THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 15, 1995 TAG: 9503150017
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
BACK IN THE 1950s, Hollywood routinely scared moviegoers with aliens from outer space or creatures from the black lagoon.
Times have changed. People are more cynical now. They are perhaps more scared of things in THIS world than dangers coming from other galaxies.
With ``Jaws,'' the first megahit box office phenomenon, folks were scared to go back in the water. Now, ``Outbreak'' hopes to become the ``Jaws'' of the 1990s.
The ominous threat of ``Outbreak'' is centuries in the making. The Black Death killed approximately 20 to 30 percent of the world's population in the first half of the 14th century.
Though less has been written about it, the Spanish Influenza epidemic in this century was the deadliest outbreak ever. Some 25 million were killed between August of 1918 and March of 1919.
The current AIDS plague will kill millions of humans before the century closes. There is still bubonic plague in India and cholera in South America.
The film ``Outbreak'' is not without its harbingers of doom.
The Ebola Zaire virus, which was the source of the scare that first got Hollywood into a dither, can do in 10 days what it takes AIDS 10 years to accomplish. It is believed to be 100 percent fatal to humans. First discovered in the African rainforest in the 1980s, it was feared for a time to have been released in suburban Reston, Va., in 1989.
The virus was imported via a group of monkeys (brought in from the Philippines as laboratory animals). It took the all-out efforts of workers at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., to prevent its spread. Today, it is believed that humans were never really in danger.
The Virginia incident was the subject of Richard Preston's book ``The Hot Zone,'' which Hollywood snapped up as if it were a Stephen King horror-melodrama.
Jodie Foster and Robert Redford were signed to star in ``The Hot Zone'' while Warner Bros. went before the cameras with the big-budget ``Outbreak,'' starring Dustin Hoffman. A multimillion dollar race was on - and there would be only one winner. Industry insiders reasoned that it was folly on both sides.
Eventually, both Foster and Redford withdrew from ``Hot Zone'' and the movie was scrapped.
Reached for comment, Foster said ``the problem was entirely in the script.''
Petersen, on the set of ``Outbreak,'' admitted that he ``breathed a sigh of relief.''
Richard Preston, author of ``The Hot Zone,'' cried foul. He claimed that ``Outbreak'' was a rip-off of his book and his idea. ``You spend years working on a project and then somebody rips it off,'' he said.
Producer Arnold Kopelson has no sympathy for the writer. ``It's a tough business,'' he said. ``Preston simply backed the wrong horse. I had offered to buy `The Hot Zone' just to take it off the market. It had no story. It had no ending. I offered Preston a job as technical adviser on our movie. He didn't want that. He lost. It's too bad, but he made the wrong choice.'' by CNB