The_Hollywood_Reporter__February_07_2018

89 Years of THR
Memorable moments from a storied history
1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1994 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
25 Years Ago, Cool Runnings Was a Gold Medal Hit
For The Hollywood Reporter, 1993’s
Cool Runnings was a “near-perfectly
executed tale” that centered
on “one of the nuttiest and most
inspiring modern sports stories.”
The Jon Turteltaub film is
the loosely factual tale of the
Jamaican bobsled team that competed
in the 1988 Calgary Winter
Olympics. (Three decades later,
the Pyeongchang Games begin
Feb. 9, and there’s a 25th anniversary
screening of Cool Runnings
a day earlier at the El Capitan in
Hollywood.) “It’s the timeless
story of the underdog,” says Jeff
Sagansky, who acquired the
script in 1989 when he headed
TriStar Pictures. “And here, the
underdog was going to the Winter
Olympics from a country with
no snow.” As difficult as it was for
Jamaicans to make it to Canada,
so it was for the film to get made.
When Dawn Steel became head
of Columbia Pictures in 1987, she
became aware of the Runnings
script because TriStar was a sister
company. After she left in 1990,
Steel made it the first film she did
under her new production deal
at Disney. “To me, it was Rocky,”
said Steel, who died in 1997. The
$15 million production ($25 million
today) went on to earn
$155 million worldwide ($263 million).
Along the way, the script
went from a drama at TriStar to a
family comedy at Disney. Hiring
John Candy as the team’s coach
was a key piece of casting. “[Studio
chief] Jeffrey Katzenberg was
the one who said we were going
with John,” says Turteltaub. “Up
until then, we were thinking
‘Olympic coach? Kurt Russell.’
And Kurt ended up playing [Herb
Brooks] in Miracle. I guess he
was born to be an Olympic coach.”
Turteltaub’s most vivid memory
of the shoot was being awakened
at 1 a.m. on location in Calgary
and told by Katzenberg that he’d
be fired unless he could get the
cast to speak in an understandable
Jamaican accent. “He said, ‘If
you can’t make them sound like
Sebastian the Crab in The Little
Mermaid, I’ll find a director who
will.’ So the next day I told the
cast I’d be fired if they didn’t start
sounding like Sebastian the Crab.
And they laughed and found the
in-between.” — BILL HIGGINS
↑ From left: Leon (as Derice Bannock), Rawle D. Lewis (as Junior Bevil), Malik Yoba (as Yul Brenner) and Doug E. Doug (as Sanka Coffie) in Cool Runnings.
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
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FEBRUARY 7, 2018