The Inside Story of How 'Wild Wild West' Spun Out of Control

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wild-wild-west-inside-story?

Because the show fused the Western with elements of science fiction, Wild Wild West’s aesthetic was steampunk: watch chains, waistcoats and top hats abound. Among the costumes designed by Deborah Lynn Scott were a number of intensely busty corsets (one of which is worn by Kline); a pair of tiny oval sunglasses for Smith; and a buttless set of pajamas for Salma Hayek. The sets, designed by Cheryl Carasik, were also eye-catching: They feature a train with a pool table that flips over; an enormous exploding Abraham Lincoln, out of whose head Branagh emerges; and buildings decorated with grandiose black webbing, to foreshadow the giant mechanical spider (on which more later).

Smith, whose star was wholly in the ascendant at this point on the back of Independence Day and Bad Boys, was on board from an early stage. His counterpart was originally going to be George Clooney, with whom Sonnenfeld had a close relationship. The two met at Sonnenfeld’s house and Clooney was attached subject to a second draft. After it came in, Clooney called the director on the day before Thanksgiving in 1997 to pull out. He felt that Smith got all the funny lines, and he didn’t want to be the straight man.

Keeping track of who wrote which draft of which version of which script is difficult but Brent Maddock and Steven Wilson came aboard in 1997, hired by Warner Bros. to do a rewrite. “Our story ends before much of the chaos begins,” Wilson says. The studio didn’t want Maddock and Wilson to read the previous versions of the script, and issued a couple of caveats. One was that the film should feature no nuclear bombs.

The pair had various meetings with studio representatives and two with Jon Peters, who was producing the film with Sonnenfeld. Peters, who used to be Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser, had executive-produced films like Caddyshack, Batman Returns and A Star Is Born (the 1976 version as well as the 2018 remake). Maddock, speaking to me with two broken feet from his house in California, says that he went alone to the Bel Air Hotel, where Peters was living while he was remodeling his house. He met him by the pool, as Peters sat with his “retinue of young Hollywood studs.” Maddock told Peters the story of the film. When he explained there would be a scene in which Jim West rides on horseback through the night in order to meet the president, Peters stopped him. “Horse?” he said. “Horses are boring.”

There was a long pause. Maddock said, “Well, we’re setting this in 1868; this is a Western.” Peters said, “You know what’s cool? Motorcycles.” Maddock told him there weren’t any motorcycles in 1868. “Yeah, you could have motorcycles,” Peters responded.

At one point, Peters said to Maddock, “You see the pool there? I was in the middle of that pool one day and swimming up behind me comes Steven Seagal. He gets me in a headlock. And you know, he’s such a pussy…” Peters then proceeded to claim that he asked Seagal, “Wanna take me down? Wanna take me down?,” got out of the pool and had a martial arts battle with him, which Peters won. “All of the four, five young men executives who worked for Jon Peters are sitting around,” says Maddock, “and the only thing I’m thinking is, How are these guys keeping a straight face?”

Around this time, Peters was coming off a string of failures with Warner Bros. (Rosewood, My Fellow Americans and With Honors); still, Sonnenfeld says that he wasn’t someone to mess with: “He yells.”

“I really shouldn’t talk out-of-school, but Jon wasn’t a hugely active producer,” Doug Harlocker, who made the majority of the props for Wild Wild West, tells me. “He was somehow attached to Wild Wild West, and I’m still to this day not quite sure why. I thought he was sort of an odd choice: he’s a Beverly Hills guy that had multiple estates and 25 full-time gardeners working on his property every single day.” (Peters, who recently married and apparently split from Pamela Anderson over the course of 12 days, and his representatives did not reply to my interview requests.)

One of Maddock and Wilson’s story ideas was that there should be that aforementioned giant mechanical spider at the end of the film. Peters’ office rejected it, however, suggesting a stealth bomber instead. The writers thought that this was inconceivable for 1868, and a 100-foot-long armor-plated “flying machine” with gun turrets was the compromise. But luckily, when they visited Peters and his representatives at the producer’s enormous Tudor mansion — a house so vast that Wilson mistook the garage for the house itself — Sonnenfeld said he didn’t like the flying machine idea. Wilson piped up and said that they’d written a spider in a previous draft. Sonnenfeld responded, “Oh, I’d like to see that.”