Kathy Bates Teamed Up With Kevin Costner For His Strange Supernatural Mystery FlopRead

Kevin Costner was in a rough patch at the start of the 21st century. Though he’d scored a box office hit with the Nicholas Sparks adaptation “Message in a Bottle” in 1999, he struck out with the baseball drama “For Love of the Game” that same year and suffered another flop with “Thirteen Days” the year after. Still in his 40s and very much his movie star prime, a comeback was perpetually around the corner; the problem, however, was that he seemed to have lost his knack for picking projects that connected with mainstream moviegoers. He’d also acquired a reputation for either second-guessing his directors or flat-out steamrolling them if they challenged him. (He’d even given Clint Eastwood trouble while making “A Perfect World.) As such, A-list filmmakers were reluctant to work with him

After the debacle that was “The Postman,” studios weren’t keen to let Costner get back behind the camera, so he was stuck making unpromising movies like “3000 Miles to Graceland.” This is when “Dragonfly” came along. Written by Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson, it was a relatively hot project given its beyond-the-grave love story (which called “Ghost” to mind). Tom Shadyac, a fellow who was then best known as the director of zany comedies like “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Nutty Professor,” and “Liar, Liar,” did not seem like an ideal hire for this film, but, then again, the same was true of Jerry Zucker when he boarded “Ghost.Universal gave “Dragonfly” a substantial $60 million budget, hoping it’d hit the weepie thriller goldmine. From there, Shadyac and casting directors Elizabeth Marks and Debra Zane assembled a tremendously talented cast that included Kathy Bates, Joe Morton, Ron Rifkin, and Linda Hunt, which seemingly spoke to the strength of the material. Alas