going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

Priscilla Presley, John Travolta, and Kelly Preston at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre’s thirty-seventh-anniversary gala, Hollywood,
August 2006
But without two more signature names the movie was back in limbo. Haggis was
about to lose Cheadle as well, because he was scheduled to make Hotel Rwanda. Yari
finally told Haggis to shut the production down.
The following Monday, when Schulman came into the production oce, she found
Haggis there, alone.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m prepping the movie.”
Yari agreed to keep the oce open for one more week, and then another, as each
Monday Schulman would nd Haggis at work preparing for a movie that now had no
budget at all. Gradually, other people began working with him, for no pay.
“If you get Sandy Bullock, you got a green light,” Schulman told him.
Haggis got Sandra Bullock for the role of the district attorney’s wife, a brittle, racist
socialite, a role far from the plucky gamines she had played in the past. In the movie,
she’s the one who gets carjacked at gunpoint. But the producers wanted one more name:
Brendan Fraser. Haggis thought he was much too young for the part, as did Fraser, but
he agreed to do it. The movie was nally green-lit, just four weeks before the shooting
started. Only now, the ten million dollars had shrunk to six and a half.
For Haggis, everything was riding on this lm. He mortgaged his house three times;
he also used it as a set, in order to save on his location budget. He canceled many of the
exterior scenes and borrowed the set of the television show Monk to lm interiors. He
was eating carelessly and smoking constantly. He lost weight. He desperately needed
more time.
When he nished shooting a scene in Chinatown, Cathy Schulman caught up with him
to ask about the next day’s shoot. “You look like you’re clutching your chest,” she
observed.