To avoid further disruptions, Teri, Dayna, and Dirk divvied up their father’s business responsibilities - Dirk would supervise the actual publishing business, royalties, contracts, etc. Public relations was assigned to Dayna, while Teri would pay the bills and oversee the houses in Phoenix and Telluride. “I made sure,” Teri says, “the lights were on and Dad could run the dishwasher and take a shower.”
Preliminary work on the next book in the Oregon Files series was scheduled to begin in the spring of 2004, but the process ground to a half when Craig Dirgo announced he wanted to terminate his relationship with Clive and concentrate on his own series. Dirgo’s departure provided Clive with the opportunity to enlist a co-writer who has elevated the Oregon Files to a new level of originality and popularity.
Jack Du Brul grew up in Colchester, Vermont, a small town near Burlington. “You probably think I’m making this up,” he says. “Raise the Titanic! was one of the first books I read. When a new Pitt adventure came out, I’d spend the day reading it from cover to cover.” Inspired by Clive, Du Brul tried his hand at a thriller during his senior year in prep school. Unhappy with his first effort, he gave it another try while attending George Washington University and submitted the manuscript to several agents. “They all turned me down,” Du Brul says, “but one was nice enough to tell me I had some talent and should keep trying.” After he graduated, Du Brul worked as a bartender in Florida, but, rather than carousing with his co-workers, he would write until three or four in the morning. “I made a vow to myself,” Du Brul says, “If I wasn’t published by the time I turned thirty, it was time to get a real job.”
Moving back to Vermont in 1997, Du Brul went to work for his father, a real estate developer. He laughs, “I was the best-educated carpenter in Vermont.” With time about to run out on his self-imposed deadline, Du Brul finished Vulcan’s Aide. His protagonist, geologist and ex-CIA commando Dr. Philip Mercer, saves the world from a rampaging volcano created by the explosion of an atomic bomb. Like Clive, Du Brul is obviously gifted with an exceptional memory since the novel’s plot was inspired by his fourth-grade teacher’s description of a Mexican volcano’s eruption in 1943.
“My Uncle Jack,” Du Brul says, “is a real reader - 120, 130 books a year - so I gave him Vulcan’s Aide. He liked the book and sent it on to Todd Murphy, a book and magazine distributor.” Murphy passed it on to Bob Diforio, a literary agent with offices in Weston, Connecticut. After hearing nothing for a month, Du Brul was getting antsy and asked Murphy to call Diflorio. When Murphy informed Du Brul the agent did not like the book, Du Brul urged him to call Diforio one more time. “I wanted to find out,” Du Brul says, “exactly what he didn’t like so I could fix it the next time.”
After talking with Diforio for a few minutes, Murphy realized the agent was not talking about Vulcan’s Aide. The manuscript had been sent to the agent without a cover letter because Du Brul’s uncle did not want the fact that the book was written by his nephew to color his opinion. After tracking down the real manuscript, Diforio promptly signed Du Brul to a contract. A month later, the book, retitled Vulcan’s Forge, was sold to Forge Books and arrived in bookstores during January 1999.
“My father has a favorite saying,” Du Brul says. “The squeaky wheel gets greased. When I was growing up, he used to drive me nuts with that line, but if I didn’t ask Todd to call Bob, I might still be pounding nails.”
Du Brul finished Charon’s Landing, his second Mercer adventure, in 2000. Hoping for a blurb from Clive, he contacted Paul McCarthy at Simon & Schuster. As luck would have it, McCarthy had not only read Vulcan’s Forge, he liked the book. A short time later, Du Brul received a note from Clive:
Have read Charon’s Landing. You’re a helluva writer. You certainly turn a phrase better than I do. Your attention to detail and your research boggles the mind. The technology you come up with is on par if not superior to Clancy. I consider it a privilege to have your work compared favorably with mine in your reviews. You’re coming along at a good time and I’m honored to give a quote for Charon’s Landing: “Jack Du Brul has to be the finest adventure writer on the scene today.” You’ve got the gift, Jack . . . your big bestseller is just around the corner.
Readers agreed with Clive, and the strong sales of Charon’s Landing allowed Du Brul to hang up his nail gun and pursue a full-time writing career.
