Hollywood Goes to Heaven

By Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles

In Hollywood, a town that loves formula films about cops and buddies and fighter pilots, a hot new character has emerged. Meet a hero for the 1990s: the dead. Or nearly dead. Or just back from the dead. But don't be spooked. Hollywood believes this could be fun and meaningful at the same time. Just listen to the sales pitch for a script being peddled around the studios right now: "It's a Ghost kind of Die Hard. It's a Home Alone Ghost. Better, it's a Ghost Alone!"

This kind of thinking has created a jarring change in the buzz words of a town devoted to the glorification of the earthly body and the display of riches. Producers are suddenly locked in meetings pondering the intangibles: death, resurrection, salvation, reincarnation, atonement, even saintly behavior. Spellbound by the blockbuster success of last summer's Ghost, a sweet, metaphysical love story that reaped $218 million in the U.S. and $500 million globally, these obsessed producers have loaded the pipeline full of movies about robust spirits. No fewer than a dozen afterlife films will be released this year, ranging from the silly (Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) to the serious (The Rapture). The subject has inspired TV movies as well, including Hi Honey, I'm Dead and The Haunted.

Hollywood's new formula neatly capitalizes on the search for spirituality that has captured America at the turn of the decade. The meaning of life and the approach of death are issues that seem pressing to a baby-boom generation in the throes of middle age. At the same time, teens who were raised on the values of the materialistic '80s now wonder what to replace them with.

The more creative minds in Hollywood fear that as the industry rushes to exploit the idea, the meaning will be lost, and only the formula will remain. "Some of these films are from the heart, but others are from the Xerox machine," says Larry Gordon, chief executive of Largo Entertainment. "The audience can tell the difference. People are looking for something that makes them feel good. We all want to believe that death isn't so bad."

"Death is hot," agrees Bruce Joel Rubin, writer of Ghost. A former hippie who studied Buddhism in India, Rubin admits the seminal idea for the movie came from Hamlet's vapory father. "The film's message is: Life turns on a dime, so tell people you love them," says Rubin. Director Blake Edwards, whose current film, Switch, tells the story of a male chauvinist pig who dies and returns to earth as a woman, believes spirit-filled movies are popular because "the kids are searching for something. Filmmakers are merely attempting to tap it." Producer Robert Lawrence recently paid $2 million for a proposed script called Manhattan Ghost Story. Says he: "In these films you can moralize without sermonizing."

At their best, Hollywood's interpretations of the Great Beyond are highly personal. In making Defending Your Life, a sophisticated satire about Judgment Day, director Albert Brooks was inspired by the death of his father when the director was 11 years old. Unpersuaded that the dead return to earth, Brooks puts his main characters on a linear trajectory into the unknown. Brooks is moved by the 20 letters a week he receives from dying people uplifted by the film. "It's not a hospice cocktail," he quips, "but close."

The brush with death is actually a reincarnation of a theme that Hollywood revisits from time to time. The 1978 hit Heaven Can Wait was a remake of the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan. In the '50s, Topper and the Kerbys explored the hereafter on TV. More recently, Field of Dreams cloaked the metaphysical in a baseball motif. In fact, the netherworld as a dramatic device is as old as theater. Anthony Minghella, writer and director of Truly, Madly, Deeply, a British variation of carpe diem, hails the technique as an inventive way to deal with loss and pain: "However dark these stories, they become an affirmation of life."

Unfortunately, many of the copycats deliver hokey, improbable scenarios with the depth of a shampoo commercial. The Grim Reaper and the fires of hell have been slickly supplanted by a blissful feel-good death in the form of reincarnation. Dying is depicted as a transitory state, at worst a move to a new neighborhood. "All these ghosts are young, attractive people," observes Scott Frank, writer of the forthcoming Dead Again, starring Andy Garcia. "Who wants to see old ghosts?" One notable exception will be The Rapture, an austere film, starring Mimi Rogers as a woman who murders her daughter and faces a biblical apocalypse, complete with four horsemen in a blinding yellow light. "All for $3 million," boasts Michael Tolkin, the film's writer and director.

To some degree, the preoccupation with the afterlife reflects the obsession of Los Angeles, the crystal-and-channeling capital of the country, where people can mention their past lives with the same seriousness as getting the car engine tuned. No doubt Shirley MacLaine's philosophical musings and Richard Gere's cassette-tape readings from the Tibetan Book of the Dead have permeated the collective unconscious of fortysomething producers forced to face mortality through the death of their parents and the tragic toll of colleagues who have died of AIDS. "Death is the great leveler," says Josh Baran, a former Zen teacher turned publicist. "Your plastic surgeon, lawyer, trainer and agent can't save you. Thus, it has to be confronted. These movies are an ego trip. Hollywood wants to remain forever young, and what better way than to extend yourself into another life?"

In another sense, the spiritual windfall is a reaction to the endless , barrage of carnage films during the '80s. Audiences are sated with special effects and numbing gore. Moviegoers want to explore the big eternal questions instead, and many of these viewers have not had a traditional religious upbringing. "Conventional religion used to help you deal with death," says Lindsay Doran, producer of Dead Again. "Now this is gone; those comforts have been taken away."

But worldly cynics in the industry think most of these pictures simply pay homage to the almighty buck, not Almighty God. In the recessionary '90s, when studio chieftains are ostensibly tightening their belts, these films are relatively cheap to produce. Moreover, the town's eye is fixed on the lucrative Asian market, which devours ghost stories with fervor. "The Japanese love ghosts and robots. Certain cultures believe in the afterlife more than we do," explains Fred Olen Ray, president of American Independent Productions, which made Spirits, a low-budget picture, starring Erik Estrada, that will be released this summer.

By all accounts the spirit binge will fade after a while, just as the recent spate of baby movies did. "The pack mentality is rampant," says Stan Chervin, a story editor at Tri-Star Pictures who is awash in "ludicrously bad scripts of past lives." In executive suites these days, screenwriters are fervently pitching stories they describe as "supernatural," or inspired by the late guru of mythology Joseph Campbell. "This vein will be mined fairly quickly," predicts director Brooks. "Only so many times can you watch a dead person help a living person with a math test." Amen!