SPACE UNDER FIRE

HOSTILE FORCES ON THE HORIZON. POSTAPOCALYPTIC CONDITIONS. MIND-BLOWING TECHNOLOGY. FEAR. HYSTERIA. AND THAT WAS JUST THE MAKING OF THE SCI-FI SHOWDOWN INDEPENDENCE DAY. by Rebecca Ascher-Walsh

July 28, 1995. Press releases from Twentieth Century Fox herald today as "the countdown to the end of the world," but it's looking like a pretty silly apocalypse. At 8:30 a.m., 340 days before the opening of Independence Day, an alien war of the worlds that features Bill Pullman, Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, and some extremely slimy extraterrestrials, the film's crew begin to set up shop on the highway beside Manhattan's East River for day one of the 72 they will spend together. Their sweaty, first-day-of-school jitters aren't being helped by the temperature, which is already up to 85 degrees. The neighboring Fulton Fish Market is smelling like its fishy self. Suddenly, with a German-accented order from the pacing, chain-smoking, green-high-top-wearing director, Roland Emmerich, cars crash and garbage cans go flying. Twenty-odd extras, trying their hardest to appear horrified by what they're supposed to be seeing, spring to the river's edge and look up at the cloudless expanse above Brooklyn's skyline.

"It's a spaceship that covers the entire city," cowriter-producer Dean Devlin says breathlessly, gesturing to the featureless horizon like a 10-year-old talking to invisible friends. As he turns back to the set, a speck appears overhead and begins circling. Finding its mark, a lone pigeon lets loose a New York sign of luck on Devlin's head.

One year, $70 million, and tens of thousands of man-hours later, Devlin's enthusiasm no longer seems laughable; even Twister producer Steven Spielberg is predicting that Independence Day will be the year's No. 1 film. For Emmerich, 40, and Devlin, 33, the partners whose most notable previous credit was StarGate, 1994's against-all-odds sci-fi hit, ID is a bit like Cinderella returning to the ball in haute couture to push her luck. Emmerich's pre-StarGate efforts ran to such fare as Moon 44 (1990); Devlin was a failed TV actor who appeared in the short-lived CBS drama series Hard Copy. The success of StarGate shocked even the filmmakers: "Everyone thought we were nuts making that film," admits Devlin, who often does the talking for his partner. "We thought we were nuts. The studio [MGM, which bought the film after completion] thought we were nuts. The actors thought we were nuts. And really, who's to blame them? We were the guys who just made a Dolph Lundgren movie [Universal Soldier]."

StarGate's ultimate $200 million worldwide gross granted the filmmakers breathing room on their next project. The idea of an unlikely band of heroes saving the world from nasty invaders came to Emmerich at the StarGate press junket in October 1994, when a reporter asked the director if he believed in aliens. Within days, Devlin and Emmerich were pounding out a script. They sent it out on a Thursday two months later; on Friday, the filmmakers were in the middle of an intense bidding war. That night, Twentieth Century Fox promised to pay them a salary of $7.5 million (plus a percentage of the profits), and Emmerich and Devlin began preproduction. With an eye on an ensemble cast that would allow the concept to take center stage, Emmerich and Devlin recruited Pullman as the President of the United States, Goldblum as a chess genius anticipating the invaders' moves, and Smith as a fighter pilot. In a few days, three conceptual artists had drawn the first storyboards of the tentacled aliens with an attitude.

"I know some of it is fairly classic stuff for genre material," says Pullman, who will rejoin Emmerich and Devlin this fall as coproducer and star of an action film called Supertanker. "But [Emmerich and Devlin] never rest until a scene sounds organic and not like a grade-B movie." With such a large cast--supported by Robert Loggia, Judd Hirsch, Margaret Colin, Star Trek: The Next Generation's Brent Spiner, and Harry Connick Jr.--and so many special effects, the actors had to put in minimal screen time to receive star billing. "The amount of work I had is a third of the usual work," says Smith. Goldblum and Pullman, who had acted with nonexistent costars in Jurassic Park and Casper, respectively, were "aware that the movie is bigger than them, so they don't have to carry it along," explains Emmerich.