In early summer, 2004, Du Brul was working on Havoc, the seventh novel in the Mercer series. One afternoon, he and his wife Debbie walked in the door just as the answering machine clicked off. After playing the message, Du Brul returned Clive’s call. Hoping stories about Clive’s sense of humor were correct, Du Brul explained he screened his calls, and Clive didn’t make the cut. “Without missing a beat,” Du Brul says. “he came back with, ‘I get that a lot.’ After we chatted about the Explorers Club for a few minutes - I was thinking about joining - Clive casually asked me if I would be interested in co-authoring the Oregon Files. I couldn’t say yes fast enough!”
Peter Lampack suggested Du Brul submit an outline and two sample chapters. A month and a half later, the assignment arrived at Lampack’s office, and everybody involved agreed Jack Du Brul was the man for the job. Clive suggested Du Brul fly to Phoenix so they could get to know each other and discuss possible story lines. “I stayed with Clive for two days,” Du Brul recalls. “I didn’t know what to expect, but he turned out to be a down-to-earth guy who is extremely easy to talk to. We’re both history buffs, and the two of us spent the second night bullshitting - while we polished off a bottle of tequila.”
Kick starting the Oregon Files, Du Brul not only cut back dramatically on the long list of characters that irritated readers of the Dirgo books, he dreamed up Juan Cabrill’s remarkable “combat” leg. “Cabrillo lost his left leg,” Du Brul says, “during an attack by a Chinese destroyer in the Pitt novel, Flood Tide. Dirgo never went anywhere with the disability, and I thought it could provide an interesting twist.” Cabrillo’s ultramodern titanium prosthetic leg is fitted with “tools of the trade” - wire garrote, hand cannon, knife, etc. - often helping him escape from tight situations.
Dark Watch, Clive and Du Brul’s first collaboration, was published by Berkley Books on November 1, 2005. Three weeks later, the book landed on The New York Times paperback bestseller list. Critics of the earlier Oregon Files books made an abrupt one-eighty: “When two great authors come together and write a book, you know it is going to be great . . . a breathtaking novel that you can’t put down”; “Jack Du Brul and Clive Cussler team up to breathe life into what appeared to be a dead-end series”; “To be perfectly honest, I could not make it through the first two Oregon Files books. There were too many characters and not enough plot. Dark Watch is a whole new ballgame.”
The overwhelming verdict was in - Jack Du Brul had passed muster.
Immediately after Clive and Crusader joined forces to turn Sahara into a film, the big question was - who was going to play Dirk Pitt? “Since Errol Flynn was dead,” Clive says. “my first choice was Hugh Jackman, but he was signed to do X-Men 2 and a Broadway play.” Other names kicked around included Tom Cruise, Christian Bale, Owen Wilson, Heath Ledger, and Christian Slater.
The Baldwins liked Bale, but Sherry Lansing, Paramount’s CEO, disagreed, declaring, “He will ruin the franchise.” Lansing’s preference was Matthew McConaughey, described by film critic Richard Corliss as, “A ‘ladies’ man,’ a species of which McConaughey may be the last, best example.” Sahara’s director, Rob Bowman, who had directed Bale and McConaughey in the post-apocalyptic action thriller, Reign of Fire, preferred Bale, but he turned the role down.
McConaughey, realizing the role of Dirk Pitt could lead to a once-in-a-lifetime multi-film franchise, had been after Clive for more than seven years. “I was in Telluride,” Clive says. “There was a knock on the door. It was Matthew McConaughey and his agent. He really pushed for the role. Went up the Niger River on his own to check out the territory and came to see me a couple more times in
Phoenix. Not a bad guy, but a little affected. I didn’t necessarily want him, but we kept him on tap. It got stupid. How about this guy? No! This guy? No! That guy? No!”
When it appeared the process was on the verge of becoming hopelessly bogged down, McConaughey, who Harold Baldwin suggested, “would crawl on his hands and knees to do this part,” was hired to play Dirk Pitt.
