. They relocated the contemporary action to New York, staging the opening duel in the parking garage of Madison Square Garden (Widen had staged the duel in the alley behind an adult theater). Instead of a national monument, Bellwood & Ferguson set the climactic duel at Coney Island Amusement Park. Connor MacLeod is going by the name Russell Nash in the present, while his adversary was sketched in greater detail, a Prussian named Count von Krohn, answering to the name Victor Kruger in the present. Bellwood & Ferguson cooked up a mythology for the Immortals, binding them together in an energy they called the Quickening. When an Immortal lopped off the head of another Immortal in battle, whoever was left standing inherited his foe’s power. The Quickening also made Immortals aware of each other when in close proximity. When only a certain number of Immortals were left, they would be drawn into final combat in what was referred to as the Gathering, the victor to inherit what Bellwood & Ferguson called the Prize, the lifeforce of all the Immortals. A line in Widen’s script, “There can be but one,” became a mantra in Bellwood & Ferguson: “There can be only one.”
The success of St. Helen’s earned Davis & Panzer a six-picture distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Financing for Davis-Panzer Productions’ latest picture, The Osterman Weekend (1983), had been assembled by a British sales executive named Michael Ryan, and he was retained by the producers to raise the money for Highlander. Ryan had sold an Australian creature feature titled Razorback (1984) and believed its director would be a good fit for an international action/ adventure film. Russell Mulcahy had his start editing news segments for Channel 7 in Sydney. Mulcahy found himself shooting promos for local bands like AC/DC and Hush, and discovered there was an emerging market for these musical short films, which would shortly become known as music video. In a lengthy interview with Paul Rowlands for the Money Into Light blog in July 2016, Mulcahy recalled, “I went to England for two weeks to make a small video and I ended up staying two years. I did the video for Buggles, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, which opened up MTV. Before I went off to do Razorback I did a whole series of videos in a row: ‘True’ with Spandau Ballet, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with Bonnie Tyler, ‘I’m Still Standing’ and ‘That’s Why They Call It The Blues’ with Elton John, and ‘The Reflex’ with Duran Duran.” (Mulcahy was being modest about his credentials. He also directed Duran Duran’s first music video “Planet Earth” and the British New Wave band’s two most iconic, “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio”).
In 1984, Michael Ryan put together a reel of Mulcahy’s music video work and presented it to Davis & Panzer, who liked what they saw. Mulcahy continued, “I read the script when I was cutting the ‘Wild Boys’ video. I loved the genre, I loved the action, and I loved the strange complexity of the intercutting timelines. What really grabbed me though was the sense of tragic, epic romance in the story, the man who couldn’t die and had to watch people he fell in love with wither and die in front of him. That continual pain and angst was a driving force in the character of Connor. He wanted to win the Prize because he was sick and tired of being Immortal.” William Panzer phoned Peter Bellwood with news that they’d found their director. The screenwriter recalled, “I said to Bill, ‘Has he made any movies?’ and Panzer said, ‘Yeah, he made one movie.’ When I got off the phone I called Larry and said, ‘They’re going to hire this guy Russell Mulcahy,’ and Larry said, ‘Great, what’s he done?’ and I said, ‘Well, he’s only made one movie, it’s called Razorback and at the climax of the movie, the heroine is eaten by a giant warthog.’ There was a long pause and Larry said, ‘This may be our guy.’” Mulcahy was announced as director of Highlander in December 1984.
Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment saw in Highlander the potential for a movie that had something for everyone, and could perform well in markets all over the world. In exchange for distribution rights outside the U.S. and Canada, including home video, EMI–which Mulcahy was familiar with as Duran Duran’s record label–had offered to put up a production budget of $13.8 million, in effect, making Highlander a British film. When it came to casting the villain, now named Kurgan to avoid any association with Freddy Krueger, the producers threw out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name due to his turn as The Terminator (1984), but the star had been inspired to go into acting by watching John Wayne, and was neither interested in becoming known as a bad guy or available if he had been interested. Russell Mulcahy was at a party in New York where he was talking to Sting about the character. The musician/ actor recommended his co-star from The Bride (1985), who’d played Frankenstein’s Monster to his Dr. Frankenstein. At 6’3” with a presence that made him seem a half a foot taller, the actor’s name was Clancy Brown.
The first name that came to Davis & Panzer’s mind when it came to casting their hero, a Scottish warrior, may have been Sean Connery’s. Twenty-five years past his expiration date to credibly play Connor MacLeod, the producers instead zeroed in on Connery for MacLeod’s mentor, now named Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez. In an obituary published February 23, 2021, the Hollywood Reporter quoted the late Peter S. Davis on one of his career accomplishments, booking Connery to play the master swordsman in his movie. “I thought he would be great in the role, but I was discouraged by everyone. Everyone told me there was no chance in the world I’d get Sean Connery. I talked to his agents at the time, and they said, ‘Davis, just make an offer … you know he’s a very well-paid actor. Make an offer.’ I offered $300,000 for one week’s work. They told me I was far off the mark. But then, I upped the ante from $500,000 to $700,000. Still nothing. So finally, his agents said, ‘Peter, we like nice round numbers.’ So we offered a million.”
Davis continued, “That got the script to Sean. We immediately heard back that he enjoyed the piece if he got to make certain changes to broaden the role. We finally settled on the million for the week’s work. David Tringham, who was first assistant director on the film–from the old school of filmmaking–told us shooting Sean would be near impossible in a week. But they made it work. David, director Russell Mulcahy and production designer Allan Cameron built the sets back to back to back so Sean could be moved from one scene to the next. Russell shot the shit out of it and managed to get true value out of our million dollars.” David Keith–who’d played Richard Gere’s navy training buddy in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)-and Barry Bostwick interviewed for the role of MacLeod, but Mulcahy took credit for flipping through magazines at Davis & Panzer’s office in Los Angeles and coming across publicity Christopher Lambert had done for his starring role in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Notified that Lambert, an American by birth who’d grown up in Switzerland and France, didn’t speak English, the director was undeterred, believing the actor had the look he was after for his otherworldly hero.
Part 2 of 2 of Highlander at 40 coming Friday, March 6.
Thanks to Jonathan Melville, author of A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander, his 2020 book documenting much of the film’s production history that might’ve otherwise been lost to time.