Arrive Alive

Plot

Mickey Crews is a house detective in a seedy Florida hotel who gets involved in investigating the death of a former champion boxer. He has a romance with a woman named Joy.

Background

The script was written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O'Donoghue who had written Scrooged (1988) for producer Art Linson. Linson had tried to get Arrive Alive made for a number of years, with a variety of stars attached, before finally securing funding with Chechick, Dafoe and Cusack. Cusack was an up-and-coming actress, working on Saturday Night Live, Dafoe was getting terrific buzz from The Last Temptation of Christ and Chechik had just directed the successful National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

Filming started in April 1990. However, after a week, the producers felt that the lines they had thought so funny in the script were not getting the laughs they hoped for. After 18 days, the decision was taken to cancel production and write off the $7 million cost.

The whole story is related in Linson's book A Pound of Flesh.

Various attempts have been made to film the script again without any success.

Lolita was also to appear in the film but production was halted while filming at the Miami Seaquarium.