What was carrying the filmmakers along at that moment was largely fear. The difficulties of working with a studio had been brought home to Emmerich and Devlin on StarGate, which was taken back by executive producer Mario Kassar and recut after poor test screenings. When it received even lower scores the next time out, Emmerich and Devlin did another complete edit one week before release. (The filmmakers' unpleasant experience with MGM might account for the suspicious similarity between the name of ID's evil secretary of defense, Albert Nimziki, and that of MGM's head of advertising, Joe Nimziki.)

Even before the first special effect on Independence Day was completed, a big, scary alien craft was hanging over Emmerich's and Devlin's heads, pressuring them to race through preproduction: Director Tim Burton was preparing a similar film--Mars Attacks!--for Warner Bros. Burton, whom Devlin calls "a genius," was sure to attract A-list actors (Jack Nicholson and Annette Bening are among those who signed on). With a relatively new director and no proven box office star, ID had to reach screens first. When the filmmakers mapped out locations in New York, Washington, D.C., Utah, and L.A., Mars Attacks! admitted defeat by moving its release date to next Christmas.

"We're doing something that's more Irwin Allen," says Devlin. "They're going for the humor, so in a sense, they'll become a parody of our film, which is pretty cool."

Independence Day may not be, as Fox boasts, the end of the world, but for Emmerich and Devlin, the pressure of making two separately shot films--one with actors, one with computer-generated images--come together at the last minute is enough to finish off any chance of a good night's sleep.

--AUG. 5, 1995. Pullman, Smith, and Goldblum cross paths for the first time on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Wendover, Utah, a wide-open, flat-as-Cindy-Crawford's-stomach desert, where, grumbles Ute Emmerich, Roland's sister and ID's producer, "Pizza Hut and Subway are listed as restaurants." The endlessly upbeat Pullman--who doesn't have to stretch far to fill the monogrammed cuff links of an idealistic President--is awed to be at the Enola Gay training site on the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima. Others have more mundane concerns.

Smith, who suffered a sunburn up his shorts from the sun's reflection off the salt, grumbles that "the texture of the salt is like snow, and I'm dragging an alien through it." The alien, a truly disgusting, eight-foot-long creature that relies on low-tech K-Y jelly for its sheen, keeps losing its slime; when the shot is finally ready, a salt storm kicks up, and with no visibility, filming is stopped for the day. A piece of salt becomes embedded in executive producer William Fay's cornea, and he has to go to the hospital to have it removed; a softball game--meant to raise money for a cameraman who injured his hand--ends with a broken ankle for one crew member and a leg brace for another. When the cast and crew return to Los Angeles two weeks later and learn that the Unabomber's latest threat has made filming at Los Angeles International Airport a logistical nightmare, it seems like a fitting welcome home.

--AUG. 20, 1995, 3 P.M. While the cast prepares for night shoots, 750 technicians are toiling at Howard Hughes' old aircraft plant, a sprawling warehouselike compound backed up against barren cliffs on L.A.'s west side. Here, they spend nine months producing special effects with both state-of-the-art and you-can-do-this-at-home sleights of hand. In the room next to the multimillion-dollar computers that simulate a battle between 150 F-18s and 150 spaceships is the stand-in for what Houston will look like from the planes at night: a piece of black construction paper, lit from the back, with pinholes through it. Catastrophic highway pileups, caused by UFO panic, are staged with Matchbox-like model cars whose puppeteers flip them with a gust of air; small-scale models of the New York skyline and L.A. street scenes are set on fire with glee.

In a nearby building, the aliens share a room with the art directors, who work at their desks overseen by the mother of all monsters, a beast with spindly legs that grips the ceiling with its tentacles. Creature effects production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, who sits surrounded by 11 aliens of all shapes and sizes, says the creatures, sketched from descriptions given by people who claim to have seen them, are "very smart and very viscous."

Next door, Independence Day's pyrotechnicians are figuring out how many explosives it takes to blow up the White House. Emmerich and Devlin have already filmed scenes with Pullman on the set used for The American President and Nixon, but for detonation purposes, they construct a 10' x 4' model at a cost of $40,000. The team spends a week in August planning the computer-controlled explosion, which will cause the building to fly to pieces in a matter of seconds. "You can't afford not to do it right," says Emmerich, who will later trundle off to an adjoining building and attempt to guide Goldblum and Smith through the actors' laughing fits.

