FROM COMBAT! DISCUSSION LIST ARCHIVES
Producer Steve Rubin discusses the COMBAT! Movie

A Brief Introduction -- March 24, 1996

Fellow Combat! veterans,

Having surfed through a couple of weeks of Combat! foxhole communications, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself to the platoon. Aside from being the co-producer of Combat! the motion picture, I thought you might be interested in the road I took to get the project moving.

First of all, my background is film - both as a film historian and author and as a motion picture publicist. As an author, I wrote "Combat Films: American Realism 1945-1970" which was published by McFarland in 1981. It's a little reference book based on the behind the scenes stories of eight WW2 films - "A Walk in the Sun," "Battleground," "Twelve O'Clock High," "The Bridge on the River Kwai," "The Great Escape," "Patton," "The Longest Day" and "Hell is For Heroes." It was while researching this book in the mid-70s that I met Robert Pirosh who created Combat! I had several interviews with Bob and when I decided in 1989 to acquire the rights to Combat! from ABC for a possible feature film, Bob helped. The plan at that time was to put Saunders in the Battle of the Bulge and get the squad involved in intercepting a group of Otto Skorzeny's infiltrators - you know the Germans dressed in American uniforrms. In our story, they're on their way to kidnap or kill Eisenhower (which was somewhat based on fact). I was working at Scotti Brothers Pictures at that time - primarily a record company, but I was their movie PR director - spending a lot of time promoting the sequel to "Eddie and the Cruisers." One of the bombs of 1989. I had been a movie publicist for ten years by then having started my career on the road doing advance promotion on the Donald Sutherland/Leonard Nimoy "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in 1978, then later as a unit or production publicist on such "classics" as "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," "Endangered Species," "Desert Bloom," "Porky's 2," "Hypersapien: People From Another Star," "Pretty in Pink" and "Rad."

Well, selling Combat! as a motion picture in '89 was all but impossible. To be honest, I spent most of my time selling it as a TV MOW, and considering how well "War and Remembrance" had done in the ratings (on life support), nobody wanted to talk WW2 period. This was pre-Gulf War and military pictures were still not in very good favor (despite the success of "Top Gun"). Also, talk about bad timing, the week I acquired the rights to Combat! Daily Variety publishes this idiotic story about how WW2 is dead as a film genre. Listen, anybody has the right to an opinion, but the idiots who were quoted in this story had no business commenting on the viability of a genre (they were a bunch of Charlie Nobodys). Needless to say, the project languished, my six month option ended and Bob Pirosh unfortunately died in January 1990. By the way, at that time we thought Powers Booth would be the ideal TV Saunders. We weren't thinking movie yet. So time passes. Scotti Brothers cuts back on their films and I start working on the road again on such "classics" as "The Taking of Beverly Hills," "Mom and Dad Save the World," "Gladiator," "Sidekicks" and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid." Oh, and "Weekend at Bernies 2" - I'm always working the sequel to a hit. Then, I start working in LA for Showtime and I start to stay in town and resume my producing aspirations. If you were living in LA reading Daily Variety in the early '90s, you started to notice that about every couple of months, a producer announced that he had a acquired the rights to an old TV series.

This reached a fever pitch in '93 when they were being announced every week. Baby boomers were getting their favorite shows to share with their new families. So it didn't take a genius to figure that it was time to go back to the well to get Combat! moving again. This time though, I started to think about movie and it was Steve Pirosh - Bob's son who told me that he was watching a talk show one night when he heard Bruce Willis talk about how big a fan he was of the original show. With that kind of G-2 information, I went to my old friend Jon Sheinberg, an agent at the William Morris Agency, (where Willis is represented) and we started to talk about getting the project moving. Jon and I used to work at Columbia Pictures in the early 1980s and he knew the rising value of old TV shows. He was also impressed that I had been able to score the rights.

Since I had no producing experience, he hooked me up with two legitimate producers - Joel Simon and Bill Todman, Jr. who were based on the Warner Bros lot. Now these were a couple of producer hotshots who knew when to run with the ball. We met on a Monday night and by Thursday, we had Willis. Whew! I won't bore you with the details, but the key person involved was writer Bill Wisher who had worked heavily on the script to "Die Hard 3." Once Wisher indicated that he was interested in the project, Willis indicated his interest and we were off and running. Every studio in Hollywood was interested at one point and Savoy Pictures through its then-production head Rob Fried won the war. It was very exciting. We had a great front page story in the Variety a year ago and it looked like we were on easy street. Unfortunately, Savoy was unable to release any hit movies in the last year, and they went out of the feature film business.

So we've been stuck for awhile - until Paramount stepped up to the plate a couple of weeks ago, and lo and behold - Combat! is headed for production at one of the most successful studios in Hollywood. Bruce Willis is still aboard, and now it's simply a question of when - can we shoot it this summer when he has an opening? We will know soon. Bill Wisher, by the way, wrote a terrific first draft which I was very excited to read. His agent, Geoffrey Brandt deserves the Silver Star for keeping this project moving when some people felt it was on life support. The script starts at Omaha Beach and shows how Saunders formed his squad. We meet all our favorite characters - Kirby, Caje, Doc, Littlejohn, Billy, Braddock, Lt. Hanley, et al. At this point, there's also an African American character (a tough Red Ball Express Sergeant) and some French Resistance Fighters.

So here we are. As more details come in on the film, I will surely inform the platoon. I'm thrilled that a Web Site is in place to disseminate what should be very exciting material.

Let's all cross our fingers and keep thinking good thoughts. Vic Morrow is smiling down on us.

Best,
Steve Rubin Co-Producer