Movie Scene
There's nothing artificial about likely success of long-awaited 'A.I.'

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Director Steven Spielberg and actor Haley Joel Osment rehearse on the set of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," a film resulting from secret collaboration between Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros.

Director Steven Spielberg's sci-fi spectacle previewed June 23 in Japan, the most lucrative overseas market for American movies, to record numbers.

"A.I." reaped $2.6 million to become the all-time highest paid preview in the nation, 14 percent better than previous record holder "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace."

Based on the overwhelming reception, "A.I.'s" distributor, Warner Bros., expects the picture to hit No. 1 when it opens nationwide on Saturday in Japan, unseating current champ "The Mummy Returns" in its third frame.

Other notes on the movie starring 12-year-old Haley Joel Osment, which is about an advanced cybernetic pet that is abandoned in the woods, based on Brian Aldiss' 1969 short story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long":

• The collaboration between Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick was so secretive and so intense, that Spielberg installed a fax line in a locked closet that only Kubrick could send to, confirms "A.I. — Artificial Intelligence" producer Bonnie Curtis.

"It's true, I'm one of the few people who knew about that fax line," says Curtis, who has worked with Spielberg for six years as a producer and started out as an assistant to him in "Hook" in 1991. She was one of the few who had a key to the room where the fax machine was kept. The memos between the two directors will probably never been seen, if they even still exist.

Crew, lighting people and costumers had to go into locked offices and read only parts of the script, and at one point, fake call sheets were distributed over the Internet in order to throw off pesky journalists, producers confirm. Some of those call sheets ended up on the Internet, as well.

Osment was one of the few people who got a full script, but every page was numbered. "They would know if my script got into the wrong hands or got out there somehow," Osment said, laughing. "They would know if my script pages ended up on eBay."

Even Frances O'Connor, who plays the mother of the boy robot, says she was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement and only got a portion of her full script. "I read the whole story once at Amblin, but I wasn't allowed to take it away with me. Then about a month before we started shooting, I got my part of the script to work on."

• Kubrick had wanted to build an actual robotic mechanical boy to make "A.I. — Artificial Intelligence," producer Curtis confirms. The reason? The ultra-meticulous director feared a real boy would grow up too fast before he finished the picture.

"He worried that the boy would grow a beard by the time we would finish the movie," says Jan Harlan, an executive producer on the film, brother-in-law and friend of Kubrick's since they worked together on "A Clockwork Orange" in 1971. "There was also concern that the British labor laws would be too restrictive and delay the project too much."