Here’s Why The FBI Went After The Director Of Die Hard

As Gail Sistrunk McTiernan waits in the visiting room, a man shuffles towards her. She’s waiting for her husband, director John McTiernan, who’s serving time in South Dakota’s Yankton Federal Prison Camp. She glances at the apparent stranger and realizes this shell of a man is her husband – the superstar at the helm of movies like Predator, Die Hard and Last Action Hero. So what’s happened to make her partner barely recognizable to her?

“John warned me,” Sistrunk McTiernan explained to the BuzzFeed news website at the time. “He said he would look like a scarecrow in a tan uniform. When I arrived at the prison, a man came in the room. I didn’t think I knew him. He was pasty and he had no life left in his eyes. I made eye contact with him to be polite... And I realized it was John...”

Scarcely recognizable to his wife that day, the Federal Bureau of Prisons knew him as prisoner 43029-112. Fellow inmates and prison staff called him “Mac,” or occasionally “Big Mac.” To friends and colleagues he’s “McT.” But the rest of the world knows John McTiernan as the director of a slew of classic action movies.

From the mid-1980s, McTiernan’s directing credits included some of the most acclaimed and recognizable titles right across the action, thriller and sci-fi genres. First came the horror-mystery Nomads in 1985. Then the Oscar-nominated action flick Predator arrived on the big screen two years later. Before the decade closed out, the director earned another four Academy Award nominations with fan-favorite Die Hard in 1988.

In 1990 McTiernan drew further acclaim with the Oscar-winning The Hunt For Red October. The Academy was impressed enough with the movie’s effects and sound-effects editing to award it a gong in 1991. The sound and editing personnel received two further nominations as well. But come 2013 the accomplished filmmaker was a million miles from his famed director’s chair.

And not only was McTiernan a highly regarded director, but he was also seemingly well-liked among his peers and colleagues. Numerous actors have popped up in multiple movies of his over the years. Pierce Brosnan, for example, first starred in McTiernan’s directorial debut, Nomads. It’s a relationship that was rekindled several years later.

You see, Brosnan appeared again in McTiernan’s 1999 crime-thriller The Thomas Crown Affair. And though their first outing together had been critically panned, it seems the leading man’s time on set had been enjoyable and rewarding enough to agree to work with the director again. McTiernan’s second movie also forged an enduring relationship.

Perhaps the most prominent action hero of the decade, Arnold Schwarzenegger was of course the star of 1987’s Predator. The Austrian actor worked with McTiernan again on 1993’s Last Action Hero, a satire of the genre that the pair are most famous for. Audiences, though, weren’t laughing, as the jokes were seemingly lost on them.

The movie was critically panned and a relative commercial flop. You see, by the turn of the 1990s, McTiernan’s movies were comfortably making nine-figure returns at the worldwide box office. But Last Action Hero made a comparatively meager $50 million profit on its $85 million budget. It was a figure that seemed to frustrate the director.

As McTiernan explained to the Movieline website in August 2001, “Initially it was a wonderful Cinderella story with a nine-year-old boy. We had a pretty good script by Bill Goldman, charming. And this ludicrous hype machine got hold of it, and it got buried...” Last Action Hero, then, failed to become the film he’d envisioned.

“I didn’t even make the movie it started out to be,” the director continued. “It was so overwhelmed with baggage. And then it was whipped out unedited, practically assembled right out of the camera. It was in the theater five or six weeks after I finished shooting. It was kamikaze, stupid, no good reason for it.”

Last Action Hero also faced stiff competition at the box office. As McTiernan recalled, “To open the week after Jurassic Park – God! To get to the depth of bad judgment involved in that you’d need a snorkel.” Still, a disappointing performance at the box office isn’t a crime.

It’d be several years before legal troubles began for McTiernan. In fact, a return to familiar territory saw his fortunes bounce back after the blip of Last Action Hero. That’s because in 1995 the director signed up for the third installment of the Die Hard franchise. It’s a move that generated well over $350 million at the box office.

