Harlin Bounty

In the last two years, movie director Renny Harlin has come seemingly out of nowhere (meaning Finland) to land five plum assignments: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (the funniest, most surreal, and biggest-grossing of the series); Alien 3 (which he quit after developing a script, because "I wasn't interested in doing another sequel just for the sake of it—I wanted to do something different, something interesting"); and Die Hard 2 (which he was talked into by his friend and proHi ducer, Joel Silver, precisely because Silver was after "something different"). In addition to fielding all these sequels, he has two originals coming up: The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a "rock 'n' roll detective comedy" starring Andrew Dice Clay, and Gale Force, for which he will receive $3 million. Now, that kind of money is enough to make you hate any newcomer, but Harlin is disarmingly calm and monumentally selfassured, with a dry sense of humor. "I really had no idea how this system worked," he says, grinning as he describes the lean years in the mid-eighties, when he was living in a friend's attic on ten dollars a week. "I just came to Hollywood and looked at the Yellow Pages, from M for money to 5 for studios."

F. X. FEENEY