There's a running gag on the Filmsack podcast that for any movie they watch, whether its The Matrix, Mean Girls or Lassie Come Home, the IMDb trivia page will claim that Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were considered for the lead role. It's certainly true that IMDb trivia pages tend to list any actor who was ever even remotely mentioned in connection with a film, and many of them are ridiculously out of place. But even so, the trivia pages aren't necessarily wrong. Sometimes movies change drastically during development, and actors considered during initial development end up being incompatible with the final product.
Case in point -- did you know that Die Hard was originally envisioned as a Frank Sinatra movie?
As hard as that is to believe, it's true.
In 1966, thriller writer Roderick Thorp published a novel with the highly imaginative title The Detective. The story follows Joe Leland, an ex-cop turned private investigator who discovers that he mistakenly sent the wrong man to the electric chair years before, and has to fight a massive coverup to bring the truth to light.
At the time the book came out, 20th Century Fox was at its nadir, having nearly gone bankrupt due to the disastrous cost overruns on Cleopatra, a movie so expensive it lost money despite being the biggest hit of the year. They managed to recover thanks to the success of The Sound of Music, only to faceplant a couple years later with another over-produced flop, Doctor Dolittle. What kept the studio going during the period were cheaply produced films that could turn a reliable profit, and sometimes broke out to become major successes. Thrillers were a big part of this, so when The Detective came out, Fox snapped up the rights and put it into production for a '68 release.
Fox slotted Frank Sinatra, one of the few bankable stars it still had under contract, into the lead role. Sinatra had just played a similar character in the 1967 thriller Tony Rome, and he was scheduled to do a sequel, The Lady in Cement, as soon as The Detective wrapped. Of the three, The Detective was the biggest hit, squeaking into the Top 20 for the year, right behind The Thomas Crown Affair.
Flash forward to 1979, when Thorp published a sequel entitled Nothing Lasts Forever. Set a couple decades after the first novel, it features a much older Joe Leland. Having never fully recovered from the trauma of the first novel, he's grown into a broken old man -- a problem that's been exacerbated by the death of his wife. Now on the verge of retirement and with nothing to hold him in New York, he wants to move out to LA where his daughter lives her own children. To that end, he decides to fly out to Los Angeles at Christmastime for a trial run.
When he gets there, he takes a cab to her office where she's in the middle of a Christmas party, and I think you can guess what happens next.
Because of The Detective, Fox had first dibs on the sequel, and they took it without hesitation. They hoped Sinatra would come back as Leland, but by this point he had largely retired from acting. His last major role had been the disastrous Western Dirty Dingus Magee in 1970, which is exactly as dire as the title suggests. He did make a brief return to the screen in 1980 with the self-produced First Deadly Sin, but when Fox came calling with Nothing Lasts Forever, he had no interest. The story went into Development Hell for the next half decade. (Ironically The First Deadly Sin was both Frank Sinatra's last big screen appearance, and Bruce Willis' first.)
As Nothing Lasts Forever percolated through the development process, the first thing to change was, unsurprisingly, Leland's age. Without Sinatra for the lead, what was the point of making the hero a sexagenarian? This was the '80s. Americans wanted young, tough-talking heroes. So Leland became a grizzled 30-something cop still in his prime. And without any continuity with The Detective, there was no point in keeping the name "Leland," so Joe became John McClain. Other names changed as well, sometimes for no apparent reason (Anton Gruber became Hans), and others to keep the story up to date (in the book the company was Klaxon Oil, but by the time movie was made, Japanese mega-corps were the big thing, so it became Nakatomi).
Surprisingly little else changed about the story, though. The plot of the finished film follows the book beat for beat, with one major exception that we'll get to in a bit. This is good, because the book is actually a bit tedious in its action sequences. There's lots of, "Leland ran up to the thirtieth floor and killed a bad guy, then he ran down to the twenty-fifth, and climbed out on a ledge to the twenty-fourth, then he hid on top of an elevator going to the twentieth, where he escaped into a heating duct and ..." If you haven't seen the movie recently, the logistics of where Leland is and where the bad guys are gets confusing after a while.
But the big things are all there -- the hero getting his feet torn up by broken glass, bungee jumping with a fire-hose, and all the makeshift methods used to kill baddies. If it seems hard to imagine this in a Frank Sinatra movie, it's best to remember that film making styles changed significantly between 1979, when the book came out, and 1988 when the film hit theaters. If it had been made with Sinatra around 1980/81, it would've been closer in tone to Dirty Harry and The Towering Inferno -- still violent, but without the copious amounts of blood.
However, if it had been made before the Reagan Era, the producers likely would've retained the book's ending. This is the one significant change, other than the hero's age, between novel and film, and it speaks volumes about how American culture changed under Ronald Reagan. Skip out now if you have any interest in reading the book.
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Still here?
Okay.
So, one of the big conceits of Die Hard is that Hans Gruber and his goons aren't really terrorists. They may've been in the past, but by the time the movie takes place, they just want to cash out by robbing the Nakatomi Corporation's vaults of millions of dollars in bearer-bonds. Even terrorists were turning into yuppies, the movie said. In a way, this is an interesting twist, especially in light of the endless terrorist-villains who filled action movies from the late '80s on.
But that's not how it goes in the novel. The terrorists in the book have a genuine political motivation, and it's a doozy -- the company where Leland's daughter works has been illegally selling arms to and laundering money for a South American dictator who is strongly implied to be Augusto Pinochet. The attack on the company has two purposes: first to find proof of the company's complicity in Pinochet's crimes, and second to liberate millions of dollars in cash that the company has on hand for their next deal -- the terrorists want to send it to freedom fighters in Chile.
Worse still, Leland discovers his daughter is a major player in the company's dirty dealings. When the terrorists kill her near the end of the book, Leland is emotionally devastated, but he also recognizes that in her own way she was more evil than the terrorists. This leads to a scene where Leland gets a hold of the money from the vault and throws it out a window, causing cash to snow onto downtown LA on Christmas morning.
There's no way this ending would've swung it in the go-go Reagan '80s. With the US supporting military dictatorships and death-squads in Latin America, a major studio would never have made a movie suggesting we were taking the wrong side. Likewise, the notion that American corporations were a cancer upon the world was a no-go in an era when people came away from Wall Street unironically quoting Gordon Gekko -- "Greed is good!" Audiences would've found McClain tossing money into the wind laughable.
And so the final film ends up being neutered, with the hero turned into a protector of corporate profits. You can understand why the movie had to be that way given the time it was made, and you can even acknowledge that it probably wouldn't've been a hit if McClain's wife had turned out to be a bad guy and there was no happy ending, but damn, the original ending would've been so much better.
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