Our faith in Jeff Goldblum’s and Geena Davis’s wonderful talent was not misplaced. We didn’t have to eat humble pie for the Fox executives. As a matter of fact, in a rare display of studio bigwigs admitting when they are wrong, we were drenched with hearty congratulations from the top brass.
Once again leaning on Dickens’s opening sentence in A Tale of Two Cities: For Brooksfilms, 1986 was the best of times and also the worst of times. It was the best of times with the success of The Fly, and the worst of times with a film called Solarbabies.
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Let me tell you the saga of Solarbabies…
The idea for the movie was brought to me by Jonathan Sanger, who had done a great job producing The Elephant Man. He had read an outline of the script for Solarbabies by Walon Green and Doug Metrov, and he thought it was an interesting sci-fi story. It was about a bunch of roller-skating orphans on a distant future Earth that’s starved for water. They find a magical alien orb from another galaxy that is able to restore the Earth’s water in an apocalyptic scene where they experience their first thrilling thunderstorm. It was an exciting and heartwarming tale. And since the Star Wars trilogy’s huge success, sci-fi was a very hot film genre.
Jonathan Sanger was too busy to do it, but Irene Walzer, who was doing a great job in publicity for Brooksfilms at the time, also read the script and thought it could be a winner, plus her enthusiasm for the project was contagious. She wanted to move up to producing, and since Jonathan thought the film could be made for at most five million dollars, Irene joined forces with another producer called Jack Frost Sanders （no pun intended, that was his real name!）。 He had produced low-budget films before and had some modest success, so even though Irene was a newcomer to producing I felt that the two of them as a team could do the job.
To really keep the budget down they would shoot it in Spain. So with my blessings, they went off to Spain to scout production sites. Like I said before, they thought five million was the most it would cost （which is a pretty low-budget movie for those times）， and since I wanted to build up a film library for Brooksfilms it seemed like a good prospect.
I got my former choreographer, Alan Johnson, who had directed To Be or Not to Be, to direct the film. He put together an exciting cast of mostly young actors. It had some future stars like Jason Patric, Jami Gertz, Lucas Haas, Peter DeLuise, Adrian Pasdar, James Le Gros, Richard Jordan as the bad guy, and a meaty role for the always wonderful Charles Durning.
I had chosen to fund the production of Solarbabies myself. They needed a million dollars to start production, which I dutifully provided. In a very short time, they needed another million…and not one foot of the movie had been filmed yet.
Most of the outdoor shooting was set to be done in an area around a city called Almeria. They chose Almeria because, like Southern California, it was mostly dry and the weather was consistently good. But that year, unlike the wonderful Alan J. Lerner lyrics in My Fair Lady, the rains in Spain did not fall mainly on the plains…they fell mainly on Almeria. So there goes the main story line of a planet in drought!
But that was only the first of the many things that went wrong with the production. I’ll spare you the details, but the bad news had only just begun and by the time they had shot the first twenty minutes of film they had run through the entire original five-million-dollar budget. I had depleted my own money, and now went to a bank and got a three-million-dollar loan to complete principal photography.
And then, I woke up one morning and said, “Wait a minute, there’s a thing called post-production.”
I went back to the bank and explained to them that I needed more money to complete the film, and if they didn’t give me the money it would be very difficult for me to repay their initial three-million-dollar loan with only half a picture to sell. So they kindly gave me another two million. But I was wrong. Post-production ended up costing a lot more than I had imagined. It was a sci-fi film and required a lot more special effects than an ordinary movie.
So this five-million-dollar, low-budget quickie was going to cost twelve or thirteen million dollars after all was said and done. I was in financial quicksand, and the sand was approaching my mouth and my nose. I needed more money. What to do, what to do?
So I went to my dear old friend Laddie and told him my tale of woe. Laddie, who was now running MGM, came up with a great idea. He said to me, “The executives running UPM are coming for their annual visit to L.A.”
UPM was a foreign distribution company, and they distributed the films of Universal, Paramount, and MGM abroad. Laddie thought if I could come up with an exciting trailer for Solarbabies and show it to them, together with my promise that I would personally visit every country in the world and sell it, they might give me the monies that I needed to finish the film in exchange for the foreign distribution rights.