‘Fatal Attraction’ Oral History: Rejected Stars And A Foul Rabbit
Three decades after it became an Oscar-nominated cause célèbre and grossed $320 million worldwide, “Fatal Attraction” continues to pervade the culture. “Bunny boiler” has become synonymous with a female stalker.
The producer Stanley R. Jaffe saw a short, “Diversion,” about an unfaithful husband whose lover phones his wife. Mr. Jaffe took it to another producer, Sherry Lansing, who thought it had feature potential. But no one in Hollywood would buy it, especially with Michael Douglas as the lead.
The film got rejected twice by every studio. They would say, “A guy who cheats on his wife for absolutely no reason!” Michael hadn’t done “Wall Street.” He had done the “Romancing the Stone” films and “The Streets of San Francisco” on TV, but he wasn’t big enough to get a movie made with a script they didn’t like.
Then Brian De Palma expressed interest in directing the film. He wanted to give the screenplay more of a horror feel.
Brian said: “I can’t do the movie with Michael. He’s unsympathetic. So it’s either him or me.”
But casting Alex proved nearly impossible.
They were turned down by almost every actress. Barbara Hershey was seriously considered and wanted to do it, but she wasn’t available.
The bunny almost was broiled. In the most notorious scene of the 1987 thriller “Fatal Attraction,” the spurned Alex (Glenn Close) terrorizes her ex-lover Dan (Michael Douglas) by boiling the family pet on the stove. “Initially, I had her grilling the bunny,” the screenwriter James Dearden said in a recent telephone interview. “But I thought that was too grotesque. So we boiled the bunny instead.”
The result remained fairly gory. “The stench was unbearable,” the film’s director, Adrian Lyne, recalled of shooting the scene with a rabbit purchased from a butcher. “It permeated the whole house.”
Three decades after it became an Oscar-nominated cause célèbre and grossed $320 million worldwide, “Fatal Attraction” continues to pervade the culture. “Bunny boiler” has become synonymous with a female stalker, and a “Saturday Night Live” sketch last season depicted the Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway cooking a CNN anchor’s rabbit.
The producer Stanley R. Jaffe saw a short, “Diversion,” written and directed by Mr. Dearden, about an unfaithful husband whose lover phones his wife. Mr. Jaffe took it to another producer, Sherry Lansing, who thought it had feature potential. But no one in Hollywood would buy it, especially with Michael Douglas as the lead.