Despite the bleak setting, the pair of renegade heroes keep losing it. The interior of the aliens' base is vast--a 17-ton, 52,000-square-foot spaceship that has taken 30 people four months to build--but it's low-ceilinged enough to make the actors claustrophobic. Here, Goldblum's and Smith's characters decide to take on the enemy--a dramatic moment that, after 12 hours of repetition, is completely beyond them. The months of pretending to board planes that aren't there and duke it out with aliens that don't exist have taken their toll. "The most deadly serious of moments became completely hysterical," Smith admits. "We're supposed to be looking out at millions of parading aliens," says Goldblum. "You sit there making faces and hope it looks good." But the actors aren't able to muster the faces they need without giggling, and finally, at 12:30 a.m., Emmerich reschedules the shoot for the next day.

--AUG. 22, 1995, 3 A.M. Emmerich and Devlin pace outside the L.A. airport. By crunching and making up for lost days, they're still on schedule and on budget, and they've just won the right to use Independence Day as a title (Warner Bros. had owned the name), sparing them the anticipated embarrassment of being called Invasion of something. "But there's still plenty of time for mistakes," says Devlin, whose black hair is flecked with considerably more gray than one month earlier. "If the models aren't ready, if we don't like them..." Emmerich sits in his director's chair, working on his fourth pack of cigarettes for the day. "Roland's under a lot of stress," says his sister Ute. "This is really big for him."

The German documentary camera crew following the Sindelfingen-born Emmerich around isn't helping. Nor are the guards who, stepping up security in response to Unabomber threats, insist on escorting cast and crew members to the set.

Earplugs and aviation safety tips are handed out to everyone who will be within range of the scene in which a helicopter takes off to communicate with one more unseen spaceship. But suggestions like "Remain at least 50 feet away" do little to reduce panic when the helicopter suddenly swerves and dips, and the rotor blast sends hundreds of cardboard earplug containers flying through the air, as well as actors crashing onto their backsides. "I hate helicopters. It's like Twilight Zone," Devlin yells, referring to the 1982 on-set crash that killed actor Vic Morrow and two children.

Pullman is still the set's cheerleader. "You never feel like you're dwarfed by the technology," he says, preparing to run purposefully up a ramp to an airplane that isn't actually there.

After the last day of shooting on Nov. 3, "I thought I'd have to go to the hospital," says Devlin. Emmerich spends 12 hours a day inside the editing room, hopping next door to supervise the model shoots and overseeing second-unit shots of exteriors. As of Jan. 4, with only 10 percent of the more than 500 special effects completed--something the ever-energetic Devlin says is both "right on schedule" and "terrifying"--the filmmakers decide they need an additional $750,000 to punch up the special effects.

"This is when the little mistakes show up," says Emmerich. A scene in which an alien breaks out of its confines in an isolated room is a disappointment; the alien doesn't look real and needs to be reshot. "We've learned over the last couple of movies that it's not enough for the good guys to win," says Devlin. "The bad guy has to suffer, and realize he's screwed, and realize he's going to die, and we don't have enough of that. We said [to Fox], 'If you wait until you screen it, it will cost about 20 times as much as it will cost now.'"

"It's always like this when you have a movie finished," says Emmerich. "You realize you're a little bit short here, or need to explain something better. It's not very expensive at this point because you just have to shoot some additional elements, and it depends on how well you behaved during the rest of the show." Since Emmerich and Devlin are within budget, Fox hands them a check, good for more explosions and alien suffering.

Emmerich and Devlin head back into the editing room, where they'll stay cooped up until the last moment, piecing together the actors with the models, inserting background explosions into the action, and making the aliens writhe in agony. The film is trotted out to test audiences; unlike StarGate, the reactions are so enthusiastic that only small changes--like showing Randy Quaid's character, a crop duster, flying an F-18 in one scene instead of his usual biplane--need to be made. By June 20, with two weeks to go, the final touches are added, and Independence Day is shown to a New York screening audience that includes Mars Attacks! star Jack Nicholson, who breaks his stoic, stogie-holding pose to applaud loudly at the end. Days before the film opens, Devlin is optimistic. "The most valuable thing Roland ever told me," says Devlin, "was 'Look, Dean, you're not a genius. I'm not a genius, and we're never going to be geniuses. But if we work really hard, then hopefully, one day, we'll make a good movie.'"