That movie, of course, saw the director reunited with perhaps his most famous character, John McClane. Yes, Bruce Willis reprised the role of the luckless cop who gets caught up in yet more shenanigans involving German criminals. And while today it’s hard to imagine anyone else taking on those bad guys, Willis hadn’t been McTiernan’s first choice for the role in the original Die Hard.

You see, at the time the actor was much better known for his comedy roles, particularly on the hugely popular TV show Moonlighting. And though Willis played a detective in that series, he was a far cry from McTiernan’s vision of a tough guy. He still ended up scoring his signature role, though – but almost by default.

According to the website Cinephilia & Beyond, Willis was the only remaining option once Sylvester Stallone, Don Johnson and Harrison Ford turned down the role. They were all leading action heroes of the day, of course and so perhaps seemed like a good fit as McClane. Willis, though, wasn’t quite the most unlikely candidate for the part.

Apparently legendary crooner Frank Sinatra had been offered the role of the rugged yet likeable cop. You see, Die Hard later evolved from McTiernan’s original vision, which was more in tune with the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life. In fact, the movie appears to have taken on a life of its own during production, transforming into the enduring thriller fans still love today.

And despite the intense nature of Die Hard’s narrative, McTiernan told the American Film Institute that there was a very relaxed and happy feeling on set. Though he wasn’t involved in the sequel Die Hard 2, McTiernan returned to the director’s chair for the third chapter. And in doing so he evidently forged a strong relationship with Willis’ co-star, Samuel L. Jackson.

So with the seemingly popular and undoubtedly hugely successful McTiernan returning to form, where did it all go wrong? Well, the aforementioned The Thomas Crown Affair was moderately successful, though nowhere near the runaway hit of his previous film. But the director’s next movie, The 13th Warrior, starring Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, was an unmitigated disaster.

You see, The 13th Warrior’s thought to have cost an eye-watering $160 million to make. And when you consider it returned only $60 million at the box office, that amounts to a massive $100 million loss. It’s probably fair to say, then, that McTiernan’s next movie, a remake of 1970s sci-fi-sports flick Rollerball, had a lot riding on it.

But it was during the filming of Rollerball that McTiernan’s life turned into what could’ve been a plot to one of his own movies. According to The Guardian, the director clashed with producer Chuck Roven over the movie’s tone. It’s alleged that McTiernan believed his colleague was deliberately messing with the film’s schedule.

When strange goings-on occurred during production, McTiernan’s suspicions turned to the producer. It’s reported that an unexplained blaze tore through a set – and the director reportedly believed that Roven had been involved.

So McTiernan employed a private detective to keep an eye on Roven. The investigator was Anthony Pellicano, a man already well known in Hollywood celebrity circles. It appeared as though his reputation preceded him, and some alleged that his methods were downright unlawful. This was something that’d come back to bite McTiernan several years later.

And when we say “Pellicano’s reputation,” we’re not talking about a man who’s a bit of a rascal. This is someone whom it’s claimed had a liking – illegal, by the way – for tapping the phones of his targets and of intimidating reporters who asked too many questions. That all led to a massive scandal in the early 2000s.

The accusations actually precipitated a federal probe into Pellicano. It’s claimed the private eye fancied himself as a Mob-style player. That was an assertion seemingly supported by his then-wife, Kat. Glossy magazine Vanity Fair even suggested that entertainment’s biggest stars, from Michael Jackson to Tom Cruise, were somehow implicated. The article claimed, “Nothing in Hollywood will ever, ever be the same.”

But following drawn-out proceedings, Hollywood was left unscathed. Pellicano was thrown in prison for a decade and a half, and four non-famous cohorts were also sent down. Yet the big Hollywood hitters alleged to be caught up in the detective’s dealings never materialized.

The Los Angeles Times reported in the aftermath, “Initially, it looked as if the government’s six-year investigation would implicate billionaires and Hollywood power brokers and put them on trial with the private detective they had hired. The powerful would fall, some thought – a cautionary tale for the industry. But that didn’t happen.” In fact, the only person of note caught up in the scandal was McTiernan.

McTiernan’s alleged involvement stems from a phone call that he took in February 2006. The gentleman he spoke to claimed to be an FBI agent and proceeded to ask about a guy named Dennis Wasser. The latter was a divorce attorney and a frequent associate of Pellicano. Though on medication and jet-lagged, McTiernan apparently tried to be as helpful as he could.