The first script was written by Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, the team that worked on another Baldwin film, A Sound of Thunder. Suggesting only minimal corrections, Clive approved their treatment and would later acknowledge, “They came closest to the book.” For reasons unknown, the producers were unhappy with the script and hired David S. Ward (The Sting and The Milagro Beanfield War) to overhaul the screenplay. Ward, whose opinion of Clive was, “insistent but not overbearing,” was surprised to discover how much control the novelist wielded. “As the screenwriter, you usually have the final say. This situation was completely reversed. You were basically the hired gun.”
“I approved David’s script in an eye blink,” Clive says. “David even came up with some stuff I wish I’d put in the book.” Crusader, after paying Ward $600,000, rejected his script. On April 24, 2001, Clive received a note from Karen Baldwin. “We are thrilled to tell you that Paramount wants to put their No. 1 ‘polish’ writer on the project. This is really exciting.” Adding the polish was Jim Hart, whose credits included Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Hook. “Jim is a good writer,” Clive says, “but he threw in all these psychedelic scenes with whales and dolphins jumping into the sunset.”
Fearing another Raise the Titanic was in the making, Clive attempted to save Hart’s script, replacing the frisky sea creatures with new material and rewriting segments lifted from earlier drafts. He sent it to Lansing who, in September, assured Clive, “You’ve done a wonderful job with your polish. I think we have a real winner. Paramount LOVES the script we submitted.”
Hart, working with Clive’s overhaul, continued to massage the script. In early February 2002, Baldwin told Hart his latest efforts were “close to being perfect. Please know how much we appreciate everything you have done.” A few weeks later, Hart was fired. “I want you [to] know that the biggest problem is the fact that Clive is insisting on another writer. I wanted to be honest with you. It is an ego thing with him. Everyone thinks you did an excellent job for us.”
After Baldwin fired Hart, she called Clive. “Karen fed me this absurd story that we all thought Hart’s draft was mediocre. I never told them anything of the sort. She also said Jim turned in two more scripts and I turned them down. I never saw either of them.”
Josh Friedman (The Black Dahlia and War of the Worlds) was the next writer to climb on the Sahara merry go round. For a fee somewhere around $500,000, Friedman promised to deliver a new script by Memorial Day 2002. “This guy was supposed to be a prodigy of Spielberg,” Clive says. “He not only cut several important scenes, his writing was terrible.” Clive returned Friedman’s script with a note scribbled on the cover page: “This dialogue is so trite it defies comment. This Josh Friedman should have his keyboard shoved up his anal canal.”
Ron Bowman and Paramount were anxious to begin shooting and wanted to go with Friedman’s screenplay. Bowman was unaware of Clive’s creative control. “We asked the Baldwins,” he said, “but they would never tell us. When the director issued an ultimatum, “Either I make this movie the way I think it needs to be or goodbye,” Clive refused to sign off on Friedman’s script, and it was goodbye for Bowman.
Bowman’s replacement was Breck Eisner, the son of then Disney Studios’ CEO, Michael Eisner. The younger Eisner had directed a series of award-winning commercials and mini-series for television but had never been involved with a big-budget feature film. “I went along with him,” Clive says, “because I wanted somebody creative. When he told me he watched Lawrence of Arabia ten times, I thought, that’s the kind of desert scenes I want. Michael Eisner called me twice to lobby for his son. He probably thought Sahara was going to be Breck’s big break, but in the end, he didn’t have it.”
In a futile attempt to bring the story back closer to his book, Clive told Karen Baldwin he was going to take another shot at the script. “Clive,” she informed her husband, “is now hell-bent on doing this next version himself. This is a monster and we have a problem. As we all know, Clive simply doesn’t know what he is doing.” The producers not only rejected Clive’s latest effort, they also canned Friedman. “She [Karen] said that I was forcing her to choose between me and Clive,” Friedman stated, “and in that case she would choose Clive every time.” Reversing course, the Baldwin’s rehired the original team of Connelly and Oppenheimer, offering them $250,000 to take another stab at the script. The idea was to cobble together Friedman’s draft with Clive’s latest version, but it went nowhere when Clive would have nothing to do with anything involved with Friedman’s draft.
