Before shooting wrapped on The Postman, Kevin Costner’s 1997 post-apocalyptic Western, Warner Bros bosses Terry Semel and Robert Daly visited the set. At one point the executives peeled away from Costner – the star, director, and producer of The Postman – and approached Dennis Maguire, the first assistant director, to thank him for his part in getting the film over the line.
The Postman was huge – a three-hour epic that cost $80 million, spanned four states, and carried the considerable heft of Kevin Costner’s mid-1990s ego. The executives, though, were happy for now. “We thought we had another Waterworld,” they told Maguire, a reference to Costner’s notorious, career-dampening farce, released two years before.