The caller asked the director if he’d employed Pellicano during the production of Rollerball. Olivier Diaz was McTiernan’s lawyer at the time, and he later recalled the conversation to BuzzFeed. The filmmaker was apparently asked, “‘So, Mr. McTiernan, you deny hiring Pellicano for Charles Roven.’ John said yep, hung up the phone and forgot about the call.”

“Two weeks later he was arrested for lying to an FBI agent,” Diaz continued. “The government later asserted that Mr. McTiernan was not completely truthful in this telephone conversation and charged him with a federal felony.” So a seemingly innocent conversation that the director had dismissed as inconsequential was now part of legal proceedings.

It should be noted that McTiernan’s later legal counsel questioned Diaz’s take on the director’s call with the FBI. As Henry E. Hockeimer, Jr. described it, “McTiernan was asked if that was the only time he hired Pellicano, and McTiernan said it was and ended the call. In fact, Roven’s name never even came up...”

Whatever the true details of that conversation, the consequences were huge. And here’s where it gets complicated. BuzzFeed claimed that McTiernan had also employed Pellicano in the late 1990s to handle a messy divorce. In a 2006 Vanity Fair article about the private investigator, though, it’s suggested that Pellicano was an associate of the director’s divorce lawyer, Dennis Wasser. Either way, it was bad news for McTiernan.

Among the evidence against McTiernan was a secret tape Pellicano made of a phone conversation between the pair. It’s alleged that the men talked about tapping Roven’s phone. A story by The Hollywood Reporter in January 2013 claimed the director’s legal team tried to suppress the evidence on the basis that no wiretapping ever took place.

Now, when the phone call with Pellicano had been submitted as evidence, McTiernan had initially pleaded guilty to the charges he faced. But with a different legal team around him, the director then withdrew that plea, which judges permitted. Following a further indictment, though, McTiernan eventually pleaded guilty again when attempts to toss out the recorded evidence were unsuccessful.

Come 2010, McTiernan was fined $100,000 and ordered to serve 12 months in prison for lying to the FBI. And, though an appeal made it to the Supreme Court in 2012, the case was never heard. Seven years after the director took that fateful phone call, he was behind bars serving an 11-month sentence. But admirers and former colleagues gave him their backing.

Among the more prominent names supporting McTiernan was The Hunt For Red October actor Alec Baldwin. By his own summation of the case, Baldwin suspected the conviction was the result of “prosecutorial overreach.” Some who’ve studied the investigation, as well as McTiernan himself, single out a certain individual whom they claim had a personal vendetta against the director.

Their fingers point to a Daniel A. Saunders, an employee at the time of the attorney general’s office in L.A. It’s alleged that before he studied law, Saunders attempted to make his way as a Hollywood actor and screenwriter. Some even claim that he’d failed auditions for parts in Die Hard and The Hunt For Red October. So could this have been his payback?

According to BuzzFeed, McTiernan’s publicity team issued a press release with the title “An Actor Finally Gets Even.” It claimed, “Three people, including those who worked on the casting of film projects in the latter ’80s, have identified the Prosecutor [sic] who entrapped John McTiernan into a telephone denial for which he could be prosecuted... as having submitted and probably auditioned for both Die Hard and The Hunt For Red October.”

Diaz also asserts that FBI protocol is to conduct face-to-face discussions, particularly in cases under the media spotlight. But, during a phone interview with BuzzFeed, Saunders alleged, “Mr. McTiernan’s pattern [of behavior] through the entire course of this investigation has been to lie, to get caught, and to try to blame somebody else for.” Regardless, McTiernan became a free man again in February 2014.

But the ordeal had ruined McTiernan: barely recognizable to his wife, he was also “pretty much” penniless, with his career in tatters. Still, 14 years after his last movie, 2003’s crime-drama Basic, the director was back with a commercial promoting the game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Now the world awaits his big-screen return with Tau Ceti Four and to see whether the celebrated filmmaker’s retained his magic touch.