On February 4, 2003, Paramount’s vice chairman, John Goldwyn, and production chief Karen Rosenfelt, met with two more writers, Douglas Cook and David Weisberg (The Rock and Double Jeopardy). “We had the understanding that this was a process in trouble,” Weisberg said. “People’s asses were on the line.” After listening politely to their proposed ideas for a new script, Clive told them, “That’s very nice, but that’s not my book.” Cook and Weisberg produced a screenplay, but it was rejected. “We did the work,” Weisberg quipped, “they paid the dough ($550,000), then said, ‘See you later.’”
While the producers battled over scripts, Daily Variety reported, “Steve Zahn is in negotiations to portray Al Giordino, the wisecracking sidekick to McConaughey’s Dirk Pitt character.” Two months later, Penelope Cruz was signed to play the role of Eva Rojas, the UN scientist Pitt rescues who helps him discover the source of the disease driving the North Africans into madness.
With a cast, but no script, the Baldwins hired writer number eight, John Richards (Nurse Betty). Richards also eliminated several scenes Clive considered essential, and he rejected his script. Richards tried three more times, but Clive, fed up with a process that was verging on absurdity, severed his relations with the Baldwins. “You have stroked me for the last time,” he wrote. “And one more thing. I absolutely refuse to go to any more restaurants and sit with all those Tinsel town phonies.”
When Philip Anschutz was informed Clive had dissociated himself from Sahara, he realized the franchise “destined to surpass James Bond” was in big trouble. He called Clive and asked him to meet him at the Scottsdale Airport. “Anschutz arrived in his big private jet and we went into a conference room,” Clive explains, “He told me everybody involved with Sahara would like me to come back and give them some input. I said, ‘Why do you want my input now? You never wanted it before.’ He treated me like I was a piece of furniture, but I politely told him I would think about it. Phil climbed into his jet and flew off to London.”
Clive called Lampack. “Peter wanted to know what Anschutz had offered. I told him, they offered nothing, other than wanting me to show up on the set in Morocco and help promote the movie.”“Screw them,” Lampack said, “We’re going to sue!”
Lampack said, “We’re going to sue!”
In early January 2004, Dayna Cussler, dressed in the flying attire of a 1930s aviatrix, climbed a shaky ladder on a sound stage at Shepperton Studios in England. Reaching the top, she crawled into the mockup of a vintage airplane cockpit perched on top of a multi-axis hydraulic system. Dayna was performing the role of Kitty Mannock, the pilot who perishes after crashing in the prologue to Sahara.
Once Dayna was settled in the cockpit, the camera would roll while the hydraulics bounced her around to simulate an airplane in trouble. The final shot was a close up of the crash. After Dayna yelled, “Oh, my God!,” the special effects team shattered the sugar glass windshield and hurled two large funnels filled with sand in her face. “The first time,” Dayna says, “the sand hit me square in the eyes and had to be washed out. Thankfully, everything worked on the
second take and we wrapped.”
While Dayna was having sand thrown in her face, the entertainment community was stunned when they read the front page of the Hollywood Reporter:
Author Cussler Sues Over Unauthorized Script . . . Bestselling author Clive Cussler sued producers Crusader Entertainment and its parent company on Thursday for allegedly altering a screenplay that Cussler had approved of one of his books. Cussler, the famed American action/adventure author who has sold more than 125 million books worldwide, wants more than $10 million in damages and an end to his relationship with Crusader, a Beverly Hills based film company owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz. “Crusader materially altered the approved screenplay without Cussler’s written consent, denied Cussler’s express screenplay approval rights under the agreement and has begun to film a screenplay which it knows was explicitly disapproved by Cussler,” according to the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by attorney Bert Fields.
“Anschutz thought I was some bush-league writer from Arizona who was going to fold up and disappear,” Clive says. “Fortunately, Peter knew Bert Fields. Bert had already crossed swords with Anschutz and agreed to take the case because he thought it would be a shoo-in - Crusader had breached the contract, I wanted the rights to my second book back, it was that simple.” Appearing on the television show, Celebrity Justice, Fields was resolute. “We intend to take the matter to trial and fully litigate it. I want to get these people in front of a jury.”