Anatomy of a Murder

Suspect Zero didn’t get made–not right away–but it raised Penn’s profile and got him other jobs doing work on good movies such as X-Men 2 and Behind Enemy Lines. It also got him a deal at DreamWorks. Good for Penn.

But eventually Hollywood did get around to making Suspect Zero. You may have missed it. It debuted in theaters on August 27, 2004–nearly 10 years after the script’s first draft was finished–and grossed a piddling $3.4 million during its opening weekend. Bad movies get made from incompetent source material all the time (see Charlie’s Angels, et al), but it isn’t every day that Hollywood finds a way to turn a great script into a disastrous movie.

(Before we proceed, you are put on warning that there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen Suspect Zero and don’t want to know what happens because you plan on seeing it in theaters, or renting it, or whatnot, stop reading and say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys as penance.)

PENN’S first draft of Suspect Zero is a model of precision, economy, and vigor. The story begins in a diner on a lonely stretch of Texas interstate where a small, ordinary man named Harold Speck is having a cup of coffee. A nondescript fellow named Benjamin O’Ryan slides into the booth across from Speck and starts interrogating him. O’Ryan begins tossing Polaroids at Speck, and while the audience can’t see what the pictures are, Speck is horrified. Then, O’Ryan grabs Speck’s wrist and forces his hand out into the open, where it is revealed that Speck’s middle finger is elongated an inch-and-a-half farther than the rest of his hand.

Harold Speck’s dead body is found in his car, which has been pushed so that it straddles the Texas-Oklahoma state line. This makes it a federal case, which lands in the lap of Tom Mackelway, a newly minted FBI agent, recently assigned to the Dallas field office. Mackelway and his new partner, Fran Kulok, go to investigate the crime scene, and in the trunk of Speck’s car find the dismembered corpses of two women. Good policework leads them to Speck’s home, where they find more than a dozen other bodies buried. Harold Speck, it turns out, was a serial killer.

As the investigation of Speck’s death proceeds, the coroner determines that he had Episodic Violent Behavior Disorder, of which one marker is an elongated middle finger. Mackelway and Kulok begin to suspect that they are chasing someone who is hunting serial killers, a modern-day Van Helsing. All of this action transpires before page 30. (For a better summary of the original script–and a takedown of the shooting script–see this excellent article by Drew McWeeny.)

Mackelway consults a behavioral sciences scholar named Daitz. Daitz asks him whether or not he’s ever seen a 50-foot shark. Mackelway is confused. Daitz responds:

And it turns out that O’Ryan is the man who came up with the theory of Suspect Zero. A former FBI agent, O’Ryan who was one of the Bureau’s first-generation profilers. While working on the Green River murders in Seattle, he suspected that of the 35 murders, only a portion were the handiwork of the “Green River” killer. The rest, he believed, were committed by another serial killer, who simply showed up to work in an area where his presence wouldn’t be noted. The theoretical profile O’Ryan developed of this phase-shifting killer was called “Suspect Zero.” O’Ryan became obsessed with Suspect Zero, went slightly batty, lost his job, and dropped off the face of the earth.

The ride from there is wild, with Mackelway chasing O’Ryan, who’s chasing what may or may not be a ghost. It’s gripping good stuff.

SO WHAT HAPPENED? Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner, that’s what. In 1995, Penn sold his script to Universal for $750,000; Cruise and Wagner signed on to produce through their company, C/W Productions. Originally considered for Cruise, Suspect Zero was almost made as a Sylvester Stallone vehicle in 1997, but the deal fell through, and the script was put on the back-burner. Disappointed, Universal let go of its claim on the property and German film conglomerate Intermedia stepped in to shoulder the burden of financing.

After languishing in development for a few more years, Cruise and Wagner hired a writer named Billy Ray to come in and rewrite Penn’s script. (Ray was most recently noticed as the director of the lily-livered Stephen Glass movie, Shattered Glass.) At the time, Ray’s most promising writing credit was the 1997 Tommy Lee Jones-Anne Heche disaster movie, Volcano. Today Volcano remains the high-point of Ray’s writing career.

