It was 1983, and a 26-year-old producer named Brian Grazer was sitting across from the most feared man in Hollywood.
Ray Stark had a rival mermaid movie loaded with Warren Beatty, Jessica Lange, Herbert Ross directing and Robert Towne writing the script. Grazer had a scrappy fairy tale at Disney — a studio whose most recent live-action release was Gus, a flop about a field goal-kicking mule — and a leading man whose cross-dressing sitcom had just been canceled.
Stark’s message was simple.
“He threatened to just crush me,” Grazer says. “That I ‘Have nothing. Nothing.’ They’d ‘kill’ me.”
Then came the offer: 5 percent of the first-dollar gross if Disney would kill Splash. Disney said no, however, and Splash opened March 9, 1984. It became a top-10 hit, made Tom Hanks a movie star overnight, invented the Touchstone label, cracked March open as a release
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