The Hunt For Red October at 35
Author Tom Clancy and Hollywood win the peace in nearly perfect fashion
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990) takes a machine-driven, first-time novel and tosses it in a spin cycle with crackerjack Hollywood writing, a director and cinematographer working at their creative peaks, an A-class international cast and recognition by the movie people of what made the material unique from the action movie of the month. The finished laundry is a minor masterpiece, a movie that not only exceeds as an entertainment, but feels good to rewatch and recommend as a human being.
Tom Clancy was born in East Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in the suburb of Northwood. He attended Loyola College, majoring in English, and upon graduation, married a nursing student he’d met at school. He went to work for a local insurance agency. In 1976, Clancy read a report in the Washington Post about a mutiny that occurred aboard a Soviet missile frigate, the Storozhevoy, the previous year. While most of the senior officers had been drunk from celebrating the Russian Fourth of July–October Revolution Day on November 7–the ship’s political officer commandeered the vessel, cast off from the Bay of Riga and headed for asylum on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. The mutineers got within three hundred nautical miles of sanctuary before an all-out Soviet air and sea search disabled their boat. Clancy, obsessed with technology and the sea, had wanted to write a novel since high school. He filed the mutiny on the Storozhevoy in his memory.
In 1980, Clancy joined the U.S. Naval Institute. An article he wrote on the MX missile was published in Proceedings, a journal of Naval Institute Press, an authoritative publisher of scholarly works on the U.S. Navy. This won Clancy an audience with Captain Edward Beach, USN (retired) who worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Clancy had never set foot on a nuclear sub, and Beach regaled him with stories about the type of men who worked aboard ships that were put to sea for the purpose of sinking. Equipped with most of the data he thought he’d need, Clancy sat down in August 1982 to write a novel. He produced three-hundred pages of manuscript before asking Martin Callaghan, the Naval Institute Press editor he’d worked with on his article, for feedback. Callaghan offered that Clancy’s partial manuscript was pretty good. Restarting from scratch, Clancy finished a 723-page manuscript in February 1983.
Clancy had no prospects in the publishing industry, but as fate would have it, the Naval Institute Press had decided to branch into fiction in 1982. Clancy’s manuscript, titled The Hunt For Red October, was exactly what the press had been looking for. Assigned to a copy editor, Connie Buchanan, the manuscript was poured over by two retired submarine officers for accuracy. Clancy had made a few mistakes–he’d placed valves on the bottom of a sub’s ballast tanks instead of the top–while getting the major details right. One of the fact checkers proposed the manuscript should remain unpublished for security reasons, wary one of Clancy’s insurance clients had blabbed classified information. Clancy was able to show NIP where he’d gotten his research: Harpoon by Larry Bond, a wargame used to train Navy ROTC cadets. Clancy had paid $9.95 for what he estimated was $5,000 in reference books on how ships and aircraft operate, none of it classified.
Published in October 1984, The Hunt For Red October looked like it would do well for a debut novel: 50,000 copies in hardcover. A Washington Times columnist named Jeremiah O’Leary recommended it to a friend, Francis Ortiz, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina. The ambassador suggested the book to a friend flying from Washington D.C. to Buenos Aires with twelve hours forty-five minutes to burn. She loved the novel so much she purchased twenty-eight copies when she returned to the States, gifting them as Christmas presents. One copy ended up in the White House for Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, a development executive for Mace Neufeld–producer of the Gene Wilder/ Harrison Ford western The Frisco Kid (1979)-- returned from a bookseller’s convention in Dallas with a copy of Clancy’s novel. The executive thought it had film potential. Neufeld left The Hunt For Red October on his nightstand until he read in Time magazine that President Reagan had a new favorite book called The Hunt For Red October.
