
Bruce Willis was signed up for a princely $5 million, and the rest is action movie history. Read more: Complete Guide to Christmas Movies and TV Specials Airing This YearĪt any rate, de Souza and Jeb Stuart adapted Nothing Lasts Forever as Die Hard, with the central character written as a younger yet still cynical cop by the name of John McClane. “Let’s put that rumor to bed right now, as there was no connection between those movies!” de Souza, who also wrote the screenplay for Commando, firmly laid that rumor to rest in an interview with us in 2013. Sinatra would have again played Joe Leland, an elder hero who probably wouldn’t have spent quite as much time crawling through ducts and swinging from fire hoses.įor many years, there was a story circulating that Nothing Lasts Forever was going to be retooled as a sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1985 action opus, Commando.

When it was first optioned, Nothing Lasts Foreverwas going to be made as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra, who’d already starred in an adaptation of Thorp’s earlier novel, The Detective. And like Ellis in the movie (memorably played by Hart Bochner), the one in the book comes to a fittingly sticky end. Interestingly, the character of Harry Ellis is remarkably similar to the one in the film he’s a smug cocaine user, immediately disliked by the hero, and at one point colludes with the terrorists.

Further, it’s his daughter rather than his wife who’s the hostage in the building, which belongs to the mythical Klaxon Oil rather than the Nakatomi Corporation in McTiernan’s movie.

The protagonist in Thorp’s story was named Joseph Leland, a retired police officer who’s unhappily divorced. Thorp was inspired to write the novel, about German terrorists taking over a Los Angeles office block, after watching The Towering Inferno, one of the most successful of Irwin Allen’s star-laden disaster pictures.Īlthough Nothing Lasts Forever’s basic high-rise thriller concept was ported across to the movie Die Hard more or less intact, the characters were somewhat different in the novel. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, the screenplay for Die Hardwas based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Foreverby Roderick Thorp.
