In ‘Sahara,’ the son also rises

Filming “Sahara,” the opening salvo in the Dirk Pitt adventures based on the bestselling novels by Clive Cussler, would have been daunting for the most veteran director. Consider a budget topping $100 million; a demanding, world-famous author with strict script and cast approval who wound up suing the producers; remote locations in Morocco, eight hours from the nearest airport, where the temperature tops out at 130 degrees (you have to carry around water to fight off instant dehydration). There was also a romance between the lead actors, Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz (superstitiously the kiss of death for a movie in these post-”Gigli” days), and, of course, a week of floods and another week of sandstorms, hurling bits of dust that render almost all filming impossible.

For neophyte Breck Eisner, a 34-year-old director of commercials and TV who’s making his feature film debut, there is one other hurdle -- at least in the court of public opinion. That’s the issue of his last name. Yes, Eisner is the son of Disney chief Michael Eisner, whose shareholder battles and recent corporate beheading have been exhaustively documented in the press and are now the subject of a slashing bestseller, James B. Stewart’s “DisneyWar.”

Hollywood is one of the most nepotistic industries in the world, where families grow cadres of agents, executives and second- and third-generation movie stars, and the children of the famous lend cachet to everything from schools to clothing lines. Yet Michael Eisner is a particularly tall shadow, the dominant Hollywood corporate figure of the last two decades, helming one of the most beloved brands in American history.

On a recent afternoon his son is sipping coffee in the posh dining room at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, back in his hometown of Los Angeles after almost two years abroad, filming and editing the movie. There is a family resemblance -- it’s as if the bottom half of his father’s rounded, silly-putty features have been grafted onto a handsome prepster.

Eisner, who’s wearing a Hollywood director’s de rigueur baseball cap, is now deep in the promotional cycle of his movie. He talks excitedly about his first test screenings, his first publicity junket, his first brush with media training, and he points with glee when a bus goes by bearing a “Sahara” billboard. He’s amiable and upbeat, an unpretentious presence that suggests that even tarnished corporate titans can produce nice progeny.

About his genealogy, it is what it is. He says simply, “I was hoping by the time I got to this point, one of the things people would say was ‘commercial director and television director Breck Eisner,’ and then say ‘son of,’ instead of saying ‘son of’ first. That’s why I did commercials first. It’s the only place where I could use the same techniques as film but outside the entertainment business.” It’s not common for a commercial director to get his feature film start on a juggernaut production, but it does happen. (Former video directors McG and David Fincher started with “Charlie’s Angels” and “Alien3,” respectively.)

“Sahara,” which opens Friday, is the tale of explorer Pitt and his best friend, Al Giordino, who travel to Africa on the hunt for a lost Civil War-era boat and wind up saving humanity from seeping toxic waste, dumped by an evil African warlord and a scheming French corporate shark. It’s one of those action- adventure popcorn movies, like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or, more recently, “The Mummy,” that live or die not on reviews but on box office. Eisner knows this -- and it’s certainly the fairest of evaluations.

Eisner, who’s directed more than 50 TV commercials as well as an episode of the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries “Taken,” has been involved with “Sahara” from the beginning. Five years ago he accompanied producers Howard and Karen Baldwin to Phoenix, where they first tried to persuade Cussler to sell them the rights to the Dirk Pitt series. The notoriously crusty 73-year-old writer and adventurer has sold 125 million books. He had dismissed numerous Hollywood overtures for almost 20 years, ever since one of his books, “Raise the Titanic,” was filmed -- and flopped -- in 1980. (Its producer, Lord Lew Grade, famously quipped, “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.”)

Yet the Baldwins promised Cussler several things that others wouldn’t or couldn’t: script and cast approval, and money, lots of it -- $10 million for the rights to the 18-book series, and another $10 million for each movie that got made. The Baldwins were backed by another Cussler fan, Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, founder of Qwest Communications and owner or co-owner of such myriad businesses as the Staples Center, several movie theater chains and the Kings hockey team. Anschutz was getting into movie production and had launched two companies devoted to making family-friendly fare.

According to David Weil, chairman of the Anschutz Film Group, Anschutz was eager to buy a major franchise for his film groups, Crusader Entertainment and Walden Media. Crusader has since been renamed Bristol Bay Productions. (Walden Media got the Narnia books.) Anschutz also financed “Sahara,” one of the largest independent productions ever, and Paramount is releasing it for a fee.

