Con Air premiered, appropriately, at Las
Vegas’ Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, which the
plane crashes through during its final descent.
Guests were flown in from LA on a 737 and,
arriving on the Tarmac in Vegas, were shouted at
by ‘prison guards’, who shoved them all onto
fake prison buses with batons, convoys driving
them down the strip. At the Hard Rock, a replica
of Con Air’s plane had been supposedly crashed
into a pop-up cinema. Guests were led through
the plane into a tunnel which housed prison cells,
behind which ‘prisoners’ shouted at them and
gave them popcorn. Just before showtime, guards
shoved a prisoner onto the stage, dressed in an
orange jumpsuit and wearing a spit guard. The
prison officers pulled off his spit guard, revealing
Bruckheimer, who duly introduced the film.
Eric Malnic, writer of the article that started
it all off, was there. “To say that Touchstone’s
version of Con Air differed somewhat from
mine — and from the reality of the federal
prisoner transportation system — would be an
understatement,’” he wrote in the Los Angeles
Times. Bruckheimer, promoting the film on
the Charlie Rose show, said, “We just added
some drama and stretched reality a little bit.”
Just a bit.and they agreed. Although the first part
of the crash, the plane causing carnage as it
descended, was done with miniatures, the rest
was real: they smashed all hell out of the place.
And then, after filming a post-climax climax with
motorbikes and a fire engine, they were done.
THE FIRST TEST screening took place in
Arizona. “It was going along fine,” remembers
Todd Garner, “until the scene with Garland
Greene and the little girl” — Rosenberg’s homage
to Frankenstein. The original cut of that
sequence, in which Garland meets the child in
a trailer park, was considerably longer, the
tension “excruciating” says West. “About
a minute-and-a-half into the scene,” continues
Garner, “a woman stood up and turned to us
and said, ‘Why are you guys doing this to us?’
And walked out. [Former Disney CEO] Michael
Eisner turned to me and [former Disney
chairman] Joe Roth and said, ‘We’re gonna cut
that down, right?’ And we said, ‘Oh yeah,
definitely.’” It was just too intense. “Yeah, the
bosses were not happy,” laughs Rosenberg.
“It was supposed to be a big popcorn movie.
It wasn’t supposed to be a Cronenberg film.”
Above: From storyboard to screen: The plane
crashes on the wrong kind of strip in Las Vegas.
Left: Director Simon West on the miniature set.West talks script with
Cusack on location.Jerry Bruckheimer,
Nic Cage et al arrive
at the Vegas premiere
in a customised Humvee.