 Starring: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, William Atherton
Director: John McTiernan
Year Of Release: 1988
Plot: New York City Detective John McCLane heads for LA to visit his wife and kids for Christmas. Heading over to the Nakatomi Plaza building, he arrives just in time for a group of German terrorists to take the entire building hostage. While they hold all the people at a Christmas party, including John’s wife, at gunpoint, McClane is the only one on the inside who isn’t under the terrorists’ control, and so he takes it on himself to foil the bad guy’s evil plans. |
The subtitle of this feature – why the Die Hard franchise doesn’t exist – may seem patently wrong. Of course there’s a Die Hard franchise. It’s encompassed four films spread across 19 years, all starring Bruce Willis as John McLane, who can’t help saying ‘Yippee-ki-yay Motherfucker’ at any given opportunity.
However in many respects it’s not really a franchise like most film series are. In reality, it’s more a group of completely separate movies that got repurposed and rewritten and turned into a franchise. It’s quite incredible that none of the Die Hard movies was ever originally intended to be a Die Hard movie, all starting life with someone completely different to John McClane in the lead role. Indeed some even started life as sequels to other movies. To see what I mean, let’s go through the films one by one...
Today, in part one of this feature, we’ll look at Die Hard and Die Hard, while tomorrow I’ll complete the story with the third and fourth movies.
Die Hard (1988)
Surely the first Die Hard movie was originally scripted for a grubby vested John McClane, running around with his shoes off? After all, it’s where the franchise started. Well no, it wasn’t. It’s actually an adaptation of a 1979 book by Roderick Thorp, called Nothing Last Forever, which didn’t feature John McClane at all. Instead it was about Joe Leland, the hero of Thorp 1966 novel, The Detective.
The Detective actually got made into a movie in 1968 starring Frank Sinatra, and that film is certainly nothing like Die Hard. Billed as an ‘adult look at police work’, with the movie focuses on Leland investigating the murder of a gay man (something seen as very progressive and taboo breaking in the late 60s). Leland is a rather soft presence, coaxing information gently out of people, and certainly not an all action hero.
However he does become a bit more action man in Thorp’s literary sequel Nothing Lasts Forever, with Die Hard actually staying fairly close to premise the book, except with a few details changed. In Thorp’s novel the building taken over by terrorists is the Klaxon Oil headquarters, and it’s his daughter who works there rather than his wife. However the main terrorist does have the surname Gruber (although he’s Tony rather than Hans), and the book is based around one man who’s managed to remain undetected, fighting off the bad guys who’ve taken an entire building hostage (in the book they’re political fighters instead of thieves). Of course the hero had his named changed and became younger, ensuring there was no connection to The Detective, but other than that a lot of the scenes and situations in Nothing Lasts Forever remained.
Changing the details of a novel when it comes to the screen isn’t that unusual, so why am I saying this wasn’t really ever meant to be a Die Hard movie? Well, partly because the novel is a sequel to a book that had already been made into a movie in 1968, but most importantly because when a movie version was first mooted, it was initially going to be something very different.
After the success of the 1985 Arnie movie Commando, the producers were looking around for a good story for a sequel. They came across Thorp’s book, Nothing Lasts Forever, and optioned the rights, with the idea of turning it into Commando 2. However after the script was written, Schwarzenegger declined to return to the role of John Matrix. However Fox didn’t give up on the idea of turning Nothing Lasts Forever into a film and so the script got retooled as a stand-alone film rather than a Commando sequel, the hero became John McClane, and Bruce Willis was cast in the lead role (and it should be remembered back then he seemed a very strange choice, as he wasn’t known for action, and was still appearing in the TV series Moonlighting at the time).
It means that while Die Hard seems to be the start of its own franchise, in some respects it’s a sequel to two completely different and separate movies – The Detective and Commando – becoming a separate film it its own right more by accident than design.
Die Hard 2 (1990)
Okay, so you’ve had a hit movie, so surely the follow-up has to be based on an original idea? Well, in the case of Die Hard, no. After all, since the script for the first film started out as a Commando sequel based on a book that had nothing to do with Commando, why shouldn’t a Die Hard sequel be based on a novel that has nothing to do with John McLane in Die Hard?
The producers of Die Hard 2 bought a novel called 58 Minutes by Walter Wager. As with Nothing Lasts Forever, the film keeps the basic premise but changes a lot of the details – and with Die Hard 2 a lot more things about the book were changed than with the first film.
58 Minutes is about a cop who has to stop terrorists who take over an airport while a loved is trapped in an airplane circling overhead. While Die Hard 2 kept that idea, in the novel (as the title suggests) the hero only has 58 minutes to save his daughter before her plane crashes, while John McLane gets a bit more time and it’s his wife in the sky. The action is also moved from New York to Washington DC and while in 58 Minutes the terrorists want seven dangerous men released from prison and given safe passage out of the country, in Die Hard 2 they’re trying to rescue a South American drug lord who is flying in for a trial.
However while Die Hard kept a lot of the specific scenes and situations from its source novel, the writers of Die Hard basically ditched everything from 58 Minutes except the basic idea. Even so it does mean that while Die Hard 2 was the movie that turned Die Hard from a single movie into a franchise, it’s technically not really a sequel as it’s based on a book that has nothing to do with the first film.
Well, that’s it for Part 1, while in tomorrow’s Movie A Day, I’ll reveal why Die Hard With A Vengeance and Die Hard 4.0 aren’t Die Hard movies either! CLICK HERE to read Part 2.
TIM ISAAC
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