Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 22, 1993 TAG: 9303200134
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
HBO HAS WINNER IN `BARBARIANS'
Hard as it would be to make an entertaining movie about the leveraged buyout of a big corporation, HBO has gone that feat one better: "Barbarians at the Gate" is a ferociously entertaining movie about a leveraged buyout that failed.James Garner gives a robust and swashbuckling performance as tycoon F. Ross Johnson, who at the height of '80s madness tried to take over RJR Nabisco, an enormous conglomerate.
Garner is one of the two main reasons the movie succeeds; the other is Larry Gelbart, who wrote a rip-roaring script that rips as well as it roars.
The official premiere date for the $7 million blockbuster was March 20, but HBO will also show the film Tuesday at 8 p.m., Sunday , March 31 and April 5 and 18.
Michael Fuchs, the combative chairman of HBO, would like some credit for the film, too, and deserves it. Fuchs picked up the project for HBO when producer Ray Stark's negotiations to make it a theatrical film faltered. Gelbart was paid $1 million for his script, much more than writers of HBO scripts usually get.
But Fuchs is proud of the film and says it helps enhance HBO's claim to being "the best programmed network in this business." The broadcast networks, Fuchs says, wouldn't have touched such a hot potato of a movie, which was based on a lacerating best seller by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar.
"You'd be surprised at how many people would not make this movie, because there are so many rich and powerful people involved," Fuchs says. "We advertise ourselves as the gutsiest place, and we attract that kind of project.
"As the networks have destabilized economically and psychologically, whatever, they have given up the high-profile program. They don't want to take the risk. And we step in. `Stalin' was an ABC project they stepped away from. A lot of things we do are things they should be doing or can't afford to do."
Some will say Gelbart has defanged the book, because he sees the story as a comedy, albeit a dark comedy, of errors; thanks to his and Garner's wit and bravado, much of what happens, and what Johnson says, is painfully funny. "I was amazed he could turn that book into two hours," Fuchs says. "I said we should do it as a miniseries."
The book and film both trash the galloping greed of the '80s, with Johnson depicted as a self-indulgent cowboy wallowing in petty luxuries. Ironically or not, Steven J. Ross, who was chairman and CEO of Time Warner, which owns HBO, pretty much fit that profile himself.
Ross, who negotiated the $14 billion merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications in 1989, died in December of cancer at 65. He was known as a man who loved pricey perks and who compensated himself ultra-generously.
"Steve Ross wouldn't have done `Barbarians at the Gate,' " Fuchs says flatly. "Michael Fuchs does `Barbarians at the Gate.' We don't take on all the attributes of our parents or the peculiarities of our management. We are an extraordinarily independent creature within Time Warner, both on an operating basis and on a personal basis, in terms of how we're treated and what we do."
Fuchs gets snappish and testy whenever HBO is criticized. But on one point he concedes culpability. HBO was widely derided for the way it handled the Clinton inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial, plastering a huge HBO logo all over the national landmark and on the screen during the telecast itself.
"I know who made that decision. It was a terrible decision," Fuchs says of the looming logo. "People were right about the logo. I think that's horrendous. I really do."
But, Fuchs says, there was nothing wrong with the concert being seen on HBO and thus available only to subscribers. "I gotta tell you something: it was a great event," he gushes. "And the fact that pay television had it instead of commercial television is not anything I'm going to apologize for."
From the perspective of Michael Fuchs, "Barbarians at the Gate" is just another in a long line of HBO triumphs. But viewers are likely to see it as a great leap upward. Garner and Gelbart hit the ground running and hit the sky flying. Result: a joyride, all the better for being a bumpy one. Washington Post Writers Group
Tom Shales writes about television for The Washington Post.