Anschutz has a lot of film business with Disney, which last year agreed to release “Around the World in 80 Days” when Anschutz had trouble finding a distributor. (The film bombed.) It also will distribute the Walden productions, including “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” expected to be an event film.

Industry machinations

Perhaps it’s the nature of being Michael Eisner’s son that assorted conspiratorial, unsubstantiated Hollywood chatter attaches itself to Breck Eisner’s directorial debut, chatter denounced by the various participants. One version involves a dispute, now settled, between Anschutz and Miramax cochair Harvey Weinstein, who declares that connecting Breck and any dispute he had with Anschutz is “lunacy.”

Weinstein says that he and his brother Bob wanted to hire Breck for a Dimension film after catching his USC film school short “Recon.” Michael Eisner told them they couldn’t, because after all, Miramax belongs to Disney. The Weinsteins balked, retorting that they could hire whomever they wanted to. “Michael said, ‘Look, I’m begging you as a dad.’ Michael talked us out of it,” says Weinstein. “I fought with [Breck’s] father so many times, there’s not enough paper to fill your newspaper stories. Michael’s been a really good corporate citizen when it comes to family, and Breck’s a really talented guy in his own right.”

Howard Baldwin, who also produced “Ray” under the Crusader banner for Anschutz before parting ways, says he and Karen met with Eisner after seeing his reel. As a former owner of the Hartford Whalers hockey team, Baldwin knew Eisner Sr. from the hockey circuit (Disney once owned the Mighty Ducks), but that had nothing to do with this film. “We wanted to bring young, fresh filmmakers to Clive,” recalls Baldwin. “We like working with young people. It was a big step. If it didn’t work, we’d be way out there on a limb. The fact of the matter was we hired Breck solely on his merit.”

Although he grew up the son of a powerful executive, Eisner says he really didn’t get onto many movie sets as a kid. He visited his dad in his office when he was the chairman of Paramount Pictures and got to see the production of “Happy Days” and have Robin Williams, then in his Mork days, say “nano-nano” to him. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a roller coaster designer,” says Eisner. “Once, with my father, we walked the tracks of Space Mountain with the lights on. It was something I always wanted to do. It was so much smaller than I expected.”

Eisner began getting interested in theater at Harvard-Westlake and, later, Georgetown. He attended USC film school, and in 1996 he made a well-regarded student film, “Recon”; it starred rocker Peter Gabriel (a friend of the producer’s, he says) and featured what was then cutting-edge experimental technology, including computer animation. “Recon” hit the film festival circuit, including Cannes.

By 1999, Eisner was attached to “Sahara.” After he had developed it with the screenwriters for almost a year, it was decided that he wasn’t experienced enough to handle such a big job.

Fortunately, the Baldwins weren’t the only ones taken with his short. He landed commercial work, again starting with a bang -- a million-dollar Super Bowl commercial for Budweiser -- before churning out a pilot for the Sci-Fi Channel and a TV movie for USA Network.

Spielberg was another who saw his short and suggested hiring Eisner to direct the second episode of his Sci-Fi Channel miniseries “Taken.”

“Honestly, he was great,” says “Taken” creator and executive producer Leslie Bohem. “The weight of who he is is his cross to bear with the crew, but he was super, super prepared, and he’s like the ideal director for a writer. He had notes that were so good that I had to change stuff in the fourth episode to accommodate his suggestions.”

About two years ago, after several more directors and screenwriters had come and gone, Baldwin brought Eisner back to “Sahara.” Even Cussler was happy with the choice. “I’m not familiar with directors, but I liked Breck at the time,” says the author, who thought he was “a young fellow who would be creative and strike out in new directions.” Making the film required lengthy consultations with the author and bringing all the proposed actors out to meet him at his home. Cussler approved five different screenplays, but then in January 2004, as the principal photography was getting underway, sued the producers and Anschutz, claiming they’d violated his contractual rights. “They went ahead with a script I didn’t approve of, basically,” says Cussler.

In the past, the author has been vociferous on the subject, telling journalists things like “They’ve sent me seven scripts, and I’ve inserted each one in the trash can.” Yet, reached on the phone last week, Cussler sounded fairly demure, saying, “I hope the movie is a big success. It certainly will be fine if it is.” He hasn’t seen the film, having refused all entreaties from the studio and the filmmakers to do so.

