F. Ross Johnson, the former RJR Nabisco president who set off the whole bloody battle by trying to ingest his own company, twice telephoned James Garner, who plays him on screen. Peter Cohen, the prickly investment banker who led the losing takeover team, placed calls to his own stand-in, actor Peter Riegert. Linda Robinson, wife of former American Express chairman Jim Robinson (a Johnson ally), pestered screenwriter Larry Gelbart for a copy of the script. Henry Kravis, the Napoleonic LBO king who won the bidding war, operated more subtly. His business associates contacted “Barbarians” producer Ray Stark, one of them with what the filmmakers took as veiled threats of legal action. “These are people,” explains Bryan Burrough, a coauthor of the book, “who are used to controlling their images.”
This time, however, the one in control was Gelbart. A former head writer of “MASH,” Gelbart had a problem of his own. What made the book so morbidly mesmeric was that everyone in it emerged as a conniving, egomaniacal greedhead. So Gelbart, who can find black humor in any combat situation, simply lightened the whole thing up. Indeed, he’s given HBO a kind of “LBO"-with Ross Johnson as Hawkeye Pierce. While devotees of the original will doubtless damn Hollywood for tampering with yet another Holy Book, this two-hour film, which premieres March 20, is to made-for-TV movies what Triple A municipals are to the junk stuff. It’s smart, pungent and, at its satiric best, depressingly hilarious.
Did all those power players have reason to fear? “Nothing is underlined,” declares Gelbart. “There’s no big arrow saying, ‘This way to the villain’.” True, but there are plenty of signals-and one points directly the other way. Garner, who could play Ivan Boesky and make us like him, portrays Johnson as a bemused, above-it-all spectator rather than one of the down-and-dirty players. “They earn money the old-fashioned way,” he says of the Wall Street crowd. “They steal it.” Peter Cohen isn’t so lucky: he comes off as a mouthy, ineffectual twerp. When we first meet Jim Robinson, in a scene not in the book, he’s heading off to a costume party-his body encased in a Superman suit. Worse, the body belongs to actor Fred Dalton Thompson, whose formidable paunch suggests a well-worn AmEx card somewhere behind it. As for King Henry, the word for Jonathan Pryce’s take is sinister (also charitable: he’s a full head taller than the height-challenged financier). Asked how he would counter a rival’s move, Pryce silkily intones: “Napalm.”
At times the filmmakers, too, slip over the top. Inventing a scene in which the Robinsons’ maid dutifully irons some $20 bills smacks of, well, a barbarian’s instinct. Of course, the book itself is an epic of excess, and this adaptation gleefully brings it all home. At one point Johnson commandeers an entire corporate Gulfstream just to ferry his pooch to Palm Beach. Cut to Kravis demanding $45 million for an hour of his time. What truly shocks, however, is the gulf between the protagonists’ world and their words. Surrounded by priceless art, swathed in $2,000 Armanis, they talk to each other like mafiosi. So while Gelbart may be doing a Wall Street “MAS*H,” we laugh at these Masters of the Universe the way we laughed at the “Goodfellas.” With no respect.