In early 2002, Ray delivered a major rewrite of Penn’s script to Cruise and Wagner. Elias Merhige, whose lone credit of note was the fine 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, was attached to direct. A few months later, Cruise and Wagner convinced Paramount to handle distribution and, with all of that in place, began casting. By May of 2002, Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley were set to play Mackelway and O’Ryan, respectively. The choice of such modest leads meant that Cruise and Wagner were able to keep the budget to a modest $27 million.

In August 2002, Suspect Zero began filming not in Texas, but in New Mexico. Under the terms of a new program designed to lure filmmakers to the state, the tax-payers of New Mexico lent Cruise, Wagner, and Intermedia $7.5 million, interest free (in addition to giving them a tax credit of 15 percent on all production costs). In return, the state became a profit participant in the movie, hoping to earn 2.5 percent of the film’s box office once it grossed $50 million, and 3 percent of the gross after it passed the $90 million mark. (With a total box-office take unlikely to exceed $12 million, it is unclear whether or not the people of New Mexico will see even the original principal repaid. Only rubes believe in the back-end.)

Shooting wrapped in September 2002, and Suspect Zero was slated for release in 2003. Except for one problem: The movie was terrible. As a sign there were too many cooks in the kitchen, 11 producers are listed during the credits, 6 of whom are, improbably, named as “executive producers.” Suspect Zero‘s release was postponed twice–first until spring 2004, and then until late this summer. It finally staggered into theaters, with little advertising support, the last weekend in August, a period traditionally used by studios to get rid of their garbage.

WHAT DID Cruise, Wagner, Merhige, and Ray do to Penn’s fantastic script? Well first off, they moved it to New Mexico, to appease the local politicos. In order to justify the shift in locale, Mackelway was no longer a new FBI agent. Instead, he became a grizzled, failed FBI agent, who’s been busted down from the Dallas field office to the minors in Albuquerque. When he catches the Speck case, his embittered old partner from Dallas, Agent Kulok, comes down to New Mexico to help him out, you know, just for this one last case. Also, Mackelway and Kulok are lovers, kind-of, sort-of.

O’Ryan underwent an important change, too. No longer a former profiler, we learn that O’Ryan was part of the Icarus Project. Icarus, we are told, is something the Army stole from the Russians, and the FBI stole from the Army. It involves teaching people the occult science of “remote viewing,” whereby they can sit in a hotel room, go into a trance, and then see out of the eyes of a serial killer anywhere in America.

In the movie, O’Ryan doesn’t track serial killers, he sits in dingy rooms, listening to a strange tape, telepathically jaunting from here to there, and sketching what he “sees.” Then, using these sketches, he figures out where the serial killers are. Just for giggles, he faxes these sketches to Mackelway.

Half-way through the movie, something even stranger happens: O’Ryan begins to see through Mackelway’s eyes, too. Then Mackelway starts seeing through O’Ryan’s eyes and then–surprise!–Mackelway starts seeing through the serial killers’ eyes.

Ray and the producers decided to scrap every bit of science and policework from Penn’s script. Gone are the references to Episodic Violent Behavior Disorder. Gone is the entire behavioral theory behind Suspect Zero. Yet random fragments of Penn’s work remain: One mental patient asks Mackelway, “Have you ever seen a 50-foot shark?” Mackelway looks at him quizzically. The crazy man wanders off.

There is more–much more. Having changed the movie’s characters and modus operandi, Ray changes the ending as well. In the Penn script, O’Ryan dies in a car wreck and Mackelway executes Suspect Zero after catching him. Unhinged, Mackelway then becomes a nomadic serial-killer hunter, like O’Ryan.

In the movie, Mackelway kills Zero, and then, O’Ryan asks Mackelway to take his life, too. Mackelway refuses, telling O’Ryan, “I’m not like you.” When O’Ryan makes a move for his weapon, Kulok guns him down. Kulok and Mackelway, we are led to believe, live happily ever after.

So do Cruise and Wagner and Ray and the gaggle of hangers on who wrangled producer credits out of this train wreck. The only people who don’t get a Hollywood ending are Zak Penn, the people of New Mexico, and anyone who got snookered into dropping their $9 on Suspect Zero.

Jonathan V. Last is the film critic for The Daily Standard.