Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 9, 1990 TAG: 9003091996
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB STRAUSS LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
Of course, the specific details aren't quite as important as a nuclear-plant malfunction. But the way the media has handled it, you'd think it was 100 times more earthshaking.
The real story is Rob Lowe, the brat-pack actor who made the greatest impact of his career with a home video of himself and two young women - one of them 16 years old - cavorting in an Atlanta hotel room during the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
Soon after one of the girl's parents filed suit against Lowe, the tape found its way onto newscasts nationwide, to say nothing of the video rotation circuit at seemingly every party on the continent.
The movie is "Bad Influence," Lowe's first since the video incident broke last May.
A Hitchcockian cocktail of voyeurism, murder and guilt transferal, "Bad Influence" stars Lowe as an attractive, sociopathic drifter who insinuates himself into the life of a timid financial adviser.
The coincidence is that several of the movie's scenes revolve around a videotaped sexual encounter. Lowe does not appear in it (he shows up on a later tape, doing something much nastier), but the eager-to-be-corrupted innocent, played by James Spader, does.
Which brings us to "Bad Influence's" secondary coincidence: Spader won the top acting prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival for playing an emotionally dysfunctional video freak in his previous movie, "sex, lies, and videotape."
"We've all heard that life imitates art and art imitates life. This is the first example, and it could be documentable, of life and art having a head-on collision," said "Bad Influence's" producer Steve Tisch.
Tisch never has been one to shy away from hot-to-handle properties; he produced "Risky Business," "Soul Man," television's "The Burning Bed" and, most recently, "Heart Condition."
This time he walked a fine line between trying to stay true to screenwriter David Koepp's original conception and not appearing to exploit Lowe's image problems.
The facts indicate innocence, if not exactly guilelessness, on the filmmakers' part. Koepp's script was written before the '88 convention.
Lowe came on board the project in February of the following year. Spader signed up a month or so later, before his conquest of Cannes - where Lowe, incidentally, was pre-promoting "Influence" when the Atlanta incident hit the fan.
Lowe came home to a storm of invasive news reports and the real possibility that his career might be over (or, perhaps, that he might suddenly be hotter than ever).
Tisch and director Curtis Hanson ("The Bedroom Window") assured the actor that he still had a job, although Lowe hadn't alerted them to the potential scandal.
"We told him we were never looking for an apology," Tisch recalled. "I'm not the kind of person who expects that or requests that, directly or indirectly. Basically, I didn't want to lose Rob.
"At the same time, we gave him an opportunity to remove himself from the project if he felt that was appropriate for personal or professional reasons. What I hoped his response would be, it was: `You've now got me stronger than ever. Let's all work together."'
Even before the Atlanta story broke, Hanson considered Lowe vital to his movie. The amoral, enigmatic Alex was not much of a character, but with the guy often described as the best-looking actor of his generation playing him, Alex became a kind of psychic force of nature.
Every time Hanson and Koepp tried to rework the film's scenario, they found it impossible to steer away from incidents that echoed the Lowe videotape. (There is also a scene near the end showing Alex in bed with two women.)
"I spent a lot of time in very fruitful collaboration with David," Hanson said. "Many things [in the script] changed, but one thing that never did change was the specific device of that videotape camera and the way in which David had very cleverly woven it into the plot. It didn't change because it was so good.
"After Atlanta happened, and not subscribing to the theory that any publicity is good publicity, I very seriously considered removing that from the script just to distance ourselves from the situation.
"It was not removed for the very simple reason that I could not think, nor could David, of anything that worked nearly so well in the story.
by CNB