In 1985, Neufeld partnered with theater and film producer Jerry Sherlock to option the film rights for $40,000. Neufeld had a development deal at MGM/UA, but submitting the novel for coverage by the story department, The Hunt For Red October got a pass. The costs associated with a seafaring adventure didn’t help, but Clancy’s narrative didn’t lend itself to being summarized in a report to executives unfamiliar with the book. Orion Pictures, where Neufeld was making a thriller set in the Pentagon titled No Way Out (1987), was interested if the producer was willing to reimburse them for development costs should the film fail to go into production. Neufeld wasn’t interested. Rejected once already, in 1986 he took another shot at Paramount Pictures, whose president Ned Tanen was headed for London. The producer talked Tanen into taking Clancy’s novel on his flight, promising the studio head he’d never have to return one of his calls if he thought the book wouldn’t make a good movie. Tanen phoned Neufeld from Heathrow Airport offering that if the producer could get cooperation from the U.S. Navy, Paramount would develop The Hunt For Red October.
Donald Stewart, who’d collaborated with director Costa-Gavras on the screenplay for Missing (1982), hammered out the structure for the film. No Way Out screenwriter Robert Garland took a pass for Neufeld. Next up was screenwriter Larry Ferguson, who’d written Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and The Presidio (1988) for Paramount. Neufeld and Tanen had screened Predator (1987) and before it was in theaters, agreed that John McTiernan would be well-suited to direct. McTiernan liked Ferguson’s macho script–which included a scene in which CIA analyst Jack Ryan was on the Potomac River in a rowboat smoking a cigar–but had zero interest in directing it. McTiernan saw the material in terms of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, a sea adventure in which a boy goes in search of the most feared man on earth. He worked with Ferguson on a rewrite, finishing in the fall of 1988.
The perfect leading man at that time to play the boyish earnestness of Jack Ryan was Kevin Costner, and Mace Neufeld had just worked with him on No Way Out. Offered more money than Costner had seen in his life, as well as the opportunity to reprise Ryan indefinitely in a series, Costner turned the offer down, taking himself off the market for eighteen months to direct and star in a western about Native Indians, Dances With Wolves (1990). Many in the film industry thought Costner was nuts. Paramount greenlit the film at a production budget of $30 million and a month later, in February 1989, Alec Baldwin, who’d been featured in five studio films released in 1988, was cast as Jack Ryan. Once James Earl Jones accepted the role as Ryan’s boss, Admiral Jim Greer, a cast fell together: Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, Courtney B. Vance, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Jordan, Tim Curry, Stelland Skarsgård, Fred Dalton Thompson. As Marko Ramius, renegade captain of the Red October, Klaus Maria Brandauer was cast.
Shooting commenced in April 1989. U.S. Navy admiralty were Tom Clancy fans, and they came around to agreeing that a film version of The Hunt For Red October would be an effective recruiting tool, as well as opportunity to show John Q. Public their tax dollars at work. With Paramount reimbursing the navy for operational costs, the nuclear submarine USS Houston doubled for aerial shots of the “USS Dallas,” while the missile frigate USS Reuben James and two SH3 Navy Sea King helicopters were provided for the production. Shooting was also permitted aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. For the opening scene, Port Valdez, Alaska stood in for Polyarny Inlet in the Arctic Circle. A 400-foot mockup of Red October was built and towed out to Los Angeles Harbor for shots of the ship being put to sea and later evacuated. The scene at the U.S. Naval Shipyards was filmed at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, with a real submarine in dry dock. The sequence in which Ryan rappels from the helicopter onto the Dallas was filmed in the Puget Sound at Port Angeles, Washington.
Two weeks into filming without having been needed, Klaus Maria Brandauer reported that he’d been delayed finishing a picture he’d directed–released as Seven Minutes (1989)--and was readying for the Cannes Film Festival. Left without an actor to play Marko Ramius, Neufeld was contacted by Sean Connery’s agent to indicate his client might be interested. Paramount had marketing data suggesting audiences adored Connery as Indy’s dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), as if Connery’s appeal was debatable, the actor receiving a standing ovation at the Academy Awards when he won Best Supporting Actor for The Untouchables (1987). Neufeld reached Connery at his home in Majorca, Spain and faxed the script to him. Three days later, the Scottish actor replied that he didn’t think he could do the film, its U.S./Soviet conflict no longer relevant given the thawing of the Cold War. Neufeld explained the film wasn’t set in the present day, but in 1984, just like the prologue on page 1 of the script explained. Connery disputed this, and when Neufeld realized Connery was missing the prologue, faxed it to him.