His lawyer, Bertram Fields, says Cussler’s suit is still going to trial in November, and that if he wins, he hopes to get back the franchise.

Where book and film differ

FIELDS points out numerous instances in which the script departs from the book. Among them: In the book, those made ill by the toxins become crazed cannibals, while in the film, they lie around weakly. And at the end of the book, a U.N. commando team comes to the rescue of adventurer Pitt, but Eisner wanted a new ending. “I wanted Africa to save Africa. I didn’t want the white man to come in and save Africa,” he says. “In the book, a U.N. team comes in and saves the day in a very bloody massacre. It’s done in a very heroic way, but they killed hundreds of people, and it’s not something we needed in a PG-13 movie, and it’s socially not something I wanted to tell.” In Eisner’s reworking, an African tribe, the Touareg, save the day. “It was a difficult thing. I had to get Clive’s permission to do it. It’s his book, his baby. You have to go through the man.”

Eisner was supervising the script when Cussler sued, but he is not named in the suit. Neither Cary Granat, the president of AFG, nor Weil would comment about the case. In the cross-complaint filed by Crusader and Anschutz, they claim that Cussler was angling to write the script himself, and when they refused, he became “vindictive.”

Eisner won’t address the specifics of the case but just says, “Ultimately [Cussler is] upset because it’s a 700-page book and a 110-page script. He’s having second thoughts, buyer’s remorse. He’s written the books for 25 years.” He adds that condensing the tome and getting the tone of the script right was the hardest part of the venture, far harder than the 100 days of shooting in Morocco, Spain and England.

“It was not a picnic,” says veteran action producer Mace Neufeld (“Clear and Present Danger”), who was brought in to the project later. He knew Breck Eisner as a kid, when he lived across the street from the Eisner family.

“It was a very difficult shoot,” he says, “because the majority of our shooting was in Morocco, in a town called Erfoud, and that was an eight-hour drive to Casablanca, where the airport was. We were fighting weather and sandstorms that come up at the drop of a hat. Breck held up remarkably well. He is a great believer in storyboarding everything, which gives you a real feeling of confidence, assuming he’s following his storyboards, which he does.”

“I don’t know if the guy slept,” says lead actor Steve Zahn. “There’d be sandstorms, and we’d be chilling out with nothing to do. I was sitting 100 yards away, and I’d see this silhouette standing still, this one individual pacing back and forth with his hands up trying to communicate with somebody. It was like Moses, and then his arms dropped and he looked at the ground, like ‘I can’t believe this. It’s been blowing for two days.’ ”

Although the younger Eisner barred his father from his commercial and TV sets, he relented and let him and his mother and brother visit in Morocco. “He was dying to see me on set. I had to let him. It was fun.” (It’s a close-knit family, and the father is famously devoted, making time to be there for all of his sons’ Little League games.) And he took his father’s advice, particularly on marketing the film. “He’s seen it two or three times, but he’s most interested in following how they’re advertising it and what the press is. That’s his thing. He knows more than anything about selling a movie.”

Eisner treads lightly on the subject of the intensely negative media glare that recently shone on his father. In the book “DisneyWars,” Michael Eisner is even seen musing that he hopes Breck can inherit the empire.

The son laughs heartily at the notion. “I haven’t read the book. That’s clearly not true. As I understand it, none of the book is true. Of course, I’d say that because it’s my father.”

Breck Eisner seems vaguely shell-shocked to have spent the last two years abroad, away from his father’s tsunami-size corporate troubles, only to return to Los Angeles, ground zero for the legions of Eisnerologists. “One of the things that makes it easier for me is his strength in dealing with it, but I don’t like it,” he says.

He also begins to squirm when too many questions are asked about his famous legacy. After all, he’s a 34-year-old man who’s been to college and film school, shot commercials and TV, and has now made his directorial debut -- a nice resume for most. “My hope is always that people will look at the movie,” he says as he gets up to leave for yet another marketing meeting. “I’m not under false pretenses that [my genealogy] won’t be mentioned, but I’ll sink or swim by the work. That’s all I can do.”

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On the Web

To see scenes from “Sahara,” visit calendarlive.com/sahara.

Contact Rachel Abramowitz at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.