His confusion cleared up, Connery expressed a desire that his character be punched up with a few “speeches.” He was also concerned that the Russians in the script all spoke like Americans. And he suggested clarity on what had motivated Ramius to take the action that he did, this unclear in Clancy’s text and Ferguson’s script. According to Neufeld, writer/ director/ military historian John Milius happened to be walking past his office door when Connery brought this up in their phone call. In addition to writing and directing the actor in The Wind and the Lion (1975), Milius had ghostwritten Robert Shaw’s speech about the USS Indianapolis in Jaws (1975). Milius agreed to fix Connery’s script concerns, taking credit for writing the dialogue for all the Russian characters. (The WGA would award screenplay credit to Donald Stewart and Larry Ferguson, based on the novel by Tom Clancy).
Connery arrived in Los Angeles on a Friday and, having requested one day of rehearsal, was filming on a Monday, scenes taking place aboard the Red October and Dallas shot at Paramount Studios on a set built atop a gimbal able to rotate 36° forward, backward and side-to-side (cinematographer Jan De Bont noted that actors could fake a leaning set up to 10° before it looked phony). Accompanied by a huge marketing push, The Hunt For Red October opened March 2, 1990 on a modest 1,255 screens in the U.S. It was the first event movie of the 1990s. Newspaper reviews leaned positive. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs up, though Vincent Canby in the New York Times held his nose. #1 at the box office its first and second weekends, many screenings were sold out. Word of mouth turned the picture into a blockbuster, keeping it among the top ten grossing movies in the country for fifteen weeks, even as competition picked up in late May.
Two things are at work in The Hunt For Red October and most movies are lucky to have one or the other. First is that the picture is a technical marvel. Industrial Light & Magic built model submarines and filmed them (visual effects supervisor Scott Squires running the contract for ILM) and while the effects look good, moments that weren’t spoofed in a workshop astound. These include Connery and Neill on what appears to be the conning tower of a Russian submarine at sea, and later, a closeup of Baldwin as he plummets from a helicopter into what looks like the freezing North Atlantic. There had never been a movie realistically depicting an American and Soviet naval engagement under and above the sea, and it’s amazing to see a real navy helicopter hovering above a real nuclear submarine. Jan De Bont, the master of light for Die Hard (1988) and Black Rain (1989), uses subtle color schemes to differentiate the Red October, Dallas and Konovalov, while the interiors, special effects shots and seafaring scenes with military hardware look like they all take place in the same shadowy world of secrets. These are shot in anamorphic widescreen, with Die Hard director John McTiernan rarely passing an opportunity for fluid camera movement.
The Hunt For Red October improves on Tom Clancy’s novel, which was about heavy machinery that happens to have men at the controls. The movie is about men who happen to control machines. What makes this one great is that it’s an adventure about the meeting of two worlds–East and West–armed with enough fear and contempt for the enemy to shoot first and ask questions later. There’s something reaffirming about humanity here, which Clancy, writing at the height of saber rattling between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., deserves credit for dialing down. The narrative is propelled by suspense in which Ramius’ intentions remain a mystery for the first third of the film. Effort is taken for its Russian characters to be introduced speaking Russian, before an ingenious transition to English, something World War II movies of the sixties, with Germans speaking English even when back at headquarters, never bothered with. Basil Poledouris, best known for composing music for Conan the Barbarian (1982) and RoboCop (1987), wrote a subtle, far less “shoot to thrill” score, with the Red Army Choir (as they were then known) providing vocals.
Video rental category: Action/ Adventure
Special interest: East Meets West
Hey Joe, thanks for this one! This is absolutely one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time… Loved when Alec Baldwin impersonates Sean Connery as he’s crawling through the subs underbelly in the shoot out with the cook… the casting was superb and the visuals were unbelievable… And as always, you’re insight into the backstory is so much fun to read… Thanks again! Peace! ✌️CPZ